PLOT

    Plot was always the last thing I thought of, if at all.  It was being able to express myself, feeling through the ends of my fingers, the few I used, connecting with my characters as I connected with the keys that carried me along.  That anything would hinge on who did what never occurred to me.

     But yesterday I started to sort out maybe not exactly what had happened to my daughter Madeleine.  But only some of it.  I think.  I can't be really sure.  This much I know for sure: she is dead.  And 
somebody might have killed her.
      I got the most beautiful picture of her, recent, pulled together like a teenage model, sent me by her dearest friend, the sad way life works out, her own life pulled together many miles away. Sending me the loveliest picture of Madeleine, looking like the supermodel it would have made her happy to be. Only dead at just turned 50.  A bad dream.

    I had an actual bad dream last night, the first I have had, at least I am aware of having, where I didn't know anybody in it, or where I was: it was a museum, I think someplace like Philadelphia, only I have been in Philadelphia and this place was foreign to me.  Filled with uptight, aloof people, who didn't know who I was, and didn't care.  And I was inarticulate, and frightened.  Knowing nothing, most especially why I was there, or where 'there' was.  And then I realized I was dreaming, and woke, abruptly, remembering Madeleine was dead.

    My poor little girl.  This is all so hard, and hard to believe.  Europe shattering, Trump re-surfacing yet again, and Madeleine dead.

MADELEINE

Strangely, I was in my drugstore in Beverly Hills when I received news of my daughter’s death.  She was just turned fifty years old, and when last I saw her she was really pretty.

     She’d had her nose fixed when she was still a student at Beverly High, which most of the girls who didn’t consider themselves pretty enough—almost all of them—did.  Disappointed with the job her surgeon had done, cute but not chiseled enough—she nonetheless held her impression of herself high—or so it seemed.  My husband was still alive, so she had her protector and maybe that helped keep her out of trouble.  Or so I thought, but then… what did I know?  I was so busy being a writer.

      It seems I am still or again like that now.  Waiting for my son to come pick me up outside the doctor’s office and pharmacy where I found myself, sort of providentially, when I got the sorrowful news, I have my Macbook in my lap, and, strangely less than emotional, am just writing.  Weird that I should be back in Beverly Hills, in front of his office when I get the news. Walked here this morning after waking at four-thirty, seven thirty New York time, back yesterday, in time to be here for news of Madeleine’s death.

     Madeleine.  Born at the tippy-top, nearly, of our marriage.  A show opening on Broadway at the same time as our daughter was being born, my husband associate producer as a way of salvaging his career, imploded from the beginning.  Poor Don.  Sweetest man in the world, not easy coming from the Bronx.  Had the option of an easier life had he chosen being crooked.

     But as he was honest, and not self-aggrandizing, he might have undersold himself.  So in Hollywood he was doomed, from the beginning.

      Maybe Madeleine was, too.  When she was born, her Grandma Helen, which she wasn't to be called, lest she sound like she was old, said: "She has pretty eyes.  The rest we can fix.”

      And because it was Beverly Hills, we did.  Not always by the right people.  But she seemed satisfied, except for how gorgeous she wasn’t exactly, in spite of it all.  And how easy it wasn’t.

       I was just back from New York, sitting in the forecourt of my doctor’s office, when I got the terrible news.  The phone rang. It was the banker who handles Madeleine’s inheritance from her grandfather, who’d been Mayor of Tucson.  “I don’t know how

to do this,” the banker said, his throat audibly closing.  “I’ve never had to do this before.” 

     I thought he was going to tell me she’d been arrested.  My mind leapt to everything I would have to do to try and make the sentence less grave.  Instead, he told me she was dead.

     Somehow, it seemed a touch less terrible.  That, apparently, is how it is in Southern California. Death is somehow a touch less horrible than a child’s being in terrible trouble.  Or at least it appears that way until you get a chance to think about it, to sort it out.  If death can be sorted out.

