REPORT FROM THE FRONT

Ducks have no Leader-Are They Republicans

2011-12-09T01:52:00.000-05:00

From my window I can see the plucked-dry-of-rice rice fields, part of them slightly flooded with water, awaiting, I would guess, the next crop to be planted, and temporarily inhabited by about two dozen ducks. I watched them this morning, a symphony of rustling feathers, checking themselves, I would guess, for fleas, wagging what would have been their tails if they were dogs, and I guess these are tails, too, or we wouldn't have had the ducktail haircut. They have left behind their morning task of foraging for leftover grains and insects, and have moved, in a white and speckled brown group, to the side of the field where they appear to be dozing. But I could not see which one, if any, gave them the signal to change functions, but they seem all to be following suit.
I am going today to the holistic doctor to see if she can help me with my allergies, which are killers right now, the air being heavy with humidity and the inside of walls probably the same. Jack told me to go to Thailand, but I am not yet in the frame of mind to move on-- still hoping for a creative breakthrough-- and even if I do I just found out I have to get an exit visa, since I was successful in getting residency for a year, so I understand suddenly what it means to be an American, free to come and go with no red tape as long as you have a Passport. Which I don't have, as it has not yet been returned to me, and that makes me uneasy.
But I am somewhat soothed from within by having seen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs which explained to me my entire Gestalt, the wicked stepmother who was at the same time my fascinating Mama with an accent over the a, fearful of losing her looks and wondering why she had been saddled with this chubby little girl when she hadn't liked children even when she was one of them(her own words), the joy of working(Hi Ho, Hi Ho) the prince(he came, though he also went) the promise of life as laid down by Disney.
Today, determined to make the best of everything in spite of being itchy, I had cereal for breakfast with a banana which I don't really like but reminded me of my Uncle Ralphie, when we all lived together on Melwood Street in Pittsburgh, in spite of my mother's thinking she had married a rich boy who then moved in with her family, so there were more sharing the one bathroom, usually co=opted for inordinate amounts of time by my father, who Grandpa called 'Lew W. Davis' to emphasize and satirize his elegance. Ralphie was the sweetest one, in spite of calling me Baby Elephant, and had an unexpectedly dark life after the Navy, marrying Honey Sue Schugar(no kidding) the mad daughter of Pittsburgh's leading undertaker. She was crazy as a loon and they had a wild-eyed daughter who I hope is okay, though I've lost touch.(a break to go to the allergist.)
So the homeopathic doctor who still gave me a shot said I had to move, and poor Sabine, my landlord, already had a headache so I hope I have not given her a worse one. I seized on the first hotel room I could find that seemed reasonable, and it is but the air conditioning isn't really working so I am not long for here.
I hope I will find the right place, one where I can write the book I think I have started: that is to say, it feels like the start, but who knows. Tomorrow I go to start celebrating the birthday of Scott, an Australian married to an Indonesian woman whose story gave me the beginning of what feels like my book, and I tell it well enough I think that I don't want to dilute it by telling it here. But he is very open and cheery, as most Ozzies are, not having been on the planet long enough as a breed to become devious.
Anyway, this is just to reconnect with all of you and tell you I miss you, and hope some of you miss me. The best thing in my life is the friends I have been lucky enough to make, even on the spur of what seemed an insensitive moment. Witness the breakdown of my computer, which closed me out because I didn't have the right password, it insisted, and then cut me off completely. One of the times I went to the Apple store on Fifth I had connected with Fernando, who coached me for those fifty minutes-- interesting that a 1on1 at Apple lasts the length of what used to be a psychiatrist's appointment. Then another time I connected with his wife Gabi, and we became what I thought was friends, but you never can tell really in the world anymore till you get to the crunch.
Well, yesterday came the crunch, because I couldn't send or receive from thegwen and was forced to open a new account under RitaFavorita, the name of my sort-of-heroine from SCANDAL, the woman who brought down someone who seems curiously close to Berlusconi(good timing!)available shortly online at Amazon. com, shallow but eminently entertaining and readable, downloadable soon in print from Telemachus Press and Amazon for $9.99 in honor of Herman Cain. So even though I had an e-mail, I longed to have myself back, and feared losing all of you because you wouldn't know who Rita was. Somehow I got through to Gabi. She spent two hours on the phone with me from her home, from midnight till 2 AM her time-- Skype it was, God Bless technology even though technology seems godless-- and she fixed it. Got me back thegwen and also my faith that there are sensational people out there, you just have to patiently make your way through the universe and Trust. Patience was always my short suit, but Trust has always been a long one. I am a very lucky woman. Now that my faith in people is restored, I must have a shot at God.
Love and xx from Gwen in a steamy room, not for the reason we might hope.

NOW,VOYAGER: Mimi goes to Sea

2011-11-10T19:35:00.000-05:00

The placing of Mimi's ashes in a young coconut, and sending her to sea off Bali, had to be postponed until the day of the full moon, which is now, because when you do ceremony in Bali it has to be at an auspicious time, or the souls do not rejoice as they should. At least, I think that's the reason. There's so much mystery and superstition around Bali that one cannot be quite sure. You just have to leave your heart open and see what happens. At any rate, I do.
So Mimi, whose last great earthly journey was to Bali in my suitcase, in a little flower-printed metal box from Hartsdale pet cemetery where she was cremated, got taken to the beach at Canggu, because that is where you are allowed to do your ceremonies. Yoni, my darling driver came today bearing five little baskets woven from palm, with tiny flowers and petals from flowers in them, and we went there, pausing for her to light the incense, and scatter a few of the petals. Then we went down the stone steps to the sand. The waves were very strong and forceful so even though I had been ready to take the coconut into the water and send her on her journey to the Infinite, I thought better of it and signaled to the single surfer taking it all on, and asked him if he'd carry her out beyond the crash of them, and he did. His name was Alex, a French Swiss, very handsome and blond and young, so I think she would have liked that. He said I spoke excellent French, so you know he was that rare Frenchman who doesn't turn up his nose at Americans and say "I speak English." I invited him to the ice cream party I am giving at Gusto on Saturday to celebrate Kurt Vonnegut, whose actual birthday is tomorrow.
I never really knew the exact date of Mimi's birth, but I do know the exact date she died, June 17th. It was all very sudden and hard, because I hadn't really known she was ill-- there was just a few little signs that something was off. As my friends knew, she was brilliant, and could spell, so when I said 'You want a T R E A T?' she would run to the closet and stand on her hind legs. Lately she had stopped jumping up onto my bed-- I had to lift her-- and when I spelled TREAT, she started running to the wrong closet. But I took her in to see the vet just as part of a regular schedule, stopping first at the very pricey groomer so she would look her best for her appointment. I had told the vet she seemed to be favoring her neck, and the vet, a very sharp woman, said 'Call the neurologist.' And I said 'What?' And she said 'Little white dogs.' By the time we got to the hospital, it was like everyone knew, and they put their arms around me, knowing. They did a spinal tap and an MRI, and she had eight spots on her brain-- there's a mysterious virus that attacks toy dogs, mostly female. A sexist virus. There must be something we can do. Gloria?
Carleen, who loved her as much as I did Had been up all night, as I was, and said: "We will see her in the clouds." When we went back the next morning and sat with Mimi, she wasn't really there anymore. So I sang her a lullaby and they put her to sleep in my lap, and somebody came from Hartsdale to pick up her body for the cremation. She was all over the sky in New York, but clouds in Bali, where I came to recover from my loss, courtesy of Denise, are different from the clouds in Manhattan. They are pretty much strung out across the horizon, instead of fluffy with holes in them that looked like her big black eyes. But today, after we sent her out to sea in her young coconut, there were Mimi clouds, puffy and lush and generous, some of them gray around the edges like the day was, I guess from the ashes.
I had lost an earring in my bed before leaving New York for this move, and Carleen, who is very good at finding things that seem to have disappeared didn't feel like looking for it. So I'd brought the other one, the one I still had in my ear when I woke up. It was a star, a diamond. I put it in the young coconut with Mimi's ashes. It is only right that she should have left with her own diamond. She was a star.

WATCHING OUT FOR COBRAS

2011-11-07T23:34:00.002-05:00

So as I was immediately informed after my arrival by the Tarot reader who may or may not have cancer, and may or may not have been looking to excite my sympathy(she did, I find it hard not to care about people who are suffering, especially when they can tell fortunes or pretend to) that Bali is full of demons, which claim I put aside, except it would probably sell well, unseating vampires, I could not that easily dismiss the caution of my smart sort-of-friend Rex Reed, who says if there are rice fields, there are cobras. Not too long after that e-mail, I met a nice English couple(they are careful to say they are not British, but English, insisting there's a difference, not being Scottish or Irish which I know from Belfast friends is someplace they were not meant to be anyway) and she told me of a favorite cat who was killed by a spitting cobra. Well, there's something to avoid.
Woke up in the middle of the night with absolutely no sense of having to go back to sleep or attempt at meditation, just content to be quiet and wait for the light, which does, eventually come if you're still alive, and saw a man working the rice field with his right hand, while he carried his baby on his left arm, little head cloaked in white like a lama, the wise kind not the animal. Babies do not cry in Bali, mostly, I think, because they are held in someone's arms until they are two or something like that, because the soles of their feet are not closed, according to the locals, so if they were set down, demons could come in. But what about spitting cobras, while Daddy works the rice?
Spent yesterday as a kindergartner learning how to touch type from the BBC online tutorial, which has music, cartoon yaks, and Oops aloud if you make mistakes. Had a good time finding out I am still a student but I was only up to 16 words a minute after graduating from that level, and I think I am faster than a speeding bullet if I type wrong, which I have done for eighteen books, more if you count the ones that never saw light which doesn't necessarily come in the book world even if you're still alive. So am abandoning my attempt to touch type and will simply try not to go blind, so I can still see the keyboard and whiz into my next literary adventure. Have no idea what it may be, which would be partly the definition of adventure, according to my wonderful friend Sandy who was murdered here but we won't go into that, as my wonderful friend Denise who is still alive says that way lie cement shoes.
Denise is the once-pastry-chef-now-restaurateur from Seattle who kindly sent me the e-mail when Mimi died saying 'Come to Bali,' so I did. She visited me yesterday afternoon at my present locale, a stable with rooms upstairs, a lovely pool and a not-bad restaurant, and a new French restaurant across the un-motorcyled road, unique in Bali where all is Vespa-clogged and buildings-in-progress. Went in there the other night in a rare moment of panic at What Have I Done? aka What Am I Doing?, and had a really bad pizza, but as Denise pointed out: "It's across the street." A gift from cholesterol Heaven.
Today, having been up most of the night, I had a true longing for French toast, so went to La Lucciola, Denise's restaurant by the ocean, at 8:45 only to be told they didn't open till 10, inaccurate, I found out later as most things in Bali are, but by the time that misinformation was corrected I was at Ku De Ta, the very pricey expat place near the Oberoi that I used to walk to mornings when I was staying there, to be served in those days by Mahar, a lovely boy-man whose wedding chest I contributed heavily to, as he looked at me with tears in his eyes and said "I will always miss you," which touched my soul and my pocketbook. I went to look for him last time I was here, but he has gone to sea with the cruise line that the Nation voyages on, so I guess he was looking for me.
Well, there I was at Ku-De-Ta where they didn't have French toast so I ordered ricotta pancakes, very disappointing, but happily there was a piece of plastic baked into the middle of them, which I got to show a waitress who remembered me, and she replaced them with a croissant. Then I passed two earnest young men who had been talking potential deals but had left untouched their plate of beautiful cut fruit so I also had a piece of papaya on my way down to the beach to visit Heimisch, or it's probably spelled Hamish, a 17 month old who had been working the faucets that wash off sand as you come up from the beach. That caused a bit of a stab to my heart, because I remembered Robert at that squeezable age, when he had a love affair with our garden hose. Power to a toddler. Our friend, great writer of mysteries, Bill McGivern, wanted to invent something called 'Stay Baby,' that you could spray on them and keep them that way. Alas, he never worked it out, so Hamish's Grandma Janet said he was inching toward the Terrible Twos, which count for nothing as compared to the Frightening Forties.
Maybe I'll take a nap.

THE VIEW FROM POMPOUS ASS

2011-11-06T07:36:00.000-05:00

The Above Title will date me, as does almost everything these days, including the date.
The view below will help explain to you my move, as in Manhattan, in the beautiful and indisputably tasteful(see classic Deco lobby) Hampshire House, my 'Juliet balcony,' real estate jargon for a little thing that overhangs a fifteen-story drop, now looks out at a hideous 91-story-monstrosity-in-progress that will eventually blot out the sky. But one should never be arrogant about where one is going, as indisputable Paradise or no, Bali has flaws, among them, for starters, a very vocal frog that does not Gribitgribitgribit as Tommy Smothers used to imitate, but is a basso, relentless and very loud and all night long.
It really didn't bother me as much as it would have if someone a little odd hadn't pointed it out, along with the cockroach on my ceiling-- I am living at Umalas Kauh which means 'horses,' there being a well-maintained stable downstairs, but it is, after all, a stable-- and my first victory, having gotten here with no major jetlag, courtesy of a brilliant hotelier friend almost always enroute to somewhere, who told me to stay up the whole transit time(approx. 20 hours from New York to Hong Kong, 2 hour wait, five hour trip to Denpasar, Bali) until I fell asleep(I never did) and then go for a walk in the sun(didn't have to, it radiated the car in which Yoni drove me to Lestari, the more poetic name for Umalas Kauh, meaning Beauty or something like that) was that I have been rightside up the whole time, with none of the suddenly pitching over head first I am used to with jet lag.
But a vague sadness has set in, a low-level not-exactly depression, where I examine the Farewells of some friends who talked about how courageous I was to come here, which I didn't think I was. Courage would have been to stay in New York and watch the further disintegration of everything I loved about my country, including the country itself. But courage, as I pointed out in one of my books that may or may not have seen print, comes from 'heart,' and I like to think I still have much of that, the hope that things will turn out to be excellent, that love and kindness will prevail, that my children will be glad they have lived, my grandchildren be able to go to the best universities as I was privileged to do, in spite of the American Dream(not a cliche, it was, it WAS) seeming to have been co=opted by morons and lunatics. I was at the point in New York this past early Autumn where I believed America had been my Imaginary Friend, something I had attached myself to as a little little girl, two years and three months old, saying the Gettysburg Address, so believing I had an actual tie to Lincoln or I couldn't have recited it at that age, in exchange for a piece of Beech-Nut gum. Then came my affection for Ben Franklin, my particular pal among the Framers, his starting the libraries, which of course I loved and supported, the post office, which seems not long for our world, and swim fins, something I never used but could feature him wearing, jumping into whatever river it was flowing through Philadelphia. Those of course may last, as will electricity, but I wonder about the chances for the rest of his ingenuity.
An imaginary friend of course is what a child invents or actually sees to dispel the loneliness. It seems to me we are a very lonely nation now-- that everyone is frightened to some degree, wary. But enough of all that. Let's just focus on the rice field outside my window. The streamers are made of plastic, some looking like they were torn from garbage bags. There is no wind now, so they are not waving, but the rice is almost ready, and the birds come in the late day, so someone stands at the pole to which the string is connected and pulls at it, so there's movement, and some sound, as halfway along the string is a can with stones inside and they rattle like a castanet.
I sat here last night with the Tarot reader I found in the restaurant Biku, Christine, who may or may not have cancer-- medicine here is beneath iffy-- no real doctors and they don't let Westerners practice,-- and she told me of her son who is a Bali priest and can see the evil demons who are everywhere, and I of course silently chortle. I brought Mimi's ashes-- I left a few of them in Circo, where she used to love to go, and was well-received and entertained, stashed them in a plant outside the entrance of that New York restaurant-- with the intention of giving her some kind of ceremony here, ritual the Balinese have for just about everything, birth, death, clearing the throat, since it was her sudden and premature departure that brought me to Bali, it being the one place we hadn't traveled together, as bringing dogs in was not permitted. Oh, that's another thing: my landlady has five wild dogs and they bark all the time. I have written to Cesar Milan inviting him, which she wishes to do, for a segment of Dog Whisperer, but it is almost impossible to get through his highly commercial wall, ads, video auditions, really annoying, but the point is I also have these barking dogs. No place is Paradise.
Anyway, Yoni and I were supposed to put Mimi's ashes in a young coconut(who wants an old coconut?) and send them out to sea, but she told me her mother said that yesterday was not a good day, that we should wait for the 10th and the full moon. So I'm waiting.
And trying not to be impatient, my worst suit. Waiting for sleep, waiting for inspiration. Probably I'm jet-lagged and it's just manifesting in this vague pall of uncertainty. Jamie told me I could always go home, that this was just 'an extended trip.' But home doesn't feel like home to me anymore. When this vague queasiness descended on me yesterday afternoon I turned on the TV and Trading Places was on HBO, so I considered that a personal gift from the programming gods, who may or may not also have demons among them. I just don't know. But then, 'not knowing' is a great spiritual state, if you can accept it and be with it.
I don't know that I can. I am hoping for a great book, or even a fairly acceptable one. I am going to try and teach myself touch-typing-- 18 novels and never used anything but hunt and peck, and what if the eyes go and I can't hunt and peck? Jack told me of a Buddhist (I think it was a cartoon) opening up a package and finding nothing in it, saying "Oh, Look: Nothing! Just what I always wanted."
Wish I could be like that. Or maybe not. Maybe I just need a nap.

THE VIEW FROM POMPOUS ASS

2011-11-05T03:43:00.000-04:00

THE ROAD TO BALI- sans Hope and Crosby

2011-11-03T18:54:00.002-04:00

So I am looking out at rice fields, grown high now, and, I would imagine, almost ready for harvesting. There are streamers of all different raggedy colors, waving in the not-very-strong wind, to scare off the birds. One man in a black and white cap was out there early this morning pulling up a few sheaves-- are they sheaves?-- and laying them on the side. To me they looked no different from those he left, but then rice fields are not mother's milk to me. But then, if you knew my mother, neither was mother's milk.

I just know that an almost fierce sense of peace has settled on me, that I am rejoicing in my heart, as Ingrid Bergman said in not so many words at the end of Gaslight, and that I left New York without a shred of regret, which she did say exactly. The scene I left behind me was one of an ugly skyscraper being built in orange and black, on its way to blotting out the sky, with scaffolding on the roof opposite my 'Juliet' balcony, (yeah, sure,) the scaffolding strung with rope that looked like thick clothesline. Right. Not a shred of regret.

I woke last Saturday morning in Manhattan with the first small ripple of trepidation at the prospect of moving to Bali in my soul, which feels almost palpable now, only to look out the window a few moments later to see the blizzard. And I thought, no, I am not making a mistake. Right after that Jack, my Jewru, called and concurred: NOT A MISTAKE. I had travel advice from my wonderful friend Neil, the Divine Hotelier, and he told me to stay awake on the plane until I fell asleep-- I never did-- and then when I got here to walk in the sunlight-- I didn't have to, as it shone into the car where Yoni was waiting for me to bring me back here, to Umalas Kauh, which means horses, where Jordan the gelding sleeps downstairs, and having sorted out what I brought of my belongings(Yoni had washed and ironed the ones I left and hung them in my closet) spent some time with the owner, Sabine, a German in her young forties who has lived here for twenty-two years and has trouble when she goes back to Germany because how could they have killed all those people, arguing now they didn't know what was happening, and suffers over the bears having their feet cut off in China and how can people do that to animals. I sent her off to bed, as I have written about the first in LORELEI, the novel I wrote when living in Weinheim during the Reunification, when the joke was, in Munich, "What's the difference between the Jews and the Turks?" Punchline: the Jews are already dead. That novel was never published as the argument was 'There was no more anti-Semitism in Germany.' Ha.

Anyway, that is in the past, and I, like the Indonesian language, intend to have only a present tense. Or rather, a present relaxed.

New York Magazine had on its cover as I left the newsracks behind me, my hero Gloria Steinem, still beautiful, which I know doesn't count for the Feminists, but it makes me really happy, especially around the eyes, starting MS. magazine forty years ago. There was a picture of her on the cover, with that hair, that I didn't know if it was now or then. But she was smoking, so it must have been then, as she is much too smart to have done that in recent years. I met her for the first time when The Pretenders, my bestseller, was happening, and Bob Gutwillig, my then editor, brought her to have dinner with Don and me at Stefanino's in L.A. I was frightened though excited to meet her because she was such a serious, important figure, and I was having this shoddy success. Then she arrived and said "A novel. That's Grown-Up time," so I fell in love, which anyone of sense had to do with Gloria. Over the years I got to see her from time to time, at a distance-- she was the woman of the year with the American Library Association, where I was honored to be a footnote, and she said, in front of all those librarians "I am told I am one of the twenty-five most admired women in America, which shows what deep shit we are in," so I fell in love with her again.

Then I got a chance to really be with her when she was married, at long last, at sixty-two, to a wonderful man-- she had had a treasure chest full of interesting opportunities, and passed on all of them until Wilma Mankiller(I couldn't help smiling) an Indian chief(tess?) told her to marry David Bale, which she did. He was tall and devastatingly handsome-- he was physically not unlike his soon to become a major movie star son, Christian-- with those same carven features and eyes that were obviously adoring Gloria, a wit that was sharp enough for her, and causes of his own, a social conscience that was on a plane with hers. It was a gorgeous match, and I was lucky to interview them for the Wall Street Journal for which I was stringing at the time, doing a feature called Shop Talk. We went dog supply shopping, as they had a dog, and they bought things at Socially Aware pet stores. We ate breakfast at a coffee shop where she told me she had been addicted to ketchup as it was filled with sugar. Now I loved both of them. The article was never published as it read too much like a "puff" piece, critics said, as I could find nothing to carp about with either of them, they were so wonderful, so ideally suited.

But as we know, happy endings do not often come along, or if they seem to, they abort. He died painfully and unfairly of cancer, as Don had. I didn't see her again for a number of years, but when I did, even in passing, she was beyond gracious and still beautiful, which I know shouldn't count, but it does. Then, when I sent her an e-mail to congratulate her on her HBO show, she told me she envied me Bali. I hope she will come visit me, as it is beyond beautiful and peaceful, as I think she is, too, though in an Activist way. Serenity can come from being on track, which I believe she has always been, and continues to be.

And there is work to be done here, in a gentle way. Yoni, my driver, this darling young woman who has two little girls which doesn't count for much in Bali where the men want sons, has an ex-husband who holds onto the two little girls and doesn't let them see their mother, not because he loves them but wants revenge on her for divorcing him. And Komang, my advocate who helped me get my visa to stay here long term, had three girls with her husband, which didn't count, and found out he had another woman, so divorced him. Then he had a son with the other woman and she has to take care of the little boy because-- if Yoni had the story straight, --the other woman ran off, leaving him with the son. So I am thinking of writing The Yoni Monologues, since I think that is the word from the Bhaghavagita or however you spell it, for Vagina. Women here do not have it easy, which is putting it mildly.

And still they smile and look happy. And all the children are black-eyed and beautiful. Today I met a two year old named after Mohammed's second wife, (can't spell it yet,) who come here to ride a horse (clip clop outside my window) before going to nursery school which she doesn't like, so her father, an Aussie who thought he couldn't have children and was put in jail for adultery before the baby was born and came out white, so they are married now and have a second who is the little rider, but that is another story. She is invited to the ice cream party I am having to celebrate Kurt Vonnegut's birthday next week, as are all of you. Hop a plane. I'll be waiting at the airpor

FULL CIRCLE

2011-10-20T17:28:00.002-04:00

Subject: REPORTFROMTHEFRONT: Full Circle

It is clearly time to leave my native land. The above-the-fold feature on the front of the Arts section of the New York Times today is about a video game. I remember when my sister was a follower of Meher Baba who had taken a vow of silence for the latter part of his life, and everyone was waiting for the words he would speak. Finally, as he died he said: "My time has come."
Well my time has went. I do not mind that it has become an e-world, as I did admire Steve Jobs and Apple especially after trying to deal with a renegade computer that needed frequent repair. But I do mind that even when you go to the theater, people are texting, so in-between their erratic attention to what's happening onstage, those little lights go on on cell phones, like fireflies in Central Park.
I could understand the inattention to the play, annoying as it was-- I mean the inattention and the play. The evening was the much-waited for(I think... wasn't everybody waiting?) Woody Allen piece, one of three with one by Elaine May and one by one of the over-celebrated Coen Bros., Relatively Speaking. It was the last preview at the Brooks Atkinson theatre, where, in Proustian tickle, my play The Best Laid Plans opened forty-five years ago, when Madeleine was born. I did not get there until the final curtain, as I was still in the hospital, it being those old days when they let you lie down for a few days after giving birth. But as the obstetrician wanted to go to Opening Night, he let me out, too, and rich and connected Hollywood studio friends who thought I was going to be a hit sent a limousine to take me from the hospital to the opening. I heard from the final laugh that wasn't there that the evening had been a disaster. The director had been replaced at the last minute and mucked up what had been frozen and stellar in the performances, and Polly Rowles, the one completely reliable pro in the cast-- we had crazy funny Kenny Mars as the psychiatrist, and he played it sometime on his knees, sometimes as a Cherman, so mercurial and outrageous that Mel Brooks, a good friend, scooped him up for The Producers-- but Polly, whose dialogue had been unchanged from the start burbled lines and, in the words of a cruel reviewer "stumbled under the burden of last minute rewrites." So oh, well. Mel and Annie Bancroft drove me back to the hospital and Mel said "Think of it this way: if your daughter had been born with six toes and two noses... that would have been okay. What mattered was the show." That made me laugh, so I was all right again, sort of.
But the ghost of Brooks Atkinson theater past was there last night, exacerbated by the truth of Woody Allen's being a prime figure in my failure to make inroads in comedy, one of my paths when I was very young and had my only job, with the Comedy Development program at NBC, sharing office space with Woody. I had plenty of room, as he came in only on the day we got our checks, and was out free-lancing the rest of the time, while I wrote a sitcom a day or a musical. So he was already smarter than I was, and I have to admit that I was jealous, but had to set aside my scorn finally with 'Midnight in Paris' which I thought was wonderful.
Last night's play, not so much. The first of the three was borderline unbearable, the work of Ethan Coen, with a mental patient and his doctor, and then a revelation of his background with a detestable couple, a pregnant mother who was as soft as Judge Judy, and no real form or content. The second was Elaine May, and featured a much-redone Marlo Thomas, looking like Erica Jong, crying out narcissistically over the death of the husband she didn't really care about and going on and on until it wasn't funny anymore. Then came Woody's, where theatergoers murmured during intermission that it was up to him to make the evening.
I don't know that he did. I was with the smart Rex Reed who didn't have a good time at all, and a venal woman said aloud that was because he wasn't Jewish. I found that insulting, not only to Rex, but to the whole idea of comedy. I remember when we were all in the Comedy Development program together, all us bright and fresh-faced young aspirers who went to Upstairs at the Downstairs for smart cabaret, one of our members had written a song: 'When you're in Love the Whole World is Jewish." It was a waltz of course, sweeping. Being Jewish has nothing to do with enjoying comedy, though Woody really milked it with his rabbi, the character I found most annoying. The rest were, by turns, cute: Steve Gutenberg as what you think is the groom coming to the Honeymoon motel(spoiler alert: he is the stepfather of the groom and has run off with the bride,) noxious: the mother of the jilted bridegroom; unbearable: Julie Kavner as the mother of the bride, doing so many takes you would have thought she was from an era even older than mine, a pizza man, and a character I didn't know who he was until Rex explained he was the best man. I don't think so. Still, I have to admit I laughed, but I don't remember at what: certainly it was not the ethnic crap. So I shall wait for the reviews tomorrow and see if Woody's survival mode, like his career, is better than mine.
On the non-theatrical side, I spoke to my once college president Pat today and she agreed that my leaving the country could not be at a more propitious time. I don't think I would survive working the next election. I am so disappointed in Barack, enraged at Michelle for a stupid personal slight to a friend who is heading up a program to improve Food in America, allegedly Michelle's 'cause,' frightened of the Republicans(why? you might ask if you are retarded, or as they say now, 'intellectually challenged") and sad sad sad for my country. Pat, who is of my vintage, said, along with me, that we never thought we would be saying, like our parents, or maybe even our grandparents, "it was better then." But it was. I grew up in an America where everybody could become, truly a land of Opportunity. All you had to do was aspire, get an education, and then the world was open to you. But that world is now on fire. The astrologer at Kamalaya, the Wellness center(read Spa with really knowledgable people in charge) said the stars now are in exactly the same alignment they were at the time of the French Revolution. Not that we believe in such things, but has anybody seen the news?
So I leave on Halloween for Bali without, as Ingrid Bergman said in Gaslight, " a shred of regret." I was here for the good part. Now it's time to move on. As my books become e-books, (go to Amazon.com, or Kindle, tell your friends) something I might once have grieved over, as turning pages and feeling bindings was a sensual pleasure, like riding in a car with new upholstery, I must re-upholster myself and move with the times. Flee them, actually.

