STILL ALIVE

So the wonder of intense aggravation, if you live through it, is verification that you are still alive, or you wouldn't be aggravated.  This is like the verification that they send you from Google or Apple or any of the myriad technical systems that have ruined our ability to be present and make eye contact, that you apparently need to survive in today's so-called society.  Or, as my friend Steve calls it, anti-social networking.
     Having spent the entire morning, after my early swim which I imagined would leave me clear-headed for the day, at the Apple Store, I forgot all my passwords, being a victim of exhaustion, I hope it is, and not (if I could make the print smaller, I would, so see it as small:) age. The computer stuff has driven me almost to the brink of madness, or perhaps I have slipped over the brink, and simply imagine I can still function.
     The Good News, though, is Ricardo, a truck driver I picked up during my move, I can't remember exactly where.  But he gave me his number, and so, though I have perhaps lost my mind, I did have my own truck, which came to the Target-- or, as they called it at the nail salon-- Tahr-zhay-- in Westwood to pick up the furnishings I bought.  That is my decor, along with some stuff from Ikea which will comfort me except they sent three duvet covers and no duvet.  Oh well, it's a challenge being young, especially at my age.
     The one book I thought to order ahead of coming here, to have on my desk which is yet to be assembled, is J.I Rodale, The Synonym Finder, that I have always used, and which says on its cover "ALL TIME CLASSIC SINCE 1961" which I guess, in my way, I, too have been. So I am going to study it for other words besides hardship, that I prefer not to think in terms of, and challenge, that sounds really boring, especially when you have been through several days of them.
      But there is the blessing of Ricardo, and more, the Apple store, which even as it was driving me crazier, afforded me a glimpse of how lucky--perhaps even blessed-- I really am.  In my late youth, when I was staying at my loved friend Diane's apartment in San Francisco, I actually went out with Larry King.  I know-- but I was lonely and desperate and I had done his show in DC I think it was though I can't remember clearly where.  I was on the air with one of those fascists who were in charge of our government at the time, and still being cute, though I don't think it would have mattered, Larry King hit on me.
     You need to understand that I had prevailed against this official-- I can't remember who exactly it was, as names elude me at this bend of the road, but I'll remember later.  It was one of those Nixon guys, and I had been prepared for the show by Floyd Abrams, who was then considered out great 1st Amendment attorney, though it was before I met Gary Bostwick who i think unofficially can claim the title.  So I actually put him away on the air, this-- wait, I have to look up a synonym for fascist so I don't repeat myself--autocratic, that works I think-- bastard-- that one I didn't need to search for. I know he was high in the cabinet of Nixon.  But I bested him on the air, and Larry passed me a note--this was his radio show-- that read "Want to fool around?"
     Well, understand I was long a widow and lonely and still publicity mad, so I agreed to go out with him.  He caught up with me in San Francisco, where I was temporarily in Diane's apartment on my way to wherever I was going to live next.  You need to know about Diane that she has exquisite taste, and had decorated the place past beauty, and he was sitting in one of her great high-backed chairs and I wouldn't let him smoke, while he waited for me to finish up what I was working on.  Not being able to smoke, he said "What'll I do?" And I said "I don't care."  So not being able to smoke, he fell asleep.
      Then we went out to dinner, and he was a complete putz.  But I was still lonely.  So I agreed to go out with him another time, at which moment he had to go to another city from which he called me and talked dirty.  And I still didn't hang up.
     But then, Fate, or God, or Luck, or all of them, intervened, and he had a heart attack-- not that I wished it on him.  Right after that Angie Dickinson took charge of his recovery, and afterwards he dumped her anyway.  The power of the Media.
     So there I was in the Apple store in Century City, when who should be leaning against the wall looking REALLY old, which if we are lucky we all become, and REALLY shriveled, which if we use enough Kiehl's we can perhaps mitigate, but Larry King himself.  The only good thing about him now that I could tell, was that he, too, hates technology, and was fighting the Apple guy who was trying to help him.  By the way, all those incisive questions he used to ask were handed him by his staff.  I don't think he ever understood anything, really, about anybody.  Thank God, if She's there, he never got a chance with me.
     One of those attorney generals under Nixon.  That's who it was I was smarter than on his radio show.  I'll remember later.  Or maybe I can Google it.  I do remember the name of one attorney general I sat next to at a dinner at whatever high-end club it was that Tongsun Park, an old friend before he got into all the trouble for bribing everybody, gave, where I was seated next to ex-Attorney General Richard Kleindienst.  As I had become loving friends with Diane Brown, she was at the time, I subscribed to her philosophy then, -- that there was no evil in the world-- only the absence of Good.  So at that dinner I expressed that view aloud.  And Richard Kleindienst said, "Oh there's Evil in the world-- you better believe it."  I guess he was in a position to know.