     

NAME DROP: Doris Day

    When I first arrived in Hollywood, I was able to drop the biggest name of the day: Doris.  I had met the singer and movie star(#1 in her radiance) when I kid-sat her son, Terry, in London, having met their traveling troupe in the south of France, where I'd gone with my mother, who'd come to Europe to check on me, convinced I could be up to no good, singing in the Mars Club as I had been.  "Is she a white girl?" Gene Kelly asked someone when he heard where I'd been performing in Paris.
     Terry, Doris' boy, was a terrible kid, but probably all eleven or twelve year old boys would have seemed terrible to me at the time. I was just past twenty,  considering myself a grown-up.  The greatest star of her time, Doris Day was sweet, kind and kind of shy.  I could think of no better way to ingratiate myself with her than to help with Terry, who was bored, restless, and an obvious pain.  
    "Westminster Abbey.  Who needs it?" he'd say.  "Let's go to Wimpy's and have a Wimpyburger." 
     Doris was making a movie, The Man Who Knew Too Much, so I had the dubious privilege of caring for Terry,  taking him around to the various obligatory sights, to all of which he sneered "Who Needs It?"  I ended up writing a song with that title, that I tried to sell her husband, Marty Melcher, whom I imagined/hoped would recognize my talent and make me into the new Irving Berlin, whose same birthday I had. "Double A Ascap stuff," Marty said, listening to my songs.  But he expressed no interest in advancing them, and bought nothing.  I don't think I really expected him to.  It was enough I could hang out on the periphery of Doris' life, when she went underwear shopping with Audrey Hepburn.
     But when we all ended up back in Hollywood, Doris invited me to Sunday brunch at the Bel-Air home of her lawyer, Jerry Rosenthal, a smart, funny, powerful man who became my friend and ally, which served me well until he went to jail.  But that wasn't for a number of years.  And in the interim at his home I met arguably America's greatest lyricist, Yip Harburg, a darling man, writer of "Over the Rainbow." At that time it was my hope to have a career as a songwriter, so the joyful fact that Yip liked me, and his wife, Eddie, a tough, smart woman, took me under her very strong wing, was a bonanza.  They were my advocates, protecting and connecting me once back in New York.  Except for the one very Leftist evening they invited me to, they showed me nothing but kindness. 
      Eddie got mad at me, though, when I turned up with Don who was to become my husband.  It had been her intention to connect me with her son(from a previous marriage.) But they ended up the most loving elders in my history.  Probably the happiest experience of my young life was walking through Central Park with Yipper, singing him songs from the musical I was writing,  having him make approving comments.  "As good as any ever written," he said after one.  And then, after the last "I wish I'd written that." 
      The friendship with Doris never blossomed into what I'd hoped would be the musical reality.  But I'd had the lilting lift of the friendship with her in my early days in the business.  And Jerry became friends with my mother, whom he called all the time from jail, collect.  She always accepted.  He had gotten into a feud with a judge he considered himself smarter than.  But the judge was the one with the gavel and the clout.  So he sentenced him to jail, from which he called my mother collect.  At one point, finally, he was released, and took up sad residence on a less than lovely street in Beverly Hills, the wrong side of Santa Monica Boulevard. He lived a very long life, the end of it, disgraced.
      He was a very smart man, brilliant, really, who outsmarted himself.  But I loved him.  I never became a big enough success in the songwriting business for him to in any way screw me. He was the first  entertainment lawyer to make himself into a powerful corporation, planning what he'd intended to make (almost literally) his own country, where he'd be able to deal in his own favor with taxes.  I saw a plan in his office of a mountain he'd outfitted, renamed, circled with roads, and dotted with outposts.  
     Many were those that he'd mulcted.  Ross Hunter, one of the most influential filmmakers of the day, whom Jerry had represented and incorporated, got tears in his eyes when he spoke of him. And Kirk Douglas raged. It was not unlike the Mel Brooks TV comedy, about a crook named Mr. Big.  "If only he had turned his badness to goodness," the former partner says.  "He could have really been... Mr. Big."

SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHDAY

So like the good English major I was, fortunate to be still alive on this, the Bard's birthday, I decided to celebrate him by going to SHE LOVES ME, the musical I most wanted to see-- after Hamilton, of course, for which I have a ticket in June, box-office rated at a fortune that can be apparently charged legitimately when a civilization, so-called, is impressed (and guilty) enough.

      I'd forgotten to go-- rather, I hadn't looked at the ticket that was here in my apartment, until the day had passed.  To my pleasurable joy, I went today, gave them the overlooked and forgotten ticket, and they let me wait until curtain time and then let me in.