THE END OF THE DRUGSTORE

2011-10-15T19:20:00.002-04:00

When I moved back to New York not long after Don died, in my quest to find a place where I wasn't lonely, I had the unexpected gentle good fortune to be befriended by Kurt Vonnegut, who I of course very much admired, as would anyone who could read or have an original thought. When I would do something like call to wish him 'Happy Birthday,' Kurt would say things like "That's very neighborly of you." When I complained, or, trying not to complain because you don't want to whine to a man like Kurt was, but borderline sorrowing over the truth that writers as a rule don't generally support each other, and what I was looking for and hoping to find was a community, Kurt said: "Go to the grocery store and introduce yourself to the clerk, go to the dry cleaners and say hello to the owner, then go to the drugstore and meet the pharmacist, and you'll have your community."
So recognizing wisdom behind the sweetness I went to the Duane Reade and introduced myself to Frank, a bright-eyed, dark haired young man who had two sons, updated not long after to three. In the impersonal world of 'press 5 for the pharmacy', I would skip to the number he told me to press and get Frank. There was a certain Jimmy Stewart dearness to it, connecting with Frank, and I followed the steps of the latest family addition as he sat up, started talking, and then ran around destroying things, all the time feeling a sense of connection, since my Uncle Ralphie, one of the darling men in my early history, was a pharmacist, as my father had been in his search for where he belonged, doing what, before his later, surprising success as mayor of Tucson.
When I came back to New York from a trip I would always reconnect with Frank, refilling a prescription or just catching up with what the little boy was doing, and, as drugs became increasingly expensive-- the good kind that made you better, we hope-- I would apologize at having found a way to get them cheaper, and listen to his counsel about whether or not they had sat around too long and lost their strength if they were made in another country. When I returned from my latest foray to Bali I went straight to Duane Reade, which, to my horror, had been transformed into a One-Stop shop, with fruit and groceries and a vast downstairs of cosmetics where it was hard to find aspirin. With some difficulty, I located Frank. To my astonishment, he seemed pleased with the transformation. "You have to change with the times," he said, "or..." I don't remember what the 'or' was, but it was something like die or fail, but in any case Orwellian.
Then yesterday, as he had been aware of my chagrin at this unwanted glamorization, after beaming at the huge additional footage-- it had been something like 14,000 square feet and now was 20 something(I have never understood any of that, how they measure) he took me aside when I said I was going to drop my insurance company because they wouldn't make a deal with Duane Reade(I think I would have to go to Walmart.) He told me, in a hushed voice, that in fifteen years there would probably be no pharmacists-- the drug companies or the insurance companies or whatever companies that have no sense of or wish for connection- were trying to get it to the place where everything would be online. They had already made him cut out 2/3 of his staff, that kids graduating from college now with MDs could not earn a living even as assistants in pharmacies, that he would counsel his own sons not to try even to be doctors, as they soon would be unable to feed their families.
So 'It's a Wonderful Life' which almost all of us swallowed and loved as the Frank Capra pastille of optimism and naivete,' where the pharmacist was a central figure in that good-will Fairy Tale will no longer obtain. In a world where people don't talk to each other but engage electronically, a blessing, sure, we all love Steve, and many of us wish he had been in charge of the economy instead of the die-easies who were, it is still a tragedy that we are losing the art of real communication: people looking each other in the eye and saying exactly what they mean. I guess it's for the best that Vonnegut isn't here to see the end of what is "neighborly," though I still miss him.
But I will give a birthday party for him on November 11th, which is also Memorial Day, once Armistice Day, all the things he sorrowed over, war being the stupidest thing in his experience and people having gotten no wiser in spite of Slaughterhouse Five making it all so clear. The party will be in a Gelati parlor called Gusti in Bali, as close as I can get to the ice cream parlor that was so "neighborly" in "Wonderful Life," but with better ice cream, run by an Italian woman and her French husband who makes it fresh every day. They have three little girls in the French school in Umalas, and the school itself has created a community, so there's one for starters.
I am inviting everybody who made it possible for me to move to Bali, so of course you all will be welcome. Because without your invisible support I would never have made it to this glorious transition, where I had the clarity to know when the time came to move, and to where. E-mail me when you're coming and I'll be there at the airport. It's the least I can do to be neighborly.

REPORTFROMTHEFRONT: An Old Post Rediscovered

2011-10-11T18:28:00.001-04:00

I received a query from a loved friend who wondered why I hadn’t sent off one of my missives, exuberant and detailed. In fact, it was a curious night. I am so used to losing, combined with where I was, that I believe I was in kind of a state of spiritual shock, a weird emptiness. In 2000 I was in London for the election, voting absentee, sitting in the bar of the Connaught when John Kerry walked in, looking as distraught about the results, still then up in the air, as I felt, so I introduced myself. He said that everyone in politics in Europe thought we were crazy. A few weeks later I was in New York, and he was standing on 7^th Ave., hailing a cab. I went up to him again—by then the truly crazy thing had happened, the Supremes had given it to Bush—and Kerry wrote me a note, “twice in three weeks on different sides of the pond—what are the odds?” At the time I was in my Mystic phase, so I figured him to be truly in tune, space-y-wise, and was delighted at his 2004 candidacy until he stepped up to accept the nomination and gave his Wussy salute, and I felt it was all over.

Nonetheless I voted for him with the same urgency a lot of us felt, the point being to get Bush out. I was in Skibo Castle, in Scotland, the night of that election, and went to sleep with the televised news that Kerry was winning. At dinner the other guests at the long table at which Andrew Carnegie had entertained world figures were rich golfers from America, those with many homes, none of them in difficult places(Tahoe, Palm Desert) who’d come there for the course, and one of them had murmured thickly, “You know, we could wake up and find John Kerry president,” to which I had silently swallowed my Amen, since I was a guest at the place, and unaccustomedly didn’t want to offend anyone. I woke up to the horror of a probably stolen Ohio, and all the GOPers preening around a Bloody Maryed breakfast table, cockatooing over the fact that Bush had won. One of them apologized to me, but as I was still an America, even being in Scotland, I told him not to suffer over a difference in opinion.

The Manchester Guardian that day had a front page all in black, with the smallest print in its center in white: “Oh, no.”

That is pretty much how I, and most of my friends have felt through the past four years, sustained only by MSNBC and Jon Stewart, whose observations and wit made it possible for me to go to sleep at night. So the fact that I did not become euphoric when Obama won is a puzzle to me, as I am certainly euphoric in my heart, as Jimmy Carter was an adulterer in his. I can only conclude it was because I was with no one I loved. Alone, these past few elections, I have suffered the loss of the country I really loved. In Nixon times when I suffered just as much, Nixon was laid out on the bed in our bedroom, a mask with a joint hanging out of his mouth, while people voted in our front hall, a polling place at that time. There was love around, Don, and laughs around, Tommy Smothers. And all of us were allied in our loathing and distrust. When he won, we moved to England. But I always had someone dear and funny to suffer with. During the OJ flight, compelling as it was, I watched the chase on TV in the bar of the Hotel Bel Air, and there were people I felt close to, including Gus the bartender, so the moment was curiously bonding.

But I guess for this I should have been in Chicago, or in LA with my family. I know it was one of the important moments in my lifetime, and I was sort of stultified, being in the company of people I hardly knew, hard as it was to throw off the mantel of dread.

Then came the news about Michael Crichton, which stunned and saddened me, great friend that he had been for a while in my life, giving it much mental stimulation as he was really smart, and really tall, so most of the time I spent with him resulted in a stiff neck. But I cared about him and sorrowed over his sorrow that all he had was success and money, with no one praising his writing. When he showed up with the blonde who was to become his wife(the last one? The fifth? I’m not sure) it was more or less the end of our close friendship, as she didn’t like him to talk to other women. He also sorrowed over the fact that he had no time to be with even the closest of his friends, as he was so busy being successful. But we both hads had our first bestselling novel on the same Time Magazine list,-- his, the Andromeda Strain, mine, The Pretenders. Of course I never got near the number of his winners, and assumed, with my still Pittsburgh mentality, that if you were that big a hit all the time, you would live a long life.

So I am sorry he is gone. He called me when I was living in San Francisco and I told him I had a three Landmark view, as the realtors like to say up there: Coit tower, the Golden Gate bridge, and Alcatraz. And he said “The story of my life. Sex, Escape, and Imprisonment.”

Well, at least the country is free again. Free at last, free at last; Lord, God Almighty, we are free at last.

Our Vines Have Sour Grapes

2011-09-30T16:01:00.001-04:00

So the time has definitely come to set sail for happier climes. I return to a New York where this week's New York magazine arrives with a cover picture of a beautiful, waif-like blonde who I wondered why she was naked to the waist when she had no breasts, and it turns out she is the Male Model of the year, Time Out New York is a sex issue, with 'Hook-up bars' and different groupsex venues, and I am sad now not just for my country, but what was never really my city. Just wrote a food piece about Bali for Food Arts and even while I was salivating, I wondered what I was still doing here, when the lunch I had at DuCasse's Benoit was notable only for the fact that my wonderful companion, a man of flawless manners and behavior, when confronted with an attitude laden server first queried her with quiet geniality, and then, eliciting no civil reaction, laced into her, in French, no less. She snapped to like a sergeant in the Foreign Legion. Or, if you're old enough to watch re-runs(the most seasoned of us was not here for the original release) Brian Donleavy in Gunga Din. Loved him, loved the not quite outburst, but food was just food. So when I think of Denise's guava juice starting my day in Jalan wherever that is, as opposed to the tasteless orange section I tried to eat pretending it was fruit, I long for my overcrowded, over-motorcycled and probably doomed little island, which still has a pocket of peace in the place I found where I am going to live. In the present, which is the only tense they have, and the only life that makes sense, since, as Jack says, "the past is history, the future is fantasy." I can hardly wait, but I have to, to try and get all my affairs, in the boring sense, in order.
Today I lay out the family silver for the man from Doyle gallery and leave at least that nonsensical part of the material world behind me. My children are not the formal dinner-party type, to put it mildly, and I don't want it just sitting around to tarnish. I put it out yesterday thinking that yesterday was today, which gives you some idea where I am jet-lag wise, and had to put it away so I could go to sleep so hope that today is really today. It is tomorrow in Hong Kong, but everybody is having a national holiday, so I can't find out what October 1st signifies but am confident it is not the Jewish New Year. I want to know the meaning of that date because it is the one I woke up on really clear that the time has come to move. I am sad for my country, hold no hope for its immediate future, hope there is a long-term one, but am frightened by the seemingly comic but clearly insidious presence of people like Sarah Palin, whose documentary as reviewed by Rex Reed is terrifying enough so I don't have to go see the movie. I am also sad for the presence in what used to be movies of Seth Rogen, whose appearance on the Daily Show the other night, with his offensive, mindless, inhaled giggle actually made me turn off Jon Stewart, the only thing I missed about TV, as you can download Rachel Maddow in Bali.
So as I laid out the silver on the bed a day too early, I had a little Proustian experience, where I went to some of the dinner parties we had, graced by the Acorn pattern in Jensen my mother had given me and Don, even though she didn't think he knew everything. There was Robby Lantz, the truly literate literary agent, and Larry Turman, flush from his triumph with 'The Graduate', a bit full of himself, so when the waiter passed the brandy and ignited it and the glass stuck to Larry's lip, Don had to run into the bathroom so he could laugh. Larry's then wife, Suzanne, was to become my best friend, but she left the planet some years ago, much too young. Then there was Mario Puzo, for whom I gave a dinner party, making myself all the dishes he described, writing bout food as I in those days wrote about sex, in The Fortunate Pilgrim, the real book he wrote that preceded the Godfather. At the time he was my best friend, the only one in the literary community who accepted me as a serious writer, saying "You wrote The Pretenders for the same reason I wrote The Godfather---to have a bestseller. But the good writing is undisguisable(sp?) I really loved him, but he got mad at me for writing too many books, so he left the planet without our ever kissing goodbye.
Lawrence Harvey was at that dinner-- the most witty and charming of (almost) leading men. Don brought in a cake for dessert as a surprise for me, in the shape of an open book, with all the titles of books I'd written, and I burst into tears, and Larry said "I wish I had a husband like that." And Pauline Stone, Harvey's mistress said "I wish I had a husband." They married I think, and then Larry got cancer, which Seth Rogen would make into a comedy. I remember Larry's being carried into the Movie Star all-white living room he lived in off Coldwater Canyon, and his smiling at Don and me, and saying so lovingly, "You both look so healthy." I still miss him, and did get to kiss him Goodbye, which I also did to Don not too many years later, another Rogen comedy, I suppose. It was at Larry's funeral that I met and became friends with Elizabeth Taylor when she was still Elizabeth Taylor, handing out sprays of violets to the mourners, to match her eyes.
Those, I guess, were what Erica Jong would probably call her "fabled" dinner parties. Everything else was just family, all of us sitting at the table on Hillcrest at Thanksgiving, when I would make and serve pumpkin soup in a pumpkin shell, Teriyaki turkey with Chinese stuffing, and Cranuberry Much, a dish I learned to make when I was in Washington and went to a cooking class during Jimmy Carter's reign, and they taught us turkey and grits. But I came away with Cranuberry Much, (my title) which adds celery and apples so there's an infinite crunch, and I do love that which is infinite. So few things are.
But I will not make this report one of them. I love you all for the sustenance you have given me during the long, dry periods of wondering whether anyone would ever know I was a real writer, and very few would care that I was a real soul. I always felt you were out there, or you wouldn't have been on the list. So I hope I haven't too heavily bombarded you, and that you will come visit me in Bali. And of course, that you have enjoyed these Reports, which I expect will continue, as in spite of how charming the Indonesian language is, and easy, I do so love English. And all of you.
xx
Gwen of (soon-to-be) Bali

Sampah Jumpah lagi

2011-09-23T14:49:00.001-04:00

So as the West sinks slowly in the west, we say goodbye to the not-so beautiful island of Manhattan and set sail for the not-any-longer-that-beautiful either island of Bali, unless you stay off the roads, clogged as they are with motorcycles, sided by construction of hotels and villas; but staying off the roads is exactly what I intend to do. The place where I am going to live sides a rice field, so that is what I look out on when I get up in the morning, and that is what Mimi looks out on, from her photo on the rooftop which I have in the bathroom window. There is a simple blue-bottomed gracefully shaped swimming pool(I'm not sure it's a kidney, but if an organ it is, it is a healthier one than one might have in States, where I expect and am afraid medical benefits to those who need them will soon be rescinded. The pool is next to a lovely open restaurant, called Lestari,(meaning exquisite or infinite, I'm not quite sure but I will learn Indonesian,) as are the stables beneath the rooms of the Inn where I will be livin, very clean, so there is no smell, and the day begins with the gentle slip-clop of their hooves on the cement paths to the riding ring, as children come to learn how to ride.

A new, great restaurant just opened up across the street, French, where I had Mahi Mahi I didn't even have to chew, and a glass of rose, (not Bandol, but not bad) a salad and ratatouille for $11, including tip. There are no other buildings around, the rice looks ready to pick or thresh or whatever they do with it, so when I come back the fields will be bare and ready for replanting.

I have a sense of perfect peace unlike any I have ever experienced, except when I go online, --that isn't easy, and is probably a blessing,== and see what is happening in the Weimar Republic, which is what I think we have become. Fear and envy and greed are running what was our wonderful country, and madmen(and women) wait in the wings to take us all the way down. There is a professor of economics here from Koln(umlaut over the o) who says that fear constipates the brain, so it can't really function. I am a little sad, as I spent most of my life being and feeling like an active patriot. There no longer seems any point.

There are of course palm trees everywhere, the trunks of the ones around the pool strumg round with fairy lights in the evening, and one of the palms drips seeds that look like an art director's decoration, a clump of yellow(the yougest one) a bright red, and a darker one. Everywhere there is inestimable beauty. A round marble bowl floats circles of flowers in a design they freshen every evening, magenta bouganvillea on the outer rim, then yellow frangipani half-open, besseching the sky, then pink, then orange, then at the center a spice called daun pandan in Indonesian-- they don't know what it's called in English, but it's dark withered green and has a lovely smell. I have never been aware of so much beauty, and I have struggled for awareness all my life.

So I will miss all of you, but if you can save up the fare, you can stay here cheaply including breakfast, and I will welcome you with open palm trees.

It really is Paradise. I looked up all words for that in my synonym finder, and some of them, of course are very right wing(EVEN THERE!) But Elysian fields works for me, as does Heaven.

Back in NY briefly, Sept 20 so call me to say Goodbye. It's been the best journey of my life. Oh, and yes, by the way, I finished my novel.

Love and xx

Gwen of Indonesia

REPORTFROMTHEFRONT:Change of Venue

2011-09-23T13:35:00.000-04:00

The day here(in Bali) begins with four little ladies working the rice fields outside my window, the sound the gentle clip/clop of horses' hooves as the horses in the stable downstairs are taken down the cement path to the ring where children come and ride them. It is a little different from looking out my window in NY and seeing the progress on the orange and black monstrosity on 57th Street that is going to be ninety stories, eventually blocking out the sky, the jackhammering and the noise of renovations in my building. Have finally managed to connect to the Internet which was a mistake, as I see where Obama has led with an opening salvo of more benefits to be given up before the Republicans even begin their assault on Medicare. I am reminded of the Ray Bradbury story I think it was, or a Twilight Zone, where a woman is trying to figure out which one the Martian is and it turns out they are all of them Martians, everybody, and that's how I feel about what was my country. They are all of them Republicans, including Obama.
So I do believe it is time for me to get my ass and what is left of my awareness out of the USA. I am staying in an Inn where there are, as I said, horses, paddocked downstairs, directly beneath me a stallion named Jordan which makes me smile as I have a dear friend with that name. The horses are well kept, and so are the stables, so there is no smell, and I figure if it was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me. I was going to lease a villa, but I like this place. There is a great restaurant, a beautiful pool, trees that are lit up with twisting lights at night, and a caring staff, small but on the job. The boy who fixed my TV-- it doesn't work too well but that's probably better as when in New York I have a tendency to surrender to reruns of Law and Order-- strew(ed?) my bed with frangipani that made a heart, and spelled out 'Gwen' so I felt I was in the Bali version of Sex and the City, except there was no city and there is no sex and all that is also probably to the good, so I can concentrate on my writing. The boy, Koman, says when he sees me he thinks of his Grandma, and I will try to feel good about that.
Anyway, all this is my way of telling you I am, if all goes well, making the move here, probably in November. I can no longer invite you to my villa, as I don't think I'm going to take that on(needing security, a staff, a pool cleaner, etc. and if something goes wrong like the AC I have to get it fixed and most of you know how handy I'm not) but the rooms here are inexpensive and maybe you can sleep above Omega, a white horse, and that must have some mystical significance.
I love you all and loved my country but it seems to be disappearing, and, like I said, the rice fields are a better way of beginning my days. The Tarot reader at BIKU says I am going to lose a lot of friends, not through enmity or death but because of the move.
I hope none of them is you.

BAT SHIT

2011-07-30T23:27:00.001-04:00

I suppose we have all heard the expression, but I've never had it on the floor before. Apparently I had a visitor or two last night, and they prefer to relieve themselves on marble.

Yesterday I went with Denise's houseboy and his family to Denpasar, for the opening of a new mall, where the son of Ketut, my masseuse, was supposed to perform. They are transfixed by noise, the Balinese, so they think loud means busy, and the sound, over an ove-ramped microphone, the various dropouts and runners up from Indonesian Idol, was so overpowering we had to leave before he sang. But in the meantime I danced with his four-year-old, Tatya, I think it's spelled, who reached for my hand after a couple of hours when I tried to reach for hers, and it was very touching and tiny and we danced. I took them all to A&W which I guess is an attempt at a local McDonald's chain and she spooned in ketchup and disinterestedly ate a few fries as a symbolic accompaniment.

Last night for the first time I watched TV and heard what fools we are making of our country. A quote from Will Rogers: We could certainly slow the Aging Process Down if it had to work its way through Congress. I am so ashamed of us.

Oh well, back to the book, so I can have the option of living someplace else if the country sinks. Love and xx

A FAIR WIND FROM JAVA

2011-07-30T00:24:00.000-04:00

or maybe it is the fan that whirrs noisily above my head now that I have gone to my fourposter bed at 8 with the hope of ending my upside-downness. Besides that it is paradisiacal and a privilege to be here, it is also a little daunting. Every night something dark and long skitters across the marblelized terrace that sides my part of the jungle, and I say to myself, but aloud, "I hope that was a cat."
My wonderful friend Denise who was kind enough to invite me here to recover from the death of Mimi had to go back to Seattle before I arrived as her grandmother had had a stroke, from which she eased out of life early this morning, I wish a gentle sail across that great gulf to Virginia. Imagine having a Grandma named Virginia. I think in terms of Gussies and Claras, so Denise must come from early settlers.
At any rate, I am alone in this lovely house, working on my new novel and working my way out of the bad temper that comes from jet lag and being tekkie-retarded, as I was engaged in trying to online publish the Mimi memoir/travel book--here it is if you want it-- and not being able to download or upload or sideload made me crazi(er) and kept me from being clear to write and frustrated me worse than the Republicans. So I have abandoned my attempt to join the 21st century and am just hopeful that the little book will find its own way, as I hope Mimi will, too, and Virginia.
I have missed Jack, who was here and called but we didn't connect so I must accept it was not meant to be, as much else seems to. But I was in Bali once in a car and Jack was just standing in the middle of the road when I didn't even know he was here, which my friend Taffy would categorize as 'Of course.' We must never take things for granted except when they are granted. Unexpectedly, but of course.
Saw my designer/free spirit friend Nadya who lives here all the time except when she is traveling which she does a lot and with great energy, sometimes hawking her clothes, sometimes just living. She says there is a new retirement visa which permits you to stay here for longer than the once alloted six months, so I'm not saying... I'm just considering. Once you're over the jet lag and the fact that you are never going to be at the Genius Bar of Apple, this is truly the most beautiful place in the world, except for the traffic which has now become horrendous. But it is always my way to find one place I like and hardly ever move from there, which I can do and still stay alive as long as there is a pool. In New York I eat almost always in the same restaurants, the ones that I like where they're kind to me, and it is the same wherever I go, though I am wearying of going, and think I would like to stay put. My sky in the New York apartment is fast being obscured by the monstrous 90 story condo and hotel(it will be) that they're building, and New York has not fed my soul or fulfilled my adolescent fantasies of showbiz showbiz, as very little is on the boards, as we used to say, that moves me, and I doubt my musical ever will be, though Tom Meehan had a really good idea and said I should set it in the '50s, which was my kind of time, with my kind of musicals.
But right now I am happiy(today, anyway) ensconced, and working on my bestseller. Once every 40 years or so I should have one, whether or not I want to. It is as I told my once and always editor, Bob, a 'sequin' to The Pretenders. It's time.
My love to all of you who are still in what was once the land of the free. Kisses to babies, and a sunbed to John Boehner that he gets trapped in and fried.

