THE BRAIN

Continuing my ongoing quest to ascertain that I haven't lost my mind, I made my way to the Museum of Natural History today, which is featuring a new exhibition, THE BRAIN. The Museum was the favorite of my childhood, probably the only one as I can't remember my mother's taking me to any, and this was a regular excursion from PS 9, and we got to eat in the cafeteria, a real treat. The windows I passed by with stuffed wolves and rhinos and Whooping Cranes(endangered) were all of them madeleines, throwing me back to that more than innocent time, when I would experience all I knew of perfect peace in the planetarium, as it was before I fell in love with classmates(the lizard brain, which deals only with feeding, mating, and defense) and I could lose myself in the stars projected on the ceiling.

Today's experience was close to monumental, as trying to extricate myself from some of the emotional turmoil of the past few weeks, I went to the cafe and bought a tea waiting my admission time(4:30) I saw how many people there were who actually loved their children, and, more important, remembered my first seated exchange with my Jewru Jack at Estes Park, Colorado, where he said to me "Experience your tea." So I did, and the half-hour wait went rather quickly, till I could join the line on the 3rd floor, which was let in in increments, which I couldn't understand until I got in myself, as it is all experiential, and you need time for every single point the exhibition and probably the brain itself are making, with wonderfully dazzling ribbons of light at the beginning that demonstrate everything that's going on in our heads, with the possible exception of Sarah Palin's.
The pre-frontal cortex is what we use to plan, predict and use language, which has always been my favorite thing(I didn't even look at the part of the brain that does math, as I know it does not function in me, if it is there at all. The Broca area is for putting words together, and then there is the part(I didn't note where it is exactly,) that produces social emotions, shame, guilt and pride, and then there's the cortex, which controls emotions and makes complex decisions, all of these rendered larger than life, dazzling to the eye which is also explained in another section, along with how we put pictures together, so we can recognize Hillary Clinton even if we don't see her clearly. The smile, which exists only in humans is a laugh that didn't quite happent, a fact that resonated deeply because my girlfriend Taffy sent me a quote yesterday from Auden talking about people he liked, but that the one universal characteristic of those he loved was they made him laugh, which made me think even more highly of Auden. And miss Don, of course, since nobody ever made me laugh as much as he did, with the exception of Hal Dresner who also went to PS 9 but wasn't that funny yet.
There are buttons you can push at various stations to see how reactions affect what portion of the brain, and a section on anti-depressants artificially upping your serotonin, the reason I never wanted to take them no matter how sad I felt because I thought it might affect other things that are important to me besides my dopamine and endorphins, like writing. A really fantastic experience which ended much too soon because I was so absorbed in studying absolutely everything.
So when the guard said "The museum is closing," I said "My brain cannot process that information," and those who were still there laughed, which is a smile fulfilled.
Not really that mellow, as I hadn't had the chance to see everything, I experienced a light jolt of anger, coming from a section of the brain I hadn't visited yet, but certainly have. But instead of acting from one of the urges that drive us, I went to the portion that invents new strategies to reach goals, and going to the guard to say I hadn't seen as much as I wanted, and wished to come back. She sent me past the overhead canoe, told me to turn left at the giant mosquito, and keep on past the Christmas tree. The only security guard left on duty who is head of his union(we had a moment to exchange pleasantries) sent for someone from services, and she said all she could do to help my situation was offer me a voucher to return another day. Well, that's all I really wanted, even in my lizard brain. I have a year to use it. Let me know if you want to come along. It's a great exhibition.

KURT VONNEGUT'S BIRTHDAY

There seems to be cosmic design in the fact that today is not just Armistice Day, but also Kurt Vonnegut's birthday. I celebrated it as such for all the years (not enough) that I knew him, and until he died a couple of years ago. I see no point in not celebrating it now.
Kurt hated war more than he hated anything except maybe what was happening to this country he loved. His novel, Slaughterhouse Five was the best anti-war screed ever written, its inimitable passage of reversing the film so the bombs instead of landing and destroying, went back up into the bellies of the planes they were dropped out of, all the way back to the factories where workers assembled them, so no harm was done. Jack Kornfield, my Jewru, read that passage as he would read the poet Rumi, at one of his retreats. I hope I told that to Kurt, -- I can't remember--though he probably would have been uncomfortable at the thought of being part of spiritual teaching, If there is design to this universe, then it was no accident that he was a prisoner of war in Dresden when it was fire-bombed, so he could write in his searingly sardonic fashion first hand of the stupidity of war.
When the husband of my classmate, Laura Maoglio, Gunther, a scientist, won the Nobel prize, he put it to a fund to rebuild the Dresden cathedral, and asked Kurt to contribute. But he wouldn't. When I asked him why, he said he didn't think it should be rebuilt, that it should be left in ruins, so people could see what war did. He was a sad man, brilliant and darling, and it is one of my greatest joys
that I could actually count him as friend.
We met after he publicly defended me without ever having met me during the ordeal of my libel suit, when he stood in an auditorium and said "Today is a very sad day: a publisher has turned against a writer," so my editor at Doubleday, whose forum it was, (and who sued me after the Supreme Court declined to hear my case so Doubleday had to pay the oaf who sued me) had to be helped from the stage. I read about that incident in The New York Times, (I was living in LA) and all the agonies I had been through when noted authors refused to support me(a lot did, but Bellows, Roth, et al. declined) were softened. Vonnegut. A literary hero. And he'd put his mouth where his words were.
A few weeks later Gay Talese invited me to a party in New York for Jerzy Kozinski and Kurt was there. He sat cross-legged on the floor in front of me, and marveled at my having been able to remember so much of the real dialogue that occurred at the nude marathon I'd attended, and subsequently fictionalized(YES! It was FICTION!) in Touching, the novel that was the source of all the grief. "How did you do it?" he asked me. "Did you have a microphone under your blouse?" "Kurt," I said, "I didn't even have a blouse."
After that, when I came to New York, we would have lunch. They were always long and desultory, with little of the stimulating conversation you would expect from tales of the literati. But always there would be one sentence or a thought that lifted me, and gave me the courage to continue through bleak times. "Women are very resourceful," he said, with his drooping, graying red mustache like a canopy over the careful words. "You're resourceful." So even though I had lost a chance in the community, such as it was, to be taken seriously as a writer, I had a champion. The best. When Don Fine, my last editor, was in the hospital at the end of his life, wanting to see no one, Kurt said "Go see him anyway. It will do him good to see a pretty woman." That was the first time since the death of my husband that I'd felt pretty.
His wife, who'd abandoned him for another man and then came back, thought we were having an affair, and intercepted my letters to him, innocent notes that expressed concern after his heart attack. But before she'd changed her mind and returned, we'd had a chance to spend time together in the Hamptons, where I was desperately trying to write another novel, so I could have a ticket back to a career. That was a particularly hard time for me and my son, who was off-center and angry, alienated from me at losing his young father, but agreed to visit me in Springs, where I was living that autumn. "Bring him around, we'll have dinner," Kurt said, generously.
"I have a surprise for you," I said to Robert, when I picked him up at the airport.
"We're going to have dinner with Kurt Vonnegut," he said.
I was stunned. "How did you know?"
"Well, I knew he was around here and if anyone could smoke him out, it would be you."
I am so happy I smoked him out. I did not get to see him much once she was re-installed.. But I did call him the last November 11th he was still here, to wish him Happy Birthday.
"That's very neighborly of you," he said. Neighborly. What a fine fellow. He told me once when I lamented the lack of a real community, "Go to the drugstore and introduce yourself to the pharmacist, then the drycleaner. The checkout stand at the grocery guy. And you'll have your community."
"I meant a writer's community," I said.
"Well, next time you're in New York, go to Elaine's."
Happy Birthday Mr. Vonnegut.

JOHN LENNON'S BIRTHDAY

It was a perfect day in New York, probably one like Vernon Duke might have experienced that inspired 'Autumn in New York,' a song that outdid the reality except on a day like today. Soft warm winds blew across my cheeks like baby's kisses, coming to rest on the crowds that huddled and tour-bussed and pointed across the street to the Dakota, where John Lennon was shot. It would have been his 70th birthday had it not been for Mark David Chapman who made him even more immortal than his music might have, elevating to myth his celebrity, one of the last true celebrities before the Crappy Age of In Touch and the obsessed American public who follow the Snookis and Shtunkies and any of the eeeeees(who ARE these people?) who waft across their TV screens and into their empty lives. I do hope there is an Afterlife, so John can see how loved he is, how much he contributed, and how he is celebrated in the true sense, without having to Dance with the Not-Really Stars, There are events all over New York to honor him, which we can all do by trying to be better human beings, use our gifts to the max, and try not to get shot.
I met John Lennon in LA when he was in his most melancholic/alcoholic pit, separated from Yoko and suffering visibly. He was at a party at Jack Haley, Jr.'s with Harry Nillson who was playing pool and also drinking a lot, on one of those Saturday nights when the bright people(which there actually were some of in the borderline-and-full-celebrity set) would gather in the hilltop house of Jack who was a quick wit and smarter than most people knew, in spite of his later marrying Liza, and sit around a hugh felt-covered table and out= wisecrack each other, kind of a West Coast would-be Algonquin. There were a lot of laughs and plenty of grass rolled into joints by Jack's butler, Clarence, and whoever was in town and had no place better to go, which a lot of smart and semi-glittery people didn't, would come and enjoy the evening, And there, very drunk and 'morose, but unmistakably special was John.
Overcome with admiration and wanting to lift him, I told him how much he had given the world, what his music had meant for everyone(naturally I represented everyone) and and and and and. With hooded eyes he looked at me after my loving barrage, and said "Gwen, if you really loved me, you'd stop talking.' (That's my son's favorite story.)
Not long after John disgraced himself at Tommy Smothers' opening as a single at the Troubadour, drunk and heckling him in a venue stocked with Tommy friends and admirers, wearing a Tampax under his hat that drifted down whitely over his nose. Tommy was tolerant, but not so Tommy fans, who erupted finally with rage, and passed Lennon out on a sea of uplifted arms, like a cork bobbing on the ocean, dumping him on the sidewalk outside. It was a very sad moment, one I hoped he wouldn't remember.
I'm glad he got back with Yoko because he really did adore her, no matter what the rest of us thought. And she has done a great job of keeping him alive. What a shame the world didn't.

