AN ARGUMENT FOR TORTURE

Although my friends, all of whom I consider illuminated, and the majority of the American people are appalled at the idea of torture, perhaps an exception should be made in the case of Ann Coulter. I can think of no name to call her that would be vile enough to call her-- not 'bitch', which seems lightweight considering the object, or the c word that so offends, as it would be an insult to all the other c___s. It shames me that she is a woman, if indeed she is.
That she would attack John Edwards as she did, sneeringly alleging that he had a bumper sticker about the death of his son, and actually try to bring down Elizabeth Edwards, one of the most admirable women of my lifetime, whose courage and bravery and genuine intelligence are palpable even in this time of mass idiocy(see Paris Hilton/ George Bush-- has anyone seen them together? could they be the same person?) is a rent in the cloth of decency. Even as Elizabeth struggled to stay the great lady she is on Hardball today, asking Coulter politely to pull back on personal attacks, Coulter continued, attacking. What is the matter with the media, that they give this harridan a forum?
I am especially incensed because I went to a fundraiser for Edwards last night, in a genial setting, the Brentwood home of a real estate developer, Tom Safran, who went all out(sushi and chocolate covered strawberries, no piker he, gracious in the bargain, insisting we stay and eat even after Edwards had gone as he didn't want any leftovers) Of all the potential candidates in '04, Edwards was the one I believed: he seemed to me a consummately honest man. Now that we are faced with candidates who are divisive or unlikely to win, and Bloomberg, whom I like, stands to cost the Democrats if he runs, I continue to be moved by Edwards. I watched him last night through a lens, lightly: the video camera of the man in front of me in the garden, filming him. It seemed a fine portrait, handsome, of course, but also believable and smart. He asked the man to turn off the video while he made the following statement: "Of all the potential candidates, I am the most progressive, and the most electable." i wondered why he wanted the camera off for that one, but a smart friend said it was shorthand for 'I'm not a woman, and I'm not black.' If that's what it was, I'm afraid he's right. But I'm more afraid of Hillary. And more impressed by what he said when the video camera was on: "Bush is an idiot." That seemed to me direct, and fearless. Everybody with a brain knows that Bush is an idiot, but it takes a lot of balls to go on the record with that, in this environment.
On the way home I spoke to a friend who told me the talk in political circles is that big money people have dried up on Edwards, because of Elizabeth's illness-- they're afraid he won't go the distance. I wish I had a pile of money to give him. I wish elections weren't about money. I wonder what would happen to Abraham Lincoln if he were here and wanted to run. With today's vile decision by the Supremes to put corporations back in the catbird seat for picking their man(oh, who could it be? A Republican? Gee!) I wonder what's going to happen to this country. If they win again, I think we are lost forever.
Maybe Ann Coulter can be Queen. Or at least the madam of the whorehouse where they practice Bondage and Domination. I am so sad for my country. Dick Cheney and Paris Hilton. What's happened to us? If it weren't for the wrestler murdering his wife and son and then hanging himself, there might be nothing else on the news.

LA VIE EN PEONY

So my beloved friend Gena Rowlands, the formidable actress and even more formidable, in a soft way, human being, told me the other night over dinner I had to go see 'La Vie en Rose,' she was so moved and impressed by Marion Cotillard who plays Edith Piaf in the film. Is Edith Piaf, really, once you have seen her. Unbelievable. She occupies her body, and, unmistakably, her spirit. My clever friend Jean Doumanian echoed Gena's sentiments, pointing out to me that the actress is only twenty-eight years old.
My sometimes friend Rex Reed wrote in his review that you would want to see it over and over again, and as I am very suggestible, once was not enough. I went Friday and again Saturday and would have gone again today except I am trying not to be compulsive. The performance is beyond remarkable, and the music is transformational, making you a part of Paris, which I never loved so much when I was living there as I do when I'm longing for it and wishing I had made better use of it. Literary use of it, I suppose, since all my dreams of Paris before the first time I was lucky enough to live there were based on what I had heard and read, Hemingway and Fitzgerald fantasies that never ripened into real.
Still, something happened to me in the course of watching the movie: I realized that my own life was not unlike Piaf's. True, my mother never sang in the streets. but she was a social director at resorts, which is not all that different, amusing people in passing. And she did abandon me when she had a date. Then again, I was encouraged to sing my songs in Paris not by someone who could later have been played in my movie by Gerard Depardieux, but by Maya Angelou, who said to me on that fateful night in the Mars Club when I was so uncomfortable and intimidated, because all the lights were orange and all the people were black, which you could still call them then, "Hoh-nee, you could get up and be bigger than anyone here." Thus it was that I got up onstage and sang my songs that had been such a hit at the Bryn MAwr Junior Prom; and the boss came over and said "You've got a job!" and I wired my mother "I am singing in a night club in Paris," and she wired me back, "Come home immediately." But I didn't. I stayed and sang my heart out, and part of my soul, too, I think, though there was no way I could be mistaken for Piaf unless a waif could be very overweight.
Nor did I ever have an affair with a boxer, but I did have a big hunky guy in my life who left too soon, though not in a plane crash. And then there's the moment when they ask Piaf what would happen if she could no longer sing, and she says she could no longer live, and I feel that way about writing, though it would be nice if there was a later appearance of some young Yves Montand. Also I have never knit, because I had a Nazi housemother in high school, Mrs. Lande, who said knitting required an IQ of 80, and I was afraid of that, as she also turned me away from bridge, which required 100, but Edith didn't play anything but supper clubs and music halls, so that omission doesn't count.
Still, it would be arrogant and delusional to think I could in any way compare myself to that great chanteuse, except I, too, lived in a whorehouse. Of course I didn't know it was a whorehouse, since my innocence extended not only to thinking I would find love and a career path in Paris, but also to assuming those sailors in the hall knocking on doors were in on leave and those were their girlfriends. I had moved to that hotel out of loneliness and desperation, because the French family I lived with and ate dinner with every night spoke to me only on the day my rent was due, and only after opening at the Mars did I feel secure enough to seek out my own lodgings. Sue Stanley, a peppery little Greek who was singing at the Dinarzade, the really upscale boite in Paris at the time, wanted my song "Sex," and so was very kind to me, and when I got sick, came to visit, saw where I was living, said "Oh, My God," packed me up, and got me out of there. "She's living in the only Left Bank hotel on the Right Bank" she said in her gravelly voice, which was not as good as Edith's, but then, whose was?
Certainly not mine. I would not dare to call my movie 'La Vie en Rose,' even if the title was available. I like peonies best at this point in my life, because they start out very tight and keep on opening and opening and even at full, lavish, almost overripe blossom are still lovely enough to paint, because you can see the heart at the center.

MINE OWN MADELEINE

When I first lived in Hollywood, before my move to the infamous Laurel Canyon, consecrated in song and last week's article in The New York Times about the 'Summer of Love,' I stayed at the Park Sunset on that epynonymous(I think it's spelled) boulevard. There was a coffee shop in the front of the hotel/apartment that had in its glass-cased counter Bear Claws, that typical LA pastry with almonds on top, shaped, I would imagine, like some baker's concept of claw, a semi-circle with ridges, glazed. I was a chub, a word that always hurt me as a little girl when it came on the label of a dress size, crazy in love with a wraith, the young and gangly and very beautiful Tony Perkins, whom I didn't know was gay, but considered simply respectful and tasteful, because how could he want a fat girl? His mind was as sharp as his shoulder blades, which were tanned to a creamy coffee brown, and he would tease me with lines from old movies, telling me if I could identify which picture, for example, "Rice pudding... in Egypt you cannot tell if they are flies or raisins" came from, he would take me to dinner. I used that as the springboard for his fictional character, Stephen Ryder, in my first novel Naked in Babylon, which I bowdlerized so Tony would continue to love me, in his fashion, which involved everything but touch, as he was upset that, in the novel at least, his character was a closeted homosexual, which I had faced in writing as I could not in life.
Anyway I was too fat to have the bear claw, because I was twenty and still lived in hope. So this morning when I took Mimi to the groomer and went into the bakery next door, there was a bear claw, so I ate it. Fuck it. Too late to worry about such things. I also remembered being closeted myself when Stanley Kubrick, my best friend of that moment, had me come down from Stanford, and secreted me in the Park Sunset to save him from what was, according to him, the unusable dialogue of Nabokov, and work on the screenplay of Lolita, not permitting me to call any of my friends, because he was sure if they knew I was in town, they would know what I was clandestinely(is it an adjective, too?) involved with. His paranoia knew no bounds. There were bear claws, then, too, that I didn't eat.
I am sad that he left as early as he did, but he could not stand a world he did not control, building his own Vietnam for 'Full Metal Jacket' at his compound in Elstree so he wouldn't have to travel to where there were actually palm trees, building a city for the insufferable 'Eyes Wide Shut'. The rest of us left here are suffering from a world, an administration we cannot control or, sadly, have any impact on, so maybe his genius extended beyond movie-making to timely exits.
My stole caught in the door of my car as I got in to come home, having eaten only of the top of the bear claw, just the slivered almonds and what there was of glaze, so I thought for a moment of Isadora Duncan and remembered having read somewhere of the woman who'd given her the fatal scarf. No other information about her, just that she had gifted her with that scarf. Scott Fitzgerald and wife once sat on a hillside in the south of France once near Isadora, and Zelda got even crazier because he was captivated by her, as we all are who know her legend, and remember the great and fatal last line, "Mes Amies, je vais au le gloire!" just before the end of the scarf caught in the wheel of the sports car she took off in and was strangled on her way to Glory. And I wondered how it was to be the woman who had so gifted her, who did nothing in life but be rich and able to give gifts to the gifted, and if she had suffered all the rest of her (what I imagine to be privileged and long) life because that was the only thing she had done of any real consequence, and that consequence so dark. I wish at such moments that I was de Maupassant(sp?) or Colette and had given myself to short stories instead of this bloody blog.
Mimi has lost fifteen ounces so is weighing in okay for her trip to France at summer's end, but she is hungry a lot of the time as it is hard to explain to her about an ideal of Beauty, or the rules at Air France. We had dinner last night with one of the great people left on the planet from when movies were movies, Gena Rowlands, and Mimi whined the whole time because we were eating some kind of beef she could smell from underneath the table. It was probably for her as it had been for me at twenty, sitting in front of that greasy glass case, filled with longing for an avenue for my talents, a great love and a bear claw.
So much for Proust, and his madeleine.