The BALI chapter

2011-07-30T00:21:00.001-04:00

So I am privileged to have entered my Mr. Maugham period. That is to say, I am in a tropical paradise, and have this morning pruned the portion of the jungle that grows in my bathroom, with its open shower and stones on the floor, smooth irregularly shaped but more or less round, so I get reflexology crossing that portion barefoot as they press into my soles and what I have of arches. I am still vaguely jet-lagged, and as I have no mercy for myself, am pressing harder than the stones to get back to work on my novel.
I am in the house of a friend I didn't realize was beloved, one of two who e-mailed me immediately when Mimi died, saying 'Come,' Trudi of Beverly Hills and Denise of Bali, so you know which one I accepted. The clouds in which I saw Mimi according to the promise of Carleen when I was in New York, have no sign of the little dog in them here== they are fluffy in a different way from Western clouds, thick and lush with no perceivable shapes or holes that could be mistaken by the seeking eye for features. They are just gorgeous clouds that turn pink and orange at sunset which I have missed twice. But I am confident there will be others.
The house I am in is open on most sides as homes in Bali are, and I am facing low-lying palm fronds and thin round trunks and straggly limbs. I am also attracting bugs with the light of my computer screen so think I will stop now as it is getting dark, and I want to save my energy for what I hope will be a refreshed chapter in the morning. But I am glad I came, and know that I am privileged to be here. The roosters in the distance are still crowing at intervals, demented, crowing at all hours of the day, fearful, I guess, that they have failed to signal the start of morning.
Next day: A tropical downpour. I love nothing better than that in Bali, as the roof is threaded bamboo and it sounds like peace gently pelting, reminding one that there are other things besides work. But I don't think so at this point, as I am joyfully driven to complete this novel. Interesting, as it is sophisticated and a complete contrast to where I am. I would call on old Somerset to inspire me, but I don't think it's his kind of novel, though it certainly is his kind of setting outside. I am a lucky woman. Thank you, Denise. Thank you God, I would have to imagine, as it is impossible to be here and slip back into disbelief, as a young woman comes every day armed with a small offering to the gods of flowers and incense that she sets out on the sink so I will be protected. Thank you, Whatever.
I have missed my Jewru Jack who was here and called but I didn't get it in time, so have to accept it was not Meant To Be, as everything else seems to. Love to you all.

FAREWELL ELIZABETH

2011-07-07T21:51:00.000-04:00

A longer time ago than I had imagined, when the world was still full of hope and movie stars were real movie stars, I had a friendship with Elizabeth Taylor, the then most legendary name on gossipy lips. I had met her at the funeral of Laurence Harvey, a delectably outrageous and gifted actor, whose death was a kind of dark present to her, as her career was in mid-sag, and she really knew how to give great funeral. She stood at the back of the Episcopal church in Westwood at the end of the service, handing out tiny bouquets of violets, that not just incidentally matched her eyes. Truman Capote had consecrated her in print, memorializing those remarkable eyes, stamping them forever violet in the popular imagination. A woman at the funeral who probably thought she looked like Elizabeth Taylor, all but decomposed in the face of the real thing, her make-up running, black hair growing limp and lank, until pieces of her white scalp showed.

The funeral’s solemnity was lifted by an impassioned eulogy given by John Ireland, Harvey’s closest friend, and, up to that moment, no more than a mediocre film actor. But when he cried as to a lost ship on stormy seas “Larushka! Larushka!” even those who might not have been that close to Harvey wept. The ‘Larushka’ was both poignant and a clue to how inappropriate the church was, as Larry, though his acting was high end British, was a Lithuanian Jew. Still, the location worked well for Elizabeth.

Elizabeth and I became friends in our sadness, mourning Larry, who was almost singlehandedly a justification for Hollywood, stylish and witty, a genuine toff, with an English accent so elegant it might have deluded a listener into believing the town and the industry had been designed by Evelyn Waugh. Larry had left several paintings to Elizabeth, and they hung now in her house on Cordell Drive, rented from Tom Tryon, a movie actor turned successful novelist, which still didn’t mean he had taste. The bedroom was wallpapered or rather wall-aluminumed with a metallic pattern that acted like mirrors, so Elizabeth could see herself every way she turned.

She was at the time romantically involved with Henry Wynberg, who was later to be charged with turning speedometers back so the mileage wouldn’t register on the used cars he was selling. Even without that, he was hardly a match for her. Max Lerner, the great liberal columnist who wrote for the New York Post, had a theory that Elizabeth went from weak man to strong man to weak again, and so on and so on and on and on. Henry fell, or rather rose-- as he was with Elizabeth-- into the weak category. Richard Burton, her great love, whom she had twice married, was on the phone with her frequently from Europe. She was paying his bills in spite of their having divorced for the second and final time, perhaps the reason why she seemed to be under financial pressure. Her son by Michael Wilding was going through a crisis with his wife, from whom he was separated: she was not going to permit him visitation with their child, the air being heavy with the perfume of hoped-for cash, the heady scent blowing towards Granny Elizabeth. “We’ll just have to get us another baby,” Elizabeth said blithely. I was stunned, my love of babies being even more fervent than my love of movie stars, so I’d assumed that her maternal instincts were as powerful as the best of her portrayals.

Our friendship was intensified as Hollywood friendships go by Elizabeth’s wish to play the leading character in my novel The Motherland. The sharp-tongued agent Sue Mengers, at the pinnacle of her power, quipped “Tell her to get the newspaper off her lap.” It took me a few minutes to understand that she was saying Elizabeth was playing with herself. Apparently she was no longer bankable. No one was standing in line to make movies with her. When, on top of that, Burton became involved with Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, Taylor’s vertebrae gave out. She took to a hospital bed in her home, in traction, legs in the air, attached to a harness with pulleys. Max, who was intermittently present, feared for her long-term health and her spine, wondering if the doctors knew what they were doing, if the weights on those pulleys couldn’t possibly cripple her. But Elizabeth seemed sanguine if not downright cheerful about the whole ordeal, sickness having been a more faithful companion in her life than any of the men she had run with and through, except for the charismatic producer Mike Todd, who did not leave voluntarily, but crashed in his private plane, ironically christened The Lucky Liz.

“When Mike was making ‘Around the World in 80 Days,” she told me one day when I was visiting her semi-sickbed, “we really needed a holiday. So when we were in Hong Kong I got appendicitis.” There was no duplicity in the declaration, just a kind of innocent ditty that a composer would sing as he said ‘And then I wrote…”

She was seeing a great deal of herself between the wall décor that reflected her image everywhere she turned, and the TV, on which her old movies were almost constantly running, with herself, in traction, as a captive and captivated audience. In the TV Guide sitting atop the set, I saw that while one channel was showing ‘National Velvet’, in which she had starred as a child, another featured Village of the Damned. I asked her if she had ever seen it. “No,” she said, “but I read the book.” It was hard not to feel affection for her. A movie star who actually read.

Laurence Harvey, with his irrepressible spirit, was visiting her in dreams. This was a phenomenon I found neither far-fetched nor bizarre, as both Elizabeth and I were interested in metaphysics, convinced that signs and omens of other dimensions are everywhere, that ‘here’ is probably not all there is,. “I woke up in the middle of the night one night, sat bolt upright, looked at the clock,” Elizabeth told me once, “and I knew Gary Cooper had died. The next day it was in the papers, and the time of his death was exactly when I woke up.”

I ran that by a girlfriend of mine, the psychic Patricia McLaine, who said “What a shame, with her psychic gifts, -- Pisces with her moon in Scorpio,-- that she wastes it on something negative.” Burton’s sun, Pattie told me, was on Eliabeth’s moon, (sounds kind of dominating and kinky) so they were astrologically perfectly aligned, star-wise, and should never have parted. “But what can you do,” Pattie sighed. “It’s Hollywood.”

Though she was not well enough yet to have any grand parties, Elizabeth did manage to pull herself together sufficiently to have a picnic on her patio one Sunday. Informal as it was, she still managed to be quite late, a behavior usually allotted to time and make-up and allowing for an entrance at other people’s houses. Her entrance that day was edged with pathos: she was clearly in pain. As she slathered mayonnaise and mustard on her third hot dog bun, I resisted the impulse to spit on it to keep her from over-eating. She was a very tiny woman, so the acquired weight was beginning to seem ominous, as she moved into Muu-Muus, with turbans twisted on her head. Max Lerner was present at that luncheon, his eyes filled with adoration and concern.

“The nerve of him!” she told me one day afterwards. “He actually claimed to have been my lover.”

“Maybe he just really loves you,” I said.

“Of course he loves me,” she fumed, “but that isn’t what he told people.” Still, she kept him as a courtier.

For a while I lost track of her. When next I saw her, she was in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. She was with a doctor friend of mine, who was gentle and fairly harmless, but very liberal with his prescriptions. At the time she was heavily into Bloody Marys and painkillers, so the violet eyes were somewhat glazed.

I asked what she was doing. “Oh, I’ve just been sort of… hedgehopping,” she said. She still looked , even with double rows of lashes drooping, every inch the movie star, but the inches were increasing. A mutual friend, a photographer who traveled with her on a holiday said she carried one suitcase that was like an arsenal, its weapons different pharmaceuticals.

When she met Senator John Warner, the Virginia Republican, impressive, tall, handsome, held in high regard by the establishment, it seemed like another shot at a Fairy Tale ending, or at least a continuing. The magic during that era shifted periodically to D.C., often referred to as ‘Hollywood on the Potomac.’ The local pols were enchanted by her; their wives more so. She told me her hand hurt from having to slide ladylike gloves into eager palms. Warner seemed like the right husband material, tall, with good hair, many of the perks that come from power, and plenty of closet space, which she showed me proudly when I visited their house. She had become a Jew for Eddie Fisher, so why not a Republican for John? Hearing past the oratory, though--she was no dummy and the content was considerably less than stimulating, -- she got bored, and it ended.

Her marriage to Larry Fortensky, whom she met in Rehab, took much-publicized place at Neverland, Michael Jackson’s home/amusement park in Santa Barbara. I’m not sure where she was for her divorce.

A wealthy and prominent man who considered courting her told me he’d had to give up, because of the fuss that surrounded her, when she was still the center of press attention. “It’s a circus,” he said, “only without the clowns.”

Jamie Lee Curtis, a close friend of mine for decades, says from the inside of that cloistered world that movie stars are, as a rule, like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard , when she makes her last great speech, about its being “just me, and the camera, and those wonderful people out there in the dark.” As much as they need love, for the most part the love has to be anonymous, faceless. With movie stars, much as I loved them, and much as they sometimes seemed to love me, the relationship was, of necessity, about them and their needs. A press agent said to maintain a relationship with stars, you need to be ‘on call.’ And I had books to write, children to raise, and a husband to love.

I think Elizabeth may have understood that, if she was interested. I’m sure she was interested when she wanted to do The Motherland. But much of what would pass for camaraderie in other places is, in Hollywood, about business. So when a deal collapses, or never happens, the relationship disappears, too. People move on to the next project, and the next human connection. If everyone, as in the Andy Warhol dictum, gets their fifteen minutes of fame, in L.A., when that happens, you also get a few minutes of friendship.

But don’t think it wasn’t fun while it lasted. Even now, having seen the recent re-make of Jane Eyre, admirable as it was, I missed the scene that most moved me when I, myself, was a child. Little orphaned Jane, played by Peggy Ann Garner, in the cruel school that was Lowood, had one friend, and that was Helen, played by an unbelievably luminous little Elizabeth. She had a gentle voice, those exquisite eyes, jeweled even in black and white, and long, lustrous black curls. When the harsh headmaster cut them off and made her stand all night in the rain, holding a sign that said ‘VANITY,’ an ordeal that led to her death, I wept. I weep now.

DAME LIZ-PS

2011-07-07T21:48:00.001-04:00

She was not very deep, but she was not shallow, People had gifted her from infancy for just being beautiful But there had not been beauty that intense and unmistakeable on the screen before.
To go out with Mike Todd, who hungered for her from afar, she demanded a jewel, Of course he sent her one. That was not so unusual. Men sent her things all the time.
Theirs was the perfect relationship: as in all great love stories, they were crazy about each other, and it ended too soon and tragically. Maybe God is a screenwriter. Maybe God saw that if Mike had lived, it would have become ... what? Boring?
She was so easily bored. But she was smart, which you didn't expect, and how else could she be but spoiled. So much adulation from the world. So much vanity without self-esteem. A gorgeous little girl with a driven mother, What else could she have been but self-absorbed, when the world was absorbed with her,
If there is Peace that you can feel, may she rest in it. If there is an Afterlife, as we all hoped, where the wits and hunks and romantics who enhanced her passage through this earthly vale are really all waiting for her, let them not fight over her, Or., maybe considering how much she enjoyed a good drama, let them fight.
We will miss her presence, But she will live forever on Netflix.

the end of the world

2011-07-07T21:45:00.001-04:00

So it's the end of the world as we knew it. As much as we understood, sadly,that Borders was over, it was still a shock to pass Barnes and Noble at 66th and Broadway and find it not just disappeared, but papered window to window to ceiling to floor in red, with some announcement of a company to come, that, I believe, will sell clothes.
For some time now the writing has been on the wall, or, more accurately, the Kindle. Someone was reading one in the park this morning-- a beautiful day, PAY ATTENTION! THIS COULD BE OVER SOON, TOO!--- and I sighed as I read, (still on paper, The New York Times, to be edited came the bulletin on my e-mail, by Jill Abramson, who was taught the business by my beloved Sandy Burton when she was the first woman bureau chief of Time in Boston--) the growth in celebrity novels by Kardashians whom I still don't consider celebrities & Snooki who can't read. Heartened by the next two benches' occupants, one reading Balzac and the other Agatha Christie from actual books, I returned to my less than spacious apt., its view bleakened by the high-rise-in-progress, to see my next door neighbors' Wall Street Journal on the floor headlined: Economic Outlook Darkens. No shit.
The good news is that I have two friends just back from death's doorway. The bad news is I was not with Shelly and Byron at Lake Geneva during the summer they were all so productive and sexy. Woody Allen has co-opted living in another time, and done it prettily and fairly cleverly, too, so I had to put aside my long-time antagonism/jealousy--as I have told before, we shared office space at NBC during my first and only job when I was 20, and were supposed to save the Colgate Comedy Hour, and he came to work only on the day we got paid, whereas I was there every day with a new sitcom or a musical and you know which one of us prevailed. Still, I would not mind having the opportunity to time-travel and hang out with Percy and Mary and the rest of the laudanum-inspired gang on the water that glorious summer, and maybe teach Shelly to swim, which would change and extend the course of English poetry.
Two guys just came to check on my awning, the motor having died so I cannot lower it and hide the lego orange and black obscenity that is the new building. One is from Nigeria, where an uncle came back from America with jeans and sneakers so he could not wait to emigrate, won the lottery, and so is here but has a friend who spent ten hours in the emergency room and no one ever helped him so says America is not what it was. Really? Snooki, jeans and sneakers notwithstanding?

SEE Book of Mormon and Die

2011-07-07T21:40:00.000-04:00

As my friends know, I just lost my adorable Mimi, the world's brightest and most accommodating Bichon Frisee. She traveled the world in a little black bag, never making a sound or relieving herself till the end of the journey, no matter how lengthy it was--New York to LA, D.C. to Paris-- up for anything as long as she could come along. The disease that felled her attacks young toy dogs, mostly female, its cause and cure unknown.

Any pet owner will understand 'distraught' is not a good enough word to describe my state of soul. I have been through this before, and all my losses have conflated, including the death of my very young husband. So I find myself sobbing in Whole Foods, and try to walk in the park, unable to lift my eyes, and often my feet.

The Animal Medical Center, where Mimi went, has been kind and helpful. Her very smart vet, when I called with the symptoms, immediately told me to make an appointment with neurology, saying very succinctly, and odiously, "Little white dogs." Everyone treated me more than kindly from the moment I arrived, as they all apparently knew even before we got there that this disease has a very rapid onset, and she was doomed. Such an Edgar Allen Poe word, for such a sweet, happy creature. It doesn't seem fair, but then, how much of life does?

It was all over so fast I haven't had time to process. The Center has a Pet Loss Support group, so I went the night after I picked up her ashes, hoping to find some kind of sustenance. Instead, the group, fifteen women and one man who said he had been a female in a previous life and wasn't exactly closeted in this one, was, to a woman, inconsolable. One woman carried a framed 8x10 picture of her little dog, a beauty, that she slept with every night, another could not forgive herself for nodding off, convinced if she had stayed awake her sick dog would not have died, another still put water out for her pet a year after its death, a cat owner who thought God had sent her her cat because there was no love in her life, and few relationships, had stopped believing in God. There was a sweet and intelligent social worker, but she was tiny, not built to stand against all the grief in the room.

When 9/11 happened, and like all New Yorkers, I was in shock, because I understood the world as I had known it was over, ambition, hope, joy, were forever compromised, I went at six in the morning to take my place outside Carnegie Hall for tickets to the memorial concert they were having, as a healing gift to New York, featuring Leontyne Price and YoYoMa. I sat on the sidewalk like the student I had long ago been, and was rewarded with tickets so good I could hear Yo Yo Ma breathing as he played. So now once again bereft, irrational and inconsolable, I went early in the morning to the theater where Book of Mormon was playing, and sat on the sidewalk, hoping for a cancellation at the matinee, as I didn't want to die, which event felt imminent, before seeing it. One of the producers, a very smart, witty woman, more empathetic to dogs than people, had been unable to get tickets for her lawyer or any number of friends who were mad at her, and asked me please to tell her if I was successful getting in.

The line for Standing Room already had thirty people waiting at nine A.M., and I was third in line for cancellations, preceded by a Bette Midler look-and-sound-alike who'd come with a folding chair, and a theater arts major from Michigan. Once again I sat on the sidewalk, this time on a cushion I'd brought, as the years have hardened my ass if not my heart. I got a ticket, and went back home to nap before the matinee, trying not to note how empty my apartment was.

Returning to the theater for the show I re-encountered faux-Bette and she told me after I left there had been a fist fight between a few people hoping for cancellations, accusations of cutting in line, threats. The lights dimmed. The show began to cheers, actual 'Huzzahs,' as if we were all part of an Evelyn Waugh novel, everyone in the audience apparently overjoyed at their luck at actually being there.

I had heard Andrew Rannells, who plays the Mormon Elder Price, sing "I Believe," on the Tonys, and had been moved by the purity of his voice and the sweetness of the music, in spite of the satirical nature of the song. So I was disappointed when I saw he was out for the matinee, replaced by Kevin Duda. But a pretty young usher assured me he was very good, and I slogged to my seat, last on the farthest aisle in the almost last row. But what the hell, I was there. Scalpers were getting $750 a ticket, and American Express had just run a double-paged ad in the Sunday Times saying their members, acting within the next ten days, could buy tickets for April. It was today, and I had paid only(gasp) $155. (Everybody's getting rich on this one: a coke to settle my stomach was $7.00, Junior Mints to rouse me from my torpor, $5.)

As one might have guessed from the elation of the reviews, the book was extremely rude, vulgar and funny, the brief send-up of The Lion King appropriate(I was not a fan of Julie Taymor's even before she hurtled out of favor, as if her very public downfall was a metaphor for what happened to several of Spider-Man's players.) Josh Gad, who plays the misfit schlub in Mormon is predictably Loser-Endearing, and Nikki James, the bright Ugandan in the village is adorable, and her love song to Salt Lake City musically fine and oddly touching.

But I wasn't really having a good time. A couple two rows ahead of me kept leaning their heads in towards each other so I couldn't see the stage, and Mimi was dead. I thought about leaving at intermission, but instead spoke to the husband who was wearing a baseball cap, something that makes me want to punch tourists even when I haven't just lost my dog. I asked him if he and his wife could stop leaning towards each other; he apologized, telling me his wife could see only out of one eye, so he would change seats with her, and that would help. I was immediately ashamed, because that was one of Mimi's symptoms: she had suddenly gone blind in her right eye. So I returned to my seat, chastened, and watched the second act, which was deeper and better, full of good points as South Park episodes always are underneath the outrageousness. And then came the song, the one song in the show that is truly, fully a song, because of the music: I Believe, what I had heard on the Tonys. And I started to cry, soundlessly and long, because the melody was so true, and when I had last heard it, Mimi was alive.

Theater as it originated in ancient Athens was supposed to be cathartic. But I don't believe this was exactly what the Muses had in mind. I am weeping even now, writing this. The show was good, though not all that it was cracked up to be. Mimi might not have been all that I felt she was. For those who have never owned one, she was just a dog. But grief, man. Grief is a bitch.

OSCARS: Life After Death

2011-02-28T15:14:00.000-05:00

So as it turns out, youth is not everything. The 83rd Oscars, revitalized as it was supposed to be, so the young would feel the same attachment to it as the older, was arguably as boring an Awards show as has hit, or, rather, leaned against the airwaves. Anne Hathaway was charming and showed she had physical grace, the ability to wear many dresses and even a tux, and sang impressively well. But James Franco seemed as though he would rather be at Yale, and the moments of deadness on air were... what?... well, what's the opposite of breathtaking?
The arrival of Billy Crystal reminded you what it was to have a wit picking up on dropped opportunities, and the ghost of Oscars past materialized with a sharp vengeance with the clip of Bob Hope, who, much as some of us thought we didn't love him when he was still here, knew how to keep a show a show.
A ton of years ago, the 42nd Annual Awards were celebrated at our house in Beverly Hills, an event covered by Time Magazine, in those halcyon days when both that magazine and the evening meant a great deal. The Vietnam war was on, so everybody we knew of a liberal persuasion, many of the truly glittering, was mad at Bob Hope for his politics, and knowing John Wayne, a rabid Republican, was probably going to win for the first 'True Grit', rather than go to the actual ceremony, came to our house. Lee Marvin who'd won best actor the year before was there, and Zsa Zsa, still with her wit intact, and Shirley MacLaine yelling at the screen("Oh, shut up, Bob Hope!" she cried, duly noted by the Time Magazine reporter, Sandra Burton, who was discreet and kind enough not to print the rest of what Shirley said, which was plenty.) Our house was divided into three rooms, Orthodox, Conservative and Reformed, (you couldn't speak in the first, the middle you could watch and talk, and the last was out of control.) Hors d'oeuvres made by the hostess(me) were constantly passed, along with drinks, and there was a Sabrett stand in the back yard so everybody could feel they were in New York while they ate their hot dogs. Everybody got prizes(Ruth Berle, the witty wife of Milton, brought a framed, autographed picture of Ruth Roman) and humor and fellowship reigned. It was a real party.
Last night, though, was an ordeal. Mostly it was about the clothes, with jewels and shoes that seemed obvious product placement. All the right people won, I think, though I was rooting for Annette Bening, who seems that she will never be rewarded for all her good work and reforming Warren, but all in all who won almost seemed beside the point. To have Eli Wallach at 95, and Francis Coppola, who absolutely transformed the storytelling capacity of motion pictures, and not invite them to say a word was as painful as having Kirk Douglas say too many. And breathing the same air as... WAIT FOR IT!... Oprah? You were expecting maybe Mother Teresa? What were they looking for, a spot on OWN?
Oh, dear. Was anybody really in charge who had any sense of movement, and comedy?
Nothing is sadder than people talking about the good old days. But hey... weren't they really?

SPIDERFREUDE

2011-02-08T13:15:00.000-05:00

As one whose childhood was brightened by what seemed the great original American art form, my heart lifted by the brilliant lyrics of Frank Loesser, Yip Harburg and Cole Porter, my soul tintinabulated by a sense of personal destiny because I had the same birthday as Irving Berlin, I have watched and listened with great dismay to the devolution of the musical comedy. When Lincoln Center had its brilliant revival of South Pacific, I wept all through the overture: hearing real songs, feeling true sentiments, not just squishy things, but a modicum of wit that made you smile, and occasioned bursts of true joy. So it was with some alarm that I experienced Phantom, and the mawkish music of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and grieved for what was doubtless going to be downhill from Lerner & Loewe.
But I had NO idea. Only as a vague sense of terror descended on me with the mounting cost of musicals, and the success of mirthless unfrolics like Spring Awakening, as my ears strained for real music, did I begin to feel what I loved was lost forever. So when the announcements started coming about Spiderman- Turn Off the Dark, that a theater was to be renovated to make room for the areial acrobatic, and a show was to cost $65 million i threw in my spiritual musical towel.
Having lived many years in Hollywood, the capital of Schaadenfreude, where one is mostly sustained by the failure of others, it is with a heart full of song that
I read today Ben Brantley's wittily negatived and admittedly early(although in terms of original scheduling, late) review of Spiderman, Turn Off the Dark. Any bad advance feelings I had towards the show had been exacerbated by the positive enthusiasm lately exhibited by the hysteric Glenn Beck, who endorsed it as if it were the musicalized philosophy of Sarah Palin. So to have a genuine theater critic from The New York Times see it at last, and express his tasteful disdain gave
a lilt to the day. The Gershwins hummed in my ears. Jerome Kern flooded my veins. I think the song he played was "Look for the Silver Lining."
Is it possible in this horribly confusing world where daily the values we once clung to are swept away, that virtue can still triumph? That Good-- that is to say not the comic book victory of masked hero over masked villain, but something of actual value, like a melody you can actually hum and words you can understand-- can prevail? Oh, God, I hope so. Are You there? Are You watching this? Or are you just trying to get out of the way before some more scenery falls?

THE BRAIN

2010-11-29T16:40:00.000-05:00

Subject: REPORTFROMTHEFRONT: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

2010-11-11T17:18:00.001-05:00

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.

KURT VONNEGUT'S BIRTHDAY

2010-11-11T17:18:00.000-05:00

JOHN LENNON'S BIRTHDAY

2010-10-09T21:32:00.001-04:00

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.

JOHN LENNON'S BIRTHDAY

2010-10-09T21:32:00.000-04:00

TIME FORGOTTEN

2010-09-24T14:00:00.000-04:00

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

2010-08-23T22:02:00.005-04:00

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?