TIME FORGOTTEN

The bitch about living in the present is you have to keep doing it or you don't remember what made it so wonderful. Having fallen pitiably behind in expressing my joy at where I was (Paris and St. Tropez: it already sounds like a fiction) I have missed my own breadcrumbs on the trail, so do not even have to wait for the birds to come to feel lost. It was so filled with joy, everywhere I was, but am now hopelessly brain-dead and jet-lagged, hearing only the sounds of the sirens as various UN dignitaries make their way around our city, and Obama loses his wheels. It is hard to see him struggling so, when the dream seemed so lucid.
Anyway, there I was. Three glorious days at the Crillon, then three days at Villa Marie, which was once the Bergerettes, where I took my still young family after Robert's(Bob he was then) Bar Mitzvah, because my beloved friend Sandy, who was with Time at the time in Paris, said "Everyone says St. Tropez, c'est finis, but I think you'll like it," and we did. After Don died too soon, expressing only denial on his way out of this planet, except for saying "I want to go back there," I took his cufflinks and buried them beneath one of the maritime pine that adjoins the property, going back to visit them (and him) during several Mays or Septembers, the best time to be in the South of France, the foule having gone. I know that's the French word for something that means the too-many tourists, or at least I think. But this time when I went back my heart was heavy, as the dentists say when they are retiring, because there have been so many losses. Prime among those is Sandy, whom my close friends and even some distant ones know died under mysterious circumstances in Bali, the great irony being that this storied investigative reporter was killed and nobody does anything about it, because the evidence is not in hand, and can't be gotten without a court order, although the details of the autopsy were available in the Jakarta Post, a newspaper that apparently can't be believed. But the case is on file as "an unsolved homicide," and as I loved her more than any other friend, I have been struggling with trying to write about it for all the years since her death, which are now six.
I thought to begin and end it in Bali, and have started several times. But this time I went up to the room where she stayed at what was once 'Les Bergerettes', and reaching out the terrace window was traveled into the beginning of 'Wuthering Heights' and thought I felt a ghostly hand. All terribly moving and dark, which the trip wasn't at all. It was sunshine and filled with light, internal as well as what Nature afforded, so I had a glorious time when I wasn't being haunted.
I had one funny day in-between luxury hotels when I couldn't get out of the bathtub in a little place I had found, it being slippery and small(the tub, not the hotel) with nothing to grab hold of, followed by lunch at the Graniers, a small beach near Byblos that tourists don't know about and guests at Byblos don't go to, because it isn't chic, then a swim in the quiet waters of the Gulf of Grimaud, which I couldn't get out of either. The whole shore just inside the final hardly-even rippling of the water is made up of very insistent pebbles and rocks; I was waiting to find a soft place and there wasn't one, so I just floated there for a while, when one of the very smart(bikini-wise) women on the beach asked me if I needed help. So I got up and out, not wanting to seem helpless, and just sat on my matelas for a while, bleeding a little from just below my knee. Not wanting to seem in any way impaired, I paid no attention to it until one of the pretty young women brought me some ice in a napkin, so I could wipe it off. It was my intention to go back there the next day and repay her kindness by begging her to stop smoking, but Europeans do not look kindly on our propagandizing against cigarettes
especially as they are all still puffing away. Anyway, by that time I had connected with The Ladies.
The Ladies: a really visually impressive group of women of a certain age, not quite as certain as mine, who were there on a yacht, I mean really, from Jersey, the place where the Brits go to hide their money, as our people do the Cayman Islands. Most adorable among them was their mascot, Gemma, just turned 21, half hidden by her T-shirt which she had made into a tent over her head and upper body so she could text, which of course made me crazy, as she was missing where she was, texting being the disease that I feel will wipe out all our young, whether or not they are driving. Mum, a beautiful woman named Fiona, one of my favorite names, owns the yacht, father being tragically gone, a fiercely charming dark-haired ringleader (I suspect) being Pia, whose third husband it is she is now living with in Jersey, Joy, who has four children, and is herself enhanced by her sisters, who apparently travel often and everywhere in a group, and Sian, the most business-like among them, apparently the Brit equivalent of an event planner, I think. Anyway they were at the next table at Graniers, suffering over which wine to order, so I gave them a taste of my Rose (accent) which was good enough, as is any rose in the South of France, and they liked it, and apparently, me. So we all got together the next day for my last lunch in Saint Tropez at Club 55 which I usually avoided because it seemed to me so phony, but it isn't if you are there with delightful people for long enough, which was the stretched-out final afternoon. I had the best time. The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as queens which we need to realize we are, whether or not we have had the luck to connect with kings.
It was a fabulous finale, marred only by the fact that I was so overstimulated I could not sleep all night, (it was Sandy's old room, the moon shone silver high in the heavens which they really are in the south of France, and I was afraid to reach out the window for the touch of that ghostly hand,) I had to drive into the glaring early morning sunlight and was frightened the whole time as I could hardly see where I was going, made my plane, didn't sleep on that either, and have been five days trying to right my place in time.
It is seven days now, my having slept for much of the two days since I lamented not sleeping, and I have remembered most of it in sequence: my three queenly days at the Crillon, where I semi-rescued my agent whose luggage had been sent to Stockholm, so I let him shower in my suite preparatory to meeting up with his coeur-throb, a wonderful dinner with my darling friend Suzie whom I met when we both crashed the pool at the Bristol, all those years ago, then only one disappointment when my once editor from the WSJ whom I deeply admire and always sets me straight, vision-of-the-worldwise, on which empty evening I roamed the streets alone which is never a hardship in Paris, had a meal by myself and wrote pomes, then Sunday with my beloved petite famille francaise, the people who lived upstairs from me when I headquartered in Paris and fell in love with Gaspard, their two-year old golden child, whose 14th birthday we celebrated over paella and his first cell-phone. It seems a staple of French life at 14, a coming of tech-age equivalent of our 16 year old car in Beverly Hills. Then Sunday night with the gorgeous widow of Monsieur Grimaldi, late president of Figaro, at Buddha something, a restaurant adjacent to and underneath the Crillon. Then to Saint Tropez, and the Usual Magic.
I chronicle this because I have developed a devoted readership of at least one, and it's good to remember one's history while one still can. My love to all of you who have stayed on board, haven't fallen off, and the new friends. Life is a ... what? Pilgrimage? Sure. Certainly a challenge. But unquestionably a privilege, no matter what the New Yorker says.

