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.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
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.'
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.'
Friday, April 27, 2007
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.
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.
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.
Friday, April 20, 2007
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.
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.
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