     

So I am Here, I think

pay your dentist.
  Just in case I could find not too much to love about New York-- the theatre has been disappointing, and most of the friends I had who lived here have quit the city or the planet-- I stopped in to say Goodbye to my dentist, a fine fellow who has made pleasant keeping my chops in order.  He said I needed a cleaning, so I got one.  And when I left, the bill said Happy Birthday, and cancelled the not inconsiderable cost.
  So there is greatness of spirit and generosity here, and happily I tapped into it just before leaving.  This sort of makes up for venal politicians, disappointing children, and a country that seems to be headed for the wastebasket.  It was Clayton Williams of Texas who said "when rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it," which helped him lose the election for Governor to Ann Richards, with whom I had the strange good fortune to celebrate the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake.
    That day in 1989, a little after five in the afternoon, holding Happy, still in his doggy prime, with one hand, the other clutching a car that wasn't sliding, I watched the quake roll slowly up the hill like a serpent arching its spine.  When it stopped I carried him up to the square atop  Nob Hill to sit out the aftershocks, and Ann Richards, then running for governor of Texas, was there, having come straight from a fundraiser for her at the Mark Hopkins.  Lia Belli, separated wife of the famous divorce attorney Melvin Belli, came tooling up in her car to pick up survivors, preferably noted, and took us back to her house. There was no electricity, but her living room had a big picture window, and as we sat out the evening in her living room, it was lit by the blaze from the marina, which was exploding. All through the night, as in Chaucer, we told our tales.
    Ann's was, not surprisingly, probably the most interesting, told in her very relaxed drawl, with a mastery of comic timing, crossed with unabashed truth.  She told one of the other women, a trainer from a health club,  how it was she had gotten into politics. "They asked my husband to run for commissioner, and he said 'Why don't you run my wife?'"  They were no longer married, and I asked her why. "Well, ho-nee," she said, "I'm an alcoholic and he's still drinking."  She was the kind of woman you would describe as 'handsome,' commanding. Comfortable in her own skin, wrinkles failing to diminish her attractiveness.
      It was a colorful night, lasting till the morning, when we could all get transportation back to where we belonged.  But it was my conviction after that night that she belonged in the White House.  If only she had won the next gubernatorial election, the one after that, she could have saved this country a whole lot of trouble with W.  Oh, well.

  I'm sorry I didn't see the play about her, though I probably didn't go because I wished I had written it.  I did write one about that night, though.  A comedy.  I have to try and find it.
       I have to try and find a lot of things, most of them inside my own head.  It is so disruptive to move, even when the move is bi-coastal. With all the traveling I have done, and the different countries I have lived in, for some reason this particular change is very hard for me. Can it be I am getting older?

A Re-beginning

So having spent the day yesterday at Target, becoming a new dweller in a building with nothing, including hooks in the closet or shelves in case you want to just throw things in, I realize how difficult, or as they would say now in more evolved circles, "challenging" it is to start over.  T.S. Eliot wrote: 

I am old, I am old,

I will wear my stockings rolled.

   I, refusing to use the word old, have written

  I am older, I am older

I will wear my colors bolder.

So I am clad in bright orange, the color of change, and, as my good doctor points out, it's also the color of identity.