On the Road Again, and Again

For those of you, beloveds, who have expressed some degree of concern
or a minimal sense of loss at not having received a report as of late, let
me take you by the gentle hand and tell you a little of why. When I was
in Montecatini, having a very low-key fine tempo at the wedding of
Marco, handsomest and most charming of the Maccioni boys, and I am
still a fool for handsome and charming, although on occasion I am also
drawn to ugly and rude, not content to simply be having a good time,
I forced myself to write on the new book, and what I sent my master
editor elicited the response 'Not good.' So instead of walking the hills
and eating the pasta, I shortened my stay, paid extra to fly back early,
and did something on the plane, where even tripping back to NY I felt
I had to write, that killed my computer(a little spilled vino? Do I really
remember? Does if even matter, if you consider the larger lesson, which
I am trying to do?) So as soon as I hit my landline, I called Toshiba,
which as many of you know is outsourced to the Phillipines, and they
said 'Someone will call you within two hours.' That same response was
given me the next eleven days, in the same tone, so I never left my
house except to walk Mimi, and then very hurriedly.
And on the twelfth day, as the Bible might put it, when they said
the same thing, I said: "I am a writer and I can't work and I am going
to commit suicide." The Toshiba guy said: 'Thank you for your
patience.' As I could not reach through the phone to throttle him, I
went down the street to the Apple store and bought a Mac.
Since then, my life has been a learning process. First, how to use
the MacBook, and second, how to be in the present and actually enjoy
my life, without simply writing it, except for the occasional pome. As
some of you know, including the literary agent who has thus far been
unable to sell it, when in Venice last early Autumn I wrote a book
called Live the day about a woman of 'a certain age' who is trying to
learn to be in the present, and not base her happiness on whether or not
what she is writing sells. Many chewed fingernails and months later, I
spoke to my beloved Jewru Jack, who had just had oral surgery and was on
Vicodin, and asked him, as I have over the years, what to do, having
been unable to accept my own artful(I think it was) counsel. And Jack
told me, speaking from the depth of the Vicodin, as he himself said he
was doing: "Why don't you go somewhere and not write."
It seemed unthinkable. Unaccustomed as I am to listening to
wisdom, I have been doing that ever since. Going places, including boat
rides around Manhattan on the yacht(it actually is, though I was
expecting a ferry) of my health club where there are too many people in
the pool--though I rarely look back, I regret not having befriended
Leona Helmsley who lived unhappily and cruelly just down the block, so
she could have left me her lap pool, as like her I was probably royal in
a previous life, though doubtless not as abusive. Other destinations
have included Central Park, just across the street, where I breakfast on
a bench with Mimi beside me, read the news(not good) and write the
occasional pome(not bad) and try and learn to Live the Day.
Recent days included a visit to Newport, Rhode Island, where I had
never been, and imagined was North of Massachusetts(I should have
paid more attention to Mrs. Laubenheimer, my geography teacher
at PS 9) and fell very much in love with it. it is once again what my
husband, Don, called a smart little village', the kind to which I have
always been drawn: see St. Tropez and La Jolla, where you can always
visit but shouldn't make the mistake of moving to after your husband
dies too young. Anyway, I love Newport, and with any luck and a few
bucks will rent a place there next July and you're all invited.
And there I lived the day, only three, but it felt good in the
basement of Vanderbilt Hall where there's a beautiful pool with
nobody in it but me, and a fine masseuse. So I was able to luxuriate
and heal, and the townsfolk weren't bad either, especially the two
realtors at Sotheby, who made the time there pass even more
delightfully. Present also was a great and colorful rock musician,
Pete Townshend, and I am always elated at the presence, especially
when it is present, of talent. I also wrote a few pomes.
While there, though, I did have ONE bad experience, going to see the
movie of 'Eat Pray Love' which I tried to go to with an open mind, even
though my beloved Jack had expressed a variation of what my beloved LA
library friend Evelyn Hoffmann had said, that she wished I had written
it. I, too, wished I had written it, because I am equally able to eat,
pray and love and my sentence structure is better. Envy is one of the 7
deadly, and though I would not have traded my grasp of the English
language and my feeling for Whatever There Might be Out There, for her
writing I would have enjoyed her royalties. So, to the movie.
I do believe it will set back spiritual study by a few centuries.
Oh, well. I have long felt a secret dislike for Julia Roberts because
my friend Marilyn said she had a mouth like a fish, and I know she took
someone else's husband. But it took Lewis Black, on the Daily Show,
whom I have long considered smart and funny but too unfettered in his
rage to rage against the movie enough. He pointed out that the shopping
network is full of Eat Pray Love merchandise, twenty hours a day. As if
that were not offensive enough(Eat Pay Love?) Julia to show her
dedication explained that she has actually been practicing Hinduism for
several years.
Huh? I said to myself, as a sometimes student of religion without
its orthodox strictures and entanglements. Huh? And again, Huh?
So going to the Internet, now that I know how to use my Mac and
understand I will never again have to ask anybody a question except
maybe Jack, I wrote in 'Hinduism' to see what exactly it required or
consisted of. I like the meditation, the belief that everything has a
spirit-- in Bali they have a day to honor the engine gods, especially
the ones in cars, a bit too over the top or under the hood, but
harmless-- but I draw the line at worshipping Vishnu the god of
violence-- and understand now why I loathe even more deeply than I
thought, Julia Roberts, since she's trying to add gravitas to her
excessive salaries by her claim. i have defined myself for the old Bryn
Mawr register as Quaker-Buddhist-Jew(at Don's urging:"that'll really
confuse them," he said.)
Anyway, on to the positive, speaking of Bryn Mawr. They are
putting on my play, The Women Upstairs, about what the wives were doing
during Plato's Symposium, while all the big guns, Socrates,
Aristophanes, Alcibiades and the rest of the gang were partying (the
actual word Symposium means 'Drinking Party' which if they would put on
it maybe more people would read) on October 29th, in the newly renovated
Goodhart Hall, where Katharine Hepburn spoke her first marbled words
onstage. You're all invited. And on the 16th of that selfsame month,
we are doing a reading of my musical, with the wonderful Tyne Daly
reading the star part which is almost joy enough to take care of my not
hoping it materializes on Broadway, but not quite. None of you is
invited to that, as we're doing it just for us to see how it sounds.
But as my wise and wonderful cousin Ruth-Anne told me once,
'Freedom is knowing you have options.' So I am filled with a great
sense of relief that I have avenues besides the one I barreled down
trying to finish the new book which I have now set aside to see what
happens with the career I really wanted all along, even though the
detour I took was being a novelist.
That's why you haven't heard from me. It felt good. Being in the
present I mean.

Who's been sleeping in my Hat?

I had some doubts about coming on this trip. I am a victim of the Protestant Ethic, a day’s work well done, compounded by Jewish Guilt—or I feel terrible. So as I have no new achievement under my belt, written books not counting for anything in my mind unless published, and being only a few chapters into the new one, I felt I was not entitled to take a vacation. From what? my Jiminy Cricket would say.
Still, I was happy to be asked to this formidable wedding, details about which it would exhaust me to list, since I have already writ about it as a loving courtesy to my hosts. But once invited, I passed a hat on Madison Avenue, and had no choice but to buy it, it was so simply splendid, so splendidly simple, and yet coolly elaborately chic. They wanted a lot more, but I was able to talk them down to $200, promising they would be part of the article I intended to write about the wedding. Then I got cold feet, just like brides do, and started to cancel, but my darling friend Pam said “Buy you got the hat.”
So I made slow haste to come, calling ahead to Delta airlines to make sure I would be able to take the hat on board in its spacious box, and the agent on the phone held while I measured, and it just made the 18” diameter. And then I called Sky Magazine, the Delta in-flight thing to try and get an actual assignment to write about the journey of the hat, figuring it would be much to their advantage since probably the people who know there is a direct flight from JFK to Pisa are fewer than legion. But they called me back and said it wasn’t funny enough, as for that kind of feature, on their back page, they prefer using comedians. Oh, well.
Still I came, and wore the hat to the church part of the wedding, where the bride arrived gorgeously arrayed in white crocheted lace in the black sidecar of a motorcycle driven by her father, and the groom wore Emiliano Zegna gray silk, and I was one of three women out of hundreds who wore a hat. The others were another New Yorker and Georgia, three times Miss Montecatini, but her beauty queen career ended there. Still, she looked cute in her hat.
I, on the other hand, looked very much the matron in a really nice hat. But what the hell. I left the hat in the car for the beach part of the celebration(groaning boards, infinite champagne, suckling pig) giant grapes and prosciutto sliced by two brothers who had taken three years to cure it(I hope of everything.)
Then today, finding that once again I have brought my currency curse on myself—that is to say, the minute I travel the dollar sinks, so even as the euro is in the toilet, my very coming makes it expensive again, and the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) are in better shape than they would have been had I not made the voyage, so decided to go home before it gets even worse.
Still, I did have to make one last swing to the open market for some sunglasses—the woman in the really good store was amazingly rude, very un-Italian, I could have been in Paris—so I saved 170 euros which by tomorrow will probably be worth twice what the dollar is if I stay.
So I went to the open market. And guess what was there. My hat. 7 euros. I was tempted to buy it simply to shove it down the throat of the owner of Mandara on Madison(DON’T EVER GO THERE, or if you do, say I sent you and spit on her.)
Oh well. Read somewhere today(could it have been the New Yorker? Probably not, too direct)the Zen saying Live as though you were dead. So walking back to the hotel I passed a beautiful mirrored and fairy-tale decorated carousel, like the one in Bordeaux that Happy had his first and last merry-go-round ride on on what was to be his final holiday, before he had his heart attack in Paris, where his jeweled collar, the one he wore on Oprah but she didn’t show the book, the bitch, hangs in La Cimitiere Pere LaChaise next to hippy bracelets on the headstone of Jim Morrison, since they both died in the same way, in the same place, although Morrison wasn’t at the Plaza Athenee. Anyway, I took a picture of the carousel, and remembered Happy, and our trip with Betsy. A little girl about 18 months, Maria-Luisa, just perfecting her stagger, came and rode a miniature auto, and I took her picture because she was almost as beautiful, eye-wise, as the boys last night looking up at the World Cup.
Then because I know what it is to have been cheated but not by an Italian, I forced myself to have a gelati, three flavors, chocolate, bacio, and something toasted with berries in it. Raging, even as I enjoyed, I ate it all up. Soon I will be in a bed that is JUST THE RIGHT SIZE.