SIC TRANSIT ALSO BUILDINGS

Watching the endless thank yous at the Tonys, I noted in passing, as everything seems to, that when Tommy Tune sang against pictures of theater people who had died this year, at the end a theater itself went up into the darkness, the Brooks Atkinson. I took that to mean that the theater had been demolished, to make way for even more unwatchable musicals with unsingable lyrics, and unwitty plays in larger, more Disneyfied quarters. Brooks Atkinson, for those of you young and wise enough never to have been fixated on Broadway, was a long ago theater critic, commemorated with a building, which they now mostly name for those who run them or own them. I am sadly used to friends departing for unknown shores, but this is the first time I ever lost a building. Even 255 W. 84th Street where I lived as a very little girl, that had a plaque on its side saying 'On this site Edgar Allen Poe wrote the Raven,' which electrified me at 8 and charged me with the thought I had to do something important with words, still stands, although the street sign has been upped to Edgar Allen Poe Way, which puts him on a level with Mervyn LeRoy, who has his own semi-street near the Tavern on the Green, a very touristy restaurant he started, which is not as good as The Raven.
The Brooks Atkinson was the theater where my play, 'The Best Laid Plans' opened the same week as my daughter. Her birth announcement was in The New York Times, 'Mother's Play's Opening Upstaged by Baby's," read the headline, and tout New York phoned me in the hospital because it seemed like I was going to be a hit, so i was inundated with friends none of whom called again once the reviews came in. They wished long life to my baby and instant death to my play. There's a backstory which is probably funnier than the play: Hilly Elkins was the producer with Don, my husband, co-producing, and my baby in my belly, the reason we rushed everything as we had to literally beat the stork. The stork does bring babies, doesn't he? And how come it's a male?
The comedy, (it really was) is about a young woman in love from a distance with a difficult playwright, like a straight Tennessee Williams, if you can imagine, so she goes to his psychiatrist, a very talkative man who failed in show business, and learns all about him, then moves into the apartment next door and pretends to be a drug-addicted, suicidal young woman so he will fall in love with her, which he does. It was really funny, no kidding. But then, out of town in Philadelphia, Hilly got hysterical, the leading lady was fired, the whole things started collapsing, and the law of the theater, "if it can go wrong it will," went into effect. Hilly wanted me to have the heroine do drugs on stage, and I refused. 'Bitch," he said, "you'll change it," "Hilly," said Don, "I remind you you're talking to a woman with a baby in her belly." The invectives continued to fly out of Hilly's mouth, increasingly offensive. Finally Don said "One more word and I'll have to kill you." Hilly said "You and what army?" So BOOM, he was down.
And Don was trying to kill him. The director(Paul Bogart, later to be fired in Boston) came over and took off Don's glasses so he wouldn't be hurt by Hilly's flailing. Nobody in the room made a move to stop Don from killing him, including Mel Brooks who was a friend and had been called down to assuage Hilly's panic, as everybody there despised Hilly. It was a darkly comedic moment. The only thing darker was everybody getting fired, my being in the hospital having Madeleine, unable to protect the play, and Hilly's bringing in Arthur Storch, a moron, to direct, so the play went down the tubes, although mine stayed healthy.
My obstetrician wanted to go to the opening, so he let me go to the party-- in those days we stayed in the hospital for a while-- I got to the theater in time for the last laugh which wasn't there, so I knew it was a disaster. Mel and Annie drove me back to the hospital. Annie was Anne Bancroft, my favorite friend at the time, still radiantly funny in my eyes from 'Two for the Seesaw' so I had told her at the start of writing it, that I was going to write a play for her, and did, anxious for her to keep doing comedy, especially mine.
She called me after reading it and liking it, but said "I can't do it. I'm doing 'The Devils.' I asked "Why?" She said, "I've never played a hunchbacked nun before."
"Besides," she said. "Who knew you would write it in two weeks?"
So in the car going back to the hospital, as I bled metaphorically, spiritually and really, Mel said "Look: You had two things happen this week: if one of them had to be less than perfect, if your daughter had been born with six toes and two noses, ... that would have been okay: what mattered was the show." So I guess, in a way he saved me, though he hadn't been much help to the play.
I got a telegram from the president of Bryn Mawr saying 'Congratulations and love to the only friend I have who had a baby and a play the same week,' Love, Kathy, (which I didn't know anyone called her, so that sort of lifted my spirit.)
Don and I hid out for several weeks, I ducking behind lampposts when I saw someone I knew, the excoriation in the papers had been so, well, excoriating. We finally moved to California, with his saying "We must never try Broadway again unless we have a million dollars." Now of course a million dollars isn't that much security, the play which cost a hundred and fifty thousand to produce, would cost ten million today, and my theater has been demolished, along with most of my girlish dreams. Also if I were to revive it today the playwright in the play would have to pretend to be gay so he could get something produced and lisp endless thank-yous at the Tonys.
Ah, but I did love the the-a-ter. Katharine Hepburn came back to college once when I was an undergraduate, and those of us who were enamored got to have tea with her. "I suppose I should tell you how Bryn Mawr helped me in the Thee- ahh- terr,"she arched. "But I cahhnnnn't."
Neither cahnnn I.

CHRISTMAS IN ERITREA

So the wish to travel has kicked in again, after an amazingly complacent period of just sitting. I remember Jack's meditational dictum: 'Just sit. Spring will happen.Grass will grow.'
Well, he's right about the grass, but Spring has been elusive: gray mornings, jacaranda late in blooming, just like me. Finally caught up with my old, wonderful editor from the Wall Street Journal Europe, now with Bloomberg in Belgium, so that sort of reconnected me with how it was when I was spinning and swimming through Europe, and stirred up a visceral longing for different places, wonderful friends I made on those journeys, or even, sometimes, sitting still in exotic locales.
One of those was Suzie Coul I shall call her for short, or better, Suzie Cool, who is married to a French diplomat. We met when we were both crashing the swimming pool at the Bristol in Paris, and became friends. Pierre(wouldn't you know that would be his name) is a most unusual Frenchman-- extremely tall, which not many of them are, and terribly funny, which none of them are, humor being the Frenchman's shortest suit (think of their national love for Jerry Lewis.) I guess that isn't really fair, since we had a national love for W. None of my friends of course, but he did get elected-- the second time, anyway.
So there is Lucky Pierre, married to the delightful, blazingly red-haired Suzie, waiting for news of his next posting. Their last post was Botswana, where I was only once tempted to go visit them, and that because they were going to have a celebration of Bastille Day. Didn't go, though, cause one swing through Botswana is enough, and I had done that as part of my Africa saga. Suzie has an apartment in Paris where she goes to renew in-between postings, and also has a con which is better than any my mother could have conceived,-- she represents a film distributor in S. Africa, so she goes to film festivals. (She was originally in Zimbabwe, married to someone else-- she's a Brit-- when she met Pierre who was next in line to be the French representative when the one who was first in line was standing by an open window and was shot dead, an expression I learned in Belfast.) You could always spot her on the Champs-Elysees from behind, by this great, high, curly mat of bright orange hair, and the careless, dancer's swagger.
Having re-lit my traveler's candle, I am going to join Suzie for the Deauville Film Festival, as she is an example for us all, traveling with just one suitcase that contains a long skirt so she will always be appropriate, and the British accent also works. After that we hope to go to Honfleur where we were once and she taught me Pierre's dictum that if they're not nice to you, go someplace else immediately, which could really keep you moving in France. We ordered moules, the serveur was scornful as it was three minutes past the hour when they were on special, so she took my hand and we went across the street and had lovely and specially priced moules. A good lesson learned.
But now, oh helas! Pierre has received his new post. I had begged him to let it be someplace I would want to visit. But Suzie has just informed me it is Eritrea. Good God, I didn't even know there was an Eritrea. It is, apparently, right on the coast of some sea I will have to check out what it is, between that sea and Ethiopia, which got a lot of coverage in today's New York Times because it has children you can adopt with a lot of problems(the adoption, not the children.) But Ethiopia is mad at Eritrea because they'd like to have a coast. I just Googled it to assuage my ignorance, and found that Eritrea is impoverished, the gross national income is $291 a year and they need food. I wonder what Pierre has done to deserve such a post.
Suzie is very gay about it, though, looking forward as she manages always to do. She says the whole place is quite Fellini-ish, as it was built by the Italians during Mussolini times, and says perhaps they can even induce me to come. I don't think so. Though I worry about how I will spend Christmas. I was lucky last year, invited by friends in New York to a number of festive dinners, but I don't know how Sirrio is doing (Jean? How's it look?) and Carleen dropped her mobile phone in the toilet, so there's no way to tune in. It might be interesting to spend Christmas in a place where nobody has been and would never want to go again.
Well, we'll see. I know you think it's a long time away, but they're already sending me gift offers on the e-mail for Christmas, along with many chances at Romance from EHarmony.com. all of which I am deleting without opening as I saw 'Away from Her' and understand the best it will be for me is not getting Altzheimer's.
Some thoughts I got while seeing that remarkable movie:

How do we know a clam is happy?
That a bug in a rug feels snug?
Or a doornail is dead?
Or the punch is pleased?
Or the whip is smart?
And how can the snow be pure
Once it's been driven?