          Unfortunately I seem to no longer know who I am.  The state

of confusion that arises from moving is, in this instance, compounded by the kind of comedy that arises from frustration.  But it is a style of comedy they are no longer making.  Philip Roth said "Nothing bad can ever happen to a writer," but that's because he never had children.  In the same way all these misadventures would be worthwhile if you could sell them, but The Egg and I is long curdled and dead, and you could not sell this to the movies, unless you could make it Iron Woman 4.  I am no longer that strong.

       I went to hang up my new, fluffy orange towel in the bathroom to brighten it up:  the towel rack came off the wall and fell into the toilet.  Then it turned out my towel was a blanket. The aviso on the ticket that comes with it says: for your dorm room.  Sure.

       I know it will all be all right, unless it isn't.  The gym that was promised to be installed in this building has been cancelled as they can't get approval from the city as the place is too old.  Maybe I am, too.

Don't say that, Gwen, even to yourself in passing, sotto voce, under your breath.  Kurt Vonnegut said "Women are resourceful.  Look at you: you're resourceful."  Those words, from that great and gifted gentleman, have kept me going for several years.  

       So I have resurrected my own sense of optimism and decided it is not too late to start over.  Target and Ikea in my corner, and across my living room and bedroom floor, I begin.

       I have my cell-- the phone that is-- and have just installed my land line with the help of a young woman who is working her way through online college and majoring in computer science, wouldn't you know. My number begins with 666(that's easy to remember if I disallow it, not really believing there is really anything Satanic in this world, if you don't count the Republicans) and the rest of it spells a word I can easily give to friends, so they can remember, while they still can. I recall when I first went back to New York some years ago my number spelled PUPPIES.  I had a borderline relationship with a very attractive(he was then) actor from the Actor's Studio,once the center of how I evaluated talent, who remembered it as PUSSIES, but that's the kind of guy he was.  Anyway, I'm excited to have a number that spells something, so ask me and I'll give it to you, unless you're soliciting.

\

 This afternoon I am going to a fundraiser for Environment California.org which I believe I must begin supporting, as the air was visible from the plane, happy as I was to be re-landing here. I am going to give them a hefty percentage of what royalties I earn from The DAughter of God, my new book which had brilliant art by Joel Iskowitz who must be allowed to keep all his royalties as he has recently  been let go by the Mint, for whom he has made many exquisite designs, some of them on coins you may have in your pocket which are already worth less than the metal they are forged on. 

Then I shall come back to this little hotel and sleep, perchance to dream, and hope to receive inspiration for all I want to accomplish by moving back here.  Everything already appears to have been the right move if you don't count the unfortunate details like the towel rack, and the chair that has come from Target with only three legs. My friend Ellen, an interior designer with exquisite taste and a wardrobe to match, has seen my little apartment and pronounced it fine, so I am heartened.  We spent yesterday afternoon at Century City, a place that lifts my spirit and makes me smile when I see that it features the new electric car that costs $99,000 and I see that there are actually people going to look at it.  

  

The bellman from the Mosaic took two Russian ladies to Bergdorf where they spent $60,000 in very few minutes on one floor, and then cancelled a spa appointment at Saks for which they had pre-paid $800, and did not even turn a hair at having to forfeit it, so I don't think we are the only country with a Mafia.  I spent a peaceful hour or so in the nail salon behind my hotel where they were collecting money for the Powerball from all the ladies, which they still can be called in Beverly Hills, and there was more of a sense of Community in that handsoak than in all the time I was in New York, where the people in your own building avert their eyes for fear you might ask them for something. The colors I chose for my nails-- I choose as much by the name as the shade, was "Don't toy with Me," for my toes, and "Nomad's Dream," for my fingers.  I accept now that I am a nomad, or, as my darling Don characterized me, "The Wandering Quaker-Buddhist-Jew."  But I am strongly beginning to re-affirm my certainty that there is Something in charge of the Universe, or my landlord wouldn't have been in the Rite-Aid the same time I was, buying everything I needed for my bathroom and kitchen, offering to transport it all back to the apartment for me.  I mean, right at the check-out stand, at the exact moment I was wondering how I would get it there, when I had no car.  You have no idea how many checkout stands there are in Beverly Hills.  Some would call it coincidence.  But for me, it is Divine Order.