Leaving Tuscany

So it is that as the sun rises softly in the east, we bid farewell to beautiful downtown Montacatini. The best part of that village, besides the kind and merry people in it with the notable exception of the unpleasant woman in the pricey eyeglass store next to Benetton, so you’ll know which one to avoid, is Montecatini Alto, which I never knew was there. Not that I have been in Montecatini that often, but had I known about Alto I might have come more often, or at least tried the adventure before. There is a truly ancient finicular(about 1895, I think it said at the bottom by way of informarion) that goes up that great Tuscan hill—a mountain it must be, really—every half hour, at the cost of 7 euros round trip. It is as scenic an adventure as you can have anywhere in Europe, including the great finiculars of Switzerland that everybody knows are there, which distinguishes them from this one, besides that the Swiss ones sway in the wind and at the top of them, when there is a celebration which there wouldn’t be if you weren’t going up there, you will usually find a banker or twelve, which I myself did when I visited Luzern, and thought to interview a jovial(for a Swiss)banker I met atop that mountain, very prominent, for my then gig with the Wall Street Journal Europe, except he was shortly afterward indicted or arrested, I can’t quite remember which, before I could go shopping with him, the cover I used at the time for getting people to relax, and/or tell the truth about themselves. I imagine had he not been on his way to jail he might have told the truth about himself, as even Sir Richard Branson( a combination of P.T. Barnum and an anxious 12 year old) did, so caught up was he with the toys he played with at Sharper Image when I went shopping with him.
Ah but the Montecatini funicular led up not to a pageant of bankers, some of them crooked even though Swiss, but a restaurant hostessed by a cousin of Egi’s, the amazingly loving Mrs. Maccioni, mother of the groom whose wedding I had just attended, wife of the restaurateur. Her good nature is so vast it goes all the way up the mountain, where her cousin, Mirelle, I think it iis, but it may be different in Italian, runs a restaurant. A fine thing about Mirelle, if that is her name, is her sister or cousin Silvia, whom I met at the wedding and loved at once,pailleted as she was in black sparkles, as that is my favorite name. It belongs to the heroine of my musical, which may or may not ever get on, but I still have hope. When I first wrote it, Irving Berlin, whose same birthday I have(May 11,no need to send flowers) was still alive and I hoped to get it on in his lifetime. He lived past a hundred, held on as long as he could. Then I wanted to get it on in my mother’s lifetime, as, if you’ve read any of my novels(The Motherland and Marriage being the best of them,) you will know what a ferocious and funny character she was, as you also would if you saw the studio she left me in the Hampshire House, on its walls a badly restored, cracked in the middle Picasso she had broken over my stepfather’s head. Anyway, towards the end of her life, stunning woman she had been, with great legs a dazzling smile, and irresistible charm, she decided rather than grow old, she would crash parties. Sp she printed up press credentials, phoned ahead to inform them that Helen Schwamm of Gannett Press or Diplomatic World(whichever her cover for the event) was coming, always flawlessly chic in black with diamonds, inevitably ending up an honored guest. When New York celebrated its 100 most important people, under Mayor Koch, Mother was among them. So that is why I loved Silvia, and by connection her cousin, delighting in the lights far below as we looked down from our station in the clouds and had a fine dinner, though I cannot remember the name of the restaurant. If you get to Montecatini, I’m sure everyone can tell you.
There is a great faded glory to Montecatini itself. Knowing little of it history, although I knew more when there were pictures of Princess Grace and the glories that had been that were once posted in the elevators, the elevators at La Pace have been modernized, which little else has. I do, however, remember the day that Grace Kelly died, when I was in Saint Tropez and and the news came through, and the woman at the desk in my hotel said :”Il faut profiter de la Vie.” You must enjoy life.”
Damned straight. The path you walk to the pool at La Pace, its water so pleasantly warm even though it is lined in what seems to be plastic, is the same pathI walked with that sweet, stylish woman who likened the place to ‘Last Year at Marienbad,’ where “nothing ever changes.” The hotel had actually changed a little, primped and polished during the time the Communists were in charge of Monetcatini, so proud were they to have a 5 star hotel, they fixed everything. Even at the time the brothers who run it, Francesco and Stefananino, so kindly rescued me, in 1998 or 9 it had to be when I was Swimming Through Europe, there was a sadness to it, a faded grandeur, that I, in my more skeptical, fractious and facetious self might have looked at with a captious eye. But my beloved and loving friend George, the artist who lives in Radda in Chianti, had come to visit me, and pointed out the aspects of the hotel that existed nowhere else anymore: the unobtrusively beautiful stained glass you might not even notice unless you lifted your eyes, which I understand now you need always do. It’s only our own bellybuttons that have lint in them, so that’s not a place we need to spend a lot of time examining.
Giorgio taught me to be merciful; not easy when you have a tendency to be a smartass. I don’t know why it is that when we are young we think being a smartass is such a good idea. It is one of the benefits of age (how is this possible? Wasn’t I just 20? The youngest one in the class, the youngest one everywhere, the youngest to imagine she could get a musical on and everybody actually encouraged and seemed to agree witn her) that you understand, finally, that, as Aldous Huxley said. “What matters is to be kind.”) The other benefit of being older is that we will not have to live in the world that Greed has made, out whole history washed up in oil on the shores of the Gulf, where there is no Alto, as there is in Montecatini.

Prosecco per prima collazione

So I think as of breakfast this morning, I have abandoned my search for truth and beauty and decided to go in for pure pleasure. Ever since coming here, albeit for a joyous and festive occasion, I have tried to practice moderation, except for prosciutto which has wormed its way into my soul, I hope without the accompanying trichinosis. When I gave up meat last year, living in Venice, there was still this hunger for prosciutto and as it has been everywhere here in Montecatini, I have buckled under the weight of my own discipline, and said Fuck it. Though I did not partake of the suckling pig, the star of the beach celebration of Marco’s wedding, I prosciuttoed out, and decided, as I took my swim this morning, and saw from my arms I would never grow young again, that I might as well live out my days enjoying them. So it was I added prosecco to my pink grapefruit juice(for health) and gave up my plan to write immortal prose whilst(a little touch of Keats there) I was here in Montecatini, and instead just, as I wrote last year in Venice, albeit still unbought by a publisher, Live the Day.
All the same I had a bowlful of ripe cut tomatoes for my lycopene, a trick I learned from my gifted and crazy friend Emily, who always looks bright-eyed and eats pomidori fresco at the Cipriani where I can never go again because Natale is gone, but I can carry her inherent diet wisdom with me and eat the tomatoes. Beside them, though, I had a touch of the smoked salmon(a fat touch, actually) and the end of the brown bread with seeds and a splatter of scrambled egg. There were very thin women at the next table eating breakfast cakes and putting rolls in their purses so I must not think of the inequities of life, but only how lucky I am to not explode. One of them had Brigitte Bardot’s old upper lip, and a ghastly stripe of white above it that trumpeted collagen recently injected, or maybe it’s Restalyn. It has been a long time since I worried about little wrinkles as my arms started to fall off. I can remember when I returned from the south of France in my late what I still regarded as my youth, and Arnie Klein, the famous dermatologist and alleged possible father of Michael Jackson’s baby but certainly the one who lightened Michael’s skin, including that on his member when the little boy’s parents sued, said of my upper lip “I can fix that,” and did, for a while anyway.
But like literary immortality, smooth skin is never to be mine, and I am resigned to it, especially seeing the ghastly pallor where would more normally, since this is Italy, be a mustache on a woman.
As for the literary life, as Gay Talese that major phony would title it, I have also decided to set it aside, my efforts on the book I am engaged in writing now having been dampened by my favorite reader’s (there’s only one) tepid reaction to the latest chapter, the writing of which required more than focus, as everyone else here has been devoted to having a good time. George, my beloved friend from my true youth (Rome, in the late 50s) had to cancel our proposed lunch in Florence, because as noted his wife is failing and their car did, too, so I had to drink of his wisdom over the phone, which crackles the line. The big question I had to ask him, already indicated in these posts, was how to let go of what you consider your art, since I suffer daily if I don’t write something, a poem, a report to you, a book. Helmut, the Nazi therapist I had in Berkeley right after Don died and I was truly insane, desperate for a man because I hadn’t realized how partnered I was until he was with me no more, my deep strain of masochism pulled me back to Helmut even after I left San Francisco, and I called him and said I wanted to learn to love myself unconditionally and not just because I produce something, and Helmut said “Too late.”
Georgie, though, having set aside his paints to tender to Anne, said the mistake we make is thinking we have to do all our work and then we will be happy, when it should be the reverse. We should be happy first. Easy for him to say. There is, he tells me, no Italian word for ‘workaholic’, but he has seen too many of them, even in Tuscany, hard to believe, and then they die. Well the really bad news is we are all going to die anyway, which they don’t tell you at the get-go, because who could go jaunting merrily on that road thinking about how it would end. He also told me once there was no word in Italian for ‘loneliness.’ There is only ‘solitudine’ which means solitude, and that for them is enough because Italians never leave each other alone so they are never lonely.
I could see that last night at the Maccionis, where Mama Egi made dinner at her really warm home for all the veterans of the wedding, family and friends, still here. Included among the guests were the parents of the woman youngest son Mauro had married who recently dumped him, so I guess there is no Italian word for grudge, either. There were many varieties of meat, filets, chicken, rabbit(again) and sausage, but I stayed with my obsession and ate only the prosciutto and salad and asked her for a tomato from a gleaming bowl of them that was on the island stove. She took it and rakishly polished it on the back of her dress where her butt was, shooting me a mischievous glance, so I could see the fun-loving, darling young girl she must have been, before she was everybody’s Mama, including Sirio’s. The table was long and festive, all the men on the other side so they could watch the World Cup and shout ‘Vai, Vai!’ to the Italians who did not vai quite enough, the excuse being that the field was so wet and the ball was slippery. But I wished I had had a camera so I could fix a memory of all those beautiful dark eyes, including the twins’, the eleven year olds who said Justin Bieber is gay, up and over our heads, fixed on the screen.
This is an exceptionally long report—the wedding itself, for those of you who wish to know details, might or might not be in the Observer this week, or if not, I’ll send you the piece if you ask. But the e-mail here is difficult and I have to log in to write it by putting in a code and I didn’t want to waste my time that I had to buy by writing this so used my Word, which I am as good as. Oh, if only we didn’t judge ourselves. It’s easier not to when you have prosecco for breakfast.