     I'd gone to the show the first time in my youth, and seen sort-of-good-friend Jack Cassidy, a genuinely gifted cad, which he often played and well, in the role of the gifted cad,-- couldn't have been much of a stretch-- he won a Tony.  I still miss Jack, as I miss all those super-talented buddies, at least I thought they were, who were my friends in those days when I thought my future was the musical theatre.  That was before Kermit Bloomgarden, who seemed at the time, the most honorable and best-respected producer in the-ah-tre, took all the money that had been raised for the musical of Mark Twain's Million Pound Note I had written with the gifted composer Phil Springer, and put it in a Mel Brooks' show that failed, across the street, (Broadway,) from where ours would have been.  I think it was called Nowhere to Go but Up, an ill-chosen and completely inaccurate title.

     You didn't sue a producer in those days, especially when he had brought you Diary of Anne Frank, and was considered a Great Man.  That was before you learned, or at least I started to, that people screwed you even when they didn't the way you wanted them to when you wanted them to.

     I note a certain note of bitterness in me, pointless and more than way overdue, pointless since almost all who are involved in my disappointments and youthful betrayals are dead, probably the best revenge of all.  Jack Cassidy, who I really loved as you loved gifted people in those eager and chubby little days, when crazy in love with the musical theatre, died quite young in his Hollywood apartment, having burned himself to death.  Alexis Smith, a gifted actress, beautiful and rarely witty, said of Jack's death, "Well, he always was flamboyant."
   So it was nice, with all this recollection,  to see SHE LOVES ME, especially since they let me in free after everyone was seated.  They found a place for me in the second row.  I imagine that Shakespeare would have been pleased that they were that considerate of a writer, even though she wasn't in his class, albeit majoring in him at Bryn Mawr.

     I need to blow a kiss, hoping it might carry into the Afterworld if there is one, to the agent who was soooo good to me in my (it really was,) youth, Bobby Helfer.  I might have written about him before, but I just want to make sure, because he was a soul like you always hope will be in the tales about Show Biz, but rarely is, because that kind of person is rare indeed.  He was the agent at MCA who signed me when I was 20, even though everyone at the agency told him not to, because he couldn't get as much money for me as someone like Les Baxter, more noted though maybe not as talented-- I really was.  I can say that with no embarrassment or fear of seeming vain, because it is as though that very young Gwen died a long time ago, the talents on which that life danced being so long unused and/or unexpressed.  But Bobby was that rare and wondrous being who did because he Believed.  

     He committed suicide on his 42nd birthday by taking 42 sleeping pills.

     Hey, Shakespeare wrote most of his great plays when he was in his twenties.  Just to take it to a lighter level.

    I am of a happier heart than I was because of Nick Corley, the great-hearted actor director who was and is so kind, who may have set me onto a more positive path.  As I said, and I hope, we shall see.  There's a morning dove in my window box as I've written more than once now.  I have a picture of her with her two eggs that I would put online if I knew how.  Tomorrow to the Apple Store.

CARY GRANT

Still my favorite name to drop, after a long lifetime, Cary Grant said "Hate will keep you alive longer than love will."  So I believe Donald Trump may live forever.
    There seems to be absolutely no secret subtext in his rants.  It is all right out there: loathing, loathing and loathing.  That the seemingly least insane of his cohorts should have endorsed him, is the saddest demonstration of where the Republicans have gone.  That my father, Lew the Mayor, as my friend Mel Brooks used to call him, should be relegated to the Afterlife at this moment seems the harshest punishment for those whose greatest joy was inflicting pain.  That seems a harsh pronumciamento on my part, but apparently it comes from someplace really deep, where I assume my subconscious originates.
     Having just come from a luxuriant lunch, brain-wise as opposed to food, with my favorite friend from my political youth, Alice Hartman later Henkin, I am in a state of complacent terror at what is possibly going to happen to our world, as initiated by our country, at the possible victory of Trump, originally Trumpf, which gives you some idea of how it should really be pronounced, with a sneer and dismissal of humanity included.  If he wins, it will be a triumphf. 
      Alice was the smartest political mind in our class, the one with whom I watched the Army-McCarthy hearings upstairs in whatever that room was in the Deanery when there was a new TV of the day that actually played during the day.  And we suffered and sorrowed over what could still actually have happened in spite of how crazy we knew McCarthy was.  That in one lifetime there could actually have emerged, risen, and possibly triumphed someone who was not only crazier but also managed to be more foolish, though in a far more theatrical way, is, from the directorial standpoint, unthinkable.
But only of course if you are capable of thinking, which, apparently the Republicans are not.  Wanting only to win, they do not seem to see how much we have to lose.
      America.