SUTURED

Feeling semi-despondent as I usually do at the end of a week when there has been no measurable accomplishment, since I am a combination of the Protestant Ethic with Jewish Guilt, a day's work well done or I feel terrible, I went with Mimi to have lunch and made my way to Katsuya, a Japanese restaurant on San Vicente.A formidable wind blew through the coral trees that line the midsection of that quite scenic local boulevard, and I imagined myself being carried to Bali, or Polynesia. But my arms were too weighty and i hadn't done my yoga, so I stayed where I was and ordered a spicy tuna roll.
When what to my wondering eyes should appear but Sir Anthony Hopkins, a gentle soul I think, and quite shy I thought: I had seen him some years ago trying to become a part of the shadows at the Hotel Bel-Air, imagining that he could disappear into the foliage that lines the driveway. So I greeted him today, told him my name, and said I knew him from the Bel-Air which was not quite a lie, then launched into some genuine praise for 'Fractured,' his latest pale blue-eyed, evil stare into the camera, and remarked at there being something inside him that could project all manner of villainy, well-differentiated, from that same pair of eyes. My clever friend Joie had noted that to me recently, saying there had to be something inside him that could do that, but her appraisal leaned slightly towards madness. I did not pass that on to Sir Anthony.
I asked him what was next, which apparently put him greatly at ease, so standing there on the sidewalk-- I was tempted to invite him to sit down, but did not want to do anything to make him self-conscious or interrupt the flow-- he launched into a tale of a stream of consciousness movie he had written, 'Slipstream',produced himself, put up all the money and done the score for, which score he also conducted. "I don't mean to blow my own trumpet," he said, to which I replied "But you probably could have done that,too." Steven Spielberg had encouraged him after reading the screenplay to make the movie-- "He didn't have the money to do it?" I queried, having learned from my friend Nyle yesterday that Spielberg's upcoming TV show 'On the Lot' is having trouble casting as he doesn't want to pay the actors anything. Pass the hat, anyone?
Anyway, Sir Anthony was most gracious, and dismissive of Spielberg's not putting his money where his encouragement is, speaking happily of what pleasure he had in putting it all together himself, overcoming his insecurities, it being his wife's idea that he should also do the score. He has also been painting, which he admits he has no training in or idea about, but his paintings have been selling nonetheless. "It is all about getting past your Ego," he said, and when I queried him as to how one did that, he said "You just have to let go." He was carrying a very fat book by the English author Colin Wilson called Mysteries, and I take it that that gentleman, too, has been burrowing through the tunnels of forgetting about yourself and letting the universe do it. A book apparently fell from the shelf in a library where Colin Wilson was, that was all about this subject, so he took his inspiration from that shelf and has written this TOME which, though Sir Anthony made some slight reference to age, he is apparently in good enough shape to carry. Carry on, I say.

The Day of the Jacaranda

The jacaranda are in bloom: a pale tree flower, lavendar-- can't you almost hear Katharine Hepburn saying that one? It was always the color, the soft burst of tree that soothed my soul when I lived in Beverly Hills and went on my walking jag, which I did the last several years we were in the house on Hillcrest. I think it was Palm Drive where the jacaranda were, and I would walk up and down the three or four blocks between Santa Monica and Sunset, and try not to tread on the fallen, delicate, tubular blossoms lining the sidewalks, hoping for inspiration. After about 1.6 miles it usually came. I can measure that exactly because when I was on my second retreat with Jack, the one where the musical started, I would walk that distance every afternoon and a song would come. Before I left I measured the mileage, as if one could find out exactly how far to go to start shooting off endorphins. Back home, the walk, combined with all that lavendar, would usually feed a novel. So I think I thought that jacaranda time was mine, the signal to be creative, and disciplined: be inspired, and get to work. An optimistic, hard-headed mantra.
When I moved to this apartment I had radiant, violet mornings, where just after dawn I would open my eyes, and they'd be bathed with that pale purple glow. But this year the tree outside my window is dark, the branches spiked with green, but nothing but dusty buds that show no color or promise. I of course take it personally, as I unfortunately take everything personally, including what's happened to this country I love. The tree right next to it has its share of color, and as I drive around West L.A., I see the pattern is the same all over. One or two trees are alive with Spring, the others dark. I try to check if it's the dryness we've been through, or some trees receiving more sunlight. But there is no logic to it, or reason I can see. Maybe trees, like people, have their own season, individual wills, an opening night/and or day. Maybe Nature is capricious, and pissed right now at the abuse it has suffered at our hands, doesn't choose to pamper our eyeballs.
I was in Johannesburg one autumn, in a hotel high above the city, with crime and all that people fear at a very great distance below. But the horizon was lush with lavendar, it being the same as our Spring, and jacaranda bursting bursting bursting across the bottom of my view. So all I tapped into was the peacefulness, the clouds of color obscuring the mayhem. I suppose that blossoming trees are another thing you shouldn't get attached to, lest they, too, be capricious in their ability to deliver.
I note a certain listlessness, like that of the trees that should be more on schedule, and suppose, quite realistically, it is because I am suffering a really deep hurt that I don't want to inflict on all of you. But having sent you my post-Happy piece in Paris, I will share with you a bit of that past I have found in yet another secret compartment of my computer, when I took a picture of Happy, my Yorkie, in a swami hat, and wrote the doggie version of The Prophet. I can't remember the title of the book, but it was very clever, for all the good that did. This is what Happy had to say about Anger.

Speak to us of Anger

The Mirror Image of the Night
Shines not so darkly
As the soul of wrath.
It is in forgiveness
That we are elevated
To the path of Angels
Which bears not the weight
Of the heavy-hearted
Or those with their foot
In their mouth
Which is all ire is
Really.
React not to those who would
Prick your peace
But bathe them with waves
Of love
Drown them with the overflow
Of your pardon
That ought to fix
The sons of bitches.

Shut Up, Memory

A friend of mine in Belfast said once "A beautiful day in Northern Ireland is more beautiful than a beautiful day anywhere else." That seemed at the time to me to be true, because I had a passion for Northern Ireland, imagining I might be able to help make things better, the hatred that characterized that at once poetic and brutal nation still roiling beneath the surface, and me being in my peacemaker mode. Besides the fear of saying anything too loud even when walking along the shore, lest it fall on adversarial ears and you finding yourself shot, the weather was so foul when it was finally a sunny day, it seemed like unrequited love returned at last. Also that pronunciamento came in that thick, almost undecipherable brogue, less mellifluous than that of the south, so when you could brain your way through the thicket, and understood what he was saying, it did seem, indeed, that a beautiful day in Ireland was more beautiful than a beautiful day anywhere else. So I had to agree.
But we did not take into account San Francisco. There is a glitter on the water that is absolutely Shakespearean, glister you would have to say, on a beautiful day, which is not as rare as a beautiful day in Belfast, but is rare enough. Last weekend I went to the Bay Area to visit my friend Ed, the retired cop and writer, who helps me, always, with plot, and often with life. Ed and his wife Diane and I went into the city Saturday night to hear Bob Dorough, my personal jazz man,--he played the Mars Club in Paris when I sang there, and accompanied me. North Beach, where mailto:Jazz@Pearl is is unchanged, City Lights Bookstore still chugging along next to a head shop, and all the same people on the streets as when I was young there, only they're still young, or young again, there being always a new crop who will want to hang with Kerouac, even dead. The old manager of City Lights, our mutual friend Joe, was always highly articulate and fun, so Marshall Naify, one of Forbes' 400 richest Americans in 1995, took a shine to him, I mean, really a shine, sent him to law school, so Joe is now handling Naify's estate which includes racehorses and oh, maybe a billion. Some there are who make friends with all the right people.
Zapping around the glistering bay on Sunday, my whole life, or at least a number of times in it, passed before my eyes without my even having to fall overboard and drown. I went on that same ferry as a graduate student at Stanford, when Stanley and Kristiana Kubrick came up to visit me, and knowing Stanley's favorite thing was the evil underbelly of man, we whipped around Alcatraz, and in that somber moment he told me: "I'm in big trouble. I just bought Lolita, and Dwight MacDonald(the #1 film critic of that day) is going to give me a great review because Nabokov is a literary genius. But he can't write one line of dialogue." Pause, a black-eyed glower at the water. A sort of smile. "You're the best writer of dialogue in America. Would you come help me out?" (unspoken) Oh please, use me use me. (spoken) "Of course." Full story told elsewhere.
Further along the coast, San Quentin, where Kesey and I did our vigil the night before they executed Caryl Chessman, full story told elsewhere. But you remember these things when the ferry glides around that corner, and you wonder if the wind still whips so fierce and chill on that hill at night. Talking to the ferry-ticket-taking man on the dock at Larkspur Landing, you believe him when he says that is the choicest piece of real estate not on the market, what condos could be there, with that view, what a golf course! But they won't move the facility to the desert because the trial lawyers don't want to have to drive that far. So San Quentin it will stay.
There is a statue of Gandhi on the dock by the Ferry Terminal when you leave San Francisco, with the sentence "My life is my message," which is both inspiring and intimidating, since I don't know yet what my life is, and I better hurry up. By Larkspur Landing, just down the road apiece from the prison is a tall metal statue of Don Quixote, armor flashing in the sun, and a very impressive round metallic ass facing the water, which Ed and I puzzled over, the positioning that is. Why wouldn't they give him the view? So Gandhi at the beginning of my journey, Don Quixote at the other end. Somewhere in there is who/what I am, I think.
Am watching the Bill Moyers interviews with Joseph Campbell, so it dovetails with my struggle to forget myself even as I write about me. He is very sanguine about letting go, following your bliss, watching pieces of yourself fall off as you get older, like a car, without feeling bad about it. I would struggle and am struggling to get to that, but always in the back of my mind I hear "Do I have to?" Especially as i know from Jack, who taught with Campbell towards the end of his life, that Campbell wanted more than anything to be famous. After he died, which is letting go in the deepest sense, the interviews went on the air, and he became as famous as a spiritual teacher could be. But, by his own appraisal, the hereafter would be so ablaze with being in the presence of God, one would lose oneself completely. So the time to do something with whatever is YOUR gift is NOW.
Meanwhile, check out a tree. A sunset. A child. The warmest place in your heart. Or catch San Francisco on a dazzle day.