KEEP THAT UNDER YOUR HAT

I had some doubts about coming on this trip. I am a victim of the Protestant Ethic, a day’s work well done, compounded by Jewish Guilt—or I feel terrible. So as I have no new achievement under my belt, written books not counting for anything in my mind unless published, and being only a few chapters into the new one, I felt I was not entitled to take a vacation. From what? my Jiminy Cricket would say.
Still, I was happy to be asked to this formidable wedding, details about which it would exhaust me to list, since I have already writ about it as a loving courtesy to my hosts. But once invited, I passed a hat store on Madison Avenue, and seeing the wonderful one in the window, had no choice but to buy it, it was so simply splendid, so splendidly simple, and yet coolly elaborately chic. They wanted a lot more, but I was able to talk them down to $200, promising they would be part of the article I intended to write about the wedding. Then I got cold feet, just like brides do, and started to cancel, but my darling friend Pam said “Buy you got the hat.”
So I made slow haste to come, calling ahead to Delta airlines to make sure I would be able to take the hat on board in its spacious box, and the agent on the phone held while I measured, and it just made the 18” diameter. And then I called Sky Magazine, the Delta in-flight thing to try and get an actual assignment to write about the journey of the hat, figuring it would be much to their advantage since probably the people who know there is a direct flight from JFK to Pisa are fewer than legion. But they called me back and said it wasn’t funny enough, as for that kind of feature, on their back page, they prefer using comedians. Oh, well.
Still I came, and wore the hat to the church part of the wedding, where the bride arrived gorgeously arrayed in white crocheted lace in the black sidecar of a motorcycle driven by her father, and the groom wore Emiliano Zegna gray silk, and I was one of three women out of hundreds who wore a hat. The others were another New Yorker and Georgia, three times Miss Montecatini, but her beauty queen career ended there. Still, she looked cute in her hat.
I, on the other hand, looked very much the matron in a really nice hat. But what the hell. I left the hat in the car for the beach part of the celebration(groaning boards, infinite champagne, suckling pig) giant grapes and prosciutto sliced by two brothers who had taken three years to cure it(I hope of everything.)
Then today, finding that once again I have brought my currency curse on myself—that is to say, the minute I travel the dollar sinks, so even as the euro is in the toilet, my very coming makes it expensive again, and the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) are in better shape than they would have been had I not made the voyage, so decided to go home before it gets even worse.
Still, I did have to make one last swing to the open market for some sunglasses—the woman in the really good store was amazingly rude, very un-Italian, I could have been in Paris—so I saved 170 euros which by tomorrow will probably be worth twice what the dollar is if I stay.
So I went to the open market. And guess what was there. My hat. 7 euros. I was tempted to buy it simply to shove it down the throat of the owner of Mandara on Madison(DON’T EVER GO THERE, or if you do, say I sent you and spit on her.)
Oh well. Read somewhere today(could it have been the New Yorker? Probably not, too direct)the Zen saying Live as though you were dead. So walking back to the hotel I passed a beautiful mirrored and fairy-tale decorated carousel, like the one in Bordeaux that Happy, my little Yorkie, had his first and last merry-go-round ride on on what was to be his final holiday, before he had his heart attack in Paris, where his jeweled collar, the one he wore on Oprah but she didn’t show the book, the bitch, hangs in La Cimitiere Pere LaChaise next to hippy bracelets on the headstone of Jim Morrison, since they both died in the same way, in the same place, although Morrison wasn’t at the Plaza Athenee. Anyway, I took a picture of the carousel, and remembered Happy, and our car trip through the Dordogne with Betsy Hailey, a soft-spoken writer who learned to shout ‘Happy, SIT DOWN!; == he was always standing on his hind legs trying to look out the car window.. Maybe he knew ir was his last view of the world.
Italy is as good. Maybe better. A little girl about 18 months, Maria-Luisa, just perfecting her stagger, came by the carousel and rode a miniature auto, and I took her picture because she was almost as beautiful, eye-wise, as the boys last night looking up at the World Cup.
Then because I know what it is to have been cheated but not by an Italian, I forced myself to have a gelati, three flavors, chocolate, bacio, and something toasted with berries in it. Raging, even as I enjoyed, I ate it all up. Soon I will be in a bed that is JUST THE RIGHT SIZE.

I KNEW HIM, HORATIO

So Dennis Hopper has left us, one of the first friends I had in Hollywood, the youngest he was of ‘Young Hollywood,’ the clique that ruled at the time, the time being the end of the ‘50s,early 60s. We never thought about death. All we worried about was whether or not we would be successes, love would ever find us, Fame would be elusive. Nobody ever considered we would grow old or, as in my case, older. And death was a dramatic surprise, Jimmy Dean having crashed his car, something that gave Dennis his big brag, his having achieved nothing yet on his own except for small parts and telling Jack Warner to go fuck himself, so his great credential was having been Jimmy’s best friend, with Dean not able to verify or contradict.
We never thought about dying as part of the life process, because we were that young. I’m sorry because I don’t think he had a really happy life, but he must have enjoyed being over-rated. There will be a piece online at Vanity Fair that I wrote about him, so read it if you want to know more and deeper and funnier, and earlier.
These have been strange weeks as I rev up to write a new book, and try to love New York. Have seen a number of disappointing plays, Fences, in which Denzel was a whole lot better as a working man in (I think it was) Pittsburgh than he was as Brutus in last year’s horrific Julius Caesar, played in modern battle costume as if it were in Turkey, with a lot of machine guns. Viola Davis was good but whole evening more a slice of life than a play, even if it was August Wilson.
Also went with my baby cousin Lori to see Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson that I had heard someone raving about. I must be careful on whom I eavesdrop. It was painfully collegiate, something a wise-ass from Princeton might have gloried in. But the African-American gent next to me loved it, I think probably because it portrayed America as horrible to the Seminoles as we’d been to the other Native Americans, thereby giving a universality to our mean-spiritedness.
The boy who played Jackson, though, was cute with a hint of blue eye shadow, so Lori remarked that if Adam Lambert had been in the role it might have been more
To carry on about.

Went to throw my newspapers away in the recycle bin in my building, and pulled out a magazine called ‘REFORM JUDAISM’ as its cover story is ‘Unmasking Shakespeare,’ “Was the greatest canon of Western literature written by a Jewish woman?” Made me laugh a lot, though the painting of her, Amelia Bassano, is very pretty, all in Elizabethan array, mit pearls, holding a mask of Shakespeare a few inches in front of her face. I hope Erica Jong doesn’t get hold of the magazine, as her Serenisima was, I thought, an embarrassment, though I didn’t tell her that at the time, as we were friend-ish, and at the Cooking School of Umbria, an expedition I had arranged, so I read quietly in between sauces, and tried not to guffaw when the young Shakespeare, there to research The Merchant of Venice, falls in love with a nun who, I think I remember, gets pregnant and dies, and as they carry her upstairs, someone actually says—NO NO I begged aloud before I turned the page—“Good Night Sweet Princess.” God knows what Erica would do with this one. Perhaps use it as an argument for reincarnation, herself being the result of being Bassano in that previous life, and the Master herself. Jews are really funny, but I don’t think they’ll claim Dennis.

REPORTS OF MY DEATH

Like most American writers worth or not even worth their salt, I have long been an admirer of Mark Twain. I always felt a loving sense of connection, and in one of my novels, Kingdom Come, which takes place in the Afterlife, the heroine finds him in the place in Heaven for those who didn’t believe, where they get into an argument. My American Lit professor from Bryn Mawr, Warner Berthoff, gave me an A plus for their exchange, and though it came many years after graduation, lifted my heart. That was my only deep connection with that masterly gentleman, if you didn’t count a happy friendship with Kurt Vonnegut about which my son, Robert, after having dinner with him, said “that must make you feel like you’re with Mark Twain.”.
That same young man, Robert, called me today on my cell when I was at my doctor’s office, laughing, to tell me that his office-mate had Wikipediaed me and found my life to have ended on April 21, 2010. This has been a challenging few weeks, but none of the difficulties I encountered seem so bad to me now, as I check my pulse and review the things that made them seem dispiriting. There were a few encounters with people I thought were allies who turned out not to be, the suicide attempt of Mimi, who ate a stalk of grapes and had to be Intensive-Cared in the pet hospital, as raisins and grapes destroy the renal system and cause kidney failure, a few theatrical openings and presentations that make me wonder what Broadway is coming to or going from, and why I still hanker for it, and the opposite unexpectedly upbeat discovery that I had friends I hadn’t realized were. All of it put in curious perspective by my death date, though I could not help feeling good that I had been cited, when passing. as novelist and ‘poet,’ when very few, except for you to whom I send my pomes know of the poetry. So I am given these days to examine what really matters, and review those of them when I was supposedly already gone, to find them not bad at all.
But of course I called to mind (and checked, though not on Wikipedia) the quote long attributed to that literary hero, “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” The actual letter reads “reports of my death are exaggerated,” which is good enough for me, being the same in my case. Still, I am going tomorrow for a Stress test, as my doctor was sufficiently spooked to think it was a good idea to check. But it remains an honor to be connected in any way with Mr. Clemens, so I hope if there is that heaven in which he didn’t believe he is having a chuckle, reminding us both not to take things too seriously.