      I

SO I AM HERE, I THINK

Having decided once again to change my life, this time changing my address, but with a re-set change of mind as well, I have taken a little apartment like the Newbie I'm not, which means getting furniture, linens, spoons, and a (I hope) fresh mind, I began the day dressing for a swim, which always clears my head, which, as friends may have noted, has not been on exactly straight, as I am unsettled by the preparation for being a beginner.  My friend Andrew, who is clever but also a little unsettled in his mind, said "What are you making such a fuss about?  You can always come back." That is great wisdom on his part, which he can have for other people, but the whole point is I want to settle in and write.
    So the first thing I did in my innocent(hardly apt except in the spiritual sense) re-beginning was buy a MacAir, so I would not have to schlep my heavy Mac in my already overloaded carry-on, little imagining that not only lighter, it would also be really little on the screen. And to my continuing surprise-- everything comes in as a surprise, since little in Change can be expected, and that is why it is Change-- my vision, like me, has gotten older.  So the screen looks really small.  So I planned to hie me to the Apple store after my swim.
    Surprise #2.  The hotel where I stay because there is never anyone in the pool, and I have discovered at this late juncture in my road that I must have been a princess in a previous life, or, indeed, in this one, that I don't like other people in the pool, having spent some glorious time in pools throughout the planet that belonged to friends, as it did with my beloved Ball family, or, as in the case of the Cipriani in Venice, could be crashed after five o'clock when the lifeguard went home, or, eventually, when I had the good fortune to be writing for the Wall St. Journal Europe and was actually covering that great and costly hotel, and then had the even better fortune to become friends with the world's best hotelier, its director Natale Rusconi, and could be invited, or, in the case of the Hotel Bel-Air in LA where I had the majesty to have a dog, Happy, who wrote about it, and went on Oprah and would have been immortal, but she didn't show the book, having learned the humility that comes from shattered expectations, I got up this morning to simply swim.  Only the pipes had broken, so the pool was closed.  Oh, well.
     From expectations come disappointment: one of the first lessons taught by the great Jack Kornfeld, who, thank God, I had a CD of last night that I'd played as I unpacked, so even though I didn't sit and follow the In and Out of my breath I had his deep, soothing voice  to more or less calm me, and give me the security of knowing there was someone brilliant in the world to guide me, or at least let me know that it would all be all right, even if it wasn't.
   And then there is the joy of the Unexpected: in my room as I arrived was a great vase of tulips, a birthday gift from my beloved Jamie, the beauty of the flowers surpassed only by the elegant-- what is it? bag? purse? flash of wonder? No, wait, Matthew here at the Apple store where I have come to try and familiarize myself with this machine. even though my head has not been cleared by the swim I couldn't have, really knows design and describes it as a 'canvas tote,' in the shape of a 'half arc.' So that's what I have, this magnificent beige, that's the color, beige canvas tote, semi-huge, with an embroidered, embossed monogramed  GD in the center, so I feel like a fashion plate, albeit one with an ego.
    Now I begin to feel comfortable with this small, veritably weightless machine, so I can leave here now and go buy some towels for my new, empty apartment, where I shall have almost no furniture, and be Zen Gwen.  Please God.

LOVE MEANS NEVER HAVING TO

Pay your dentist,
   

   Just in case I could find not too much to love about New York-- the theatre has been disappointing, and most of the friends I had who lived here have quit the city or the planet-- I stopped in to say Goodbye to my dentist, a fine fellow who has made pleasant keeping my chops in order.  He said I needed a cleaning, so I got one.  And when I left, the bill said Happy Birthday, and cancelled the not inconsiderable cost.

   So there is greatness of spirit and generosity here, and happily I tapped into it just before leaving.  This sort of makes up for venal politicians, disappointing children, and a country that seems to be headed for the wastebasket.  It was Clayton Williams of Texas who said "when rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it," which helped him lose the election for Governor to Ann Richards, with whom I had the strange good fortune to celebrate the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake.

