Happy New Year.
As those of you know who followed her adventures in the year now gone, Praise Be, Mimi, in order to continue her European education, had to weigh twelve kilos, including carrier, to be allowed to fly Air France. So I put her on the strictest of diets, worked her out, had to take a car to JFK to get her health stamp several days before we actually flew as that office was closed on Sunday, spent a small tesor on various certificates, and then no one ever weighed her or checked. She was livid, which shows in a white dog, no matter how fluffy. Nor could she have the many treats one is offered as an irresistible femme in France, Switzerland or Italy, as there was the chance they would weigh her on the way back(they didn't.)
So safely home, in a fury of revenge, or perhaps a secret longing to be on Access Hollywood, she has developed an eating disorder. The first business day of the New Year, January 2nd, I spent on the phone trying to reach the vet, to find out if there is bulimia or anorexia in dogs-- if I don't feed her right on time, and much, she spits up, very delicately of course, as she is always Mimi, and looks for a place on the wood (not cushions or rugs) where it will be easy for me to clean up, The vet, however, according to the receptionist, was dealing with a dog that was 'crashing,' which translates 'dying,' and was in surgery. Mimi is nothing if not compassionate so was momentarily distracted from her obsession with food by worrying about a fellow(girl) creature, something nobody has yet recommended as a solution in diet magazines, or by Oprah, but perhaps should be.
If we could all go out and do something for a fellow(or girl) perhaps we could cut back on the frantic excursions for sushi, the longing for pasta, the bolted hamburger. Good deeds in place of bagels! I can hear the cry of street-hawkers in Baghdad, the fairy tale version, not the ugly today reality which has fallen out of public interest as a key issue in the election, I can hear him crying 'New lamps for Old!' giving rise to Aladdin and a thousand fantasies. Good deeds for Bagels! What a positive substitute.
At any rate, the patient (a black lab) lived, so it was a good first day of the working year for Nicole Overby, D.V.M. Mimi is still hungry and dissatisfied with the amounts the vet prescribed, taking little solace from the snack bone she is allowed in place of a heavy lunch. I have decided to give her as much as she wants and that I will love her more the more of her there is, as a journalist who was hitting on me once when I still worried about gaining weight said to me as part of his pitch.
Happy New Year. Enjoy life, it is fleeting as kibble.
Friday, January 04, 2008
Monday, December 10, 2007
Inviting Christmas
So with great reluctance, I finally put my Thanksgiving away, the little Pilgrims and Indians back in the closet, the glorious red and russet leaves, still shiny, into a bag to throw away. All the pumpkins, great and small, a turban squash and the one truly royal, squat one were moved onto the terrace, awaiting transformation, as most of us do. There were no maple leaves on my table this year, because Spring came so late to my side of the street, and things bloom and flower and leaf here in strange disarray, as the sun hits them, so my side blossomed with jacaranda later than anywhere else, including across the street, and the maples never tired and dropped Fall onto the sidewalk, even into December.
But last year I'd had big, not exactly fat but scenically lush maple leaves on my table, and when I put the Pilgrims away, I found them, sprayed gold, as I'd done for last Christmas, still intact and ready to welcome the late come and even later acknowledged new holiday. It had been my plan to go to New York to meet up with loved friends, but the sweetest of them got ill, so the plan was cancelled. In my heart, where Jimmy Carter lusted, I was relieved, because I'd started my new novel and was grateful to stay put, especially when the news came in that it was 21 degrees in Manhattan.
Then I hied me to Blick Art supplies to get the gold spray for the pumpkins and the nuts and the pine cones I'd collected all year-- not many, but when you see one, you know to keep it, like a good friend. I had stopped by Trader Joe's for fresh flowers, some sprigs of pine, and roses, and drove into the sidestreet by Blick's, to park my car. There was a young woman pulling into one metered space in the shade, and as I had Mimi in the car, I pulled up beside her to ask her to move forward so Mimi wouldn't be parked in the sun. I honked my horn, before I saw how or who she was. To my surprise and general universal sorrow, her face was flat against the wheel, her hands holding the sides of it, her posture, shoulders not quite heaving, one of complete despair. I knew that it was only love that could do that, and wondered why it is called love.
Empathetic as I try to be and mostly am, I am also Mimi's mom, so I rolled down my window and asked her if she was all right and would she mind moving up. She was Asian, and young, and very lovely, her eyes not quite streaming. "It's going to be all right," I said, and hoped it would be. I went over to her after I'd parked and told her I was sorry for whatever it was, not saying I knew it was love, but that she was young and lovely, and everything would change as it always does. She asked me if we had to put money in the meter. As it was Sunday we didn't.
I saw her again inside Blick's, and knew she was an artist, so wanted to tell her to use what she was feeling to make a great work of art. But I lost sight of her in between the rows of paint and great displays of brushes, and couldn't show her something I'd found in one of those little books they sell for $4.95 that have about twenty words and are making people fortunes, that said 'Creativity solves everything."