Dead Before Me

My son and I were reminiscing about Vonnegut last night, and he remembered when Kurt paid for the dinner we had together at Bobby Van's in the Hamptons, and passed his Visa to the waiter. Robert saw the Visa card with his name on it, and said it was "surreal," seeing 'Kurt Vonnegut' on a credit card. Then I said something about my once buddy Kesey, and Robert said I should write something about writers I knew-- a book was what he suggested, but I hope this will do-- called 'Dead Before me," and made sure I emphasized the 'before' when repeating the title, and not the 'me.'
So I started thinking about all the writers I have known, not as many as I would have liked, since I always fancied a literary life, really yearned for it, envied H.D., the poet, who went to Bryn Mawr, and ran off with Ezra Pound. Not that I would have chosen Ezra Pound, although Joan Fitzgerald, a sculptor who lives in Venice, is fierce in her defense of him, swears that he was none of the dark things he was accused of, took me to his grave on that little island near Venice on the Day of the Dead, put a rose on his headstone and said Hemingway would have been nothing without him, that he gave Pound a check for the work he had done that Ernest took credit for, and Pound just framed the check, never cashed it. I mean, I should have had some of that, I think, although H.D.ended up a lesbian and I haven't had any of that, either. I wonder if that was because of Ezra Pound.
Writer dead before me I have known from a distance: Saul Bellow, from whose Nobel Prize speech a definition of what a novel is and where it comes from was incorporated as part of my writ of certiorari to the the Supreme Court in my libel case. He said it was part experience, part imagination, part something else-- I can't remember exactly, sort of science-fiction-y or fantasy, but of course it was eloquent, as he doubtless was, until I called to ask for his support when Doubleday was suing me and he declined with aggressive gusto, had his secretary call me back twice to make sure I didn't use his name on the letterhead that writers of great worth, many of them strangers except to principle, joined in adding their names to, asking that Doubleday withdraw the suit against me, including Capote and Mailer, whom I didn't know either except I once argued politics with Mailer and got him really incensed when he was running for mayor and I suddenly realized I was standing by the balustrade of Peggy Hitchcock's marble mansion where his fund raiser was, it was many, many feet down to the floor below, and he had, after all, stabbed his wife, so I backed off and away. But there were wonderful men and women who stood behind me then and Bellow wasn't one of them. Nor was Philip Roth, whom I actually knew sort of as he had eviscerated one of my closest friends in not one but two novels, just as Bellow had vampired his women. And when I asked Philip's victim why both these men had refused to let their names be used, she said "Because they're both cowards." So I don't lament Bellow, in whose name Philip will be receiving an award. Perfect.
We did have one very literary evening early in my marriage, when Philip and his lover, my lovely, gentle friend came to dine with us and Jules Feiffer and his then wife Judy. Don described it afterwards as like sitting in the shallows of the ocean, getting hit with wave after wave, they were so brilliant and competetive, the wit tsunamied; none of us could catch our breath. I am glad Jules is still alive. The exact thing he said which I expurgated from my piece when Vonnegut died, when he asked why I wanted to be friends with writers, "they're terrible people," to my answer that Gay Talese was close friends with Vonnegut whom I so longed to know, was "How could anyone be close friends with Gay Talese?" I like Gay, so I left that out, but fair is fair, and since I spare no one in these things, and Jules repeated quite recently that he stood by both statements, what the hell.
Kay Boyle is doubtless known to almost none of you. She was one of those high, lofty writers, not in attitude, but esteem, elected to the American Academy, already old when I met her, after reading in Publisher's Weekly that she had cancelled her contract with Doubleday because they had sued me. I tracked her down and we became good friends for the rest of her life, when I would go up to Oregon and visit, or she would come down to San Francisco when I lived there after Don died and she would be honored by PEN for her political activism, which she never forgave me for not having in my work. Hope there's still time. She had lived in exactly the right era, wrote a book with another author called 'Being Geniuses Together," about their young times in Paris, which of course I would have liked to emulate, but then when it got to be my turn to expatriate I was singing in a night club, in another much later decade, and Fitzgerald and Hemingway, all those I would have liked to have hung out with, even if Ernest did badly use Ezra, were long gone. Kay had been married-- she was much married as I recall, three or maybe four times-- to a man who was hounded by the House Un-American Activities Committee, the reason she so quickly stepped up to side with me, whom she didn't even know. As it turned out, the advance she returned when she canceled her contract with Doubleday, was $1000. That made me sick and sad. That great lady, and a lady she was, with such stature, and fine works behind her, and all they had given her that she gave back, which she could ill afford to do, was $1000.
Mario Puzo-- well, that's a whole saga. He was for several years our closest friend, Don's and mine, loving Don more than me which was easy to do, he was so genial and un-demanding. I gave Mario "The Pretenders" when it was one place behind The Godfather on the best-seller list, and he called me from the airport and said "You can't fool me: you wrote this for the same reason I wrote The Godfather; you wanted a bestseller. But the good writing is undisguisable." What could I do but love him? We gave him a dinner party consisting of all the dishes in The Fortunate Pilgrim, his earlier book that went un-noticed that he really loved, as he did the dishes, cooked by me--alongside "thigh-thick bread,"-- Mario wrote about food like I wrote about sex. We went everywhere with him and his Zelda-like mad mistress, only blonde, Nedra, she'd changed her name to, never telling him she was a lesbian, using her girlfriend at the Hollywood Reporter to get to him, because she wanted to play Kay in the movie, imagining, as the innocent do, even when they are corrupt, that a writer has anything to say when it comes to casting the movie. We made our front window on Rembert Lane into a bookstore, with floodlights and all, just for him, when they re-issued The Fortunate Pilgrim. We went everywhere together having "eating experiences," which Mario liked best until he found Nedra, and conceivably after. He went to Duke to try and lose weight and told us of a fellow inmate who'd had to be rushed to emergency after eating two gallons of Kosher pickles. We really loved him. Then he got mad at me for writing too many books. "Another book!" he raged, throwing The Motherland on the floor. He was having a really constipated time, creatively, and when Nedra, whose whole life was extreme fiction(run out of a Southern town for seducing the minister's son, which she turned into a Blanche DuBois reverie, re-making herself into a debutante in New Orleans) died young and still willowy dazzling, of an aneurism, he managed somehow to make it into a not interesting novel, Fools Die.
Still, when I got sued for libel by the charlatan who ran the nude encounter I'd gone to, and tried to transmute in my novel Touching into my Madame Bovary, I called Mario. He said "That's ridiculous. Anyone could come out of the woodwork and sue anyone-- writer they'd passed in a hall. Sinatra could sue me. You must call all the writers. You can't appeal to their morality, because they have none. You must appeal to their cowardice. You must say 'If I go, you go.'"
"Thank you, Mario," I said. When the Supreme Court refused to hear my case, and Doubleday, which had argued up to that point to the court that it would have "a chilling effect on Fiction," turned and sued me, I called Mario. He wouldn't take my call.
As Don was dying, the one gift I could give him besides being there in a really deep way, was getting everyone who had been important in his life to call him, he was so loving, so appreciated knowing people cared. I ran into the woman who had optioned Fools Die, and asked her to have Mario call, as I no longer had his contact. She phoned me the day before Don died and said Mario didn't want to talk to him. I'm afraid I lost whatever centeredness I had, and let out all the rage and frustration you feel about cancer, which you can't get your hands on, on her.
Some months later I went to a party at Scandia, where we had had many dinners with Mario. My dinner partner was, as good Serendipity would have it, Freud's Last Pupil. He was almost blind, but he could really see. I told him the whole story, weeping, and he said "What ego!" I rejoiced in my soul that he was really going to let Mario have it. "You knew from the first incident that the man was an asshole," he went on. "But you thought you could change him."
So there it was. The ego was Me.
Ah, but another year went by; I went to a book signing, and there was Mario's secretary. Yet again I burst into tears. I told her the last part of the story. "But Gwen," she demurred. "Mario loved Don. The woman never told him. He would have called. Call him tomorrow," she said, and gave me the number.
I did. He wouldn't take the call.
There are some I don't lament, going before me. Emphasis on the 'before.'

Sic Transit

Jack Valenti is dead, arbiter of ratings and motion picture fan. He was also a lover of my mother's. Little men particularly were heated up by her, because she was so tiny and flirtatious she made them feel tall. At least until she had them in her grip at which point she cut them down to below size.
She met Valenti through Leo Jaffe, a family friend, who was treasurer of Columbia Pictures, Vice-President towards the end of the Schneider regime, and mad for her, after her for years, in spite of or maybe because of the fact that she and his wife Terry were friends. He schlepped my first musical, written when I was twenty in Paris, from Max Gordon's, the producer's office, to several other offices with my stepfather Puggy, who lugged a huge machine--they were then--so the tape of my creation could be played. When one person didn't like it, Leo said "Then we'll find someone who will," which sounded very heartening and helpful to one who was twenty, and thought all things were possible. What wasn't possible was that Leo would ever land my mother, though he tried up to the end of his life, and, for all I know, after, since they are all now in Little People's Hereafter, or Not. And if so maybe they get to have all their dreams come true, even the carnal ones.
Valenti nailed her in Rome, and she told me it was the first time she had an orgasm without foreplay, not the kind of thing a mother usually discusses with her daughter, but as most of you know by now, she was not the usual mother. So he must have been a spicy little Sicilian, and Leo would have had a heart attack earlier than the one he had if he had known that Jack had been where he so wanted to go.
Jack also hit on my friend Wendy, when I introduced them in DC. Wendy was young and adorable and with NIH and he was after her 'Big Time,' in Wendy's words, inviting her to Mexico. He seemed brusque and unsexy to me, but then, what did I know-- certainly less than my mother. Wendy turned him down. I wonder how she is. She was one of the first women working on AIDS.
As for the musical Leo Jaffe schlepped, it finally got a hearing when my agent at MCA got me an audition with Frank Loesser, my idol who wrote 'Guys and Dolls' and a trunkfull of wonderful songs, some of them allegedly other people's. I sang a few numbers for Frank, and he said "Kid, you're the biggest talent since me. Write me a musical." So I pulled out the one I had written when I was 20, made it better, added some new songs, and sent it to Frank. After some weeks I called to find out what had happened with it.
"Moss and I are working on this musical in Boston, and we've used some of your stuff."
Shocked but flattered, I finally managed "What about money?" "Write your family," Frank said.