2010-07-05T18:33:00.000-04:00

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

2010-07-05T18:27:00.001-04:00

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

2010-06-16T04:00:00.001-04:00

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

2010-06-16T03:56:00.001-04:00

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

2010-06-01T14:52:00.003-04:00

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

2010-05-06T10:11:00.000-04:00

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

2010-02-15T18:21:00.002-05:00

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

2010-02-15T18:18:00.001-05:00

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

2010-02-15T18:15:00.000-05:00

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

2010-02-15T18:10:00.000-05:00

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

2010-01-25T20:05:00.000-05:00

It Never Rains in California

2010-01-20T12:55:00.001-05:00

The Decorations Come Down

2010-01-14T21:40:00.000-05:00

So Mimi and I are in Beverly Hills, in fine regalia for the holidays, Manufacturer’s Trust bank building with a big ribbon up the side of it and across, so it looked like a present which it might not have been to anybody but Ben Bernake. But as they were cutting away the pine from various storefronts on Santa Monica Boulevard this morning , I snagged a big red ribbon for Mimi who does not care to wear it, thinking it makes her look like a whore. Whores do not proliferate in Beverly Hills as there are too many women looking to give it away, but I did see a number of tiny, tight-assed women in very butt-conforming pants who are wearing spike heels with gold or red on the undersoles, so they are either making a lot of money being manicurists, or emulating Oprah.
It is a great privilege to be here when so much of the country is freezing, so I set aside the last of any contempt I had for LA and just say thank you for the weather. There are also a number of people I love here, so it is good to be back, and some favorite friends are being kind, bringing me DVDs of movies to watch during my confinement (I am With Book) and recuperating from minor eye surgery to correct what Tom Korman called my Quasimodo, an overused muscle from staring too long for too many years at the computer or what was once known as a typewriter. I understand Cormac McCarthy’fias typewriter sold for a fortune at auction, but I do not have it in me to try for greatness that is depressing, and it would be pointless anyway, as my last typewriter I gave to a charity in San Francisco when I wrote a novel there. When I tried to get it back after my career took what the Fed would call a downturn, thinking perhaps the talent had been in that machine, I was informed that by then probably people were living in it.
So I am here at the Hotel Mosaic, a little undiscovered jewel, repairing and courting the Muses. I think if they have any sense, they will be glad to come to California, setting aside the financial crisis and the bad rap. We shall see.
Meanwhile, my last work, Live the Day, a picaresque tale of a woman of a certain age (who could that be?) in Venice, is in the capable hands of a young man who believes in it. My Greek play, as friends of this blog know, is to be a part of the celebration of my Alma Mater, Bryn Mawr’s 125th anniversary, in a renovated Goodhart Hall, where Katharine Hepburn spoke her first words onstage. She came back to talk to those of us who were interested in the theater while I was an undergraduate, and with hand holding a shaking teacup, and a very Main Line accent, said “I suppose I’m expected to tell you how Bryn Mawr helped me in the the-ah-tah, but I cahn’t.”
Well, if the occasion ever warrants it, I can. It seems only yesterday since Junior Show. How did that happen?
Love to you all, amd a belated Happy Healthy New Year.

The Fall of Bedford Falls

2010-01-14T21:32:00.001-05:00

A mild wind, chill around the edges, blew alongside the structure at 221 West 57th Street, beneath those big metal rods that hold up buildings that await demolition. And with that wind, papers blew, used cups and candy wrappers, notes that people had written each other when people still wrote on paper instead of texting, receipts and unpaid bills part of the blowy debris. A black man, I think I am still allowed to call him, listlessly swept up some of the mess. I asked him what had been there, and he said ‘The Hard Rock Café.’ The whole scene, dreary as it was, viewed after coming from a performance of David Mamet’s ‘’Oleanna”, seemed particularly desolate, like the part of “It’s a Wonderful Life” when the angel showed Jimmy Stewart what it would be like if he’d never been born. I know there are many who regard that movie as mawkish, but I believe Frank Capra represented what was uplifting in the American spirit, and he is gone gone gone, as is the country he loved, and what we are become is Pottersville.
You can take the temperature of the country by what is happening on Broadway, although the Sarah Palin part of it, the “real America” would insist on opting out, if they knew what opting was. The play I saw this afternoon was an agony, unpleasant to begin with because that was David Mamet then, (I look forward to seeing where he is now, which is coming any day) and as I remember Madonna was in it, so it must have caused quite a stir at the time, the student bitch with her own feminist agenda, looking to bring down a harried professor with the charge of sexual harassment. Today’s matinee was particularly uncomfortable, because everybody knows it’s closing early, the cast in pain because they have to soldier on, the audience, fractionally filled, probably mostly paper, resistant to what is for openers a difficult and contentious play, with its unlikable non-heroine(Julia Stiles) triumphing over the good guy(Bill Pullman.) I have a personal soft spot for Mr. Pullman because we were once in the lost luggage department of an airline at the same time, and children were climbing on him, and I saw the decent human being he was managing to stay in spite of being a successful new young actor in movies. To have suffered through the audience restlessness (and in a few cases, leaving)must have been as discomfiting as not knowing where your bags had been sent by mistake or if you would ever get them back, and there were no tiny tots clambering up his legs to reassure him that life would go on. The whole experience was shadowed even grayer by today’s piece in The New York Times about what’s working(Wicked, over the roof—go know, somebody tell me why) and what’s struggling(Finian’s Rainbow, the most joyful, witty score, lyrics especially, by my once mentor and wonderful friend, Yip Harburg, the true poet among songwriters) and what I know to be closing, Superior Donuts, the best play I have seen on Broadway in a long time.
It is all about more than Broadway, and I think I know why. Everybody is afraid, whether or not they admit it. No one knows where we are going, or if, and rather than examine that scary scenario, they want to be entertained. No thought, please, we’re tourists. Stores are empty, or closing, except for Apple, where a constant stream of customers,15,000 a day on Fifth Avenue (and there’s a new one where Circuit City went out of business on Upper Broadway) stand on line to buy pricey Ipod Nanos(that’ll keep you from thinking) or Iphones, so they can twitter what they are doing to keep themselves mindless, which is nothing.
I would venture, as a retired optimist, that what we need is Jimmy Stewart, except I think we had him for a few months before reality started bringing him down. (You may remember Mr. Smith goes to Washington, the idealist who becomes a senator, and then…) So the wind blows, hauntingly, beside deserted cafes where once were noisy, spendthrift revelers. Good God, the evil banker triumphed.

Mimi and I watch 'Marley and Me'

2009-11-22T14:22:00.001-05:00

It being Saturday night, and my having learned in Venice that to be alone is not to be abandoned, but a kind of silent privilege, it was with a peaceful heart that I stayed home, and turned on the TV. With luck (or Bershert I think it’s spelled, or Destiny it felt like in Venice) seeming strangely still operative, I tuned into a very bad print of the very bad movie, Xanadu, with my dancing teacher from Pittsburgh, Gene Kelly, in his fading role, unfortunate but fascinating, since his ego outweighed the wisdom of Cary Grant, who didn’t want his daughter to see him onscreen old, though old he still looked better than almost anyone else does young) and having had enough of the dark transmission and the sadly fading voice, I changed channels in time to catch the beginning of Marley and Me, which I had never seen, but doubtless unconsciously still resented, because I had better dogs with better stories than almost anyone, considering that Happy was on Oprah and would have been immortal, but she didn’t show the book.
Then even as the cast failed to capture me and I stopped feeling sorry for Jennifer Aniston’s being dumped by Brad because she truly has zip charisma, I got caught by what I knew was the inevitable ending, as everything ends for everyone but is somehow, like the loss of a child, particularly hard to face with the death of a dog. And as Marley packed it in, not only were my tear ducts but also my heart valves reengaged, and I remembered all my dogs.
The first was Bo. Spelt ‘Beau’ by the pretentious woman who owned him, a very rich lady who wanted to be in show business, so my husband went to have lunch with her at the Beverly Hills Hotel to raise money for a film project he had, where, instead, she sold him the dog. That will tell you a great deal about Don, my husband. “Say hello to Bo,” he said, coming home with this little Yorkie in his hand, and a sheepish expression, except it was more aptly puppyish, as he knew how pissed off I would be, as the last thing I needed or wanted at the time was a dog. Then, when I was at the height of my seeming success, on a book tour for The Pretenders, visiting the set of the Exorcist, Billy Friedkin sent me to the airport in his limo and when I got to LA my luggage was lost, and I freaked and was nasty, and the man at the counter said ‘It isn’t like it’s loss of life.’ When I got home they told me Bo was in the hospital, that Shani Wallis’ boxers had come down the hill, and in the words of my then little girl, Madeleine, “they made of Bo a trampoline.” I called the vets and they told me Bo would not live through the night, and I fell to my knees, honest to God I did, and prayed, and in the morning I went to the hospital, and he was alive. My friend Diane, my most spiritual buddy, called him ‘Bo, the Miracle Dog.’ He lived for many years, though with only one eye, so some were moved to refer to him as Sammy Davis, Jr.
When we were in-between homes, that is to say we were in escrow but couldn’t get our loan approved so went everywhere there was sanctuary, Diane’s home, and the farm Pat Paulsen had bought in Northern California where there were snakes, and which he had bought in a moment of not knowing where he would go either, to which he had absently invited us at a dinner party as he probably invited everyone and was stunned when we not only accepted but showed up, where Bo fell into a cattle crossing, and lost his sense of adventure. Then Marge Champion spoke to Mark Taper whom she was dating, and as he was on the board of the bank, our loan was approved and we lived there till and beyond the end of Bo’s life.
That sadly coincided with the untimely and agonizing last weeks of Don’s, when Norman Cousins sent us a healer, who first laid hands on Bo, who was failing, and Bo immediately became even more ill, so Robert, my son, said of the healer, “Don’t let that guy near Dad.” So I took him to the vets’ to be put down, and because I had a dying husband at home, did not have time to wait around or grieve. “Did the guy put a mask on before he brought down the blade?” Robert asked me, but I was in too much pain to realize how darkly funny and sad that was. And because I had Happy, the new puppy we had bought the kids for Christmas, the last Christmas we were to be a whole family, and there was so much on the unseen horizon that would tear us apart, I did not suffer over the death of Bo.
But when Happy died in Paris, at the Plaza Athenee, I fell apart, as Robert did when I called him to tell him I would have to put Happy to sleep, because Happy had had a heart attack running down the rue, and was suffering. I spoke very softly to Happy in the darkness, as he lay beside me on the bed, and soothed him, he was so frightened, and asked him to help me-- we had an appointment with a vet we didn’t know, to put him to sleep the next day. I stroked him in the darkness, and told him what a good boy he had been(the best, accompanying me everywhere in the world in the purse I smuggled him in until they started x-raying at airports, when he was busted.) When I turned on the lamp at four in the morning, he was gone, perfect and lovingly cooperative dog that he’d always been, so great he appeared on Oprah and would have been immortal, but she didn’t show the book.
Now all these histories and heart-searing moments came back to me last night as I watched with Mimi, my Bichon, so I guess I was off base in the beginning of this tale when I said I was alone. I wept into her soft, white, curly coat, and counted up her doggie years, and prayed she would have a very long life, as I pray for all of you, though I am embarrassed to pray. Camus, to drop an unloving name, said that people have invented God so they would not die, and it is hard to deal with being an ambivalent believer, struggling with Doubt, in this age of Sarah Palin, who has made religious feeling into an obscenity, or as Frank Rich put it so succinctly in his column this morning, “Oy.”
But whatever the absolute truth, if it turns out the truth can be absolute, there is no denying the spark of divinity that is in those little creatures, though Mimi showed signs of sibling rivalry this morning when I gave croissant crumbs to the birds in the park, so radiant with leaves that are even more colorful as they are dying, instead of her. But who says Divine Love can’t be jealous? Certainly not Oprah, who has given us two years to grieve not her passing, but her passing over, which some of us are hard put to do, since she didn’t show the book.

Out of Venezia

2009-11-18T21:01:00.001-05:00

Well, she might have had a House in Ahhhhhhfrica, but I have one in Venice. I cannot tell you what street it is on, because street names mean nothing here, it is all in knowing which side of the canal is yours. I wandered today for several hours on tiring feet(thank God for Puma, though a litter would have better) trying to find the Bigleterria I think it’s called(as you all know I have a hard enough time spelling in English, but as Herbie-Huhbie he called himself, being Southern) Merritt, my Olde English prof at Stanford told me, as he and Joe Herben (Huhben) my Chaucer professor at Bryn Mawr had told their classmate Scott at Princeton, ‘If you write well enough someone will spell for you.”
Finally found the ticket office and now have official card to go on the Vaporetto for a month which is the least time I stay here, I think, though never say ever. The place that sells Broadband I never found, and maybe that is for the best, as I don’t want to spend too much time on the e-mail so I will have full focus for the novel if it comes. Most of my morning was spent trying to send from a regular computer at the Internet place on the corner when you can find what corner it is, and because I had never used a mouse(I have a keypad) it took me fifty minutes to send two messages and that cost six Euros.
But the Daily Word, (the magazine of Unity to which I subscribe as those of you who know me well or even a little know, I am eclectic in my search for spiritual faith, often not having any) today was ‘Something New.’ So I decided to try Something New and live my life instead of just writing about it. I have missed most of the places I’ve been, so busy was I trying to create a book, a poem, an article, whatever would take me to a more interesting future and so I have failed to experience the present, where I am, as if I had been forever texting even before it became a disease. Today I was everywhere I actually was, and it was really wonderful, as I was in Venice. Could have done without San Marco and the Rialto where I was really afraid I might die and then that I wouldn’t, but I finally got to a salad on the deck by the canal, and actually tasted. The lettuce was nature fresh and good enough so you thought you could like lettuce.
Walking through those little alleyways afterwards I could not help thinking of times in Venice past when I was fixated on buying things, and thought ‘When you are happy and present you don’t need to buy things.’ Nevertheless I did buy a purse. Big and soft and a color of red just off enough so it isn’t obtrusive or offensive, and big enough to carry everything in. Then I got on the Vaporetto with my painfully acquired pass that nobody asked to see, and got off at what I hoped was the right vaporetto stop and walked up a pretty street where there was a snack place called ‘La Revista.’ Having passed up the public toilet and saved the 1 Euro 50 they charge you to pee in public places, figured the 7. 50 Euro sundae was a bargain, especially since it involved a clean loo. I ordered the extravagant sundae I had resisted eating my whole life, but did tell them to hold the whipped cream, and relieved, went inside and relieved myself.
There was an elderly couple at the next table when I returned and we started to talk and of course it turned out he had been a professor at Bryn Mawr when I was there. But he taught math and the reason I went to Bryn Mawr was that they didn’t have a Math requirement to graduate. Nevertheless he spoke in terms of mathematics being actually poetic and his sense of loss when I brilliant student of his opted out for a course with Marianne Moore who appeared that year at Bryn Mawr, her AlMA Mater that semester, and went on in sensitive terms about what mathematics was or is, and told me he had helped Nash get his Nobel prize(a Beautiful Mind, see Russell Crowe, but not too closely) and then he spoke of what a coincidence it was that he and his wife should be there and we should speak but I don’t think so, since I don’t believe in coincidence with something like that, because what would it be, as my friend Taffy used to say, but ‘of course.’ Of course I drove through Bali and standing in the road when I didn’t even know he was there or how to get in touch with him was Jack. So of course I would sit down in Venice next to a teacher who’d been at Bryn Mawr and his wide. She complimented me on my purse, and I confessed how compromised I felt having given in to material feelings in view of the spirituality I was operating on for the day, but she pronounced it “a happy purse,” and said I had done the right thing. I would have invited them to my house for a drink but I couldn’t remember quite where it was.
Trying to find my way home there was yet another adventure. M. Rusconi, the great gentleman recently retired as Director of the Cipriani, had a dog once named Iago who actually made his way back to his house after having followed his master to the train station unobserved and forgotten, but I am not so smart as Iago. Desperate, finally, I called Connie Rusconi, his wife and mother of Pietro whose beautiful little house I am lucky enough to be renting after my escape from Capranica and asked her the name of my street. But she didn’t know either, so I returned with her on the phone guiding me by way of landmarks, churches, the place where their older daughter Francesca went to school. And now I am safe, unless the waters rise(you have to put metal slats in the doors if you hear the sirens.)
I am so happy to be here. So much for Karen Blixen. Happily I have stopped looking for love, so have not got my eye peeled for Robert Redford, but Clooney IS in town for the Festival, though my friends the Meads are deeply disappointed at the Cipriani, where he is staying, that they haven’t seen him. Maybe it’s better.

You Have to Have it Stolen in New York

2009-11-18T11:40:00.000-05:00

As those of you know who have been following my high (alta) adventures know, I have just returned from a joyful and productive sojourn in Venice, in the Dorsoduro, the quiet and lovely part of that magical city, marred only un po by having my wallet stolen on the Vaporetto a few days before I was to return. Happily, or as a kvetch would put it, Thank God, I had friends who fed and wined me, as the incident as reported to Citibank resulted in their failure to stop my ATM from being used, or their sending me any new credit cards, so fortunately friends also staked me to enough to get to the airport, and home, I guess you could say it was, where I am now banking with Chase, I wonder why.
So today I went to the DMV to get a replacement for my driver’s license, and having been through a saga to get it in the first place (I spent enough time at Social Security to read the whole of Thucydides History of the Pelopennysian(sp?) Wars waiting for my social security card which I needed to get my driver’s license, and then had to have my name changed, since my SS was under Mitchell, my husband’s name, so I went through another series of classics I had no intention of reading while going through the rigamarole of changing my name to my name.) So it was Gwen Davis’ wallet they stole with everything in it in Venice, where I spent an unhappy morning at the police station getting an official report. All of this is to tell you how fortified I was for my return to the DMV, where they needed a passport(had it) Birth certificate(got it) SS card(done it) mail,(check) together in a packet I feared losing lest I vanish from the earth officially, and the police report, which you had to produce to avoid the $17.00 fee.
Semi-fearlessly I went to the Express Office of the DMV with all that stuff, stepped up and filled out what I needed to when a license is stolen, my coat was admired by Mrs. Robinson, who loaned me a pen, and then, to my absolute amazement the number she gave me was called immediately, and I went to the window.
“I have everything I was told to bring,” I said to the woman at window 1. “I don’t need it,” she said, “and in a minute I’ll show you why.” With that she turned her screen around and showed me my photograph which looked curiously like me. “And here’s the police report,” I said, giving her the Italian precinct which noted all that had been stolen, including my license.
“Where’s that from?” she said.
“Venice,” I said, adding “Italy.”
“That’s no good,” she said. “You need a police report from New York.”
“But it was stolen in Venice.”
“I can’t help that,” she said. “You’re going to have to pay $17.00.”
The good news is Mrs. Robinson said I could keep the pen.
Anyway, it’s good to be home, I think it is, though having been without newspapers for two months except for the occasional check-in with the International Herald Tribune and the Gazzetta Della Sport, which is what Matteo kept in the bar where I had my morning cappucinos, I find the New York Times overwhelming, and the news about Sarah Palin alarming. I don’t think most people realize just how dangerous she is, stupidity aside. She is skipping New York very smartly, but as she knows and we don’t seem to realize, the country is not New York, and it elected George Bush, the second time, anyway.
Oh I was so illuminated when I was there, and here I am paying attention to politics. Anyway, hail and whatever the opposite of Farewell is. I’m here.

Full Moon Over Zattere

2009-11-18T11:35:00.001-05:00

So tonight, having gotten the blessing of my family—my daughter-in-law said she is happy I am here, and Silas said it was okay that I called him during the football game—I watched a golden moon rise in a very dark sky, and listened to a lot of young people singing along to Italian Carioca, many more words than I could follow in a moment, projected on a screen. But I did get to see the words to Billie Jean, that I had never really quite heard before, and I am sorry Michael Jackson ended as he did when he was capable of such involuted lyrics, grateful to be in Venice, hopeful that my work will go well, but thankful I can be here at all, with a mild night glowing on the Grand Canal, and God in His/Her Heaven I sincerely hope.
I send you all the fruits of the season: your own special energies and the will to prevail. This would have been my mother and father’s Diamond anniversary, had they not divorced when I was eleven, tried to kill each other several times, and died. I hope you all still believe in love, but it really isn’t essential. What matters is a heart full of appreciation and gratitude for being alive, the moment, and catching it as it flies, which it does and will.
Much love from a beautiful sidestreet off the Dorsoduro, near the Chiesa San Trovaso, with a Madonna attributed to Jacobello del Fiore. But what difference if he didn’t do it: it’s there. xx

A FArewell to Cone

2009-11-18T11:32:00.001-05:00

So inspired by my insightful editor not to try and be inspired, but instead take advantage of the fact that I am in Venice where, if I am not seeming to lord or lady it over you, so many of you might enjoy being, I continued my explorations of the artistic mind of Thomas Mann, and made my way on foot—I thought it would be longer,but once over the Accademia Bridge it was a very small stretch of the leg-- to La Fenice, the fabled opera house which has been here for centuries in between burning down, and is due to perform a new ballet by a company from Hamburg of Tod im Venedig. That’s Death in Venice in Deutsch which should give you some idea why I am so afraid of Deutsch. That Death should be Tod is not so bad, but that the lyricism or Venice, Venezia, can be transmuted to Venedig is what makes the language so formidable, and deepens even more the puzzle of how Goethe and Heine could have been so light on their linguistic feet, and given such beauty to the world with their masterpieces, which in German is Meisterstucken, and that’s pronounced ‘schtooken,’ making it even worse. Hamburg is even in the opinions of Germans a place of remote and cold people, except for the whores in the windows, so it will be interesting to see what they do to the ballet. The images of the Meister, Mann, do themselves dance in the mind: there is a feverish dream that the writer hero of the tale, Aschenbach, has shortly before his own finale that demands a ballet as many nightmares do, though few are so poetically transcribed.

So there I was at the box office and the ticket seller, Stefano, offered me the “least worst” seat, which was 35 euros, but not until after much delay and whatever the Venetian equivalent of ‘folderol’ is, where he said I had to come back tomorrow because the Internet was down and many people might have been trying for the same seat. I offered to deal with the Internet myself, a prospect more horrifying to me, secretly, than any thought of returning, but that seemed to bring him to full present attention and he sold me the least worst seat for opening night, which is the 29th, so stay tuned. Then I continued on to the important and grand local bookshop in St. Mark’s Square which I had been avoiding like the plague in ‘Death in Venice,’ and that, too, was surprisingly close. When you take the Vaporetto, as it glides so gently through the Canals, except when it bumps up sharply against the dock, shocking the vertebrae of all those waiting, there seems to be great distances between places which is not at all the fact. It was practically right there, as I discovered once I stopped to inquire at Fendi, which was unfortunate as they had a full length mirror and I saw for the first time where all that ice cream had gone. Pietro, my sweet landlord, is about six feet four so the mirrors above the two bathroom sinks are so he can comfortably see his face, so all I had been seeing was my eyes which had been unchanging and reasonably bright, so I imagined I was getting away with it. The saleswoman in Fendi wasn’t sure where the famous bookshop was, though it turned out to be almost facing. There I was able to buy the English language version of my guiding tale, which I thought I had read in my (it turns out) long-ago youth. Reading it though, as translated by Joachim Neugroschel, which should give you some idea, it seemed more heavy-handed and stilted than I remember anything of Mann’s, including or maybe especially The Magic Mountain. But even so, the writing is strangely gripping, particularly since Aschenbach is ‘too overburdened by the obligation to produce,’ which felt chillingly familiar, along with ‘his concern that the clock might run down before he had done his bit and given fully of himself.’ So there I was, my own hero, relating completely except for the fact that I have no international renown, knighthood or Nobel Prize, which my friend George D’Almeida told me years ago I could get along with anything else I wanted as long as I no longer wanted it, but I never really wanted or even dreamed of a Nobel prize, just a publisher who saw the good in my writing and stayed loyal and in business and alive which of course none of them has done.

I sat there in the almost square near San Barnabas, which is my ‘hood, at a small café called Imagine, eating a salad and devouring the tale, unable to leave until it and Aschenbach were finished. “Normally,” Mann wrote “whatever refreshment he gained from sleep, food or nature had been promptly expended on some work;” which is and was, alas, pretty much the truth about me, no matter how unrealized or failing to be accepted or lauded or recognized, poor Gwennie, but then, he goes on to say: “but now any daily strengthening by sun, sea air and idleness was generously and inefficiently consumed in euphoria and sensation,” which, alas, as all the publishers say when they are turning you down after telling you how much they enjoyed reading it, had not happened to me as there was no beautiful young boy I was trailing, that part of my life clearly being over, thank God and Gloria Steinem who to some are the same. What euphoria and sensation I have had have, as the full length-mirror showed me, have come from ice cream and pasta, which I understand now I must give up. Sigh.

But it was a great relief understanding that I am under no obligation to do anything more while I am here than enjoy and explore Venice, especially after making it clear to Citibank that I am really me, since my ATM card had stopped giving me any money until I answered the many security questions as they were sure it had been stolen, since I didn’t inform them, the supervisor told me after a half-hour of my asking to be connected with someone higher, that I was leaving the country(ours.) I didn’t know they were my mother. I only thought they were my bank.

At any rate I relaxed after that,(except I hope I left my Mastercard at the Café 1518 which I couldn’t find out until today since they’re closed on Tuesday and I’d hate to have to go through that grilling again.) Went last night to Arsenale to have dinner with Pietro at his other apartment which a French madwoman he befriended has stolen the keys of and denounced him to the tax police but that is another story. We had some takeaway fish from a junk tied up at the dock(very slow service but good calamari) and he told me the story of his apartment which is magnificent and was the home of the cannon maker from the Lepanto(I think it is) war, which was Christians against the Turks and if they hadn’t won with his cannons Europe would be Muslim, a fear that continues and renews to this day.

Then he walked me to the vaporetto(hoping she wouldn’t come while he was being such a gentleman and use the keys to steal things from or trash his apartment, as she is in a lunatic rage since she made a move on him that he rejected—I told him to explain that to the tax police and use the word ‘erotic’ which would get their full attention). I got off at Ca Rezzonica, my stop, and made my way through San Barnabas stopping at the overpriced and overrated especially by themselves as they advertise the flavor of the month outside ice cream stand, and ordered the very very chocolate for my final cone. The vendor gave me a taste of pistachio which was great deal better than the chocolate. “The test of ice cream,” said an oceanographer standing nearby with some colleagues who have come here for a conference, “is always pistachio. If it’s too green, go away.” My very very chocolate was icy and disappointing, rather like a fudgicle that had been watered. I threw it away half-eaten and did not go back for a redo in pistachio because once you have made up your mind this is the last one, it better be the last one as there are many full-length mirrors in America, to which I will return the 6th of October, as originally planned. There’s no point telling myself I have to write the new novel someplace else.

That burden having been lifted, I awoke this morning strangely light and carefree, so much so that I thought I would take my meditation in the bathtub. There was no hot water.