I gathered up my spray paints and glitter, and paid and left. Her car was still on the street. So I took the most beautiful of the long-stemmed roses and left it in the handle of her car door.
When I got home I gilded all the pumpkins, and silvered a fallen branch I'd picked up in March it must have been, and set it in a glass vase by my fireplace, strung it with candy canes, stuck in some pine branches, and added some water. Then I hung some captious angels and red and green and glittery Irish fairy folk from the little dangles on the ceiling that are supposed to hold speakers for the sound system, but as I don't have one here, I imagined Carols in my head, and even sang "We Three Kings," first the melody, then the harmony. Star of Wonder, Star of Night. My daughter-in-law is very observant, so they have been celebrating Chanukah, and as our relationship is just starting to get really good, I know better than to try and show her my Christmas.
But it is very beautiful. Most glorious are the nuts spread out on the sideboard, all sprayed gold. Almonds are good, and that great ugly nut that my old friend the musician Tiger Haynes called 'nigger toes' because he could, being black, hold the gild beautifully. But best are the hazel nuts, as they add their own shine. And there's glitter on the pine cones. They stand like a magic forest around the nuts, so you'd hardly know this was Los Angeles.
And then I invited Christmas to come. I hope it comes to all of you. I hope it comes Big Time to the woman in the car.
But last year I'd had big, not exactly fat but scenically lush maple leaves on my table, and when I put the Pilgrims away, I found them, sprayed gold, as I'd done for last Christmas, still intact and ready to welcome the late come and even later acknowledged new holiday. It had been my plan to go to New York to meet up with loved friends, but the sweetest of them got ill, so the plan was cancelled. In my heart, where Jimmy Carter lusted, I was relieved, because I'd started my new novel and was grateful to stay put, especially when the news came in that it was 21 degrees in Manhattan.
Then I hied me to Blick Art supplies to get the gold spray for the pumpkins and the nuts and the pine cones I'd collected all year-- not many, but when you see one, you know to keep it, like a good friend. I had stopped by Trader Joe's for fresh flowers, some sprigs of pine, and roses, and drove into the sidestreet by Blick's, to park my car. There was a young woman pulling into one metered space in the shade, and as I had Mimi in the car, I pulled up beside her to ask her to move forward so Mimi wouldn't be parked in the sun. I honked my horn, before I saw how or who she was. To my surprise and general universal sorrow, her face was flat against the wheel, her hands holding the sides of it, her posture, shoulders not quite heaving, one of complete despair. I knew that it was only love that could do that, and wondered why it is called love.
Empathetic as I try to be and mostly am, I am also Mimi's mom, so I rolled down my window and asked her if she was all right and would she mind moving up. She was Asian, and young, and very lovely, her eyes not quite streaming. "It's going to be all right," I said, and hoped it would be. I went over to her after I'd parked and told her I was sorry for whatever it was, not saying I knew it was love, but that she was young and lovely, and everything would change as it always does. She asked me if we had to put money in the meter. As it was Sunday we didn't.
I saw her again inside Blick's, and knew she was an artist, so wanted to tell her to use what she was feeling to make a great work of art. But I lost sight of her in between the rows of paint and great displays of brushes, and couldn't show her something I'd found in one of those little books they sell for $4.95 that have about twenty words and are making people fortunes, that said 'Creativity solves everything."
I gathered up my spray paints and glitter, and paid and left. Her car was still on the street. So I took the most beautiful of the long-stemmed roses and left it in the handle of her car door.
When I got home I gilded all the pumpkins, and silvered a fallen branch I'd picked up in March it must have been, and set it in a glass vase by my fireplace, strung it with candy canes, stuck in some pine branches, and added some water. Then I hung some captious angels and red and green and glittery Irish fairy folk from the little dangles on the ceiling that are supposed to hold speakers for the sound system, but as I don't have one here, I imagined Carols in my head, and even sang "We Three Kings," first the melody, then the harmony. Star of Wonder, Star of Night. My daughter-in-law is very observant, so they have been celebrating Chanukah, and as our relationship is just starting to get really good, I know better than to try and show her my Christmas.
But it is very beautiful. Most glorious are the nuts spread out on the sideboard, all sprayed gold. Almonds are good, and that great ugly nut that my old friend the musician Tiger Haynes called 'nigger toes' because he could, being black, hold the gild beautifully. But best are the hazel nuts, as they add their own shine. And there's glitter on the pine cones. They stand like a magic forest around the nuts, so you'd hardly know this was Los Angeles.
And then I invited Christmas to come. I hope it comes to all of you. I hope it comes Big Time to the woman in the car.
Sunday, December 02, 2007
A Church for Britney Spears
As longtime friends know from reading this Blog, my life for the past several years has been a search not just for the cliches, Love and Fame, but also for God, perhaps in itself a cliche. Last Sunday in my panic to find inspiration, or at least the motif for a new novel, I went to Self-Realization on Sunset and walked twice, or thrice as Tommy Thompson would have writ, around the Lake Shrine, willingly suspending Disbelief, and asking for guidance. That night before I went to sleep, I believe I called aloud several times for Help, and asked that God make clear what I should be writing, or, even better, send me an idea.