Carol Burnett's Birthday

I mark this event not because I am so moved by or tied to Carol Burnett, but because it turned out that was also the date I got married. I had wanted my wedding, since it was finally taking place, bonding me to Don, the only kind man who had ever come into my sphere and wouldn't go away, to be on the 18th of April, Paul Revere's ride. But that wasn't on a Sunday, and we had to get married on a Sunday, because my mother was suing my father for child support for me(I was 29), he was the mayor of Tucson, and that was the only day he couldn't be arrested: the marshall was waiting at the end of the crystal-chandeliered corridor for it to turn midnight, kind of the dark, vengeful Jewish version of Cinderella, so he could nab him.
We gathered in the Gold and White Suite of the Plaza Hotel, everybody I loved or thought I did, for a wedding breakfast following the ceremony; my mother and Puggy, her husband du jour, on the right, on the left my father and Selma,the bitch wife to whom my mother had introduced him, thinking she would surely finish off the job my mother had started, only to find, to her horror, that Selma actually elevated him, took this man who was such a loser he couldn't pay $100 a week child support, moved him to Tucson where she filled him with such confidence he subdivided the desert and made it bloom, becoming the richest realtor in Tucson, and then its mayor. He had come to New York some months before to check out this man I had been seeing, and, pronouncing him not my type, returned to his hotel room to find the marshall waiting with a subpoena, for failure to pay child support from the time I was eleven, when they divorced, till I was twenty-one, some years before. My father immediately called me and accused me of fingering him to my mother, but in fact, my mother, probably the world's best detective, with her restive relentlessness, had gone through the yellow pages, calling every hotel until the Pennsylvania, where he was staying, and found him. Nonetheless my father accused me, and as I sobbed 'No, Daddy, NO, I didn't, I didn't," Don, not used to such high-level domestic drama, came into my apartment just in time to see me jump out the window, not knowing there was a little balcony outside. I can conjure to this day the vision of his sweet face drained of all blood as he stuck his head out, assuming i had leapt to my death. I guess it was then I made up my mind to marry him, in spite of what a good man he was.
So there we all were at the Plaza on Sunday, April 26th, with my maid of Honor(how funny it seems now) Sue Mengers, who said "We must do this every Sunday," and Stanley Kubrick, my on and off best friend, cornering Don who was producing the Jets games at the time for TV, telling him to keep the camera on the line, and Don saying, "Stanley, if you'll let me run credits at the end saying 'Directed by Stanley Kubrick,' I'll keep the camera anywhere you say." Then there was the Rabbi we'd gotten after we decided we couldn't use the Rabbi fromTemple Emanuel, what with his name-dropping who he'd just married(Freddie Fields) Our Rabbi had to leave early because it was one of those tish somethings where you couldn't dance and he thought we might want to dance. There was Canadian bacon we told Don's Grandma was corned beef, and my Grandma who didn't care, except she was glad I was getting married.
Then Lew the Mayor, as Don called him, took us aside, and said, more rabbinical than the rabbi, 'My children-- anyone could give you presents or money-" Don murmured in my ear 'Anybody but you, you stingy son-of-a-bitch-- "But i am giving you something with meaning: a tenth of a lot in Tucson where one day a great medical center will rise. Unfortunately, it's beneath regulation size for a medical center, but we'll fix that." A few months later he sent us a bill fot the taxes on our share of the lot, and Don told him what he could do with our tenth or, indeed, the whole lot if he had room for it. That launched a breech that was not to be healed, in spite of beautiful grandchildren who looked just like Grandpa Lew until he came to visit when my trust fund, into which he'd put the money he owed my mother for child support for me so she couldn't arrest him, came due, when he reappeared and asked if I didn't want to give it to him to invest.
But it was a lovely wedding. Today. I won't tell you how long ago,because I can't believe how old I am. But I am glad I married him, Happy Birthday to Carol Burnett.

HITLER'S BIRTHDAY

Today is Hitler's birthday, and for those of you (us) who thought there was an end-time for a clear delineation of evil, SURPRISE! These past few days have seen an outcrop of ugliness that reminds me of when I was taking geology, and our professor marched us through Wissahicken Schist. We laughed then, because we were undergraduates and made little jokes of mispronunciation in our minds. But the world, or certainly our country, has lost any concept of decency and privacy, and what has outcropped onto the airways is Wissahicken Shit.
We could only turn away from the constant broadcasting of the horror at Virginia Tech, the excuse on the part of the networks being that it was a "News Story," and so there was an obligation to broadcast it. Really? Wasn't Auschwitz? Did we have to see the films of the skeletons and bulldozed bodies if we weren't sadistic?
How low have we sunk, that those who regulate our laws(see Gonzalez) are the patently stupidest, and the biggest liars. And worse, that the alleged 'Truth' is broadcast on the 'Today'Show, which had the tasteless temerity to run Alec Baldwin's rant to his daughter, undoubtedly sent to YouTube by the relentless bitchery of his ex-wife. What's wrong with people? What business was it of ours?
And what business is the Today Show in, that they would make that a part of supposedly homespun Americana?
I feel so bad for Baldwin that he blew, so sorry for his having loved not wisely and apparently not too well either. I am so sickened by the villainy of his ex-wife, that she has such a vampiric appetite for revenge. But most of all I am sad for our country, that this kind of crap is going down, welcomed, and exploited,
We have learned nothing from the man who made the cover of Time Magazine, because that publication really had no choice but to put Hitler on it, he was such a dark force. But "the last good war" was apparently never really won. The forces of evil, something I never really wanted to believe existed, are elbowed into the sidelines by the forces of media.
I remember during Watergate, when I went to a dinner party at the Georgetown Club; my friend Diane, who was my guide at the time into the world of metaphysics, had said there was no such thing as evil-- there was only absence of good. I expressed that belief to my dinner partner, Richard Kleindienst, one of Nixon's fired attorney generals. And he said to me, "Oh, there's evil all right. I've seen it."
Well now we've all seen it. The producers of the Today Show should turn the cameras on themselves and add their faces to the rogue's gallery of villains. What a world, what a world! Margaret Hamilton might say, no longer seeming a witch when measured against Kim Basinger. And what a country, what a country, that any of us are buying into any of that because of our preoccupation with celebrity, and our complete, I mean complete lack of an inner life, so we suck around the remains of the shattered lives of others.
Shame on us. And Happy Birthday to Hitler. He would be so pleased with the way it's all turned out, in spite of his appearing to lose.

A CONDOLENCE LETTER

I woke up this morning with the slightly queasy feeling of loss, and the nagging suspicion I should write a condolence letter. In the haze of a confused or relaxed consciousness, it took me a minute to remember who had died, Kurt Vonnegut, a beloved but not close friend, and not more than a spit of time for the realization to sink in that I could not write to the person most appropriate to receive my condolences, since she, as Shakespeare might have put it, likes not me, and it is because of her constant intercession that Kurt and I did not become closer.
So I have decided to write to the one whose greatest loss it is, and that is the world, the planet that Kurt had such an elevated awareness about, whose despoiling he mourned for most of his intelligent life, exacerbated towards the end by his reasonable loathing of George W. Bush, and his grief over the ruination of what had been the country he was so proud of. Rage in Vonnegut wore the cloak of wit, expressed so originally and with such unique cadences that his popularity was greatest among those who fancied themselves rebels, as he was. I wrote several times to the Nobel Committee nominating him, which he found particularly amusing, since he understood how political that prize was, and how little chance there was of their ever taking him seriously, since the only living American(he was then) they were considering had to be a blowhard like Saul Bellow, when Kurt was a man who blew soft.
He was in his sixties when I first met him, an age I no longer consider old, but might have at the time because he was already venerable, the words he had written powerful as they were comic, or rather, loaded because comedy was their disguise. But he was also on the side of justice and sanity, neither of which were prevailing in his time, or maybe never were, and have certainly vanished now. My son likened him to Mark Twain, which the critics also did at his passing. But I suspect Mark Twain, who was a close friend of mine, though long dead, (see a meeting I had with him in Kingdom Come, for which I received an unsoliticted A+ from my college American Lit professor, Warner Berthoff) was a lot funnier, and perhaps more comfortable in his own skin than Vonnegut, pissed off at most things though he, too, was. Vonnegut's hair never got quite as white as Twain's, and his lot, I don't think, ever got as financially desperate(Twain had to roam the world as a travel writer to sustain himself in his later days, something I know from personal experience is a gift, but might not have seemed so to him at the time.) Kurt stayed closer to home, though he St. Barted in the winters, and looked forward to autumn, when he would travel north to New England to visit friends and see the leaves change.
If you have looked lately into the heart of a flower, fixed on it for some moments at least, you can see peace there, so I hope it was the same for him when he saw those sweeps of russet and gold on the canvas Nature made. When we became close to close, he was just turning seventy, complaining that he was already many years older than Steinbeck had been when he died, so the towel with which he mopped his cares was already poised to be thrown in. I was in my meditational phase, or trying to be, my attention playing hooky from serenity school, but I tried, in ways, to gentle him down, he was so anxious over having been abandoned. He was trying to write a book from the point of view of Booth, the actor who assassinated Lincoln, but it was not going well. Lincoln being a particular hero of his, I tried to get him to come to the 125th anniversary of the Los Angeles Public Library, using the lure of the wealthy woman here who has snagged all Lincoln's china and silver and high-faultin' doo-dads from that era, promising the dinner that honored him would have a table set with all those things, but he said it would make him too sad. I asked him why, and he said because Lincoln was dead. I tried to point out that even if he hadn't been shot, he would have passed anyway. But that was no consolation. Besides, his very hands-on spouse insisted to the woman whose task that event was, that it would be just too unmanageable, toting around that lumbering-- (he still was, then, not yet frail) giant on airplanes, unless they got to go first class and could bring everybody, which the library couldn't afford.
So he's gone, and with him, the conversations you could have with him, world. In recent years my conviction that This was not all there was has weakened, my hope, faith really, that there was some guiding intelligence behind the universe, and we were all headed for a place where we could chew over, without swallowing, what we had learned, has faltered. I would like to think that, cynic that he was or struggled to be, he might be having a pleasant surprise around now, and be in the Bardo, maybe with Steinbeck. But I am afraid in view of the spiritual mantel I long believed was protecting this country having shredded, the hope/faith/dream of all that might be delusion. If not, it's good, world that you paid at least some attention. Kiss him Goodbye.
And Heaven/Afterlife/Bardo-- if you're there, for God's sake welcome him, thank him, let him know he really made a difference. And show him there are more things in Heaven and Earth than have been dreamed of in even his philosophy. And so he goes.