CORRECTION:To Die So Young and Singing, this one

2009-11-18T11:28:00.000-05:00

The nuts at the Hotel Des Bains are rancid. That is the place in the Lido where Thomas Mann lived and wrote Death in Venice., which I had failed to visit on my first visit, trailing his footsteps and the advice of my editor, who said ‘Go get an English edition and then go where he went,’ followed by a second aviso to ‘lighten up.’ Those might seem to cancel each other out, but not really. These have been better days because I am actually looking at Venice rather than waiting for my Meisterstuck. His suggestions were augmented by an Englishman and his wife whom I met at the local wine bar who told me there was a ballet of the classic coming, and also that they had seen La Traviata at La Fenice, where the ballet is going to be but Traviata is no more. So I bought a ticket to Traviata that was to be perfomed last night at the Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista- try asking directions for that one. But first I spent some time at the Hotel Des Bains, where I had the rancid nuts. It would hard for nuts not to be rancid at the Hotel Des Bains. It is imposing and impressively ancient, and, I would venture, unchanged since Mann wrote his Meisterstuck there, including clerks in long dark waistcoats and several scenes Stanley Kubrick left out of The Shining. So I sat on that regal porch and had my Aperol Spritz, a seemingly light aperitif to which one could easily become addicted, and the rancid nuts, to which a sensible person wouldn’t, unless driven by a strange intensity and being within hearing range of some people from New Jersey.
I used the ladies’ room downstairs, where the locks are as ancient as the hotel, and turned mine the wrong way. So I couldn’t get out. There was no one within hearing distance, the place is vast, so I had some anxious moments where I imagined it was my end, and the article would read ‘Author Found Dead in the Toilet,’ which is, I’m afraid, a projection of how I have felt about my career of late. But I finally got out and Vaporettoed back to San Marco to the Montadori bookshop which I told you was across from a narcissistic salesman at what turns out moré accurately to have been Hermes, to buy the Blue Guide to Venice, which my friend George D’Almeida who lives in Radda in Chianti said would be like having him with me, always a good idea, as there is little George doesn’t know about everything. When we were very young in Rome where he and Anne were living at the time, and I was living for a year, he gave an eloquent tour of the Sistine Chapel to Julius La Rosa whom I somehow had found, I can’t remember how, probably at American Express. So I bought the Blue Guide(25 Euros) and also a Donna Leon novel about Venice that my friend another Donna had recommended and I really resented because at this time I don’t want to read anything but Masters and myself if I ever produce again. Still, I am trying to follow the fin rouge, the little red ribbon according to Pietro who owns this little house, that connects you to whatever you’re supposed to find and learn. I hope he didn’t get that from the Da Vinci Code.
Then on to San Toma to begin to try and find the imposingly named place above. Grand is indeed the right description: a climb up marble stairs to the main room , a magnificently sculpted Madonna (unless it was the Evangelista, I haven’t read the Blue Guide yet) recessed in the back wall behind the stage where the performers were to sing. Violetta was blonde and actually quite pretty, not fat, a reality that factored in sympathetically when she was somewhat off key. But at that moment it became my madeleine, Proust’s, not my daughter, and all there had been in my life of opera came rushing back at me.
Puggy, my beloved stepfather, had been orphaned in his youth(read The Motherland, The Motherland, available at Abe.com for $1.19,) and he and his brother had a monumental struggle to survive economically and make it on Wall Street. So when he became wealthy, which he was when my mother married him, he had a subscription to the Met, then an imposing building around 39th Street as I remembered, where we would be limousine on Thursday nights. This was preceded with a formal dinner in their dining room, also imposing, where he would sit at the head of the table and read aloud the Milton Cross book about what happens in what scene, and my Mother would shout ‘Skip, Skip,’ the same thing she would say at the Passover Seder. Then we would go to the opera, and thrilled as he was to be able to afford it, and in such a good row and on the aisle, he would fall asleep.
Later on, as it turned out, my life having been orchestrated better than a novel, he became involved with his son’s ex-fiancee(I never have to make anything up and if that prick Michael Korda hadn’t dissed my wanting to do a sequel, it might exist) an heiress from D.C. whose family had refused to let her marry Mickey, his son, b when they were in college, because he was a Jew. So Mickey tried to commit suicide, cutting his wrists only on the wrong side. Then lo, all those decades later, she came to Puggy for financial advice, my mother accused them of having an affair, so they did, divorce ensued, and he married Kathy, who was, she said and maybe even thought, a singer. I called him once when she was rehearsing for her debut, which he paid for in an invited concert at Spence, and as I remember she was in the background rehearsing. The Mad Scene from Tosca, I think it was, appropriately. Vocally it reminded me of nothing so much as Charles Foster Kane making whatever her name was sing at the opera house in Chicago. I mean he paid for it, Puggy.
So all of this went through my mind as I watched Traviata, the church, or Grand Scuola version, which was quite like a road company, only with a recessed Madonna or maybe Evangelista. The upside was, though, they gave you a flyer before that summarized what would happen, in a more succinct version than Milton Cross, so my mother wouldn’t have had to say ‘Skip, skip.’ I did, however, skip out before the finale, where, according to the flyer, she sings ‘To Die So Young,’ which it constantly surprises me I no longer am.
Then I stopped in at a little garden restaurant and had some terrible fish as I am trying to swear off pasta and ice cream and saw an adorable two year old who reminded me of my Robert when he was that age and irresistible and could also read minds(a nanny we had while we were living in London said she was thinking: ‘Robert, you’re irresistible,’ and two year old Robert turned to her and lisped “Whath irrethithible mean?” She had to lie down for several hours. I took his picture which upset his mother and I apologized. People were always taking his picture she said, because he was so adorable. His name was Akki, and his father is here to do a study at some university on ants. Later I saw them in Santa Margherita, a piazza where hundreds of students were gathered, I thought to have a protest, but they turned out just to be drinking and being students.
Many of them were Polish, two of them were beautiful archeologists, who feel this is the right place to be, because everything is about the past. I’m not sure I think so.

A Plague on Both Your Poets

2009-11-18T11:23:00.000-05:00

To Die so Young, and Singing

2009-11-18T11:21:00.002-05:00

Dante’s Beatrice died of the plague. So probably did Petrarch’s Laura. So it’s a good idea not to get involved with an Italian poet in the age of Swine Flu. Still, having been instructed by my faithful editor and unofficial therapist to “lighten up,” after a day at the Lido and several ice creams, and a Jacuzzi finally taken, I followed, not my heart, but the music, and came upon a jazz band playing their pecs out on the Zattere, their imitation of Ray Charles flawless, and their rendition of ‘You Are My Sunshine’ with sax, electric guitar, keyboard and drums (Batteria, I love that) fine enough so I bought their CD(the Trio Santi Bailer, no matter that there were four of them, the Italians do not insist on accuracy in the face of pleasure) and felt merry, continuing on to a waterside(redundant,almost everything in Venice is waterside) pizzeria. I should have looked at their menu before my last REPORT: it’s spelled UOVA. But then as you may already know, I am not that good a speller even in English. My Olde English teacher at Stanford, Huhbie Merrit(Actually Herbie but his southern accent was very thick) had gone to Princeton with my Chaucer teacher, Joe Herben(no accent); the two of them had been there with Fitzgerald. He asked me “Mees Davis, what you want with a Master’s Degree anyway? I told Scott: ‘If you write well enough, someone will spell fo you.’.
Back at the pizzeria, the wine was watered, so I invited the couple at the next table, really cute Greeks, to share an actual bottle of wine. They were grateful and affectionate, and it was not until the second glass that the girl,Elli, an accountant, said they had to leave because Dimitri, a cafeteria owner, had a fever and was on medication he had to return to his Pensione to take. I tried to remember if we had actually embraced, and wondered if I drank my bottle of Purel I would live long enough not to get it.
Then understanding that we only live once unless the Eastern religions have it right, I continued on to where the lights were even brighter: a cruise ship at anchor. Stopping just before I entered the police station which I guess is there to make sure no one is bringing in drugs or more Libyans, I turned right and heard the strains of a guitar, not that well-played, especially after what I had heard on the Zattere, but a voice was trying for ‘That’s Amore,’ so I went in. A great old guy named Italo played his heart out and the proprietress, a dark-eyed, warm smiling woman welcomed me and a Bangladeshi sold me flashing red glasses with hearts on them, while her daughter, so slender and tall it was a struggle not to dislike her, danced. I had a great glass of wine and met a Croatian,their new chef, whose name is Robert which is my once favorite name, so will go back there tonight, in my struggle to live in the moment which actually works if you can do it, and wake up to the fact that you are in Venice.
Now to the Guggenheim, to buy an English language copy of Death in Venice, as my editor Robert told me to do to get myself out of myself and moving around, suggesting I go to all those places Mann visited in the novel to cheer myself up. I mean, really. You can imagine how depressed I was if he suggested Death in Venice as a spirit-lifter.

The Uova and I

2009-11-18T11:18:00.000-05:00

I am so happy to be in touch with you all. It wasn’t easy. Fifty euros and a chiavetti later (that’s the thing that connects you) I was finally able to figure out how to send a personal e-mail, and, piu importante, how to get one back, without using up all fifty euros. All through my so-called career at the Wall Street Journal it was the Reports that kept me sane, or sort of, because as great as it was to go to all those places, and for all the great people I met, I was alone. But I had you.
At the start of this adventure I complained to my daughter and myself that I had never really been anyplace I was, I was so busy writing, or writing about the place, that I never actually experienced it, for all my training with Jack, my beloved Jewru. I had never been there, that is to say HERE, or anywhere when you got down to it.
So determining to be in the present, I screwed myself again, by believing I was in Venice to write, as I had not been able to even try to do in Capranica, though I had managed to fall in love(Samuele was eighteen months old, built like a tank, with a haircut like Aldo Ray, so I told his mother to join Netflix, as if they could find Capranica, and watch Pat and Mike, Tracy and Hepburn for those of you who are young.) But when I wrote(I started the moment I was sort of settled) it was, according to my lifelong editor and friend, Bob, who for all his many brilliant careers was never in the diplomatic corps, ‘awful.’ That is a word that resonates deep in the belly, and when I recovered and spoke to him, he told me to take some days off. “I know you don’t like to think about it,” he said, insightfully, “but we’re not getting any younger.” In other words seize the giorno, and enjoy that you are in venice where a lot of people would like to be. He assigned me Lido, so I went on the vaporetto and found my way to the beach and sat on some rocks and looked at a sparkling sea and waited for an epiphany, but none came. I’d been vegetarianing since I got here, imagining I wanted to live as long as possible so I could write many books and plays and movies and songs, but as I am uninspired I ate prosciutto and melon and prayed that God would forgive me, especially since it is Rosh Hashonah and not give me trichinosis. Then I had an ice cream , rum raisin, and ate only the raisins, oh maybe just a bit of the ice cream, and then when I got to the port I had, oh just half of another flavor. There are no full length mirrors in Pietro’s house, which is either a curse or a mercy. When I got home I took a hot bath, which is a major endeavor, as the water, now that Pietro has fixed it so it’s hot—I had dinner with his parents when it wasn’t, so wanting to be clean but not complain I carried several pots of boiling water(I hadn’t watched them, but they still took a long time) up the slippery stairs, praying the whole time, and finally had enough to at least bathe my parts. Now the water, fixed, comes in scalding, so I have to wait till there’s so much of it and then turn on the cold. This process takes about an hour until the tub is a decent level but I have still not been able to take a Jacuzzi which is one of its adorable if impractical features since you have to get it to exactly the right level or it explodes. The tub itself is also a peculiar shape—if I had paid more attention in Biology I could probably tell you if it resembles a paramecium or something more specific like a sperm, but you have to be very careful getting out or you can’t.
One of the great features of Venice is that they pick up your garbage if you leave it outside your door early in the morning. I saved my really important garbage, the too soft figs I bought from the boat the is on one of the canals every morning and made jam out of, but not the too soft ones, and the shell of the melon, with all its seeds, and some teabags and really unpleasant things and put it out this morning. Elisa, my darling friend, Pietro’s sister, in giving me the tour of the house, neglected to tell me they didn’t pick it up on Domenica, which is today. But the alert apparently went out to the wild roaming dogs, and when I opened my front door this morning, it had been torn to shreds, the contents scattered all over the street. So I had to get down on my hands and knees which also are not getting any younger, and pick it all up, put it in many other bags as it appeared to have many times replicated itself, and then toss soap and water in great pails onto the street, very Anna Magnani it felt like, before mopping it all up.
I am put in mind of Mr. Blanding’s Dream House, though it is missing Cary Grant, or the Egg and I, except they don’t make movies like that anymore, as none of them could star Julia Roberts. For some peculiar reason she was on an Italian TV show last night(I watch TV to try and improve my Italian,) which was kind of, I have to guess, since my understanding isn’t that sharp, the local Oprah, a blonde woman with a basso voice who goes on and on telling the heart-wrenching story of the wife who looked like Lorraine Bracco, and kept reacting with pain and some tears to the story of her and her husband, who was on a different screen, looking abashed at what he had or hadn’t done, and in between there were long close-ups of Julia Roberts looking really moved and patient that it was going on and on and on and only a little uncomfortable that she had nothing to do or say and couldn’t really chew her gum except when she thought nobody was looking. I am assuming she was getting a translator feed, as she did manage to put a consoling hand on the poor wife at a moment of particular related (I’m guessing) anguish. Finally Julia was invited to speak (“now?” I caught her asking) and she first of all (saying “First of all”) congratulated him on having such a wonderful wife, and then told him not to squeeze the toothpaste in the middle of the tube anymore, but otherwise there were no complaints, and then the wife came in in a wedding gown and crown and veil to the music from ‘Pretty Woman’, that song ‘SHE’ which I guess might have been Italian originally or at least is now, and they were allowed to have the wedding they apparently had been too hard[pressed for either time or money to have the first time, and Julia was the bridesmaid. It was all most peculiar, and I can’t imagine why she was there and could not help thinking, the whole time she was looking uncomfortable, that she was saying to herself “I must kill my fucking publicist.”
So that’s all the news from the Chiesa(thank you Howards) close to San Barnaba. I am going upstairs now to try and take a Jacuzzi. Perhaps by now it has cooled off, but if not, remember that I always loved you.

A Non-Death in Venice

2009-11-18T11:15:00.000-05:00

So after a most daunting and un-auspicious beginning(there is a reason nobody ever heard of Capranica,) I am settled in my palazzetini(I don’t know if there is such a word, but the lovely Irish couple I met in my local wine-shop said this is not quite a palazzo,being very tiny but charming, and with a back garden,) near the Zattere, which yesterday was still slightly watered down or watered up== there were huge rainstorms two days before, giving rise to(not a pun) ‘High waters,’ so there are certain places in Venice you cannot walk, besides the canals. I have had many electronic adventures, including this one,the wireless that will connect only with a (try and find it in Venice) chiavetti and that erratic, so the e-mail unlike the pony express does not get through. I have no idea if or how many of you will get this. But I want you to know that I am thinking of you and trying to communicate, and if this doesn’t work there is always the iglesi(sp?) just a few meters away where I will send you my prayers, or the synagogue, if I make it to the Giudecca. I am trying not to be obsessed and do something besides my work, because my wise daughter said some eight or nine books ago(see Marriage) “That’s all you ever talk about—your work. You could make a recording.” So I am hoping to really look at Venice in-between trying to write this novel.
People are very calm here, as long as you stay away from San Marco where they get very excited and push, and my new Irish friends think it is because there are no cars so no traffic and much wine so no drugs, but I think it is because of all the pasta. And ice cream. Everywhere ice cream, the best in the world I think. It’s hard not to feel comforted.
I am going to try and send this now so I can get back to(switch on the recording.) Please let me know if you get this, and if not, know in your hearts that I am thinking about you, wishing those among you for whom it pertains, a Happy, Healthy, sweet and prosperous New Year, and the same to the rest of you who believe in everything else or nothing. Love from beautiful downtown Venezia.

In the Cell of Saint Somebody

2009-11-18T11:10:00.000-05:00

Well, that was a short visit. Do you get a refund for not staying at that god awful place? And how long will you be in Venice? Can you write the book there? I'm so confused.
After reading your email I wanted to rent a helicopter and fly you out of there. It's like
you're in Somolia. Our heat wave has finally subsided which is a good thing. We had two weeks of almost 100 degrees daily. Miss you and hope everything works out...let me know when you are safely in Venice...

xxx J.

--- On Sun, 9/6/09, Gwen Davis wrote:

From: Gwen Davis
Subject: REPORTFROMTHEFRONT: In the Cell of Saint Somebody
To: thegwen@gmail.com
Date: Sunday, September 6, 2009, 7:01 AM
This place, where I sleep at least, brick floors, one tiny carpet too small to accommodate my yoga, not that I am that stretched out anymore, reminds me of a hotel I visited in my WSJ travels, overlooking somewhere I hoped I could find Thornton Wilder’s ghost. You know the place, where he was towards the end of his life--I just can’t remember the name, as I never knew where I was going while travel-writing, having no sense of direction and lacking the map-reading gene. Fortunately there were always people to Guide me(I have always relied on the kindness of strangers, and I spoke French=some.) It was West of Arles, that I remember, because I could understand why van Gogh cut off his ear, having spent too many days in that city, which seemed to me to lack a soul. This hotel was up a mountain looking down on whatever town it was, a few mountains in the distance, a garden below my window with a very happy, noisy young Italian family down there having a meal, calling to me to join them.
My room there was called the cell of St. Whoever, the place being a former monastery, all of the rooms and very small suites named after someone who had given their lives to the church, often literally. My particular cell—don’t suffer too much for me, it had become a Relais-Chateaux and there were live lobsters in a tank beside the dining room and you got to choose your victim, Michelin-prepared—was named after a saint who had pronounced the queen a slut or something worse, so she condemned him to death and while he was being Cheneyed, as I now like to think of it, he forgave her, so they made him a Saint, but not in time to stop the torture. I loved that cell. I was deep into a fantasy romance with a pallid youth who lived far away and was scared of me, so it was the right ambiance for yearning, much as I tried to keep it spiritual. The Italian family had a gorgeous brother who at their behest helicoptered down to meet me, I think, though I can no longer distinguish between the facts of my life and the fiction I was writing at the time, but yes, I think he actually arrived there. We had a delicious flirtation, or maybe it was the dinner, but he was a terrible kisser and I was still, though aging, in my late adolescence, so not really interested. But I loved that hotel the name of which is inscribed in an unpublished manuscript—it was really lightweight, as were my feelings at the time—so when I get home(if) I will let you know where/what it is, and what that place was the lights of which twinkled down below.
Today is the Festival of the Patron Saint of Capranica, whatever his name is, even the natives aren’t sure, so I went with Cristina, daughter of the proprietor who is mad at me for not loving it here, into the village, such as it is, to observe the celebration. There were cannon shots, and deafening firecrackers and ponderous brass music not unlike the parade in the Godfather, villagers dressed in short bright orange robes with gold braid carrying the huge gold and brass effigy of their Saint, radiating out from a painted wooden sun, looking almost more Buddhist/Hindu/Whatever than Catholic, it was so elaborate, the saint like Ganesha though missing the elephant nose. Anyway I will try and find out what he did before leaving here, which I do early tomorrow, having been rescued by my beloved friends the Rusconis, Pietro, their son, renting me his apartment in Venice, with a garden yet. There are just two obstacles between me and what sounds paradisiacal, and that is the Autostrada between here and Fiumicino Airport which I don’t know how to find( I have for some reason lost the gracious accompaniment of my host) and then getting to the train station in Rome. Oh, and getting a reservation. Trenitalia is closed on weekends, and online they said my credit card was unacceptable(they don’t take American Expresss, see the ads) and my MasterCard they will let me know within 48 hours if they can accept. Dispiriting as this is, I don’t want you to think I was able to overcome my fear and trembling in front of the computer. Cristina’s boyfriend is an electrical engineer at IBM and kindly did all the www. But even he was unable to get any satisfaction.
So pray for me, those of you who pray, that I will find the airport, not crash on the Autostrada(I did that once in Poggibonsi and broke my wrist in many pieces which offered me a nice exchange with John Updike some months later, at the New Yorker office, as being a golfer he had actually heard of Poggibonsi; as he shook my hand he noticed it was in a sling, and apologizing, asked if he had hurt me, and I told him “Not as much as the accident.) Those of you who don’t pray, visualize me arriving safely in Venice, happily puttering around my garden, being inspired at my computer. In the meantime I send monastic kisses to all of you and promise to let you know what the Saint of Capranica did, besides get the hell out of Capranica.

The Big News About Capranica

2009-11-18T11:08:00.001-05:00

Besides that there are fig trees outside my little Casa door, the ripe upside of the locale, no hot water, towels that feel like Brillo and no place you can make a phone call—the checkout girl at the supermarket(where there is only an internal line) felt so sorry for me she gave me the nectarine for nothing, as I didn’t know where to weigh it, nobody has ever asked for a train schedule before from Rome to Venice so I am not sure what will happen when I try to leave, as I’m not sure I can find the airport to return the car and get to the Rome train station, passing on the dusty, barely maneuverable dirt road to I Castagni(the Chestnut)there is La Heaven Club. I took that as a good sign as once I wrote a charming movie about the afterlife for Jeff Bridges and Jamie Curtis with that title(don’t think either of them ever read it) so I thought I might have an unexpected blessing. Turns out La Club Heaven is a wife-swapping club in this place which has not even a cafe to have a coffee in the afternoon
I am hoping to live until Monday morning, having wasted completely six days of my life(“the problem is we think that we have time,” Jack says often in his talks) coming to this place I thought would be the perfect locale to write my great(have I still got it in me?) novel. As it is, I am still fucked-up in time, waking at three in the morning and then dosing myself to go back to sleep and waking at noon. Max Shulman, a darling man, a humorist from my extreme youth said the reason he wanted to be a writer was so he could sleep till noon, but I don’t think he meant after waking in the middle of the night and taking Atarax.
Went with Pepino, the scrabbly caretaker who is very calm and reassuring, to the railroad station to find out about the trains but as noted nobody had ever asked to go to Venice before. It is doubtful any of them have ever left Capranica, except perhaps the members of La Heaven Club who might have been looking for a heated pool. The lovely young daughter of Giuseppe, the owner of La Castagni, Cristina, came to introduce herself to me, and said she wanted to meet someone famous. I must assume my friend Kristin who found this place for me told Giuseppe I was this famous author, why he must be so offended that I fail to find it inspirational. This is sort of a suicidal version of A Year in Provence(Six Days in Capranica) except that nothing works out, and I have not learned to take joy in being here and, in fact, can’t wait to get out but am afraid of how I will get back to the airport to turn in my car, and rush to the arms of my beloved Rusconis who offer me shelter in Pietro’s apartment but first I have to get there.
So much for romantic plans of writing someplace exotic. Stay in your own houses and ask the Muses for clarity.

On the Road Again

2009-11-18T11:04:00.000-05:00

It has been a long time since I literally faced something I HAD to do. Looking at the screen of the computer I am too tired to be really bright, too wiped to be ornery, having flown all night from NY to London, privileged to be actually stretched out on a semblance of a bed on the plane, but not comfortable enough to really sleep. I have lost the easily slipped on travel cloak, so apprehension built up in me on my way to this (I hope) great adventure, a country house some miles from Rome where I intend to (will I?) write my best book. The owner, Giuseppe Di Milia, is a retired Italian diplomat who bought it for when he retired for him and his wife, who has sadly died. I told Kristin, my friend who runs the travel service that found the place for me that if this were going to be a romance novel, I would get there and he would be Franco Nero. But it is not my intent to seek or even hope for love. I am fixed on the idea of my breaking through to a novel that is riveting, a tribute, un-put-downable. Tp dp that I must capture my own complete attention, and want nothing but art. Oh, and maybe Justice.

` Just do it.

The owner, Gisussepe, whom I believe to be in his seventies was to have met me at the airport, a gallant suggestion he made when I expressed some anxiety at finding my way to I Castagni myself. But he could not come and instead is sending his son. If this were a Nicholas Sparks novel, (see Message in a Bottle, the movie of which unleashed my first incident of projectile vomiting-really--) I would get to Rome, the son would have a yen for older women we would fall in love to the horror of the father, and, his objections finally overcome,Giorgio or Cesare or whatever his name turns out to be and I would finally get Papa's blessing, and he would go into town(there is one) to buy the ring- her hands(mine) have been bare since the early death of her husband. Whilst(I am on British Airways now) he drives to Rome for the jewel the widow waits, heart beating happily, her romantic optimism , her vanished dream of love restored. Then the son gets killed coming back on the Autostrada. (See Night at Rodanthe: that is his formula, love lost, love unexpectedly regained, and then he dies.) In their mutual grief, as Giuseppe consoles her, they fall in a sort of love, and she pretends to herself that old affection is as good as getting fucked.

I meant to write it last night on the plane from JFK to Heathrow, but I fell asleep, though I imagine if I knew how to touch-type I could have done it with my eyes closed.

ROME!!! There you are outside the window. Speak to me of Eternity, Art, Passion, the Glory of Nature, History, Women who Aspire, Five Coins in the Fountain(it's been a long time, and everything is more expensive.)

Not exactly how it turns out. Giuseppe is kind of a wreck, polite, gentille, showing up in place of his son, unable to drive my car as he has a tendency to stop short since it is an automatic, so I drive it myself. It takes forever, twisting road included, and Capranica is not a town, even, but a grocery store and a pizza parlor and one Gypsy with his wares, socks, potholders, strung on a line across what could generously be called a piazza. We dine in the pizza parlor, and he insists on picking up the check, which I allow him to do since there are, as Nancy Boyarsky predicted, no screens on the windows and no cross ventilation, so stuffy is too understated a word, and there are bees, even though G. promised me, charmingly, 'bugs are not available.' I have of course packed clothes for a Mardi Gras but understand now I can live in a T-shirt, and the pool, gotten to by tracking down an unmaneuverable staircase cut into the earth, with wooden slats, is too cold to swim in. Nothing works, not my cell phone, not the card I bought at the airport for 24 euros, (20 to the saleswoman, her commission for being smart enough to blindside me) and, finally wined out, or wined down, I go to sleep till 3 AM, resorting to prayer that this will not be as bad as it feels right now. I take a sleeping pill and sleep till 11 AM when Guiseppe is gone to Rome, leaving the aged caretaker Pepino to try and work the Internet. We finally get Giuseppe on the phone and he tells me he has never been so offended, presumably because I am obviously so unhappy with his beautiful, primitive country house, where he intended to live peaceably the rest of his life with his wife, who died. I apologize many times but he will not be consoled. I call my great friend in the hotel business, retired, Natale Rusconi for help in re-locating but he is napping.