The Ghost of SuperBowls Past

I was never one for football. The college I went to, Bryn Mawr, was near Haverford and Swarthmore, and to describe the boys(men?) who went there as effete and/or epicene was to be lavishly understated. I attended only one football game of theirs with a hefty German exchange student named Gerd who feared for the lives of those on the field if they as much as tripped, much less were tackled. When I first met my husband, who was a jock, albeit darling, he was producing the original games of the Jets, then a brand new team, but as he really loved me, I did not have to pretend interest, though as writ in other Reports, at our wedding, Stanley Kubrick, on hearing that Don was producing those games, told him not to follow the ball, but keep the camera on the line, as that was the most interesting part of the game. Don told him “Stanley, if I can roll a credit at the end that says ‘Directed by Stanley Kubrick,’ I’ll keep the camera anywhere you say.” That immediately gave rise to an idea of Don’s, to bring in other directors, so there would be one game by Billy Wilder, and so on. Of course it never materialized but it was a funny concept.
Less than funny was the price women paid for loving their men during football season. I know there are many women who actually loved football, or pretended to, but I was never one of them. As John O’Hara always waited for winter to begin one of his novels(now mostly forgotten, alas, as a sort-of friend went to buy one on the orders of her writing teacher, and the stores carried none of them) I attribute my productivity during football seasons to fleeing into the other room where I wrote, to avoid the rasping voice of Howard Cosell. One of my meditations in How to Survive in Suburbia when your Heart’s in the Himalayas was ‘Imagine Life as Mrs. Howard Cosell.’ A chilling thought, for those of you who remember.
But much as I hated football, I did love my husband, and so we hosted many SuperBowl parties, one of them a surprise for Don’t birthday which usually came around that time, where he was actually upstairs while the guests gathered downstairs, and he never had a clue. I loved surprises, especially when they were. Once I got him to go to a concert, black tie in San Francisco, to what turned out to be a sit-down black tie party in his honor at a friend’s Mansion(not showing off, that was the name of his hotel) and even though we ran into a couple who were friends at the airport, also in black tie, he thought they were going to the same concert. I also invited Cary Grant, who did not come, though we all know or at least those of us old enough to remember, how good he looked in a tux, but he did call Don at the party to wish him Happy Birthday, which added to the surprise.(Don’s birthday was Jan. 16th, Ben Franklin’s the 17th, and Cary Grant’s the 18th, so I used to have a continuum of Polish birthdays for my three favorite guys.)
Then there was little Robert, who, at six, spent a whole SuperBowl party with Steven Spielberg, and when I asked Spielberg what he had found to talk about with my son, he said “He knows more about football than anyone I have ever met.” That encyclopedic knowledge has been passed down to Lukas, now l0, and Silas, 6, both of whom can go on endlessly about stats and fiercely love the game, though the NFL website has been most remiss about sending Silas his Brett Favre jersey, so he will probably have left the Vikings or gone on to yet another team or genuinely retired by the time it arrives and I will have to send it back to exchange for Tom Brady. SO the family tradition of loving football has been passed down through the boys, and, I must admit, I realized how much I missed Don after his early death when, all alone, I actually turned on the playoffs.
But none of that prepared me for the actual joy of yesterday’s game. As you may have noted, our country is in a great state of disrepair and dysfunction, with many devoted to simply keeping anything good from happening, a whole party pledged to blocking Barack. You may have missed the news in the FT(it’s in the lobby of this hotel, so I have become global) that China bared its dragon teeth, and said it was not wise of Obama to meet with the Dalai Lama with the US in a state of economic crisis, which sounded like a not too heavily veiled threat that they’d call their notes, as you may be aware that they own us. (I am assured by Jack Kornfield, my Jewru, who is close to that spiritual leader that the meeting will indeed take place, and what Obama needs is a copy of The Prince, as he clearly lacks an inner Machiavelli, and even in the opinion of a spiritual man could use some of that.)
Anyway, as you all know, New Orleans represents the greatest glitch of that awful administration if you leave out unnecessary wars and the destruction of the economy, so to have them rise and redeem and triumph as a team is absolutely glorious. It did feel to me like redemption. Rachel Maddow, who, openly gay, is much the softest voice, not to mention the smartest on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann having too completely filled out his terrible suits and his even worse ties and Chris Matthews yelling at everybody, did a lead-up on Friday that was incredibly touching to what a victory would mean to New Orleans, already so evenhanded and proud they planned a parade even if they lost. So I wish I could be in their numbers when the Saints Go Marching in. What a day it must in that city, and tomorrow is Mardi Gras. And the best of it, the worst of it, it would have been if I went on clinging to outmoded feelings, was I really loved the game. I hope it wasn’t just because my son hates Payton Manning.

Not Quite a Madeleine

So as I looked for fresh flowers to brighten my hotel room roaming Pavillions, formerly Von’s, but suddenly made elegant by a change of name, I fueled my trip with a paper cup of Seattle’s Best Coffee, and as I no longer give a shit, had a bear claw. Bear claws played a very important part in my life when I was very young and just starting out in this business(alleged) as I was staying in the Park Sunset, a less than upscale motel made sort of upscale by its location(Sunset Boulevard a stretch of the leg and imagination from the Sunset Towers, where some kept starlets stayed and George Raft in his very last years when he still had a pimp so the rumors about him were probably true.)
There was a coffee shop by the street entrance to the Park Sunset where they had bear claws, and as I was very chubby, fat actually, in addition to young and wasn’t sure anyone would ever love me(someone eventually did) I would resist the temptation to have one. I gave in only occasionally when the temptation became too strong and my will power caved, along with the conviction that someday someone would love me, so what the hell: there was something about the thinly sliced almonds and icing that smacked more of comfort than a hope did. Also living in the Park Sunset at the time were Vince Edwards who went on to improbable TV stardom in some doctor series I can’t remember the name of, Vic Morrow who almost became a star but a helicopter blade took his head off, and Corey Allen, the one who went off the cliff while playing ‘chicken’ with James Dean in ‘Rebel Without a Cause.’ He was a very handsome lad, most intense, and the son of Carl Cohn or Cohen, I can’t remember, who was head honcho at the Sands in Vegas when it was still heavily Mafia-ized, and he was considered a ‘White Jew,; which meant he was allowed in the inner circles even though he wasn’t Italian. I know this for a fact because my father-in-law was a ‘White Jew’ who told me Mario Puzo had a lot of things wrong and one day he would tell me the real story, and I am sorry I never heard it. I did, however, hear from him the story of the man who took the fall for Sinatra in the Westchester Playhouse scandal where there was a lot of illegal stuff going on that they tried to tie Sinatra to, since he was heavily involved in making sure the playhouse got tippy tippy top talent, and there was much graft and rumors of payoff, and Harry, my father-in-law, told me that the fall guy, a buddy of Sinatra, took the rap, went to jail. When he was released Sinatra sent his private plane to pick him up and take him for R&R in Vegas, but like a sandy Amelia Earhart(sp) he disappeared somewhere over the desert and was never heard from again.
Anyway, Carl Cohen, Corey Allen’s(changed back to Allen Cohen when he became a director0 dad was a really nice guy in spite of what it said in The Green Felt Jungle, an early expose of the Mafia, and he liked me and so okayed me at the money window at the Sands, which was kind but unfortunate as being an addictive personality I had a run as a gambler. Nothing Kenny Rogers, you understand, but I would keep going back and cashing checks thinking I could finally beat the crap table. I had gone to Vegas for the first time when I was with MCA as a songwriter, and they sent me to Vegas to write for Judy Garland and Gordon MacRae(sp?) I drove up there in the car Jennings Lang sold me from the MCA lot, that I bought with what his wife, Monica Lewis, paid me for a song I wrote for her night club act. It was a yellow Pontiac convertible, and quite hideous, but I was barely twenty and proud to have a car, even though I was being ripped off in several directions by the machinations of M CA.
Anyway I got to Vegas to write material for Judy Garland, who had a nervous breakdown as I arrived(before I met her so it couldn’t have been cause and effect,) and then I went to the Desert Inn where Gordon McRae(that looks better) was standing at the crap tables. I introduced myself to him, and he immediately began a losing streak, and after about $25,000 said, tight-lipped and dry-mouthed to one of his cronies “Get her out of here.” So friendless in Vegas, which goes not quite as deep as Eyeless in Gaza, but you’ve seen one desert you’ve seen them all, I made my shaken way to the safe deposit box, wherein was contained a certified check from NBC for all I had earned during my brief career at the only job I was ever to have, writing for the Colgate Comedy Hour, where I shared offices with Woody Allen who never showed up except the day we got paid so was clearly already smarter than I was, I who wrote a sitcom a day or a musical a week to which no one listened. Anyway, there I was, about to get my check and cash it, and I passed the old comic Jackie Miles, and said ‘Stop me, Jackie. I’m on my way to the box,” and he raised both hands rabbinically and said “Go my child and learn,”
I went back to the crap table where I had been spiritually eviscerated by Gordon McRae and put a dollar on the pass line and won. So I took the extra dollar off and said “Someone please tell me how this workd, “ and they said “Shut up and keep shooting.” I made thirty five straight passes. Someone betting against me lost two hundred thousand, someone betting with me, made sixty thousand. I made thirty five dollars. Afterwards someone explained the game, and I went to the box. It took me two and a half days with no sleep but I managed to lose every penny I’d made. The next time I had any money at all I drove to Vegas, put a hundred on the pass line, won a hundred dollars, got back into the car, stopped for gas in Barstow, where someone stole my wallet.
So I understood I was not meant to win, and so became an inveterate gambler, since in that arena losing is the spur. I would sneak out during nights in Vegas after I was married while Don slept, and cash checks and lose. Finally, during a rough patch in my marriage, we flew up to Vegas for Liza’s opening at the Riviera in a plane load of H’wood semi-celebrities, and I was so mad at Don I promised God if He would get me through it with a calm mind I would never gamble again. So He(or She or If, as I still believed at the time) did so I did, too. Have never gambled since except at a raffle in the Cotswolds where I won a stuffed Penguin.
Anyway, back to the bear claws. I think I may have eaten one or two during the time I was secretly hiding out in the Park Sunset writing the beginning of Lolita for my best friend(I thought he was) Stanley Kubrick, which was intense and lonely as he wouldn’t let me call any of my friends as he was very paranoid and thought if they knew I was in town they would know what I was doing.
The one today at Pavillions was very fresh and quite good, and I actually tasted it instead of just quieting grief and isolation, which I did as a 20 year old. During the course of eating it I remembered Maila Nurmi, who played Vampira on TV while introducing horror films, and told me she had peered in through the window of the lower level of the Park Sunset and watched Corey Allen humping, which at the time, since I was very young, I considered shocking, Not the spying, but the actual hump. She had been great friends with Jimmy Dean, predicted his stardom but apparently didn’t tell him not to drive so fast. She was probably the most interesting character in Naked in Babylon, allowing me full throttle to write about madness. She told Hal Wallis to go fuck himself which had ended her career as a seemingly serious actress. But she was genuinely fascinatingly nuts.
As for Don, the man who finally loved me, I remembered when he met my father, Lew the Mayor as he called him, and my father suggested before we got married that he change his name to ‘Davis,’ Don said “If I changed my name to Davis, I would have to get a pink jacket and add ‘And his’, as the full monicker should be ‘Don Davis and his orchestra.,” He was funny.
Our son wore a pink jacket to his father’s funeral when he was sixteen. I tried to get him into a dark blue one, but he said if he wore that, in case he managed to be there to observe, his father wouldn’t recognize him.