STEAMROLLER TIME

I cannot help thinking that there is a curious parallel between what Howard Stern is doing to 'American Idol,' and what the Clintons are doing to the election. To my chagrin, because of Pam Korman, a darling friend I have made since moving back to L.A., I started watching 'Idol,' and, to my deepening shame, got hooked. My addiction to my country, though, has a long and I hope more illuminated history, starting when I was a very little girl, and understood words and voices, and thought I could hear in F.D.R.'s reassuring resonances, that everything would be all right. My student days were lifted by Adlai Stevenson's humanistic concerns and the possibilties of greatness, what was left of my idealistic youth elevated by Kennedy's eloquence, shattered, along with everybody else's, by his assassination, when I turned the channel from Cronkhite's wiping his eyes after looking at the clock and announcing the death, to NBC where I thought he might still be alive. After that I had babies, so my affection focussed elsewhere until Johnson said he would not run, when I re-began loving America.
As I have already written in these reports, I felt I had a personal hand in bringing down Nixon, voted Republican because I trusted Gerald Ford, and later mistrusted Jimmy Carter. Don would not die until he signed his absentee ballot for Mondale, which I took to the polling place, sobbing. So my sense of connection is passionate and deep-rooted. Along with my thinking friends I have suffered through this abysmal administration, wondering why we were not taking to the streets.
And now comes our chance to pull ourselves out of this cesspool, and I am fearful we are going to blow it. Though I don't know David Geffen, I agree with him that Hillary is polarizing, and that if she is the candidate, the Democrats lose. But as Howard Stern maniacally undermines the genuine talents with the farce of getting his listeners to vote for the desperately ungifted Sanjaya, so the (almost) irresistible Bill is out beating the money drums for Hillary, to try and overcome Obama.
The true horror is that this all seems to be about money. Pols understand that it has ever been so, but I really don't. I thought it was about serving our country, about finding the person with the most to give, the ability to unite, lift, inspire, and make other nations respect us, not laugh and/or tremble as this joker has done. So that it all comes down to the buck is enough to turn me against the whole system.
Even my own personal choice, John Edwards, has a staff that hassles me for money, when I ask if I can write for him, volunteer, man phones, anything. Having sent in one donation, I get an e-mail a day with a solicitation, a cry that if more money isn't sent in, he might not be able to emerge as a candidate. I hate all this. Howard Stern is a malevolent geek who likes to undermine and show his own wacko power. But who/what is the force behind our elections turning on the dollar?
And what are we going to do about it? Let's get Sirius.

THE RETURN OF MIMI

How young we must have been when we wanted to conquer New York. How brave our hearts were, and how blind our eyes. I cannot be sure whether it is the city that has grown harder, or my own skin that has thinned, but the place that gave rise to the circle at the Algonquin has given way to a restaurant owned by Graydon Carter. That is to say, aspiration, wit, and poetry have shrunk and morphed into a celebrity culture, if a culture it can still be called, and if those looked at with... what? awe? shock and awe? can be considered true celebrities, paralleling a president not in the least presidential. What a great country we were. What a great city New York was. Or maybe, in the words of my fellow P.S.9 alum, Hal Dresner, we were strengthened by having the John Jasper Journal, in which both our works appeared on the same page when we were nine or ten, to affirm us at an early enough age to make us think all things were possible when we grew up.
My own sensibilities seem validated by Mimi's. The whole time we were there she appeared reluctant to pee, she is SUCH a lady, and is not sure if the sidewalk outside our apartment building is the continuation of the lobby. The park was either frozen over, black-slushed, or a fetid dark puddle, so we rarely made it into that sometimes sanctuary, instead circling the block so she would eventually relieve herself at the back entrance of the Essex House, where there is a mat she could use unobserved, while I looked around and whistled. Once back in LA, however, her sense of relaxation is visible, and she lets go every few feet on the grass. I am not usually fixed on the toilet habits of little beasties, but the parallel between human confusion/tension and theirs is evident.
Still, we must love New York for a number of things: the friends we still have there, the fantasy that it is the hub of the universe, which I suppose it is if you are a theater junkie and cannot get to London, where Kevin Spacey is in charge of the National, so how good can that be? We must also love it for its restaurants, most treasured of which on the High End is Le Cirque, because we love the Maccionis. That is not the Royal We, but the Me and Mimi We, since Sirio and Egi are beloved friends of mine, and Marco, the middle son, is beloved by Mimi. Marco wanted to be a vet, and has a bull mastiff named Mostro who, on pleasant days, guards the entrance to Circo, the less expensive, more neighborly arm of their restaurant kingdom.
Pleasant days, I understand, have returned to New York now that we have left. I try not to take it personally. I try not to take anything personally, but a lot of the time I lose that battle, including what this admininstration has done to our country, which all of us should take personally and maybe it will finally get us into the streets. One of the great Justices, I think it was Frankfurter, said the 1st amendment should not apply to crying 'Fire!' in a crowded theater. I believe that 'Off with their Heads', as the Red Queen kept crying in Alice in Wonderland could now be the acceptable roar, as the worst of them will not back off from a crowded theater of war.
It really feels like Impeachment should be back on the table. Pelosi's chiding him like a strict disapproving Mama just doesn't seem enough. I'm sure he already had one of those, and look at the result.
Well, Easter is coming, and Passover too, so maybe the Hand of God will make an appearance. I would turn to prayer to ask that, but am afraid my words might get caught in the updraft coming from the evangelicals.
Love and kisses from a Kinder, Gentler Clime.

THE COAST OF BULLSHITIA

I have written before in this report of my old editor, Don Fine, from whom I learned the word 'ineffable.' It became a favorite word because there are more things in this world, Horatio, that are 'unspeakable' than one could have predicted. Still, I use the word rarely, because it has such power in my mind, that one must be discriminating and not abuse it. But now I am afraid that our whole culture, indeed, perhaps our whole so-called civilization, has become one of such ineffable bullshit that we are poised on the brink of... well....falling so deep into bullshit we won't even be able to speak. Or maybe not even note it anymore, the Emperor's New Clothes cladding everything from our political system and our alleged leaders to our books, our fashions, and, God Help Us , the The-ah-tre.
I am in this particular ineffable rage because I went to the Tom Stoppard's 'Coast of Utopia,' a troika of plays(they were supposed to be) yesterday, having bought tickets for all three in their marathon form on my last trip here, imagining that Spring would be coming this time of year, and my consciousness would be in full bud. So yesterday morning, filled with hope I went at 11 Am to the first of the three. It was very Russian, having many characters with names you couldn't distinguish when you were making your way through their novels, which at least had plot, and were, in the best of them, gripping human tales. Tom Stoppard has apparently done his research, and there is no question he is intellectulally adept. But oh, my dears, it was so very unmoving, except for the staging and scenery, which included projections where we swirled in a deep ocean that I eventually decided was his ability to fool people. I could remember my husband saying 'Dazzle 'em with footwork,' but this was wordwork, none of it leading anywhere except to the carotid artery. I also remembered my darling Mabel, the Greek teacher at Bryn Mawr, telling me when I went back to write a play under her aegis "Drama means 'To do.'" I could also hear Shakespeare citing himself, pointing his finger at 'a poor player who struts and frets his weary hour upon the stage, full of Sound and Fury, signifying nothing.' But oh, what a rogue and peasant slave are we, that we buy into this pretentious pap, now at $100 a throw.
Still, I went back for the second play, having bonded at intermission with a nice lady named Lila, all preened for the event, having come up from Philadelphia, having wanted to get her Master's at Bryn Mawr but they made it too hard for her(my second beef with them) who asked me over lunch what my children did and if I was involved in their lives, and in a magical sweep of word economy, reacting to the surfeit of verbose, I said "Not much. Not very."
We agreed to have dinner together but all the restaurants around :Lincoln Center said they were "fully committed." As it turned out, I didn't make it to dinner, and left play two at the intermission, which I had hoped was the end of the play, there being no way to tell since there was much strutting and fretting its weary hour and a half upon the stage but not a single thing that touched the spirit or moved,except the scenery, including the French Revolution which was staged with full smoke and banners and a horse statue on the Concorde that came apart with the first explosion. I tried to sell my ticket to play three, but the box office had several from those who had wised up before me, and at dinner, sitting at the bar at Josephina's, I couldn't even give it away. On the way out, by the way, I told the Maitre d' that he should say 'Fully booked' instead of 'Fully Committed' as that meant having some emotional stake. What a fiasco! At one point a little boy in the play(I use the word advisedly--- it was more a flash of all the information Stoppard had under his raincoat) went for a walk and his mother said "Don't let him play on the riverbank!" so I was hopeful he might fall in and give us one moment we had to shrink from, but no such bad luck.
To be fair Ethan Hawke was surprisingly good, full of bombast, as suited his character, and as Lila from Philadelphia said, it gave work to a lot of actors. But when I came home I did my laundry, which turned out to be more exciting, and then watched 'Judgment at Nuremberg' where Spencer Tracy's looking out the window at the Germany that had wrought the enormity of this sorrow spoke more than all Mr.Stoppard's words.
Happily I had reuned this trip with a bright Brit friend who'd told me she always found Stoppard, ultimately, light. I was glad not to feel alone, though I would have said 'empty.' But then it's all empty right now, isn't it, here on the brink.
Today I had brunch with Tyne and some of her friends. Happily, she'd saved me from 'Year of Magical Thinking' along with my smart friend Carol who also found it "tedious." I'd suffered for a few years because when Don died an otherwise wise friend dissuaded me from writing about it, because she said no one wanted to hear about a widowing, so when Didion wrote her book with her scalpel(I think that's what she uses rather than a pen,) I felt bad, although as I read it I could not help musing that she had, in truth, for all her pain, been spared the real agony, which is the process of losing, watching someone hale and funny and, in my case, hunky, gradually-- though speeded up with Don, who took eleven weeks from diagnosis till death-- disappear. Tyne says that Vanessa Redgrave actually announces in Didion's words (something like) "I'm going to tell you, because this is what you're all going to go through" which would be haughty and presumptuous even if not put in the mouth of a usually British-accented actress(though not here; I'm told it's acceptably American) We all have or will have different experiences in connection with loss, so she has SOME nerve, and that's okay, she's suffered in her way, but nobody did it for all of us except Jesus and then not unless we're Christian. So I'm glad to have skipped that, and saved several people on the street from going to 'Utopia.'
Now if there were only some way I, we, God, --anybody,-- could save the country.