Pepino and I go to the market where I buy a great deal of wine from Puglia, some vegetables and some sunblock, the thing I was most prepared to bring but have forgotten. Pepino weighs everything(except the sunblock) the terminal at the grocery store is down so my Master Card doesn't work. I pay cash and Pepino tells me Giuseppe is a hysteric, so that seems an indication I must not be.

I return to I Castagni(look it up on the Internet, it looks fucking palatial,) pick some ripe figs from the tree outside my door, eat them, carefully stepping between the over=ripe ones that have fallen on the ground, drink a great deal of NegroAmaro Puglia(really good) and try to believe, as the prophet of profit said, "Tomorrow is another day."

If a tree falls in the Forest, is it allright to torture?

2009-08-26T14:02:00.000-04:00

The worst of the weather seemingly having passed, except for some victim trees in Central Park where a renegade wind had carved a path of destruction, I decided to spend a pleasant, humidity-less morning breakfasting at Sarabeth’s, looking across at the trees that still stood, and what was left of one that had gone into making my copy of The New York Times. Thus it was that over Granola and Decaf I got to read some details of the interrogations of the HVDs, or ‘Highly Valued Detainees.’ As I chewed and sipped, there danced before my eyes pressure on the carotid arteries, causing faintings, dousing with 41 degree water, but never for more than two hours at a time, lightbulbs kept on night and day, but never to exceed a certain wattage, nakedness for only so many hours before clothes were returned, threatened rape and abduction of family members limited to minimal and doubtless selected cases, and finally, of course, waterboarding.
The Times, or perhaps it was the report itself re-worded, then delicately goes on to explain that the last has been considered torture since days gone by (they do not cite but I had heard The Inquisition) but there is still some question as to whether and who and how many will be prosecuted, or, more succinctly, if. I suppose if the sun had been beating down more mercilessly it would have been harder to swallow, but as the day was as delicious as the cereal, I munched on. The question is: will Eric Holder, Jr. do the same?
I have always been proud of my country, explaining to foreigners during our aberrant times that America really wasn’t like that, that people cared about each other and the issues, elections were fair and Bush II was a mistake. But this latest revelation of the horrors endorsed and probably conceived by that administration is insupportable, once digested.
I was with a brilliant proponent of the law last evening, and asked what he thought about punishing those higher-ups who openly defied the Geneva convention, no matter how loudly they proclaim they were within bounds. He said he had thought Obama was right, that we ought to just look ahead, not back. But now, he added, the country is so messed up, between health care and people carrying assault weapon and free speech protecting the incendiary rabble-rousers, the same stripe that inspired Timothy McVeigh—that the president, and Justice(the Department and the idea) might as well go after Cheney.
Hear, hear!!! Look, look!!! See, See!!!

IT COMES IN THREES

2009-08-06T15:15:00.000-04:00

There is a saying, a superstition, probably both, in Show Biz or Life Biz or Writing Biz that when someone falls, buys the farm, or takes a cab as my darling Donnie used to say in avoidance of the word--ok, dies,-- there will be three. My first confrere to go in recent days was Tom Korman, and no fuss was made as he had stopped mattering except to people who loved him which doesn’t seem to count that much in the country we have become or maybe the world we are. The next was Sidney Zion, a smart curmudgeon who had the ability to sidle up to important people and then write about them without making them mad, but who became an avenging angel when his young daughter died in a hospitalized coma because of improper care. It was the mensching of him, because for all the self-interest he actually probably helped other people. I knew Sidney a little from the literary gatherings I was sometimes invited to, or the bars he hung around, or the estimable lawyers who knew us both, or probably Victor Navasky, the one truly generous soul in the literary so-called community. At any rate his name was brought up when I moved back to New York after my young husband died, or my husband died young, whichever is correct and more touching, and Gay Talese with his usual sensitivity about women asked me “What are you going to do for white meat?” and brought up Sidney’s name. We were never more than friends, although that was before he had been ennobled by tragedy, so he would have been more than willing. But I liked him and I’m sorry he had a rough exit.
Today, the third, and a fine lot of space it got in the New York Times which pleases me, and I’m sure would have pleased him, was Budd Schulberg, author, first in my mind, because his was the book about Hollywood we all read when we thought Hollywood might be the place we wanted to be as writers, What Makes Sammy Run, then a number of other works mighty and not so, ‘On The Waterfront,’ and The Disenchanted among them. The last was his novelistic recounting of Scott Fitzgerald’s alcoholic falling apart on a project they were working on together(lucky Budd, and he knew it.) I had just read a piece in Esquire, the magazine you had to be reading at the time, about those who shone a little too brightly and then faded or exploded, as had been the case with Thomas Heggen, I think his name was, who wrote the unbelievably successful for a very young man “Mr. Roberts,” and then committed suicide. Budd was mentioned in that piece, probably with reference to his disastrous association with Fitzgerald. I was incredibly young, it seems to me now, although I felt I was already old because I was over 21 and hadn’t yet published a novel, and living on North Doheny Drive in an all-white apartment that allegedly had been Marilyn Monroe’s—I was to use it as a setting for part of the mystery in Silk Lady—and aching for friendships as one is when they first move to LA and is doomed to be for most of the time afterwards no matter how long you stay or how many friends you think you have made, I gave a party. Nicky Blair, a darlingly pushy and anxious would-be actor/friend of the stars/sometime restaurateur and some say pimp, called and asked me if he could invite a few people, among them Cary Grant. (This preceeded by several decades my actual and still magical in memory friendship with him, so of course I must have squealed my assent.) That gentleman never came, but a raft of others did, like a skiff unloading sailors on leave, drinking my booze, meeting my friends the starlets(Tuesday Weld among them-- by today is she Friday?) And, in the midst of all of it, brought by Nicky, was Budd Schulberg.
He was a nice man, somewhat surly with curly white hair, and we got into an actual conversation, which I guess in retrospect he wasn’t expecting, any more than a woman who read. We talked of the piece in Esquire, and I said, finally, that even if Fitzgerald hadn’t drunk himself to death fairly young, the tragedy was less so because in any case “he would have been dead by now.”
Budd looked at me hard, and said “You’re a dangerous woman,” starting out of the garden. “I’m leaving for Mexico.”
“Where do you live?” I asked.
“Mexico,” he said, taking the air out of his own drama balloon. He was back in a little while and stayed for the rest of the party.
I always liked him because nobody had ever called me a dangerous woman before, and it had a dramatic sting to it, especially because the danger was that I thought. He seems to have had a very full life, extinguished at 95, writing till the end of it, dying in the Hamptons and not out of boredom.
I wish him a happy journey if there is to be one, and the peace he will have now anyway even if there’s no After. Cary Grant, when we did become friends, told me that there was nothing afterwards, that he had talked to Peter Sellers after his heart attack where he was dead for a number of minutes and Sellers, a major believer in all things WuWu, had reported back, disappointed, that there was absolutely nothing. I don’t think I fear Death myself; the thing I really fear is lawsuits since they go on forever whether or not you believe in them.
But I do hope the trio that just left us has found some comfort, or, if there’s anything more, that Comfort has found them.

THE END OF COMEDY

2009-08-05T15:14:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine, whom I love, but whose view of life and books is very different from mine, has told me that if I insist on savaging Phillip Roth, which sounds to me redundant or whatever the word is that makes the adjective self-descriptive or excessive, since my dislike of him is not based on his words which are always brilliant, but his complete lack of compassion for and passion that never becomes real love so leads almost always to his savaging of women, from his, as we say in H’wood,POV., brutal and self-absorbed, says I must spell his name correctly, which is with one ‘l.’ So here goes. Philip Roth.
In the same way, I must be careful not to spell Judd Apatow with two “pp,”s as he had created in me a sense of personal loathing for someone I don’t know unmatched since Dick Cheney. I am one who grew up with a great affection for screen comedy, the wit of Preston Sturges, the oversentimental but still compelling work of Frank Capra, the brilliantly subversive satire of Stanley Kubrick, with whom I had the mitigated joy of actually working. He was charmingly mad as a hatter but unquestionably a genius, and the only good thing about his having died too soon is that he didn’t live to see what movies have become.
Which brings us to ‘Funny People,’ that I have just seen on the understated bulletin that appears in the midst of 60 Minutes has captured the weekend box-office.
My very clever, low-on-tolerance-for-crap friend Rex Reed described seeing it to me as only surpassed by bamboo shoots under the fingernails, or perhaps the other way around, surpassing them, and then I read David Denby’s review in the New Yorker, my overly esteemed magazine, and he praised it so highly, saw things in it so deep that I was unable to fall asleep, trying to figure out which of them was right, or whether they had seen the same movie. So I have decided to go myself, today. Tune in later.

LATER: As it turns out, they were both right. It is not quite Dickensian, the best of comedies and the worst of comedies, but there are elements of almost genuine humor and indisputably the pits. But that is, of course, only my opinion, and opinion is what we are really talking about here; there’s a First Amendment, we are entitled to our opinion, and people can’t be pilloried for it, except by an ignorant. confused jury in Santa Monica and a bad trial lawyer. But that is another story, one which my friend at Time Magazine says I must save for my autobiography. Meanwhile there is this movie.
To my surprise, I actually liked Seth Rogen, whom I have hitherto loathed, wondering what he was doing in movies. The easy answer to that is that movies have changed, mostly Alas, and so have audiences, so the ordinary schmuck, which Rogen appears clearly to be, perhaps gives an audience filled with ordinary schmucks the temporary license to believe that they could become comedy stars, as in olden (they ARE) days we could bathe ourselves in the comforting, non-combative darkness and believe that we, too, could become involved with that devastatingly attractive man(they seemed to be) on the screen, or, in the case of the boys who had pin-ups, the woman. The basis for fandom. In Rogen’s case, slimmed down, he still has the aura of Everyschlub. So it could happen to you, as was titled the Judy Holliday comedy when there were still unbelievably appealing cinema comedians, who could actually speak dialogue that was not punctuated with genitalia and excreta, which Funny People is. I stopped marking down the number of cock and penis references when I came to the end of the paper on my pad. But it is beyond excessive, extraneous, and as far as I could see, added nothing to either the humor or the potential pathos of the piece, which it clearly had, though by the wishy-washy finish of the movie Apatow blew it, or as he might want to put it, gave it a blow job.
The story centers around a highly successful comic, played by Adam Sandler, whom I have liked sometimes and sometimes found a cipher, wondering how he ever became a star which since I have heard he is a decent sort and most comedians are riddled with self-doubt , I figure he must fall asleep some nights wondering too. His character, George, is diagnosed with an obscure, seemingly incurable illness, and takes on as assistant, the very self-effacing (especially as he has little self) Rogen, here named Ira, to supply his needs, jokes, punchlines, and sympathy, as he hasn’t any true friends—“You’re my best friend,” George says to him, in one of the better exchanges, “and I don’t even like you.”
I will not spoil the plot for you since there isn’t really one that you can believe, but suffice it to say that Apatow surrenders any real chance to examine the true nature of stardom, ego, as well as what constitutes meaningful relationships, true comedy and love. But there is enough of an attempt to look at what’s funny to warrant a fall-by(more than more than more than enough—the movie is overlong, and even those in the quite packed audience who seemed to be having a really good time, tired by the protracted end of it, left the theater voicing disappointed opinions to which the First Amendment entitles them but it’s thrilling to observe that they were not so dulled by the extended endlessness of it that they could still think.) But these are, if course, the Dog Days of Summer, so one can take refuge in the air conditioning, even if the succor is sort of a dog.
Also I must confess that it is a long time since I whole-heartedly visited a club where there’s stand-up, so perhaps the filth, organs, excreta, and spilt semen is mandatory, part of the scene for today’s young audiences. But I couldn’t help remembering, from eons ago, a stand-up comic who played an army base, perspiration pouring off him as joke after joke met with bored silence; as he staggered from the stage, his manager collared him and taking both shoulders dripping with flop sweat, pulled him to his own chest and cried into his ear, “But Baby! You ARE funny!”

The Best Scenes in Bed

2009-07-31T17:06:00.002-04:00

I have received an unexpectedly poignant e-mail from an intimidating writer friend I long admired, never knowing he actually admired me. This is what he wrote:

"OK, I give up and give in. Where are the blogs that keep life sane for so many of us? Where are the reviews of Broadway plays nobody has any attention of seeing for $300 a ticket? Your disappearance is more mysterious than Sarah Palin's plans for the political future."

Had I but known that anyone really needed or wanted or even slightly relished my ramblings, I probably would never have put aside the Blogs. My reasons for doing so were three-fold. First, I remember that Hemingway, whose actual prose I did not that much admire but felt compelled to read and envied because of the lions, the mountains, the bullfights, the wars, the romantic adventures and the public esteem, not to mention the sales, said he never made love during the course of writing a book as he was afraid he would leave his best writing in bed, though I suspect he was not all that good there. As I am revving up to write what I hope will be my best novel, I didn’t want to leave my best writing in blog.
The second reason is that I got a bill from my Tekkie on moving from California that broke down his billing, where he charged like a lawyer, by the hour, a very high hourly rate, and in several instances charged me for that hour when it had only been one phone call, for example, that took five minutes. So when I by mistake deleted my ‘Friends’ list, which made it easy to assault all of you at once, I could not bring myself to ask him to reconstruct the list for me, and a friend who volunteered to help me reconstruct it for nothing, never did(it’s okay, she was not that long, or apparently, that good a friend.) Therefore a combination of my natural thrift, learned from my mother who had lived through the First Great Depression, and feared nothing so much as running out of money except running out of men, coupled with my saving up my juices, led to, or rather, out of my blogging.
The third and possibly most honest reason is that I am basically lazy, and have not allowed myself the luxury of lassitude for lo these many years. Some summers ago I led a Writer’s Workshop at the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference where a guest Real Writer (there were many Bogii—I believe that to be the correct plural for Bogus,-- including the man who ran it, an amiable alcoholic who had once run with the bulls and/or Hemingway) was Eudora Welty. I asked her if she wrote every day, and she replied in her quavery, wavery, high-pitched Mississipian, “Oooooooonly when I haaave a project.” I took that as my dictum, if dictum be the correct word, and never again worked every day unless I was immersed in something I hoped would be major, taking exception for poems, all of which were rejected by the New Yorker. Until I began to Blog.
Still the bleat of longing from that unexpected source has touched my heart, or my ego(probably both,) as there is nothing a writer needs more than approval, except a publisher and most of them are dead or made redundant now. I asked my Last Therapist(cue Robert Browning: “That’s my last therapist hanging on the wall, looking as though he wants to help,”) to make me able to love myself unconditionally, just because I was a good person, and not just if I had a work accepted or was engaged in writing something, and he said without hesitating: “Too late.”
It is too late for a lot of things, including finding that Great Love (I already had it, but wasn’t fully cognizant of that fact till it was gone and I saw what was left in the world,) or rescuing my darling friend Tom Korman’s languishing career as an agent/manager with something I wrote that would be “Happening,” and so would give him the chance of being back in action. Pam, Tom’s loving and adorable and level-headed-in-spite-of-living-in-and-around-Show Business wife, called me this morning to tell me that Tom had died. That he managed to stay alive these past few years was a tribute both to his love of the business, in spite of its more or less shutting him out, and Pam’s love of him, never wavering, in a town and so-called society that drops people the moment they stop being of use. He was heavy on humanity, but short on loyalty from those he represented, most of whom he made big stars at which point they dropped him for one of the powerful agencies. He and Sue Mengers, who were partners in New York at the beginning of her now notorious career, represented me when I had my play on Broadway the week my daughter was born, before Sue stole Phyllis Rabb’s Roleidex from her desk at William Morris and struck out on her own, making big waves, one of them Goodbye to Tom, who she never again honored as he deserved to be honored, including with a returned phone call, unless somebody they both knew like Lee Solters died, and maybe not even then. He called her when he heard she was ill, and she never even bothered to call him back, but I am sure she will wish she could call him back now and say how sorry she is, and how much she loved him. I am really sorry, as he was a genuine mensch in a seemingly glittery world that doesn’t have many, never turning ugly, never turning bitter towards those who betrayed him in the least auspicious way, the suddenly unreturned call that lets you know, in spite of all the costly parties you gave when things were good and everyone came, that you are no longer a viable part of the action. But he had a great big heart that finally, quickly gave out on him. I have suggested to Pam that she send his ashes to Sue Mengers, in lieu of flowers.
So I am back in New York where walking in the street is like taking a warm bath, but not one that makes you comfortable, where a darling new friend called me this morning from what sounded like her bathrtub, but it was the traffic splashing by on 30th Street. She is a fabulous woman who carries enough burdens for five 21st Century heroines, a child with learning and attention disabilities, a husband depressed because he has no work, a mother with dementia, and a job she somehow manages to do brilliantly in spite of all, to my never-wavering wonder. If I have any penchant for self-pity, (and what writer doesn’t, with the possible exception of Phillip Roth who converts it to pitilessness?) I am brought up short just reminding myself of her. And of course Tom. As long as you are alive, there is a chance, except of course in Hollywood.
Which brings me to today’s New York Times, which features on the front of the Weekend Arts section, an article on Cary Grant, headed ‘Once Upon a Time, A Real Leading Man.’ As my longtime friends know, I had the privilege of having Cary Grant not only as an actual friend but a fan, which made bubbles in my brain when he would call, as he did often, once we were friends, as he was a telephone freak, had a never-ending curiosity and interest, and, I would venture, the occasional feeling of boredom or loneliness in spite of being Cary Grant, when he would call and go on sometimes for hours. He called me one Sunday at a quarter of eight in the morning, giving the opening salvo that always dizzied me: “Hello, Gwen: this is Cary Grant. Am I disturbing you?” Well, hardly. That day he was calling because there was a review of my poetry book 'Changes' in the LA Times that was highly favorable, and he said he wanted to be the first to read it to me. Sometimes there’s God so slowly.
His birthday was the 18th of January, two days after Don’s, one after Ben Franklin’s, so I used to do a three day Polish birthday, celebrating my three favorite guys. I always invited him to the party for Don, and he never came, but he always called to give him a birthday wish, and when it was my daughter’s birthday—Madeleine was the same age as his late-come Jennifer, who was invited to his party but didn’t come—he sent Western Onion, a costumed trio to sing Happy Birthday to her. He was a true gent. He was really Cary Grant.
The headline, reading as it does, gives the aura of Fairy Tale that he gave off: Someday my Prince Will Come, which he was, on screen and in life. We first became telephone buddies at the finale of the 60s, when he called to tell me that he had had “a devil of a time getting your number from your publisher. I wanted to thank you for sending me this copy of The Pretenders.” Garbage-men didn’t bother to thank me. I had to lie down on the terrazzo floor of the kitchen so my face would cool as I realized it was really Cary Grant. Charles Champlin, then the Arts Editor for the LA Times suggested the screenplay had yet to be written that could bring Cary Grant out of retirement. By that time we were actual friends, so I wrote it, a lively(I think it was) romantic comedy for him and David Niven about two old guys who had both had an affair with the same woman(Irene Dunne, Voice Over, Off-Camera) and now her grand-daughter, eight, was a multi-millionairess and was left to the two of them to court her on a yachting-trip through the Greek Islands, at the end of which she would choose between them. “It’s very funny,” Cary Grant said. “But why are you sending it to me? I wouldn’t want Jennifer to see me up there on the screen, looking so old.” Old he was still the handsomest. I wrote a meditation for men, some years after his death: “ Cary Grant still looks better than you do.”
Anyway, the movie got made, badly, without him—I will not say who played the Grant part because I don’t want any of you to try and find it to see it, it was so awful. I forgave him for passing on it, but I still haven’t forgiven him for dying. The world, as is pointed out in the article, is a much less classy place, and the movies—well, what have we got for Romantic Comedy? Adam Sandler? Seth Rogen? Is it a wonder we have turned our erotic imaginings to vampires?
But to leave the not so wondrous wonders of CelluLa La Land and turn back to the front pages, there is that picture of what the media called the Beer Summit. A friend of mine, a serious journalist at Time, expressed pain yesterday because it was the 40th day since the killing of that beautiful young woman in Iran, and 40 days after death is important in Muslim culture, so there were protests and demonstrations(over a hundred of the earlier protestors have been beaten to death in prison) and here the top of the news was that conciliatory, stupid(can I use that word that Obama wishes he hadn’t?) beerfest. Jon Stewart made reference last night, sotto voce, and seemingly in passing, to the waning days of our empire. Frank Rich wrote that we can’t leave our commentary to Jon Stewart, but I am afraid that is as incisive as it’s going to get. The downside is that who Jon Stewart interviewed was Judd Apatow, the singular force behind lowering movie comedy standards, who first gave us Seth Rogen, moving us a million years away from Cary Grant. The upside is Apatow had the cover of Time Magazine( he showed the mock-up to the camera in his carefree romp through self-adulation) but Obama knocked him off it, with his wished-for program for Health Care. The Downside of the Upside is that Health Care got scuttled by beer.

Gwennie's Most Excellent 4th of July Adventure

2009-07-05T16:36:00.003-04:00

Those of you who have known me for some years know also of my (as yet) unproduced musical comedy, about a woman, down on her luck in New York, who crashes parties, looking for love and free hors d’oeuvres. I named my heroine Sylvia, and yesterday, in an effort to pull myself from my summer torpor, I Sylviaed, going in for the second act of Mary Stuart, which I had seen the first act of when my darling Fiona was here from Belfast, and I had been too sick to tough out the entire play, which renewed my admiration for Shakespeare, who really knew how to lay down what was going to unravel later at the same time always moving the action along, something that cannot be said for Herr Schiller. Anyway, I brazened it out(“Your ticket?” “My husband has it,”) and was glad I had gone, enjoying the play not more than one act at a time, bumping into a friend and his friend, livening up the afternoon with frozen margaritas. On the way home I fell into conversation with a young couple who had just come from HAIR, she an artist, he an actor, which brightened up a day I had thought would go uncelebrated, even though it was the Fourth of July, something we had always made festive when Don was here, the nation had a prominent place in our hearts, and the children were still adorable.
I had had an e-mail from a new youngish friend asking me if I would watch fireworks, and had sent a peevish reply that that was something I didn’t do anymore. But lo, as I walked on Central Park South about to enter my building I saw a young woman, very sweet and pretty, wearing a black T=shirt and four long strands of South Sea seed pearls that I had noted that morning, falling gracefully as they did across her bosom, and greeted her, remarking that I had seen her before. She seemed a little flustered, and it turned out that she was from Brazil, an au pair whose brother and mother had flown in from San Paolo for the week; they had locked themselves out of the apartment where they were staying. She introduced me to her mother, whose name was Silvia. Naturally I didn’t need any more reason to come to their aid.
I got a locksmith’s # from our security guard, called and was assured the locksmith was on his way, and we went to meet him at the building of their absentee host, a student of Silvia’s--she teaches Ayengar(sp?) yoga in Brazil. Portuguese is the one language I would yet love to learn, so my good Samaritaning was not without a degree of self-interest. We went to the building, a toney brownstone on East 62nd Street, just a few doors from the Park Avenue synagogue and even more importantly in this alleged culture where celebrity means more to us than God, Joan Rivers. I rang all the bells, and a kind art dealer, a Dane,-- I don’t think there was anyone in New York yesterday from New York(they were all probably in the Hamptons) let us into the building, since he had seen them there before. The locksmith arrived, an Israeli, and I asked if he had gotten his training in Israel but he said, no, here, something that was soon substantiated by the fact that didn’t know what he was doing, pulling what looked like a wide palate knife from his sack and trying to jimmy the door. Silvia, concerned that he would damage it, said that they would go instead to a hostel, where they could stay till getting hold of the maid, due back on Monday.
But it was the Glorious Fourth, and she’d told me her story—like my heroine she was a widow—there’d been a gas leak from the heater in their bathroom when Laisa was seven and Miguel was one, and her husband had been asphyxiated, and it was only recently she’d been able to speak about it, the pain of loss had been so shocking and intense. So we went back to my place, I checked the computer, and found that the fireworks were going to take place on the Hudson River near 57th St. at 9:26(nothing will be left to the world as unfathomable mystery with the Internet, and I suppose that’s a good thing) took a taxi to 12th Avenue and 57th—barricaded, thousands of people and a lot of nervous police(I didn’t think until later that more than crowd control they might be concerned about terrorists) who advised us to go further uptown where there might be a view. We took another taxi to 66th and the river and got there just in time.
My friend who had e-mailed me, Megan, said that nothing could touch Redentore, the fireworks in Venice, but this certainly came close. The exact number of pops and bangs and lights and trickles can probably be found on Google(Macy’s Fireworks, July 4th, 2009) and twas truly a sight to see. Missing was the music(that was further downriver) but I heard in my head The Stars and Stripes Forever, and was tempted to sing it aloud as the crowd oohed and aahed, but contained myself, having broken out in several directions already that day. Afterwards I took them to dinner at Ollie’s, a Chinese noodle place on Broadway, and we called a few hostels(they’d downloaded them at the Apple Store—is there no end to the seeming e-miracles)--when all I had thought to do was call Traveler’s Aid(they were closed for the weekend) and found them a place to stay. They dropped me at home on their way to the hostel, we exchanged numbers, swore eternal friendship and parted, and Silvia said she would pay me back with yoga lessons, when I visit her in Sao(pronounced San) Paolo.
A good, longtime friend I’d called in the country to ask if they could stay in her NY apartment(mine could sleep only one, even with yoga mats, of which I have two) said to be careful, that if they were Brazilians visiting here they had money, and I shouldn’t be so generous, and then there is my wonderful friend Gary the attorney who long ago told me not to confuse what is insane with what is fascinating(best public example: Sarah Palin) But anyone who can articulate the way your bones interlock with your soul when you do Ayengar yoga cannot possibly be a bad person. Even more important, when I looked in the mirror this morning, I appeared strangely younger, as if an act of kindness had stripped away, if not some years, some cares. The other night I saw again ‘The Wizard of Oz’, when Frank Morgan looks in the crystal ball and describes Auntie Em as ‘careworn.’ And I could not help but think how much more poetic it seemed to have suffered the years on the farm in Kansas, rather than in the great cities of the world, where we get to become simply ‘old.’