     That day in 1989, a little after five in the afternoon, holding Happy, still in his doggy prime, with one hand, the other clutching a car that wasn't sliding, I watched the quake roll slowly up the hill like a serpent arching its spine.  When it stopped I carried him up to the square atop  Nob Hill to sit out the aftershocks, and Ann Richards, then running for governor of Texas, was there, having come straight from a fundraiser for her at the Mark Hopkins.  Lia Belli, separated wife of the famous divorce attorney Melvin Belli, came tooling up in her car to pick up survivors, preferably noted, and took us back to her house. There was no electricity, but her living room had a big picture window, and as we sat out the evening in her living room, it was lit by the blaze from the marina, which was exploding. All through the night, as in Chaucer, we told our tales.

     Ann's was, not surprisingly, probably the most interesting, told in her very relaxed drawl, with a mastery of comic timing, crossed with unabashed truth.  She told one of the other women, a trainer from a health club,  how it was she had gotten into politics. "They asked my husband to run for commissioner, and he said 'Why don't you run my wife?'"  They were no longer married, and I asked her why. "Well, ho-nee," she said, "I'm an alcoholic and he's still drinking."  She was the kind of woman you would describe as 'handsome,' commanding. Comfortable in her own skin, wrinkles failing to diminish her attractiveness.

       It was a colorful night, lasting till the morning, when we could all get transportation back to where we belonged.  But it was my conviction after that night that she belonged in the White House.  If only she had won the next gubernatorial election, the one after that, she could have saved this country a whole lot of trouble with W.  Oh, well.

   

   I'm sorry I didn't see the play about her, though I probably didn't go because I wished I had written it.  I did write one about that night, though.  A comedy.  I have to try and find it.

        I have to try and find a lot of things, most of them inside my own head.  It is so disruptive to move, even when the move is bi-coastal. With all the traveling I have done, and the different countries I have lived in, for some reason this particular change is very hard for me. Can it be I am getting older?

       

        

YOUNG HOLLYWOOD GROWS OLD, and Old Hollywood Grows Deadly

So my whole life, or at least the part of it I considered so luminous, passed before my eyes yesterday, and I didn't even have to drown.  The day began with my being interviewed on camera for a documentary on Tab Hunter, an inadvertent buddy of my early Hollywood days, when I was obsessively infatuated with Tony Perkins, and had no idea, or mostly, didn't want to believe that he and Tab were lovers.

   I was not quite fresh out of Bryn Mawr, having spent a year after my graduation in Europe, living in Paris and the south of Spain, the prescribed post-graduate fantasy for a dreamer/songwriter, when I went to Hollywood to Become.  Tony was my first true friend, if you didn't count Dennis Hopper coming out of the bushes saying "I crashed this party, fuck everyone,"  followed by "I come from Kansas, which is nowhere, and I hate my parents who are no one," his opening lines in NAKED IN BABYLON, my first novel.  The book was more or less a not that heavily fictionalized fictionalization of my relationship with Tony, Marlon Brando's relationship with Josette Mariani, the darling young Frenchwoman who had been the Lee Strasberg's nanny, his first abandoned fiancee, whom I knew up close after I had known (and adored, of course)the still young and beautiful Marlon from a theatrical distance, and Montgomery Clift, whom I hadn't actually met, but imagined my way inside his head.  Ah, youth: what gall, especially when you have sung at the Purple Onion on Sunset Boulevard, and all of Young Hollywood has come to hear you.

    "Young Hollywood" was how Army Archerd, the best and kindest of columnists, who wrote for Daily Variety, referred to the group who came to see me as I performed.  Tony brought them all to the Onion, their group consisting of his close (I didn't know how close) friend Tab, Tab's "date" Venetia Stevenson, the flaxen-haired sculpted daughter of Anna Lee, naughty Dennis, his date (and fellow visitor to Nick Adams' bathtub, across the street from me on Rothdell Trail) Natalie Wood.  A picture of four of them, including the twenty year old me,  was given me at the filming, at a long ago recording session, probably Tony's. Stunning, really, for a number of reasons.