Foul Weather Friend

This visit has been a test for Mimi. Probably the whitest dog in Life Biz,(she will probably end up in Show Biz but will always try for a sense of Balance,) she has been groomed three times, or thrice, as Tommy Thompson would have writ, since coming to New York. Forced into boots, very smart but annoying, to preserve her paws in the snow, she has suffered in silence, waiting for Spring, which officially starts today but teased everyone into thinking it had come last week, only to be undone by ice storms and sleet storms and all the garbage that could possibly have been thrown into the atmosphere, sending us both into retreat, quite literally, giving us cabin fever, locked in as we were. When she could finally venture out, it was only the Beggin' Strips bought especially for her by King, the tall black doorman next door at the Essex House who missed the dogs of his boyhood, that gave her the strength and will to continue, the streets were so icy and slick.
Then yesterday, my mother's birthday and the 4th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, something my mother would never have started unless it was with a husband, it seemed a fair enough day so we could walk up Fifth Avenue. The West Side of that majestic boulevard was still cluttered with empty grandstands from the St. Patrick's Day parade, the cracks in the sidewalk aglint with tiny fallen green foil shamrocks. So we walked uptown on the other side, where the grand hotels(what's left of them, the Pierre having been diminished along with the Sherry-Netherlands) and elegant apartment houses are, so the sidewalks are cleared, none of those buildings wishing to have lawsuits. (Snow is still piled high and black, as it used to be in Pittsburgh when I was a little girl, and the air was filthy, as it no longer is in Pittsburgh, the steel mills having been vanquished, apparently relocating here, or maybe it's just the smoke from politicians.) The Frick Museum, having the most money to lose, had salted the sidewalk alongside, so I had to carry her for a block, as that salt is murder to paws, and she wasn't wearing her boots. She has porked up in her confinement, so it was a furry handfull, and her belly had been blackened by the excursion, so it wasn't easy for either of us.
We visited my dermatologist, then returned on foot, and by the time we got back here she was filthy. So I put her into the tub, where the water turned black as her eyes, and she had her second home bath in-between groomings, and looked at me with a look of absolute betrayal. What had she done?
New York New York. If you can stay clean there, you'll stay clean anywhere. I shall not lament returning to LA, where all you have to deal with is your brain turning to mush and the occasional earthquake.
Meanwhile, my friend Tyne Daly who moved back here has just returned from the 'Ms.' Magazine cruise, and says that Eleanor Smeal is between a rock and a hard place what to do about Hillary, or, as I put it, Barack and a hard place. Tyne says it is exactly the same situation as after the Civil War, when they didn't know whether to give the vote to black men or women. I'm not sure of the accuracy of that statement, but she reads all the time, so it's probably true. But many are those who are trying to find the neat way to dump Hillary. Harris Wofford, once president of Bryn Mawr, which is how I know him, studied with Gandhi, worked with Martun Luther King, JFK, RFK and Clinton, and, difficult as it is for him, has stepped away from her as he doesn't "want to hear her voice coming out of the TV for the next 8years." He assured me that Barack can indeed, do the job, as he worked with poverty for ten years before he became a senator, and is three years older than "John" (I love that) was when he became president, and though "John did manage to graduate Harvard Law, he did so with no particular distinction, whereas Barack was the first black editor of the Law Review."
I watched Obama last night on Larry King and he certainly can handle himself, with enough grace and smarts to make even Larry King tolerable. I dreamt last night I went to visit the Obamas at their home, which was on the side of a hill, and they were wonderful hosts and very helpful afterwards when I couldn't remember where I parked my car-- there were a lot of cars and I think I had rented, so maybe the confusion was I didn't know which was mine. I am unable to interpret the dream, but I did want to report they were good company. But I still like Edwards.
Tonight I go to the Italian Cultural Institute for a reception for Charlotte Chandler, a nice woman who lives in my building, and has written a number of star biographies, tonight's being Ingrid Bergman's, Ingrid Bergman in Italy, the title of the book, celebrating her time with Rossellini, which I hope it was. A celebration I mean. She seemed borderline despondent when I met her later in her life, and told her in the rush of enthusiasm I always seem to have around those I admire, especially movie stars, that she was the most beautiful woman who had ever been in films('tis true: check out her supporting role in 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,') and she said, rather sadly, "How very lucky for me." I was strangely moved until I saw Saratoga Trunk on TV a few years later, and that was a line in the movie. You always think these people have brains, confused by their beauty and the sound of their voices.
The world will not feel that with Mimi. (Her picture TK. That's journalese, I think, for 'To come.') .

Spring is Here

So Mimi and I had a few blighted, icy days, one where she had to wear booties and walked as though she had been gang-banged, but today the sun is out and we came home from the groomer's through Central Park. In a tunnel, the best in the park acoustically, he said, having tested them all, a piper played Irish tunes though he wasn't Irish and didn't want a dollar. He is Italian in origin and a lawyer who just enjoys music. I wished him well and told him to keep his soul. It can't be easy to do that if you're a lawyer.
We ran into another lawyer, she the mother in a young Chinese family, and I said the few words I can remember in Mandarin, which is little more than Hello and Good bye, Thank you, and Fabulous!(loose translation of Bang, which actually means delicious) when she told me she had passed the bar in English and Chinese. She must be truly brilliant, as the biggest waste of cerebral time and money in my life has been the study of Mandarin, begun when I found a flyer that said 'Cecilia Rasmussen, linguist to the Stars, as featured in 'In Style Magazine', which I thought had to be a hoot. It wasn't, though the upside is I reeled in a buddy and we have gone through it together and bonded, as nothing will bond two bright women faster and better than both of them feeling stupid at the same time. Initially I was studying it so I could speak it when I went to Shanghai, a trip I figured I would make this Spring, but I am sufficiently put off by the language to have given up all thought of going. Partly, I think, that is because I feel unsure, as do many, of what will happen in the world, but mostly it is because I have no love of the language, and that is what has bolstered me through most of my adventures, including the ones where I spoke English.
But it most definitely Spring. Flowers are not yet budding, though people are, coming out in droves as they do in Paris the first decent day. When I was in New York in December, and the weather was milder than it is now, I walked along Central Park South and at the curb outside one of the buildings someone had put out for garbage collection a big box of old 33 1/3 albums. Angled at the top, propped up and smiling at me was Rosemary Clooney, so I took it as the greeting it was, commandeered the album, subsequently made it into a CD and put it in my car CD player in LA. The best song on it is 'Spring is Here', that captures to the full Rosie's magic, a kind of honey-throated reverence for lyrics that sounds like she is on the verge of tears. It is easy to do that with that lyric by Lorenz Hart, filled with the only admirable kind of self-pity: "No desire no ambition leads me-- maybe that's because nobody needs me," belly-button staring turned to art. I loved that song when I was young, and love it still, though the fears on it are very outdated. It is not lack of romance we have to be afraid of anymore as much as these guys. I do not have to tell you who I mean, since you have all received my last poem and I have been cautioned(warned? threatened?) by a Republican that I am now available electronically so I should watch what I say.
Anyway, after a most pleasant afternoon I went with Billy Danoff, my friend who wrote 'Country Roads' and 'Afternoon Delight' to a concert at Zenkel Hall, a bamboo(it looked like) and metal-lighting fixtures on the ceiling side-adjunct to Carnegie Hall, to see some performers who play with Billy at the John Denver memorial in Aspen that takes place every year- Denver fans being true fanatics, coming from as far as Japan to remember that dorky guy, as Billy refers to him, but with affection. Bill and Taffy, his then wife and singing partner were an act called 'Fat City' when Denver walked in on them at the Cellar Door, a once boite in DC where they were loved, went home with them, laid in the first line of 'Country Roads' and the rest is pop history(Billy got $89,000 in royalties from Germany this year.) I myself found Bill and Taffy when I went to DC for the restorative debut of Tommy Smothers as a single(his initial outing at the Troubadour had been upended by a rude, drunken display by John Lennon who, after a smoke-filled(it still was then) room-ful of Tommy friends unsuccessfully tried to to quiet him down, was carried out of the club like debris on a wave atop an ocean of hands, with a tampax on his nose(self-applied.) The DC debut was a lot more friendly, Harry Nillson having flown in along with other noted well-wishers, all of whom ended up at Bill and Taffy's house on Chain Bridge Road. And twas there, just like in the movies, that everybody played guitar and sang and wined and puffed in talented circle on the floor, and Billy played a tune for which I laid in a lyric that became a song for 'Kingdom Come' my movie that never got made but the song exists and is fine, and Bill and Taffy recorded it when they were much loved, which they still are by me, and the legion of Denver fans. Billy remains one of the most eclecticly knowledgeable people I know, having studied Mandarin(he must be smarter even than I imagined) at Georgetown where he was classmates with Bill Clinton(he did the music for their 25th reunion.) By eclectic, I do mean eclectic. For years I have been walking into the park by a statue of Jose Marti, and never knew who he was until yesterday when Billy informed me Marti was a revolutionary and also the author of the lyrics of 'Guantanamero.' "Tommy Smothers sang that," I said to Bill, with some sense of wonder at the breadth of his knowledge. "Sort of," Bill replied.
Last night's concert, however, was not as memorable as that night on Chain Bridge Road, except for the playing of a phenomenally gifted guitarist named Pete Hettlinger(I think) and the greater amazement at all those who had flown in from everywhere to hear these people who are associated with Denver only from his memorial concerts. Staggering. Well, throw a little sunshine into this world, and there's no telling who you'll touch or how long you'll be remembered. I try to think of that when I read Frank Rich on Sundays. . .