REUNION: Priceless. For everything Else, there's Mastercard

2009-06-01T13:30:00.001-04:00

There is much to be said-- everything in fact-- for being with people you have known since the beginning of your adult life, to whom you have to explain nothing. There is only the joy of seeing them again, the embrace, the how are you? the not even needing to tell them what you have been doing, what prospects there are. To be alive at such times is enough, to be able to be who you really are.
So it was that I arrived at my Bryn Mawr Reunion-- I will not say which one it was, as there is a sense of embarrassment in our society at growing older, instead of realizing how lucky we are to have lived this long, gotten this far. Bryn Mawr, with its majestic Gothic buildings, the old M. Carey Thomas library now called 'The Great Hall' which indeed it always was even when we sat in little green-lit cubicles studying, fearful of dropping a pencil as it sounded like a thunderclap and a sneeze echoed forever, the Cloisters where legend had it Katharine Hepburn swam nude in the little pool the night before Comprehensives when Truth was we all did, for luck, the weeping cherry tree cut into the shape of a palapa, offering shade-- everything so preened and perfect, flags waving from the towers, it is lucky the eyes are still working, and the heart can remember how it felt to arrive there the first time, and be so overwhelmed, so intimidated, it was hard to see-- well, secondary anyway,-- how beautiful it was.
Lovely(although one shouldn't probably use words like that, as Feminists prevail)pink-shirted young undergraduates were there as helpers, a fantastically impressive woman, Jane McAuliffe, specialist in Islam, is the new president,and it is only right to feel a sense of pride to have gone there, and actually gotten through. There was no Phi Beta Kappa at Bryn Mawr, as we were told, on entering, that to graduate from there was the equivalent of Phi Bet Kappa anywhere else. AMEN.
A Hepburn quote is painted on the wall of the Campus Center: 'As long as you do what really interests you, at least one person will be pleased.' Amen to that, too. Would we had all learned that lesson, especially me.

A Tree Still Grows

2009-05-26T19:22:00.000-04:00

When I was a very little girl, the big Bestseller (capitalized in my mind even then) was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. My mother in her never-ending hope of Upliftment(of the material kind) was a social director at a hotel where its author, Betty Smith, was a guest, and telling her that her daughter, then maybe around eight, wanted to be a writer, succeeded in getting her to write to me. I remember the way the letter looked, all carefully typed and single spaced and filled with kind advice, none of which I remember now, but all of which I hope I took. I treasured the letter for years but so many years have passed I haven’t a clue where along the line I lost it, but then I lost wedding pictures, too, not to mention the people in them. But I do remember almost as clearly as if I were reading it now that her main counsel was to look at everything, and take it all in, and when I wrote about what I saw and felt, to write from the heart. I think she told me to love people, but I might just be being fanciful, because it was so generous of her to bother writing me, and single spaced at that, and hers was—this I do remember for sure—a wonderful book.
But I had never been to Brooklyn until yesterday. It was, almost as though prescribed, a remarkable day. The one before it had been too hot, and today is too cold, but like Goldilocks I was ushered into a day that was JUST RIGHT. There was a soft wind blowing off the waters which I had never really noted were nearby in spite of this being an island—at no time during my life have I had a sense of geography—even when traveling the world for the Journal I never knew exactly where I was, but the kindness of strangers, etc. and a lucky gift for language got me where I was going. Yesterday though I had a wonderful guide, the husband of a new friend who has a palpable love for his borough, and gave me details even The Museum of New York would be hard-put to match(”There the house of Diamond Jim Brady, who was mayor, and there his mistress, a dance hall girl.”) Children did not play in the streets, but there were acres of green they might be hiding behind, and parks and cemeteries to take care of all the city’s no-longer-living history, including someplace to bury Boss Tweed, and Leonard Bernstein, returned there by his own request.
My hosts live in a red-doored brownstone, with polished wooden floors, a real house with nooks and a stained-glass skylight, a backyard where Francie Nolan might be playing even now. There is that neighborhood feel to it, that somehow you just can’t get in Manhattan where I once lived in a high rise and never met anyone else in the building until I had my hair cut at Dusty Fleming’s in LA and the woman getting shampooed in the next chair was from my New York floor. Yesterday being Memorial Day Brooklyn was quiet, the storefronts closed, Weight Watchers along with those selling what would ruin their determination to slim down. But we found a charming almost sidewalk café—that is to say, it had sides that opened and there were two tables on the sidewalk, so Mimi, who was present, could come along as though we were actually in Europe, Greece in this case, with a menu that had a water-color rendering of – was it Santorini?—someplace magical in Greece, and we drank retsina and had almost Spanikopitas(it was spinach pie) and something cheesily pleasing in dough. So it was all breezily Mediterranean, and a fine memorial to the diversity that still makes up New York, especially if you cross the bridge.
I wish I knew where that letter was.

SURRENDER DOROTHY!

2009-04-05T17:48:00.000-04:00

So apparently Mother Nature is attuned to cyberspace. Having read my report that the first Robin Redbreast retreated in the chill, she released Spring today to the full. As if by a signal, Forsythia burst from the barren branches, violets carpeted the sidelines, dancing along with the daffodils, while, though you could see the forest for the trees(elms along the Literary Walk, twisting skyward) you couldn’t see the grass for the people. It was a true release, as if everyone had been let out of jail. Locals, tourists, Mimi and I, plus a brass combo, trumpet, slide trombone and tuba, playing (What a surprise!) When the Saints Go Marching In, were part of the explosion. A Yugoslavian bride with her retinue of coffee-silk-clad bridesmaids and silver-beaded traditional-costumed flower-girl, caught the blessing and saved a fortune, having her wedding in Central Park.
Though the Literary Walk ¼ offends me—FitzGreene Halleck, so obscure that he was not even taught by the boring poetry teacher at Stanford is there along with Bobby Burns(no argument) Sir Walter Scott(a little plodding, but he did his job) and Shakespeare(no question), the four who are honored with statues, there is no disputing it is as glorious a park as exists anywhere. Especially on a day like today, one of which the poets would sing no matter on what level their gift.
Earlier than that, I had joined with two lovely new friends, one a bright PR writerperson who blogs, and a would-be writer and sweet spirit I picked up on the crosstown bus, to have brunch. The blogger(Single Gal in the City) had the patience to drag me into this century, so I am now on Facebook, and from now on you can go directly to www.reportfromthefront.com as I will not be sending these individually to anyone except those who are Century-Impaired.
So as the sun sinks slowly in the West, not so fast as the West would have sunk under another Republican Administration, let us bid goodbye to our charming but antiquated ways, stop grieving over Michael Crichton who easily would have understood all this shit, and hope that his spirit will endure even though ER is off the air and there will be no more Jurassic sequels, and he will drop a little futuristic and technological savvy onto my head, and the understanding, along with the words, will flow.

In Lieu of Diamonds

2009-03-05T14:12:00.000-05:00

There is a great story I read long ago in Helen Hayes’ autobiography, when Charles MacArthur was courting her, and they were eating peanuts, and he said “I wish they were emeralds.” Then they both became very successful, and he gave her a lot of emeralds, and finally said “I wish they were peanuts.”
My husband, usually borderline impoverished, was a great romantic, so no matter how little money he had, whenever I finished a novel, or had a new work, (including my musical comedy, begun so long ago he was still alive to believe in me and cheer me on and think it was wonderful) he would give me a diamond. There was an engagement ring(the stone was a big Marquis, but flawed, not that it showed, but at least it made it only a little unaffordable,) earrings for which I had to have my ears pierced(it hurt—I could only take one and then went to lunch with Tungson Park, of Koreagate, at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and encouraged by the truth that I had the admiration of an international scoundrel, as I had argued in his defense, fictionally, in Ladies in Waiting, went back for the second lobe. Then there were bracelets and pendants(a diamond 13 when I published my thirteenth novel, and all manner of little antique pieces to celebrate every accomplishment, almost all of them lost or stolen in the years he’s been gone, save, as Tommy Thompson would have writ, the lovely, dainty little ring that looks like a lyre, which I never take off so it won’t be stolen or lost.) Don called me dainty once, and delicate, and the words killed me, as they were something I never considered I would be considered. So it was that after his unbelievably untimely parting, whenever I finished something I would buy myself a little jewel, because I needed and felt entitled to that affirmation. But as the years went by, there was less and less to affirm myself for: the joy in the work and the output never diminished, but a loving reception for the work itself did.
Still, if you live long enough, things can turn around. So it is that not only my musical appears to be surfacing, gulping for air in this economically strangling time, but an ancient(comparatively) movie of mine for which I kept the stage rights, is to become a musical by someone very au courant and esteemed on the Great White(not exactly,) Way. But in the absence of Don, or a flush economy, I have had to downsize my reward. Thus it is that yesterday Mimi and I slogged through the frozen slush to Gracious Homes and bought a very smart and shiny black toilet seat. It seems exactly the right note. My cartoon by Herblock, in which the Chief Justice ponders the decision that writers of Fiction can be held liable for libel, and considers whether he should think the same for those who had just published a book on the Supreme Court justices themselves, commemorating what was essentially the death knell for my happy career as a novelist—the lawsuit over my novel ‘Touching’—is on the bathroom wall, framed in black, as is the poster from the play that opened on Broadway when Madeleine did, so the Times reviewer wished long life to my baby and instant death to my comedy. Above that, on a shelf, is my beauteous grown daughter on her first wedding day, escorted by my handsome and confident Robert in his tux, in a pailleted black shiny frame. As Shakespeare might have noted if he paid attention to the Seven Ages of Woman: sans diamonds, sans décor, sans hairdresser, sans smooth skin slightly tanned, sans romance, sans everything but optimism, a possible new beginning, and a little white dog who cannot walk three blocks without turning gray.
So bit by bit it feels as if there may be Life after Life. The Bel-Air is reprinting HAPPY AT THE BEL-AIR, the wonderful little book starring my late dog, a Yokie. (Robert Browning, “That’s my last Doggie on the Shelf, looking as if he knew he was on Oprah” which he was but she didn’t show the book. I was thinking of making the re-done dedication, ‘To Oprah, you bitch, you could have made him immortal.’ But what’s the point. The past is the past, and I have Mimi, and one day she might have a book.) We’re going for our walk now. She sort of looks forward to it, having the gift, as I apparently do, too, of not remembering that for every joy there will probably be a painful comeuppance. In her case, a bath.

Barack, the Musical

2009-02-26T14:14:00.000-05:00

Not since the overture for the revival of South Pacific at Lincoln Center, when the lid of the pit drew slowly back like the top of a piano, and the lush sound of that wonderful music played by a full orchestra invaded my ears, have I been so moved. To have a president who can speak! Explain! Inspire courage and at the same time love his wife, was overwhelming. I wept at his words, the resonance of his voice, the truth that we have survived the moron and his Vice, as Maureen Dowd called him all the time, accurately, and have a chance at restoration was beyond uplifting. Maybe we had to fall so low so we could rise.
The President’s speech was preceded by my foray into my next career which should have been my first one: the musical theater. There was a ‘MeetnGreet’ for all those submitting projects to NYMF, the New York Musical Festival, and I went enthusiastically, which my son once explained to me meant ‘infused with the love of God.’ Well, I have that, too, on occasion, but mainly what I am and have always been is infused with the love of musicals, a passion that has been increasingly hard to sustain for the past several years as I saw/heard what was out there, including a revival of what is arguably the best of all time, Gypsy, as I am that rare dissenting voice that cannot bear Patti Lupone, and had to leave at intermission because she was so ferocious singing ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’ I was afraid of what she might do with ‘Roses’Turn.’ I had the joyful privilege of a friendship with Julie Styne, the composer, and am happy for him that the show lives forever, but think he would have been frightened of her, too. Of the new, ‘In the Heights’ which won the Tony was likewise awful, in my opinion, and I hear the new ‘Guys and Dolls’ by my old special friend Frank Loesser is really the worst, so I will skip that and any personal stories about Frank although I have some good ones. Those theater folk with whom I late-dinnered the other evening after ‘Love and Loss and What I Wore’ a reading of a light but touching piece by five clever actresses, were all annoyed at Jo Sullivan, Frank’s very rich widow, for permitting it to be so miscast(Oliver Platt as Sky,) heavy-laden(the set obscures much of it from the audience) and dopily re-set in the ‘30s, which makes no sense at all, unless they were also reviving the Depression. So the only honorable thing I could do was put my work where my opinion was, and try to bring back what it was about the musical comedy I loved, and just DO it. Thus it was that I found myself deep into 44th Street, at a bar above a bar, with the others who had made submissions. I expected them all to be twenty, as I was when I Gung-Hoed into the world after Bryn Mawr, but rather than uniformly young, what they were, at least those I met, were beyond eclectic. One was a parole officer who’s written ‘Charles and Diana, the Musical,’ another a man who sells tickets on Broadway at TCKTS where you get them cheap—he’s written a Hip-hop--, a man who has “The Gay Bride of Frankenstein” and another sweet but vaguely depressed guy who’s written a musical about Jonestown. My my. Best of last season’s presentations one attender opined was a musical about pedophilia, while another expressed pleasure over a musical based on Meet John Doe, the classic starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, about a good guy who becomes the hood ornament for needy American men who pledges to jump from a tall building to rectify the lack of attention being paid to needy good guys, and who, on realizing it is a swindle, is really going to jump, dissuaded only by the love and pleadings (and could she plead!) of Barbara, only in the musical they changed the locale to the Brooklyn Bridge and in it he jumped. That must have been a spirit lifter.
But in the midst of that mélange, where we all wore name tags, a man said to me ‘You didn’t write The Pretenders?’ and I all but shouted ‘YES, I did!’ SO it turned out that my evening was MADE, MADE, MADE. And I went happily home to watch my president, whom I can proudly claim at last is genuinely MY president, and listen to him be eloquent and make wonderful sense. When he said he would end the war in Iraq the camera flashed on a less than elated John McCain as, at the Academy Awards, it had focused on Angelina when Jennifer Aniston was speaking, but this time with a wee bit more portent. A tad more weighty, though without the 115 carats of emerald dangling from each ear. I thought they were green glass, and admired her for putting all her money into needy babies, those she didn’t actually adopt. The high angled cube of glass on her artfully held finger, then, must also have been an emerald, but that in no way is meant to diminish John McCain, who wore only a patriot’s insignia in his lapel, and looked a little less unhappy at the news that we do not torture.
So were we in our original times, the country that is, not the adaptation of musicals, a town crier could ring his bell and announce the hour and say “All’s Right with the World.” Well, maybe not exactly, but it’s righter than it was, and I have almost as much conviction as Obama that we will make it right, now that we have a real leader. You’ll find out what happens with our history. And I will let you know what happens with my musical. At least I will if Life is Fair, which it seldom is but happens sometime. God Bless us Almost Every One.

The Ghost of Oscars Past

2009-02-22T14:49:00.001-05:00

Astrologers tell us that birthdays are hard, usually a little depressing, because of the Solar Return, or some such nonsense, the planets all aligning the way they were at our birth, and not because we are getting older, as, in my opinion, older is a privilege to be able to become. For me the Oscars is a hard time, because for so much of my life I was in love with movies and movie stars, and at the time of my breakthrough success with 'The Pretenders,' I was invited to everything in Hollywood, because (I hope you're sitting down) the town is just a little bullshitty, and success is the currency. So it was that Don and I, still young and pretty and sure the world was fair, with our two beautiful little children, Robert, 2, in white jacket and black bow tie, and Madeleine 4, in a taffeta and velvet gown, gave a Black Tie party to watch the event on TV. We were the first to dare to mock, and it was in the words of the great journalist who covered it for Time Magazine, an 'anti-Oscar party.' And everybody came.

Sandra Burton was the one who covered it:she had heard through our mutual hairdresser, Dusty, that he was going to a great party, and she called me to ask if she could come. I of course was nearly overcome with rapture, as caught up as I was in my temporary fame, with a publicist who never stopped longing for more press, Time was at the time as close as you could get to publicity Valhalla. I had been cooking for days--caught up in ephemera though I was, I was still a Ballabusta, if that's how it's spelled, loving to feed friends and family with my own recipes. So I made wontons and those South American things I don't remember the name of,--oh, empanadas-- to be passed on trays, with a Sabrett stand(imported from New York) serving hot dogs in the back yard. We had a red carpet outside the walkway to our house, a klieg light at the curb, an usher's uniform from the Roxy on a friend's son who showed everyone in with a flashlight. Don tended bar and did a Jackie Gleason impression,wiping the bar and singing "My Wild Irish Rose'--(he was a GREAT bartender and did terrible impressions) The house had three rooms for watching: Orthodox(no talking, reverential) Conservative(Talking and watching) and Reformed (talktalktalk and yell back at the set.) It was 1970, and there was Vietnam, and everybody hated Bob Hope and John Wayne."Oh, shut up, John Wayne," yelled Shirley MacLaine, the only thing she said that night that Sandy actually quoted, which was truly generous of her as Shirley was stoned and never stopped spewing invective about Mike Frankovitch who was still, as I recall, the head of Columbia. Shirley was to attack me when the article came out, saying "I thought I was at a private party!" But Sandy had stood in front of her with conspicuous pad and pencil and thrice, as Tommy Thompson might have said, told her she was there for Time Magazine, as I did, too. I spent many years trying to make it up to Shirley who told me I had to make it up to her, but never did, except for offering her my musical, which she said she would do only five performances a week in and wanted to own. When the Awards broadcast was over, she sat staring at the TV on which Sandor Vanocur was, sound off, as she was at the time having an affair with Sandor VAnocur. I do not consider this a tale told out of school, as there are few interesting men whom Shirley has known with whom she did not have an affair. ('Did you know Rod Gurney?" I asked her once, speaking of the psychiatrist stepson of my mentor,Yip Harburg, who had collaborated with Jay Gorney on 'Brother Can You Spare a Dime,' and then made off with his wife. "I had an affair with him," Shirley said.}

That was the first time I met Sandy, who was to become a lifelong friend, though her life was not long enough, ending five years ago when, after a career of dangerous adventures, including being with Aquino on his return to Manila and recording his murder when they wouldn't let her follow him off the plane, Beijing during Tiannammen Square, an elephant stampede, a daring interview with the Nobel prize winner Shu under house arrest in Burma, she retired to the peace and quiet of Bali where she was brutally murdered in her bathroom. So this day sits heavy on my soul, as I loved her as much as any friend I ever had, she had more clarity than anyone I have ever known except for Jack my Jewru(it really amused her that my guru was named 'Jack,') and there are not a lot of people I can go to whom I admire that much and say 'What shall I do?' and trust that the answer will be the one I should listen to. I miss her all the time, and resent with a passion her life being so cruelly cut short, though I realize in my more rational moments that it was harder on her than me, Still, though, I wonder from time to time whether death isn't harder on those left behind.

Anyway, back to the party: the 42nd Annual Academy Awards, so you know how Ago it was, tonight's being the 81st. The invitations were engraved, 'The Mitchell Academy of Arts and Games,' they read, and like I said, everybody came. Ruth Berle, wife of Milton, the dowager doyenne of Beverly Hills, a tough, dear woman who had been a sergeant in the army and did jiu-jitsu on a man nastily tryimg to cut into a line waiting to hear Sinatra, a special friend of hers,had accepted, so everyone else did, too.(Sandy called her the 'Bellweather of Beverly Hills society.') Lee Marvin was there, having won Best Actor the year before, with Michelle who was shortly to become semi-infamous for 'Palimony,' and most of the gifted and beautiful and funny and sometimes surprisingly bright celebs we knew. Everybody brought a prize, and the big winner of the evening for accurate picks was the super-talented and slick-haired Jack Cassidy, whose prize was what Ruth Berle had brought: an autographed picture of Ruth Roman. It was a glorious evening, with endless reverberations as everybody who hadn't been invited was mad about those who were, as,-- if you're still sitting down,-- there's a lot of jealousy and venom in that town. At least there was when there were, as Rex Reed noted in his terrific article about the Oscars in this week's Observer, REAL STARS.

So this night for me is especially painful, because Sandy is gone and her death is unavenged, and there is no justice in Bali if you have money to pay off the police. Also, they don't have too many really good movies anymore as a rule, I don't care how they pretend or market or raise the prices in a Depression because people are so desperate to be distracted, they will pay $12.50 for dross, to put it poetically. I really miss Cary Grant. I really miss Sandy.

Of Mice and Mimi

2009-02-12T23:55:00.001-05:00

Saturday gave us a faux Spring day, the kind of impossible warmth that suddenly appears in midst of Winter, that in Paris, would send tens of thousands of Parisians into walking their glorious streets, crossing their wonderful bridges. But I am not in Paris. I am in New York. So I am given to exploring our own particular less-than wonders, checking out the neighborhood, after giving Mimi a footbath to clean off the slush. A few days ago, having joyfully accepted and frolicked in the snow, it was so cold that she stuck to the sidewalk. She looked up at me with a kind of ‘Huh?’ so I gently pried her pad loose. She is not so fond of ice now, but didn’t know that gentler weather meant another bath.
You wouldn’t know from the Barnes and Noble that the book business was in trouble. The store on Broadway was full, with a line of would-be buyers waiting their turn to spend what’s left of their money. There were fifteen magazines in the stand by the line with Obama covers, all the news mags, Vanity Fair and something called PT that said “Yes, he did, but can he?”
Whole Foods, aka Whole Paycheck, was likewise busy, with a line of potted Spring flowers, baby daffodils and primroses by the cash register, brightening the shelves, so I bought two red primroses and one sunshine yellow to replace the frozen, dead peppers that are on my balcony. I asked the clerk if a frost comes and kills them in the next few days, could I bring them back and get a refund.
But the days stay temperate, almost balmy, through to today, Tuesday. Still, iIt was blowy cold on the corner of Madison Avenue yesterday, walking home from the dentist, and a very frail, not very old man was hunched shivering in his wheelchair, holding out a cup, saying “I’m so cold, won’t somebody help me get a hot meal.” Most people can walk by that in this city, but I couldn’t, and gave him what I had. Then I walked up the avenue to Aveda to buy myself some shampoo and conditioner but the store wasn’t there anymore. Just darkness and a sign that offered Retail Space.
I had gone Saturday afternoon to see ‘Coraline’, trying for a transition to childrens’ books, but found it terrifying, not because of the 3D glasses but because of the darkness of the depiction of the other world Coraline goes into, with a seductive better mother who eventually morphs into a bony, sunken-eyed monster, though I was delighted that evil is depicted as too thin. Still, I sent out a warning alert so my son would not take Silas.
Caught as I am in the study and exercise of words and the feelings they give rise to, I must now make a small aside for ‘Scurrying’. I returned to my little atelier which it would be in Paris, here it’s a studio, and opened the door under the sink where the garbage can is and saw a mouse. There were mice in ‘Coraline,’ highly entertaining mice, but they, too, eventually morphed into the horrific and became rats. After the cliche shriek, I closed the mouse into the plastic bag that lines my garbage can and dropped it down the chute, which upset my tender-hearted friend Joie who worried on the phone over its slow death, but there is no incinerator below, only a pile of garbage, so it would have been a soft landing. Still she suffered over its suffering. I called down to the desk to ask for help, and they sent someone, but the family (four it turned out) endured till yesterday when the building closed up the hole. Last night, one little mouse came out looking for its relatives. I was reminded of the time I was working for the Journal, staying in a then moderately priced hotel in Paris, interviewing the genial manager in the bar, when a mouse came out and looked around with the same confusion. The manager turned to it and said “I thought I told you to stay in the kitchen.” I really liked that hotel.
Today the building sent an exterminator who couldn’t set traps because of Mimi, so under my red dragon=painted chest from Chang-Mai, a silver box that has a hole in it that will catch the mouse, as it will be attracted to the shine, be curious, and go inside. So it will not be the cat only that curiosity killed. Oh, dear. I really hate to think about it, but I don’t like thinking I am sharing quarters with something besides Mimi. Scurrying.
As for the demise of the mice family, I handle it by thinking of them as Republicans. I really can’t believe how stubbornly and stupidly and rodently they are behaving. What will it take to make them understand the country literally hangs in the balance? I thought Obama was clear and candid and brilliant last night, promising that he was saving the best answers for Geithner to give today. But the investment banker who lives next door told me Geithner said nothing in his half-hour talk, so the market fell three hundred points.
Oh, craven new world that has such creatures in it. So much to worry about. Did A=Rod use drugs to enhance his performance with Madonna?