     Tony would call before going to the studio every morning at 4 AM, and say "what's for breakfast?" and I would get up and make him popovers that were "better than his mother's," he would tell me, spread with homemade strawberry jam that "wasn't as good," both genial lies, as it turned out his mother didn't cook.  The least and most harmless of his falsehoods.  Then he would leave, saying "I'll call you from the studio." I would spend the whole day waiting.  He never called. At night, furious and frustrated, I would Miltown my way into sleep, saying "I never want to speak to him again," after someone-- usually a nasty guy, --would call and say "He's at the beach with Tab," when I would slam down the phone, screaming "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" Then at four in the morning the phone would ring: Tony would say "What's for breakfast?" and I would get up and make it for him.

   All of this I have recounted before, but I am reminding myself of it again, having re-lived and re-told it yesterday at the Kimberly Hotel, where we filmed this thing. Tab was there, astounding, still with the same open, earnest, blue-eyed all-American face, the years having taken no greatly perceptible toll, except perhaps in his body bulk.  Maria Cooper, the very lovely daughter of Gary Cooper, was being filmed as I came in; Tab was astounded that we had never met before, as she apparently was dating Tony the same time I was, I am sure to the same erotic effect.  I was glad I did it, as he really is a sweet man, and I am happy he has made his way into what seems a healthy and contented retirement in Santa Barbara with his longtime partner, Alan.

   Anyway, I told as much as I could, from the heart, to the interviewer, many of the unrecounted adventures re-assessed and retold in these Reports, in case anybody is ever interested in how it was when stories were still on paper. Afterwards I enjoyed a lunch with my smartest friend, and fortified by being still alive, went to see the revival of The Big Knife, which is where my exuberant feelings end.  An incredible bore, riddled with cliches, not all of them from the pen or maybe it was the typewriter of Clifford Odets.  The Hollywood of the 60s was not that different, I don't think, from what was onstage set in 1948, with studios still having people under contract, and stars that were still really stars, empty as their souls might have been, like Tony Curtis, whom I knew well and loved anyway, and who might have had a movie projector coming out from behind a painting as it did in this production.  I do remember for a solid fact the crystal glasses Tony and Janet (Leigh) had in their bar, etched into each one a famous first name, set out in couples, Jack and Felicia, Billy and Audrey, Greg and Veronique.  Divorce took less of a toll on their glassware than death, as if all those people knew they had to stay together for the sake of the shelf, excepting Tony and Janet.  It was still a glamorous place then, with geniuses like Kubrick coming out of the high-priced woodwork.

   But oh, the play, stentorian and oafish, with me never before having seen Bobby Cannavale, but having heard from apparent admirers how talented he was, waiting for him to come onstage, not realizing that that was him already there, so loud and not very impressive.  All of it, at least the acts that I saw before leaving after intermission, noisy but empty. I met a nice couple from LA outside the theatre as I was on my way out, who worried that they had eaten too heavy a dinner before, and so were falling asleep. I promised them it was not the food.

   But back to Young Hollywood, as it had been resuscitated in the Hotel Kimberly, and in the glossy pictures I was given as a remembrance of those closeted days. There's a genuinely handsome, huge-shouldered Tony, at the time still playing romantic leads, some of them in my feverish imagination, worrying his bottom lip, before he decided his head was too small for his shoulders, went on a diet and spindled his way into the grotesque he became for Psycho. Beside him a sweet-faced fat girl leans against the back wall.  I was stunned at first to realize that was me. It set off a train of memory about my mother, her saying  as I returned from European and Hollywood adventures, "You're still fat," instead of Hello.  Hurtful, sure. But she was right.

    I hope there's an Afterlife so she can see how thin I am.  I hope that Tony is there with his old shoulders.

THE ROAD LESS SUNG ON

So having gone to sleep last night watching a broadcast of ROCKY, which I am surprised to report really holds up and was a terrific movie, awakening to The New York Times, which, like many other Americans I have read obsessively since the Boston bombing, trying to figure out why...  I am remembering a book by Elizabeth Kubler Ross I read while I was living in Weinheim, Germany, asserting that if Hitler had been admitted to the KunstHalle, the art school, six million Jews would be alive.  In other words, if his rage had been funneled into creativity, the whole horror would have been averted.