Opus Deities

I think I thought my mother was a movie star. She was tiny ---you can’t tell that when you’re little, looking up, but you can see that men are watching her. And you could observe her smile, dazzling, even white teeth behind parted shiny red lips, great legs, and the power, like The Shadow, to cloud men’s minds, starting with my father’s. He was madly in love with her, ‘madly’ being the operative word, as the violence between them was consistent and regular, charted by me on a calendar as soon as I was able to read numbers and make circles, around the age of four. I would draw a ring around the date of the last explosion, estimate the probable time of the next one, and was eerily accurate. Incidents when the police came, summoned by my grandpa—we all lived together in those early times—were noted with a star.
I suppose I thought that great love was signaled by bursts of passion like in the movies, absent the blood. Mostly, as I remember, and was able to reason in recollection, the fights were provoked by her, she was so disappointed by his moving in with her lovable but poor family; his family, though irascible and not much fun to be around, was on so much higher an economic plane, she’d imagined she would be marrying up. His failure to rise—he was a pharmacist and sold condoms for Bauer & Black, a kind of road company Johnson & Johnson, and she mockingly called him a ‘cunjun salesman,’—added to her rage, exacerbated by her conviction that he was cheating on her, a seeming irrationality that might have found footing in the fact that he hit on her younger sister.
The movie star Helen, aka Mom, most resembled was Paulette Goddard, being little and dark, saucy, with that flashing smile and perceptible wit. So when I heard, in Key West, where we’d fled when I was five, under cover of darkness so Daddy wouldn’t intercept us, that ‘Reap the Wild Wind,’ starring that actress, was filming there, I played hooky from school to watch. I’d written a note (I could write by then) signing my mother’s name, saying little Gwen was ill and could not be in school that day. So I stood hypnotized and enchanted on the dock, arduous and uninspiring though the actual movie-making process was, until it was time to go home.
My mother was by then a secretary in the offices of the U.S. Army—as bright as she was fetching, she had mastered Gregg shorthand on our train ride South—but the school had managed to get through to her to report my truancy(I guess my handwriting, at six and a half, was not too convincing.) So when I heard her high heels clacking in the hallway, the fury audible, I braced myself for the worst. It came. She hurled a lamp that missed me, and wielded a wooden yardstick that didn’t. The physical mayhem that apparently gave her and my father such disturbed satisfaction, serving as a kind of foreplay before they healed their anger with sex, had morphed its way onto me, the object of her disaffection. She was always sorry afterwards; I always forgave her. How could I not, when she was a movie star?
So it is at the feet of that apparent masochism that I lay my infatuation with the movies. Not that movies were unkind to me. On the contrary: it was in that protective, cosseting darkness that I was most comfortable. But many were the stars with whom I was besotted, several of whom I came to know personally, through quirks of Fate, or maybe some invisible, guiding hand that elected to impose on my life a deep superficiality. That is not an oxymoron, but an observation. There’s comfort in superficiality, the layers of fat and tissue that lie between the harshness of the world and you, cushioning its ability to inflict an actual wound.
Maybe that’s what accounts for the current celebrity craze. Maybe what’s going on in our time is just so painful and insoluble that most people take refuge from the war and the blind ignorance and their comfort from endless dispatches about Anna Nicole Smith. Or Brangelina, or Vincifer, if, praise God(Jennifer Hudson would say) Aniston gets it back together with Vaughn, or her nose job straightens out more than her septum.
In any case, this is by way of a confession that movies as church for me are over. I knew that the other night watching the Oscars, a ritual I have observed with reverence for more years than I thought to count, the weighty trio of directors having announced, when they finally got to give the award to Scorcese, that they had been close friends for thirty-seven years. I realized then that that was the exact number of years since Sandy Burton had covered our Academy Award mock-party for Time Magazine. 1970. The 42nd Academy Awards it was, given by the Mitchell Academy of Arts and Games, the raised print invitations read. Sandy called it an anti-Oscar party, because it was in the midst of Vietnam, all the liberals hated Bob Hope who was hosting, and John Wayne who was up for, and would receive the award for ‘True Grit.’ So, as noted in a previous Report, everybody who was anybody (and many who weren’t, since Don and I still had a taste at the base of our tongues for real friends) came to 9492 Rembert Lane in Beverly Hills.
But the darker part of the confession is that for me it wasn’t a bit ‘anti.’ I was thrilled at the presence of all those stars, elated and probably drunk with the truth that Time Magazine was at our house and I was getting publicity, which was more than Mother's Milk to me, since my mother's milk was a little sour even at the breast. But still sort of grounded in domesticity—a classmate in the Creative Writing program at Stanford where I went after Bryn Mawr(not as good) said that the reason I was crazy was due to an inner tussle between my mother and my Grandma Gussie, who only wanted to give love and food—I made all the hors d’ouevres for the party, won tons and empanadas and tiny franks rolled in dough (also hand-rolled) which had kept me cooking and baking and frying for days. Still, I also put my children, Robert(2) and Madeleine (4) in black tie, and myself in a beaded Michael Novarese. That is to say I admit not only to buying into but also buying for the Bullshit.
I watched this year’s awards from bed, alone, except for Mimi. I experienced no wish that I were there, or near, or leaping over the giant hedge outside Morton’s that Graydon Carter had had shaped into letters that read VANITY FAIR, that reminded me, when I attended, of the topiary in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining,’-- equally scary. I remember a story of E.M. Forster’s called ‘The Other Side of the Hedge,’ written, I would guess, some time on the brink of his fascination with the mystical and his dance with the Great God Pan. I think, I hope, that I have made it to the other side.
What's there is magic, and invisible. It turn out, particularly in these times, what matters most is that which we cannot see. Especially on television.

Jet Blues

I wrote an e-mail yesterday to David Neeleman, CEO of Jet Blue, responding to his personal e-mail to me as a Jet Blue loyalist, in which he apologized to me along with all his other customers, promising a "passenger's bill of rights" and compensation if another horror ever takes place as it did in the ice storm at JFK, where passengers were kept on runways for up to twelve hours with no chance of escape, food or clean toilets. I congratulated him on his unending round of public mea culpas, from the Today Show to Letterman, because he took full personal responsibility, admitted all the airlines' errors, and promised he would do all possible to rectify and see that it never happened again. My congratulations were based on the fact that he stepped up, something none of our leaders have seemed able to do, and suggested he run for president.
Thia after a blow up among the Democratic frontrunners, Obama and Hillary, because David Geffen, a very deep pocket and a very big mouth, threw a fund raiser for Barack and a brickbat at the Clintons, via Maureen Dowd, the savvy and extra sharp editorial columnist for the NYTimes who must have been exhilarated beyond belief that she had a new target besides her aptly labeled but (it was getting tired) Vice. For those of you on distant shores, the brouhaha was created by Geffen's saying the Clintons lie with "great ease", Hillary is polarizing and unelectable. I happen to agree with the last, and hope that all of this, her contained but perceptible rage, decrying against Democratic infighting, and asking Obama to step away from Geffen, and the money raised, (it was Big Time,) which Barack has declined to do. So he hasn't taken the high road that so far he has skated along, all of which is okay with me, as I hope it will clear the arena for the man I think can do the job, John Edwards, the only one of any of them whom I have believed all along, including when he took the 2nd spot to the phlegmatic, pompous and disappointing Kerry. From the first time I listened to Edwards, I was convinced that every word that he spoke he really meant, and that they were from the heart, which he still visibly has. His wife is no less touchingly magnetic, having lost a child then had two more, and is a breast cancer survivor without wallowing. They seem truly estimable people, and it would be a major healing for this country to have people as our hood ornament who were genuinely admirable for a change, not driven by self-interest or oil, or satanic, sweaty, growling billiard balls(I wonder who she means by that?)
Anyway, in spite of my sincere regard for the airline, we left Burbank this morning for New York and headed instead for Denver as the plane didn't have enough fuel what with the heavy load and the wrong runway out. And twas then I began thinking about what must have happened to the pets that Jet Blue allows you to have under the seat for a fee during that ordeal in New York, and what Mimi might have endured.
Mimi, as friends know, has been traveling with me everywhere, and in spite of the fact that she should know by now that she will not be left behind, gets crazy for several days before I leave, which she knows out of some deep brilliance and intuition that seems not to carry over to the fact that she will be going along. So I can't start packing until just before. Even so, she guards the door for several days, and once there is luggage, sits on it, lest I leave her behind.
A very smart friend suggested to me that I put Mimi's travel case out the day before so she understands she's going too. I did that yesterday, and last night I couldn't find Mimi and she was in it. She slept in it all last night,
LATER: I am rescinding the letter I wrote to Neeleman. Though we arrived in NY only an hour past our original slated time, it took us another hour and a half to get our luggage. Then there were no taxis and it was cold. My solution" STAY HOME. But first: FIND OUT WHAT REALLY FEELS LIKE HOME.