A Golden Ticket

2009-01-27T11:05:00.000-05:00

Have received what sounded like an affectionate complaint from a friend I admire who apparently enjoys these ramblings and noted there had not been a Report recently, which is because I have so much to report. First, there is the adjustment to the cold, something Mimi has been helping with, as she stays in bed as long as I do, not complaining, and, when pressed, or it is snowing, courageously goes out on my little balcony which would be a fire escape if it were not in such a high-toned building. Also there is not anywhere to escape to, it is just a little iron arc looking across at the rooftops, but it is enough for Mimi, who is beyond a good dog. Then there is the reality that I have gone back to actual work, abandoning my last career as novelist and going back to the first one I had which I imagined in my youth would be the real one, writing musical comedy. Those of you who are still alive who remember that time may recall my mentors were Yip Harburg, whom I recently got to see again in a dream when he helped me with a song, and Frank Loesser, who listened to my songs all those decades ago and said ‘Kid, you’re the biggest talent since me.’ So I am calling on them both in the ethers for help, and we will find out soon if there is an Aftersong.
Then, there was the Inauguration. I hope you were all as moved as I was. Mostly what touched me was Obama thanking those who ‘braved the cold’, as that brought up images in my mind of that crew crossing the Delaware, and it does feel so much like a Second Beginning, which is probably just a step below A Second Coming. Still, Paul Krugman was annoyed in today’s Times that Barack didn’t address health care in his speech and the Bush crowd was unhappy on the way home to Texas that the Prez had stuck it to W, but we do like Plainspeak. I received in the mail, forwarded from LA, what I think of as a golden ticket, very Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a gorgeously embossed and gilded with the presidential seal invitation to the inauguration itself, which I have no idea why I received, but was glad it came late or I would have gone and frozen. There were apologies today that the string geniuses, Itzhak and YoYo were pre-recorded, but they were afraid that a string might break in the cold. I was in the front row of Carnegie Hall after 9/11 when YoYo and Leontyne Price gave a free concert first come first sit, and as I arrived at 5 AM I was in the first row, and could hear YoYo breathing while he played, an intimacy that makes me feel I can call him YoYo. I wept then out of sadness, but found myself tearing up frequently during the events leading up to and during the inaugural event itself, out of joy and an excess of sentimentality and, here it is, back again, love of country. I hope he will be able to pull us out of this morass, and I think Rush Limbaugh should be tried for treason, along with stupidity, for actually saying he wants Obama to fail. A lawyer friend advises me that treason is applicable only in time of war, but what is this, after all?
A man collecting money for the homeless, who was himself freezing on the corner of Broadway and 64th Street as he stood by his inverted water bottle that was not too stuffed with bills and coins asked me why Bernie Madoff is in his penthouse and I have no answer. Nor can I answer those who want the bad guys tried for War Crimes, except that I know it would tear the country apart and the job is to pull it together, and save the system which has failed.
I wish there was a punishment for Greed, but as another lawyer once said to me when I asked him if I could countersue for Greed someone who was suing me for Libel, “Greed is a Given in a court of Law.” And of course it is a Given in Human Nature, at least many human natures, or it wouldn’t be high on the list of the Seven Deadlies.
Have been inching out little tentacles of longing as I re=connect with this great city where I cannot walk Mimi more than a block without having to give her a bath. If I were still a novelist, I would be tempted to go tonight to a workshop called ‘The Miracle List’ where you are supposed to come with a laptop or a journal to note times in your life when you have been touched by Grace, sub-titled ‘Writing, Telling, and Reliving God Moments’ because the group that shows up, edited, would certainly give rise to a good novel. But the day of the book is, I’m afraid, very over unless you’re Toni Morrison, whom we discussed last night at a meeting ot the Bryn Mawr Book Club(I am trying.) Selfsame friend who noted I hadn’t been blogging notes the rise of Hitler salutes in Germany, and I am reminded of the first novel I wrote to a changing market when I lived in Weinheim near the Bergstrasse in Germany after Don died, trying to conquer all my fears at once: being alone, the computer, and the German language, as hearing it immediately signaled to me that they were coming to get me. I was able to observe up close the Wiedervereinigung, the Reunification of both Germanys, where on the TV news every night there would be a map of Germany with little fires all over it, and those were the places where there had been attacks on foreigners. The joke in Munich then was ‘What’s the difference between the Turks and the Jews?’ Punchline: ‘The Jews are already dead.’ The novel was about neo-Naziism, and when my agent submitted it, the response was ‘There is no neo-Naziism in Germany.’ Right after that, most of the publishers were bought by Bertelsmann.
So it is for a long while now that the Fates, or the Muses, or Whoever They Are, have been indicating I should take a different path. So I embark on it like Dorothy, following my yellow brick road, to the lyrics of my mentor, Yip, with my own Toto. Hello, Broadway, Goodbye Borders. All the same, I might go tonight. I mean, you just never know where Grace will find you. Or you will find her.

A New York Kindness(as opposed to a NY Minute)

2008-12-31T18:43:00.000-05:00

I remember that the literary idol of my youth, Aldous Huxley, who started out as a smart mouth/hand, writing witty, sneeringly searing novels of social sabotage, had had a change of heart and mind as his life lengthened, doing LSD and espousing Vedanta, moving deeper and deeper into mysticism, and making a final pronunciamento that “in the end, what matters is to be kind.” Having arrived in NY in time to start my new life, whatever it will be, in the place where it is to be whatever it will be, I decided to spend my first full day here applying his dictum. Strangely it is easier to be kind in New York because you can talk to everyone, and run into a great many people, which it is difficult to do in LA except with a car.
I began the day—late of course, we are still on California time—walking Mimi in the park, where two young, pretty women leaned against the stone wall at the edge of a slightly frozen pond that I thought was freckled with snow balls, that they assured me was garbage. They were both from Pittsburgh, as are a great many people worth knowing, including all my relatives, Vicky King and me, so I asked them what their dreams were and why the prettiest of them was already disappointed and she said it was a long story but as I am a writer I told her I could hear it. It was of course about a man, but as she has just graduated from college she’ll get over it, and I promised to try and connect her with the career she wants when she moves to New York. The best thing about coming from Pittsburgh is the gumption to move someplace else.
Then I met a strikingly beautiful and lively blonde in the lobby of my building, which has no one strikingly beautiful unless they can no longer move their mouths or comfortably blink their eyes, and lively is not an operative word, and told her she should be in St. Moritz. As it turns out, she was on her way there. I suspect she will be my new best friend. Happily I have two old best friends, one of whom saw me out of LA and cleared out my apartment after my departure, the other one who prepared for my arrival here by making everything orderly in my apartment, plus the building housekeeper which she isn’t really, but kind of an organized marching band, who had plugged in all my Christmas lights that I keep up all year long, so the place would look fairy tale-ish and welcome me.
Then I went for a night stroll with Mimi and saw five little children in Tibetan wooly hats, the kind that has a point at the top with flaps down over their ears making them look even more vulnerable than children already are. They were half Dominican, half Puerto Rican according to their very young aunt and mother of one, who also had that kind of hat on, and peered out with liquid brown child’s eyes and a shinily innocent face looking much like my loved friend Betsy. The children were gazing with longing into the ice cream and candy store on Sixth, so I invited them all in for an ice cream. The auntie/mom said they couldn’t possibly, but I insisted. It reminded me of when I was living in Weinheim, in the Bergstrasse writing my German novel, and a class came through the Marktplatz of eight-year olds, and I picked them all up and took them, with their astonished teacher, to the ice cream parlor, and he all but wept and said in perfect English “Thank you for being kind to children.” I thought at the time his English was imperfect, and what he meant was “Thank you for being kind to these children.” But as it turned out, as he explained to me when we became friends and corresponded, that he had been exact: Germans in general, he said, don’t really enjoy children, and tolerate them until they grow up. They are unpredictable, you see, and Germans best like order, swaddling them in infancy in their carriages so they won’t touch their genitals. I understand this is a generalization and Peter Mandelson in Ireland told me I mustn’t generalize, but I think in this instance I can since a teacher told me, and there were signs in the railway stations in Weinheim saying “Be kind to children,” so I had to gather that might not be the rule. Anyway my little Tibetan-Hispanics were very happy, although the five year old who was her son was sorry he had taken the mint, so I threw it away and got him the chocolate, to match his eyes, though it was actually Rocky Road which I imagine is the one he will be on.
Late in the evening I went to the market, again with Mimi, and put a lot of groceries in the cart in which she sat in the child’s seat. The delivery boy had gone home, and there was too much to carry so I said I would come back in the morning. But a woman said “I’ll help you,” and she did, walking me home, carrying a few bags, telling me her story. She is a dental assistant and gave up her job to come to New York to help her sister, one of eleven siblings, children of farmers from Florida, who has a little girl, 3, she doesn’t like to have hired help for. She is very happy now, as she loves her little niece, and never had children of her own, but still misses the dentist.
I had a dentist in LA who follows a philosophy called ‘RAK’ which stands for Random Acts of Kindness. Apparently there are, and apparently whatever you give comes back to you. I mean, a stranger helping you with packages. In New York. All things are possible.
HAPPY NEW YEAR.

Shakespeare does it Again!

2008-12-25T12:47:00.000-05:00

“There is a Destiny that shapes our ends,” the best of the poets said, and of course he was and is Right On. What has happened to our country, even though it looks just now like a disaster, I believe will be its salvation. Had the economy not caved, there was a good chance the election might have gone the other way, and the deep inhalation and release, the breath of fresh air that has come as the result, even with the bad times, might well restore us all. Or, at least, get us back to our starting principles, which were almost as good as if Shakespeare had written them.
The downside of course is the way it appears on the immediate surface: the men lined up in shifting disarray outside the 7-11 on Sawtelle and Santa Monica look like the shape-up in ‘On The Waterfront.’ But the sadness is strung with hope, like Christmas lights, and it is doubtless for the best that we’ve cut back on the tinsel.
The direct effect (or is it affect?) on me is that I am moving back full time to New York, to inhabit the studio apartment left me by my mother, that rescue effected(I’m sure there, anyway) by the smarts of my cousin Rodney who got her money back from Bernie Madoff. I am also looking forward to resurrecting my musical comedy, which the times have made completely believable, about my mother (raised to mythic proportion,) who, towards the end of her life, rather than grow old, crashed parties, looking for love and free hors d’oeuvres. I am sanctifying that bravado(see also chutzpah) by making the character a widow whose husband left her a co=op on Park Avenue, and just enough money to pay the maintenance, so crashing is not optional, but the only way she gets to eat. She will have given her portfolio to Bernie Madoff, so everybody will understand. To cut back on costs, since theater, too, is in the loo, it will take place on an empty stage with one chandelier dangling crookedly into what was once an elegant room, as she’s had to sell her furniture. But why not the theater? I mean, since it’s going to be uphill for everyone, why not take on a mountain. So I return to my first and most favorite career, that of songwriter(there’s a very uplifting score, and as ‘White Christmas,’ the saccharine adaptation of the sugary Bing Crosby movie of long ago,also starring Rosemary Clooney) had just outmoneyed ‘Wicked,’ which can only be explained by the fact that people want to hear real songs. And that I think is what I have, as sung on a demo by Rosemary Clooney, who, as you may know, liked the score so much she recorded it for me in exchange for sandwiches for the musicians. So though I may not be loaded for bear, I have, in my heart, ammunition to stave off creatively the wolf at the door.
Speaking of ‘Wicked,’ I took my grandboys to see the LA production so they would have a memory of their first musical theater with Granny. We were late and so had to watch the first twenty minutes on a monitor, but I decided that was probably a good things because they are TV addicts(mostly football,) so it was something they understood. Then, when the usher showed us in in the middle of the act—we had seats 2nd row center—it must have seemed to them as it seemed to us as children, when in The Wizard of Oz it suddenly turned into color. What had been for Lukas and Silas another TV experience, blazed into Stage (More-than) Presence. So it ended up being an okay thing, that we were late.
But I will try to be on time for my next act, hoping the plane lands all right next Monday night when I return to take New York on. There is a line in one of my novels, probably one of those not published in a world that suddenly closed its doors and a few fell off their hinges, where a funny, feisty heroine looks out at the lights beneath her windows, and shouts; “I’ll get you yet!” I don’t know that I can make that come to pass, but the truth is, you just never know. The original story I wrote when little more than a tot, that became the movie ‘What a Way to Go’ has been optioned (amazingly I kept the theater rights in my deal with Fox) and the man who has it, a clever music maker and producer, is making sounds like it’s really going to happen. So I might just have two musicals going at the same time.
Why not? There is a not only a Destiny that shapes our ends, but one that also shapes our Continuings.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a Goodnight.

Mimi's Personality Disorder

2008-11-02T12:02:00.000-05:00

Almost everyone having tired of the election, wishing it were over already yet, I have allowed more petty things to capture my attention. Since if the economy doesn’t improve, I will have to give up things along with everyone else, and may have to surrender my bi-coastal status and headquarter in New York. That means this studio must be eminently livable, so, symbolically I will need a new toilet, as that is the thing most in need of replacing, fitting since it is also what we are in.
So I hied me with Mimi to E. 62nd Street, and Kraft Hardware that features a most reasonable line of toidies, called TOTO, not after Dorothy’s dog, though it could be, but the brand of a Japanese firm (out-thought even about that, Gott.) Mimi immediately attracted the attention of a genial salesman, who said he had considered getting a Bichon Frisee(she has a website, BICOASTAL BICHON which I suppose we will also have to give up) and so had researched it completely. Apparently the breed goes back to Roman times, though the temps most publicized is the French Revolution, when it was the chien of Marie Antoinette, who got her wig’s hairstyle from her dog. Once they offed with her head, the people did not like to be reminded, so killed all the Bichons. A few were saved, and emigrated to Italy, where the Italians recognized at once how clever they were and taught them to dance and be circus dogs. Once the French saw they were gifted, they of course took them back and marked them French. But back to the genial salesman.
He told me that this breed had a gene that made it impossible for them to be alone—that they had to be with people, that if left by them(dog)selves they went crazy. They were the first lap dogs, and even now, are desperate in their affection and need to cuddle. The days grow chilly here, and since, along with everything else, one has to watch grooming fees($81 for a cut) I have let her grow long, so she now truly resembles a sheep. I never had a teddy bear when I was a little girl, (Aawwwwwwwwwww) so I have enjoyed her warmth and what turns out now, according to the salesman, to be a personality disorder. She needs me. She is a co-dependent.
Speaking of which I have had my first stalker, a pleasant(I thought she was) Norwegian, who, as I already wrote you, had unexpectedly inherited a fortune from her aunt, a dentist who invented fluoride(or maybe discovered it, science is not my frield.) I had had dinner with her and her sister and counseled her to get rid of her traveling companion, an alcoholic who finished up everything in the minibar—not the same one as Eliot Spitzer’s—and then threw up all over the room. She sent me many e-mails telling me how I had saved her life, but apparently decided I was to replace him, so barraged me and finally called me day before yesterday at 4:30 AM, so I have had to tell her in no uncertain terms to leave me alone. My dermatologist said the woman is a co-dependent and crazy, the reason why she, my dermatologist, has an unlisted home number, as apparently when you fill in someone’s wrinkles they think they belong to you, and she has to hide from recently upholstered patients. Anyway, it’s all back to just me and Mimi, with her lovely long hair, which is like having a fur throw on the bed at night.
I look into her highly intelligent black eyes, sing to her “My fuzzy Valentine,” and no longer grieve that there is no man in my life. I mean, no matter how much they love you, they do not crawl on top of you and leave it at that, and too hirsute are less than appealing. So I am sort of at peace, though I, too, wish the election were over.

Bringing in the Sheaves

2008-11-02T11:59:00.000-05:00

Unaccustomed as I am to public service, yesterday was a lift to the heart, a jolt to the spirit, and an illuminating journey. Went with two other women, a New York Good Person—very involved in selfless deeds for the betterment of her community, and a teacher of theatre at Hofstra, the first at the wheel, the second sitting behind me chatting amiably on our journey to Bristol, Pa., to canvass for Barack. We were the first to arrive at the meeting place, at ten o’clock as prescribed, but were sent to the hall of the Boilermaker’s Union, across from which was a flower stall, hanging baskets and Halloween ornaments, where we went while waiting for others to arrive before we were sent on our assigned rounds and squares. The seeming diversion was the first in what felt like the stations of the cross, the pockets of ignorance that less than grace this once great nation. The young woman, a mother of three who was its proprietor, doesn’t trust Obama because of “his background,” didn’t want to discuss it at length(we have been forewarned not to try and argue too forcibly at this late stage of the game) but said they were carrying signs for him in Pakistan. “Why would they want him to win in Pakistan?” she asked me. Back in the shelter of the Boilermaker’s Union, Local 13, I suggested that if it were true, it might be because they wanted to live, and were hoping he had the savvy to keep India from making it all go BOOM! But by this time the rest of the out-of-town cast had assembled, and as we were richer by several hanging baskets, a witch, and a calico turkey for Thanksgiving, we did not dwell, but moved on, as Kevin, the African-American who was gently in charge, advised us to do.
The trio of women was joined by a tall young man from Guiana, who had come to this country so disapproving of the political mayhem and injustice of his land that he immediately involved himself in the politics of ours. He paired up with the tiny Hofstra person, while the doer of good and I worked our streets, courtyards, low-lying apartment complexes, only knocking on the doors that had been pre-checked by the Bristol Obama people, so we were just to encourage, reassure, ask those we knew to be friendly to make sure they voted. More people were absent than present, and those who were present were often watching football, but as Kevin was to tell me the people in charge had already decided we were so close to the election that we couldn’t be put off by the fact that we were probably intruding, and just forge on, not getting into protracted conversations or certainly not trying to convert, and just leave the print-out of how flawed McCain was from the pen of a Philadelphia Inquirer writer who had been a Republican. Alissa, my cohort, and I encountered one probable serial killer who looked like Raymond Burr in ‘Rear Window,’ had all the same nervous mannerisms and several pots on his front porch that we ventured likely contained the chopped-up remains of the gay couple who had been living there, who were our committed Democrats. Another man rolled his eyes, was obviously mad in the sanity sense, not just angry at our intrustion, would not give his name, didn’t want to know ours, and ignored our extended hand and obvious fine humor. On the whole it felt more frustrating than fulfilling, but we had done our job and seen many red-leafed trees, which cannot help but fill the heart as they warm the eyes.
There had been few doors that were locked in that working-class neighborhood, the exception being one of an African-American who seemed very anxious and uncomfortable at our knocking, but was going to vote for Barack, and one other black family who also seemed unsettled. One black sailor, on his way back to Virginia said he would vote absentee for Obama but did not talk politics with his fellows. I understand why.
What I didn’t understand was how unsettled the black locals seemed, though Cindy, our cohort who was with Jerry, the Guianan(?) did better, having actually managed a few genuine interchanges. When I got back to base I talked to Kevin, and here’s where it all becomes a sad, dark poem. He told me the reason for the dis- ease (not the sickness, the anxiety) could be traced back to the 60s, when JFK, Dr. King were assassinated, and finally Bobby. He said when the train went through carrying Bobby’s body, the blacks stood on one side of the track, the whites on the other, and all put their hands over their hearts and saluted as that carriage rolled by., And when it was gone, the blacks turned around one way, the whites another, and all went home. Since that time there has been a total disconnect in the Civil Rights movement, the reason why this is such a seminal moment in our history.
But all I could think of was that train rolling through, and the train that rolled through the country after Lincoln’s murder. And I wonder why the hatred goes so deep, and the people are so empty. Anyway, I hope he wins, and we get back what’s left of the country. Still, it felt really good to be doing something that mattered.

In 1492 Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue

2008-10-14T00:33:00.000-04:00

I had forgotten it was Columbus Day. Such has been the emotional, financial and political see-sawing of the past few weeks that the struggle has been to stay in some kind of balance. The trees in Central Park remember their assignment, and turn yellowish, the most audacious of them flaring out bottom branches of orange. A friend newly returned from Massachusetts says the leaves at the topmost of those trees are pink, and I wish I could see that, but understand we are always where we are supposed to be, so I must be grateful that I am here with not just the leaves changing, but the world as we knew it. There is a piece in the Times today about a woman in LA cutting back by drinking espresso instead of Latte, and the writer’s amazement at her then not bursting into laughter. So in a strange way I miss what has seemingly become my home, though one I probably will not be able to keep, where the view is so narcissistic you can’t see the foraging for the trees.
Sitting in the park this morning I was startled to hear a drumroll, and trumpets, and remembered the court-clad(Isabella, la Reina) young man I saw walking there last week, medals and plumes and silk-ribboned cloak flaring, asking him what that was about. He said he was from Spain, and was one of a group of musicians that would be in “the celebration.” So I made my way to Fifth Avenue, though wary of the crowds, and watched from where the carriages are stationed, as a corps of drummers went by, such elation in their drumming. And I realized this was the great event in their year, probably all that had consumed them in these surreal weeks, making sure they were in step, and in tempo.
Then a giant stage, with wine-red curtains, with tapestried ceiling and huge gilded heads at its corners was carried by, and in it graceful young women in harem clothes danced, while beside it umbrella-carrying ladies in long white dresses paraded. None of it made much sense, at least not to me, but so thoroughly were they engaged in what they had doubtless been practicing and living for, that it was genuinely enchanting.
So I realized that between the leaves, which my friend who’d seen the pink ones, explained to me was because of the dying of the chlorophyll with the loss of the heat of summer, doing what they are meant to do, changing colors, and the drum corps and the dancing harem girls, and the proud young man in his courtier clothes, that the most and best we can do is our job, that which we have been rehearsing and sometimes getting a chance to perform. That, and working for the good, and hoping for it.
Made phone calls for Barack over the weekend, and went to dinner with some Norwegian sisters who stopped me on the street because I “looked so happy.” They had both of them been disappointed in love, but left a fortune by an aunt, a dentist who discovered Fluoride, from studying the teeth of porcupines. That would have been, to a dentist, what Don called ‘The Mother Lode’ when speaking of what The Godfather was to Mario Puzo. And it was probably that for Columbus, too, finding us, though he doubtless didn’t know that then. And hey—it really worked for a good, long time. And maybe it will again.

A FAILURE OF COMMUNICATION

2008-09-28T17:28:00.000-04:00

Paul Newman has left us. Larry Gelbart, one of our great writer-wits said recently that we were getting out just in time, which might be the truth about Newman, great gentleman, true American, and caring, alive activist that he was, doubtless wracked not just by his illness, but what was happening to this country. I spoke to Hotch, A.E. Hotchner to put it formally, his great friend and partner in Newman’s Own, the organic foods that benefit children with cancer, and my first semi-weighty literary friend when I was embarking on my writing career. Hotch said that it had been coming for a long time which was known, and also that he had left his mark, which he certainly did. “While you’re here, do something,” Hotch quoted his saying. Mimi needed a treat yesterday and I bought her a packet of Newman’s Own for dogs, and even as I did felt some kind of shadow, so am glad I got to make a small contribution to one of his beneficences, while he was still on the planet, though about to leave it.
I’d met Hotch the first time I spoke as an author, at an event in Richmond, when he had just published Papa Hemingway, attached as he’d been to old Ernest, and we became friends enough so when there was a party for Newman on Coldwater Canyon during the time of Nixon’s decline, Don and I were invited. I was in the throes of my Watergate spying—that is to say I had friends who were Republicans that I cherished in spite of all that was going on, so I was in their houses during the fall of that president, spending most of my time in Washington. I stayed first with a loved friend from Bryn Mawr, then through her became a friend and guest of the wife of the Chairman of the City Council, then eventually ended up staying regularly with the Gerald Warrens. He, at the time, was the assistant press secretary to Ron Ziegler, so every morning when the phone would ring at 4 AM with yet another revelation from the Washingon Post, I was right there to observe.
When I went to that party in LA, I remember clearly Newman’s standing behind the bar as I told him about the friends I had who were good guys, and his saying grimly “There are no good guys in that bunch.” My friend Hal Dresner had written on ‘Cool Hand Luke’ and he had told me how every time Newman drove by a billboard for one of his movies, he would say belittlingly, “There he is: old blue eyes.” But the blue eyes served him well, as besides giving women something to sigh over, they also perceived.
The main wit in that screenplay of Luke I would have to guess came from Hal, the most memorable line “What we have here is a failure of communication.” I’m afraid that that has become what could be the anthem for the world the way it is today, for all the blogging and Internet and Youtube and Iphones and now today I learned there are something called Kendalls, where you can download books onto a hand-held instrument from Amazon, God Help us. Nobody is really communicating clearly or we wouldn’t be in the trouble we are. Where I learned about Kendalls was at a brunch at the Waldorf-Astoria—I went because I believe in Serendipity and last weekend I walked to the Book Fair in Central Park with Mimi, and was saddened to see that of all the booths, and for all the writers living and dead, the only two old ones that seemed to have made their mark, as opposed to Paul Newman, were L. Ron Hubbard, who gave us Dianetics and thus Scientology, and Ayn Rand, egoist, both of whom have spawned cults, and businesses. Or maybe you don’t need the ‘and.’ Cults are businesses.
The real writers from previous eras have more or less vanished, a sadly neglected pile, unexamined, being an unfinished novel by Lionel Trilling whom I remember from my long ago college education as one of the great critics, so it gave me a sense of sorrow that no one cared or was moved to examine this work he had doubtless suffered through writing, as it’s easier to shoot other people down than plumb your own soul,now discovered at Columbia and nobody gives a shit. Who discovered it was Geraldine Murphy and I half-hoped she might be the spawn of Gerald and Sara Murphy, the colorful duo who played the Riviera with Scott and Zelda, and wrote ‘Living Well is the Best Revenge’ but their children would probably be dead. Anyway, I dropped my card into a cup that said there would be a raffle to go to this brunch today, and I won, but apparently so did everyone who dropped their card in, because it was the book version of a theater’s being ‘papered,’ with non-paying customers rather than having an empty house. Several hundred people, good eats, and a couple of genuinely witty writers on the dais, Larry Block and Harlan Coben, in addition to the celeb writers, Dionne Warwick(who now lives in Brazil, which my old editor Jim says will be one of the power countries along with Russia and China) and Marlo Thomas who still looks good and is still married to Phil Donahue. A number of librarians were there who had obviously dropped their cards in the cup, and of course the news is the libraries are hanging on by a very slender thread which I guess will be there till Sarah Palin cuts it.
I am in a state of genuine dread over this election, as my worst case scenario, which is of course the one I always have, is that McCain drops dead election night from the shock of winning, and leaves us with her as our ‘president.’ This would be good news only because it would give Tina Fey something to do every Saturday night as she did again last night at the beginning of Saturday Night Live, where she was brilliant, but Oh God, if You’re there, please help us. I remember when Bush won, Jamie Lee Curtis, trying to find the bright side, comforted me or tried to with the fact that “Saturday Night Live will be funny again.” I don’t think it’s a fair exchange. I am going with a bunch of concerned women to Bristol, Pa. next Sunday to electioneer, and this Thursday there’s a Bryn Mawr group getting together at my classmate Evie’s, the first black student to have been accepted to the college and when she showed up they sent her to the maid’s quarters. Supposedly we’ve come a long way since then, but Evie still thinks the country, or at least white working men are not ready to vote for a black man, so she’s working on Seniors.
There was a white haired woman sitting in the corner where the concerned women were meeting the other night, and she will be in charge of the ‘Boobys’, the old Florida ladies the group is trying to pull over the line in this terrible tug-of-war, their reward being a big party that the white-haired Booby will throw. There is some sweetness in this campaign for all the bitterness and rancor, and I am hoping that the Jewish New Year, which I never really celebrate, will bring blessings to the Boobys, -- certainly the one who sat in the corner.