    I saw some of his art work when I went to the camp of the Aryan Nations, the American Nazi party for their convention Hayden Lake, Washington, during the time after Don's death when I was fearless, in spite of the fact that if any of the members had known I was a Jew, I would have been dead.  All I cared about at the time, I think, was my next book, and I figured this was it. I had been tracking American Nazis, lunching with them in places like Colorado, keeping both my heritage to myself, struggling to be able to swallow my food while they gently ranted.  "You know," said the head of the Posse Comitatus, "It isn't true that the Jews rape their daughters when they're infants."  "Really?" I managed to say.  "No,"
he said.  "They keep them to have sex with when they're ten."
         So madness dealt with, theirs and my own, thinking I could write a novel about these people, I went to their enclave.  Hitler's art was there on sale as part of the Fun proceedings. It was truly awful, a lot of it cows, as I remember.  But I still wished he had been admitted to the Kunsthalle and maybe they could have turned his attention and fury to a less bovine subject.

    But when I read this morning about Tamerlan, the older brother in Boston, and saw that he had been disqualified from boxing in the Olympics because he was not American born, I sorrowed not only for the victims of the Boston bombing, but for him.  Apparently he also played the piano quite masterfully, so if any of his gifts, either the bulky or the sensitive one had been engaged, all those people might be okay.

    Being one whose thoughts often turn to her own life, I remember my own tentative first forays into show business, which I loved and thought I was writing songs to become a part of, and recall affectionately Bobby Helfer, an agent at MCA in LA, Elmer Bernstein's cousin, who said he would not be able to represent me and hold me out for movie projects because he could get more money for Les Baxter. But when he heard some of my songs, said the hell with it, he was going to represent me anyway.  So he set up an audition with Frank Loesser-- for those of you too young to remember Where's Charley, and Guys and Dolls, and How to Succeed in Business, which my few readers might well be, he was the great one of his era.  

    So I got to sing my songs for Frank, who said "Kid, you're the biggest talent since Me."

    It was, as the two of you can imagine, a thrill beyond a thrill.  I was twenty years old,  inexperienced, and except for my audacity and openness in non-sexual areas, very much an innocent.  This was one of my idols, giving me the greatest possible affirmation.  So my heart and my legs opened, and I had what now in view of how casual sex is, would probably be called an incident.  Afterwards, as books said at the time after three dots, Frank sat naked on my piano bench on Havenhurst in Hollywood, and played and sang "Warm All Over," somewhat ironic in memory, from his soon to be successful musical The Most Happy Fella.  When he left LA, he said "Kid--- write me a musical." So I did, of course, and sent it to him.  A month later I called him, and asked what he thought. "Great, kid, great," he said.  And I said "Well?" And he said, "Moss and I have been working on this musical in Boston, and we're using one of your songs."  I said "What about money?"  And he said "Write your family."  

    Some months later I saw him on a street corner in NY and he was with his new wife, Jo Sullivan.  He muttered "Don't say anything," his eyes shifting, lids lowered, so I understood he was referring to our tryst, when he had actually been cheating on her, though they had not yet been married at the time, as he had still been married to his first wife, Lynn, who was known as "The Evil of Two Loessers."

  All of this in Hitler and Tamerlan retrospect makes me wonder if, if Frank had been decent and above board and made me into a recognized songwriter of the day, who/what would have been changed, spared, elevated?  My love for songwriting and the great writers continued for some years to come, blessing me with Yip Harburg for a daddy figure, still the finest lyricist ever, and Julie Styne, who was adorable and failing, so though we lunched together every Saturday at the Carlyle, he could only be tentative and darling,  though occasionally hitting on me.  We did write a little bit of a musical together, THE BIG APPLE, that which became, without him, over the years that passed, until now, SYLVIA WHO?  Julie's music wasn't too good anymore, though I still adored him, boy pixie that he was.

   But back to the point: if Frank had championed me, I would probably never have turned to writing novels, or Don.  Two children would probably never have been born, like those needless victims in Boston wouldn't have fallen.  That might not have been so bad, but two adorable grandchilden wouldn't have existed either.  It's fascinating, really, the road not travelled.

Horrific and sad, the one that led to Boston.