DEAD BEFORE ME

My son Robert has long wanted me to write a book called ‘Dead Before Me,’ about all the famous people I knew/was actual friends with, who are dead before me(among them John Lennon, Stanley Kubrick, Cary Grant, Marlon Brando, ken Kesey to give it a literary spin.) When I was in Venice this past autumn I received from him notice of yet another celeb passing, along with an e-mail that read “You better hurry up: there aren’t that many people left to be dead before you.” This morning’s LA Times carried the iconic photo of James Dean walking down a deserted, seemingly foggy Broadway, hands in his pockets, looking prematurely despondent, something he would not live to be at an appropriate age. I did not know James Dean, but he was the center of my first novel, Naked in Babylon, the plot kicker-offer(I did occasionally have a plot in my novels) being the frenzy to find his replacement for the maddened teenage audience, and keep his legend alive long enough to save the not-yet released ‘Giant.’ I called him Johnny King, not understanding yet that the dead had no rights in libel cases, or that the living had a good chance of losing them if they had a bad lawyer. The rest of the cast of characters, most of them Dead Before Me, were given pseudonyms, including Natalie Wood(Dead Before Anyone) Tony Perkins, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and a couple of little Mormon girls who came to Hollywood specifically to fuck Elvis, which they did, though the less assertive of the two had to do his cousin Gene. I hung out with them at the Hotel Roosevelt in-between bangs, while Elvis ate peanut butter and banana sandwiches and swilled Pepsi. I did not fully understand at the time the full extent of Elvis’ magnetism, but I certainly got it about James Dean.
The photo that they had in this morning’s Times(LA,’s. alas—I am on a budget and the NYT is prohibitive here) was by a photographer named Dennis Stock. The photo is so well known that it made the front page because Dennis had died. He had been one of the figures in almost constant attendance at the dinner table of the Stanley Kubricks, who were my best friends at that very young time in my life. Stanley had a collection of people in whom he was deeply interested, or from whom he thought he could steal some secrets—an actor I had gone out with when I was sixteen or so in New York named Freddie Martinl(he changed it to) was developing a brilliant new technology which Stanley appropriated for 2001, giving him no credit and very little money, which was Stanley’s way. But I liked Dennis Stock, and always wondered what he did that Stanley thought he could plunder, went to a small showing of his photographs at a gallery in New York last year and wrote him a note he never answered, so now I will never know what Stanley wanted from him besides his company, which was not that stimulating, but he was a sweet man. He had fallen deeply in love with Jimmy, as those who were also in love with Jimmy(Dennis Hopper among them) called him, and devoted what little time was left of the young Dean’s life to hanging out with him, and a few decades after trying to get movies made about him, some of them written by Stewart Stern, whom I believe had also fallen under the necrotic spell. But alas, poor Dennis, I knew him not well enough to go on about him, but it was slightly thrilling, in a chilling way, to see that what there was of his art made the front page.
In a later page there is more brouhaha about the Warren Beatty book, and how many women Warren made love to. As I made him a character(name changed, in another novel) and was personally very close to one he had had often in real life, in person and several times over the phone, including an outdoor payphone on Rodeo Drive, where he caught a cold from exposure, and one he wanted who was most unlikely, because as wonderful as she was, she was a physical wreck and very much his elder—Maureen Stapleton—(when I asked him what his character, in something we talked about my writing for the two of them could possibly be attracted to in her, he said “she has a vagina”)—and having seen the incredibly radiant and thoroughly shell-shocked Julie Christie sitting barefoot and cross-legged on the floor in the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire where he lived when he dumped her, I feel I am in the perfect position to be an authority about him and so will be the only one in Hollywood not to express an opinion. Though I will recall one time just after the big earthquake when I was recuperating in the Bel-Air pool when he came out of one of their apartment cabanas where he was meeting with Emma Thompson, and started talking to me, so I couldn’t get out of the pool as my body wasn’t good enough. He told me the full details of how he had made it back through the broken glass, barefoot, to check that his wife(he had one by then) and children were all right, and then how he was questioning living in Los Angeles, because of the safety factor.
“But then I stand on Mulholland Drive,” he said, “and I see mountains and desert and sea and all this exquisite scenery, and think ‘Where else can you find all this in one place?’ And how does it rack up against the danger? It’s like … all your life there’s this gorgeous hooker you wanted to fuck, and then you’re finally going to do it and she has Aids.”
“Why Warren, “ I said. “How poetic. Have you ever thought about being a writer?” He closed his eyes against the sinking sun and appeared to be considering it.
The book someone ought to write is about his parents. Imagine the two people who produced Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine.
Anyway, as you can tell, I am once again caught in the fake majesty of Hollywood, though I am on its most economically dangerous border, Beverly Hills, within walking distance of Neiman-Marcus. In all the years I lived here I never set foot in Neiman-Marcus, and now I understand why. They are having their ‘Last Call,’ everything GREATLY marked down. So my friend Pam having told me what incredible bargains a friend of hers had gotten I went in. There were purses piled high on the counter, among them a good-looking turquoise leather a grade or six above the kind I usually pull off the carts in New York, and I love the color, so I looked. $1570. “Is this a joke?” I deep-throatedly gasped. “Well, it was $5800,” said the semi-outraged salesgirl. I then called my friend Pam to report, and she said there were women waiting all year for that bag to be $1500, and went on to tell me how when she was younger she would shop in the lingerie department which was reasonable, and wear that to the prom. So I went to the lingerie department and found a silk robe, black and red, with satin tuxedo front, that was only $103. I was immediately struck with RAPTURE OF THE CHEAP, and thought I could spend what is left of my sojourn here in that robe, like Oscar Wilde. I mean, suddenly, it was like they were giving it away. Once having been touched with the feel of silk and the loss of any real sense of values, I went back the next day to see if the matching camisole wouldn’t be a good idea. Happily they had only the wrong size. But on passing out the door on the first floor, I saw that the only $1570.00 purse was gone.
WHO ARE THESE WOMEN?

It Never Rains in California

So as if to demand equal time with the freeze in the east, and, more devastatingly, the disaster in Haiti, the heavens(if you can think of them as such) have opened up .
Great mudslides are everywhere they can do the most damage, and for some reason I can hear Cass Elliot singing ‘It Never Rains in Southern California,’ although that was a hit by Toni Toni Tone, whoever the hell they are, when I Google it to check.
I think of Cass often, possibly because my son wanted me to write ‘Dead Before Me’, and she was one of the first famous friends I had to go. But also I think of her because I can still hear her voice, sometimes on the radio (“All the leaves are brown and the sky is gray”) and sometimes in memory, combined with her own appraisal of herself, the only overconfident thing about her, that “there are three great pipes in this country: Barbra, Edye(Gorme) and me.” We met her at the palatial movie star home of the palatial movie star Laurence Harvey, whose epicene talent was surpassed by his elegance. He had more style than anybody, most of it painstakingly acquired, since he had been born Lithuanian, and it was a long trip, probably by boat, to the impressive if ultimately frail figure he became. He married the sophisticated British actress Margaret Leighton, many years his senior but a slender heavyweight in theatre and films, which was what he wanted to be, and at some point left her for the widow of Harry Cohn, the ferocious head of Columbia, whom he kept referring to, even after their divorce, as ‘Mrs. Cohn.’ It put me in mind of Billy Rose, the once long ago flamboyant tiny producer(read The Pretenders) who told me “You should never marry a woman who’s richer than you are.”
Anyway, Larry had this great white house looking down into one of the chi-chi-ier canyons, up atop a street called Cabrillo off Coldwater Canyon, with Greek statues around the pool and all the rest of it, as one imagined movie stars lived, probably including the builder of the house who could not wait to snag someone pretentious, which Larry also was, although very dear. The furniture was also Movie Star white, and on one of the deep armchairs , sunken in, was Cass Elliot. She either liked and trusted me immediately or didn’t know how to hold anything back, and told me she was not financially secure. “Joni Mitchell is shipping gold, and I can’t even get a record contract<’ which, for one of the three great pipes in the country had to be really painful. Her life itself was obviously painful, judging from her size, with which I both identified and empathized, as having grown up a fatty whom people always told ‘You have such a pretty face, if you’d only lose weight…” I could see the pretty face hiding in Cass. She had wonderful green eyes, something I always regarded as an achievement, and though the rest of her features were less than impressive, I could wash the bloat away with my not green eyes and see who was hiding inside, and she was pretty. And very very funny, and quick. Easily wounded and compulsive—I knew of a very cute young writer who drove with her to Palm Springs in her Cadillac, tilted heavily to one side, who made very clear to her that he had no intention of sleeping with her, at which point she pulled off the road and went into a store and bought four of the giant size Hershey bars and ate them in very few minutes during the rest of the drive, at the end of which she had him fired from the comedy he was supposed to write for her.
We had the same doctor, a very sweet man later to miss completely my husband’s cancer so considered himself responsible for his death which I try not to do, who had an overload of compassion(although apparently not a lot of smarts) and he was very loving to Cass, and enlisted me to help her. At one point she fell on herself and broke her leg, and as I visited her, in traction in a hospital bed in her home, leg pulled high in the air, I told her it was a warning, that she would have to lose weight or she would kill herself, which she not long after did, the cruel verdict of the gossipmongers being that she had died of a ham sandwich. Undoubtedly the report that she had choked on something she was eating was a true one, but I always considered she had died of loneliness, the kind of desperation that when you were alone in a hotel room in London could drive you to eat too fast and without thinking, imagining that feeling full would make you feel less isolated. I am sorry for the health rage now finally sweeping America about obesity that she, or someone like her, with powerful pipes, is not around to be a poster girl. They could use the army motto ‘Be all that you can be’ and try and turn it around so it sang ‘Be less than you are.’
We went once, to see her in Las Vegas where she had a new act. She wore a voluminous silk outfit that made her look more like a circus tent itself than the clown she thought she was dressed as, surrounded by boy dancers dressed the same, but of normal size. At one point Don turned to me and whispered “You could have been her.” (I had started my professional life, such as it was, as a singer, doing my own material—mostly comedy-- in Paris at the Mars Club, and in Hollywood at the Purple Onion on Sunset. At the time I was still a chub.)
So I ached for my beloved(which she was, -- I am a sucker for funny, especially when I can see the poignancy underneath) friend, her inability to find love, especially for herself enough to stop eating. When she died, her fineral was the same day John Dean went to jail(he was my neighbor on Rembert Lane, him and the martials(sp?) who were staked out in the upper room of his garage waiting to see him to the slammer for his complicity in Watergate.) I remember at the time standing in the Hollywood Cemetery, the once top place to get buried i—Valentino and the rest of the kids—that had lost out first to Forest Lawn, then later to Westwood, or what Peter Hyams calls ‘Our Lady of Avco’ where Marilyn and Natalie and Billy Wilder are planted, not to mention, though I must, Don,, thinking that of the two, Cass had gotten the lighter sentence. At the time I was a great believer in the Afterlife, having a close friend who had soul-washed me, but has since disappeared from my life, angry and unforgiving, so I am no longer sure that anything she believed in could possibly be true, or Christian, in the best sense of that word, probably with a little ‘c.’
So Cass is under the ground and probably not on high, but she is on the radio, and the voice is wonderful and strong, and whether or not one of the three greatest pipes in America at that time, still worth listening to. I remember when I introduced her to my close, loved friend Taffy who was the other half then of Bill, one of the writers of Country Roads, with a lovely voice, and a face that drove Republicans wild, with dimples yet, Cass told her not to give up her day job. Fairly merciless I thought it. Taffy ignored her and went on to become one quarter of the Starland Vocal Band, who had the big hit(one) “Afternoon Delight.” So sometimes it’s good not to listen to someone who you’re impressed with, though I often wish Cass had been impressed enough with me to pay attention.
Still, I think of her in Baltimore, where she climbed up on the stage when she was four, in the movie theater where they had talent searches and giveaway dishes during the intermission. And the MC said to her, “Little Girl, what are you doing here?” And she said “I came here to sing.” And that was why she was born, and that was what she did.
I think of it more than I probably would when I sit on myself too hard because I do not feel whole unless I am writing. I think of her, and then I think “I came here to write.” And I did. I should probably be starting on a new book now, but I’m scared. So this is my Instead, while it’s raining.
.

Not Quite a Madeleine

So as I looked for fresh flowers to brighten my hotel room roaming Pavillions, formerly Von’s, but suddenly made elegant by a change of name, I fueled my trip with a paper cup of Seattle’s Best Coffee, and as I no longer give a shit, had a bear claw. Bear claws played a very important part in my life when I was very young and just starting out in this business(alleged) as I was staying in the Park Sunset, a less than upscale motel made sort of upscale by its location(Sunset Boulevard a stretch of the leg and imagination from the Sunset Towers, where some kept starlets stayed and George Raft in his very last years when he still had a pimp so the rumors about him were probably true.)
There was a coffee shop by the street entrance to the Park Sunset where they had bear claws, and as I was very chubby, fat actually, in addition to young and wasn’t sure anyone would ever love me(someone eventually did) I would resist the temptation to have one. I gave in only occasionally when the temptation became too strong and my will power caved, along with the conviction that someday someone would love me, so what the hell: there was something about the thinly sliced almonds and icing that smacked more of comfort than a hope did. Also living in the Park Sunset at the time were Vince Edwards who went on to improbable TV stardom in some doctor series I can’t remember the name of, Vic Morrow who almost became a star but a helicopter blade took his head off, and Corey Allen, the one who went off the cliff while playing ‘chicken’ with James Dean in ‘Rebel Without a Cause.’ He was a very handsome lad, most intense, and the son of Carl Cohn or Cohen, I can’t remember, who was head honcho at the Sands in Vegas when it was still heavily Mafia-ized, and he was considered a ‘White Jew,; which meant he was allowed in the inner circles even though he wasn’t Italian. I know this for a fact because my father-in-law was a ‘White Jew’ who told me Mario Puzo had a lot of things wrong and one day he would tell me the real story, and I am sorry I never heard it. I did, however, hear from him the story of the man who took the fall for Sinatra in the Westchester Playhouse scandal where there was a lot of illegal stuff going on that they tried to tie Sinatra to, since he was heavily involved in making sure the playhouse got tippy tippy top talent, and there was much graft and rumors of payoff, and Harry, my father-in-law, told me that the fall guy, a buddy of Sinatra, took the rap, went to jail. When he was released Sinatra sent his private plane to pick him up and take him for R&R in Vegas, but like a sandy Amelia Earhart(sp) he disappeared somewhere over the desert and was never heard from again.
Anyway, Carl Cohen, Corey Allen’s(changed back to Allen Cohen when he became a director0 dad was a really nice guy in spite of what it said in The Green Felt Jungle, an early expose of the Mafia, and he liked me and so okayed me at the money window at the Sands, which was kind but unfortunate as being an addictive personality I had a run as a gambler. Nothing Kenny Rogers, you understand, but I would keep going back and cashing checks thinking I could finally beat the crap table. I had gone to Vegas for the first time when I was with MCA as a songwriter, and they sent me to Vegas to write for Judy Garland and Gordon MacRae(sp?) I drove up there in the car Jennings Lang sold me from the MCA lot, that I bought with what his wife, Monica Lewis, paid me for a song I wrote for her night club act. It was a yellow Pontiac convertible, and quite hideous, but I was barely twenty and proud to have a car, even though I was being ripped off in several directions by the machinations of M CA.
Anyway I got to Vegas to write material for Judy Garland, who had a nervous breakdown as I arrived(before I met her so it couldn’t have been cause and effect,) and then I went to the Desert Inn where Gordon McRae(that looks better) was standing at the crap tables. I introduced myself to him, and he immediately began a losing streak, and after about $25,000 said, tight-lipped and dry-mouthed to one of his cronies “Get her out of here.” So friendless in Vegas, which goes not quite as deep as Eyeless in Gaza, but you’ve seen one desert you’ve seen them all, I made my shaken way to the safe deposit box, wherein was contained a certified check from NBC for all I had earned during my brief career at the only job I was ever to have, writing for the Colgate Comedy Hour, where I shared offices with Woody Allen who never showed up except the day we got paid so was clearly already smarter than I was, I who wrote a sitcom a day or a musical a week to which no one listened. Anyway, there I was, about to get my check and cash it, and I passed the old comic Jackie Miles, and said ‘Stop me, Jackie. I’m on my way to the box,” and he raised both hands rabbinically and said “Go my child and learn,”
I went back to the crap table where I had been spiritually eviscerated by Gordon McRae and put a dollar on the pass line and won. So I took the extra dollar off and said “Someone please tell me how this workd, “ and they said “Shut up and keep shooting.” I made thirty five straight passes. Someone betting against me lost two hundred thousand, someone betting with me, made sixty thousand. I made thirty five dollars. Afterwards someone explained the game, and I went to the box. It took me two and a half days with no sleep but I managed to lose every penny I’d made. The next time I had any money at all I drove to Vegas, put a hundred on the pass line, won a hundred dollars, got back into the car, stopped for gas in Barstow, where someone stole my wallet.
So I understood I was not meant to win, and so became an inveterate gambler, since in that arena losing is the spur. I would sneak out during nights in Vegas after I was married while Don slept, and cash checks and lose. Finally, during a rough patch in my marriage, we flew up to Vegas for Liza’s opening at the Riviera in a plane load of H’wood semi-celebrities, and I was so mad at Don I promised God if He would get me through it with a calm mind I would never gamble again. So He(or She or If, as I still believed at the time) did so I did, too. Have never gambled since except at a raffle in the Cotswolds where I won a stuffed Penguin.
Anyway, back to the bear claws. I think I may have eaten one or two during the time I was secretly hiding out in the Park Sunset writing the beginning of Lolita for my best friend(I thought he was) Stanley Kubrick, which was intense and lonely as he wouldn’t let me call any of my friends as he was very paranoid and thought if they knew I was in town they would know what I was doing.
The one today at Pavillions was very fresh and quite good, and I actually tasted it instead of just quieting grief and isolation, which I did as a 20 year old. During the course of eating it I remembered Maila Nurmi, who played Vampira on TV while introducing horror films, and told me she had peered in through the window of the lower level of the Park Sunset and watched Corey Allen humping, which at the time, since I was very young, I considered shocking, Not the spying, but the actual hump. She had been great friends with Jimmy Dean, predicted his stardom but apparently didn’t tell him not to drive so fast. She was probably the most interesting character in Naked in Babylon, allowing me full throttle to write about madness. She told Hal Wallis to go fuck himself which had ended her career as a seemingly serious actress. But she was genuinely fascinatingly nuts.
As for Don, the man who finally loved me, I remembered when he met my father, Lew the Mayor as he called him, and my father suggested before we got married that he change his name to ‘Davis,’ Don said “If I changed my name to Davis, I would have to get a pink jacket and add ‘And his’, as the full monicker should be ‘Don Davis and his orchestra.,” He was funny.
Our son wore a pink jacket to his father’s funeral when he was sixteen. I tried to get him into a dark blue one, but he said if he wore that, in case he managed to be there to observe, his father wouldn’t recognize him.