The next morning I went to my computer, which is my sometimes wont, when I should be doing Yoga or meditating, and Lo! On the e-mail was my answer! So God is into technology, and could, should He/She choose, have an online service. Let let us call it FAITHBOOK.
Anyway, I started the novel and felt good about it, so today, having from the same source found an old Friend, capitalized as I met her in Quaker Meeting, and she told me she was now going to Unity on 14th and Maple, I figured what the heaven. Went there this morning at 9-- and the little children from the Mt.Olive Lutheran Preschool's Choir of Angelic Voices sang their sweet songs, and just before the parson, a woman, began her sermon, one of the mothers, in jeans, took her three-year-old, she must have been, up closer and held her and squatted and the jeans, cut low, went down below the mum's bottom cheeks to reveal quite fully the crack in her ass. And I thought this would be the right church for Britney.
I wanted to write that down but didn't have a pen so prayed for one, and Lo! God sent me a blue one, from the box beside the Hymnal, inviting me to make a donation(didn't.) At that point the parsonette began her talk and it was about Advent which this is the first Sunday of, getting ready for the Coming, and she said, referring to Matthew, that much of it draws on Jewish scriptures, and I thought, as I do from time to time, that is probably where I should be.
There was a minister in Weinheim, the little village in the Bergstrasse where I went to write my novel about neo-Naziism in Germany in the early '90s named Herr Lohrbacher, the only person in the town to admit there was such a thing, a precursor of the publishers who were to reject the book on the same thesis-- no neo-Naziism in Germany-- especially since they had almost all just been bought by Bertelsmann, the powerful German publisher who had never had any connection to Naziism either, until they finally admitted they had. Herr Lohrbacher, a highly intelligent and obviously questing man, had suggested to the local schools not only that they examine the Holocaust-- Weinheim had been one of the three villages where Hitler did his out-of-town tryout for Krystallnacht, on September 22nd, 1940,rounding up the Jews of that village, along with those from Hemsbach and Mannheim, and sending them to Gurs, a leftover Pyrenees prison from the Spanish Civil War, to see if their neighbors would say anything(they didn't)-- but also introduce Jewish studies into the German schools, since he was himself a Lutheran, and felt as the minister did this morning, apparently accurately. that much of Christian gospel came from Jewish scriptures, and, in addition, that there was a morality in Judaism that would be helpful to Germans. After that Herr Lohrbacher got about 85 death threats a day. But there was no neo-Naziism in Germany.
Anyway I left the service with little feeling of uplift, so that one isn't for me. But I did get a chance this afternoon to go see my old(88) friend Betty Garrett perform the songs she had written, abetted by a company of players at Theater West, which included a still radiant Lee Meriwether, Miss America 1954. That year has significance for me which some who read this will understand, but Lee said not to tell anybody, I don't look it, and at Virgin Atlantic Airlines where I have Frequent Flyer Miles, that is the year I was born. In the audience was Connie Sawyer, who is 95, sharp, pretty, still driving, and living at the Motion Picture Home where she entertains at lunch, to which Betty and I will go.
So there is uplift in unexpected places. We have only to be open to it, with hearts full of hope and love, at least on occasion.
In spite of the Stagehands' Union going back to work, I am having trouble striking my Thanksgiving, as I really love my table, all my little Pilgrims sitting on pumpkins and a bed of leaves I keep adding to. Because of the lateness with which Spring came to my block, the trees are still dropping leaves of a wonderful color, as I hope I will, too, in my attenuated Autumn.
The next morning I went to my computer, which is my sometimes wont, when I should be doing Yoga or meditating, and Lo! On the e-mail was my answer! So God is into technology, and could, should He/She choose, have an online service. Let let us call it FAITHBOOK.
Anyway, I started the novel and felt good about it, so today, having from the same source found an old Friend, capitalized as I met her in Quaker Meeting, and she told me she was now going to Unity on 14th and Maple, I figured what the heaven. Went there this morning at 9-- and the little children from the Mt.Olive Lutheran Preschool's Choir of Angelic Voices sang their sweet songs, and just before the parson, a woman, began her sermon, one of the mothers, in jeans, took her three-year-old, she must have been, up closer and held her and squatted and the jeans, cut low, went down below the mum's bottom cheeks to reveal quite fully the crack in her ass. And I thought this would be the right church for Britney.
I wanted to write that down but didn't have a pen so prayed for one, and Lo! God sent me a blue one, from the box beside the Hymnal, inviting me to make a donation(didn't.) At that point the parsonette began her talk and it was about Advent which this is the first Sunday of, getting ready for the Coming, and she said, referring to Matthew, that much of it draws on Jewish scriptures, and I thought, as I do from time to time, that is probably where I should be.
There was a minister in Weinheim, the little village in the Bergstrasse where I went to write my novel about neo-Naziism in Germany in the early '90s named Herr Lohrbacher, the only person in the town to admit there was such a thing, a precursor of the publishers who were to reject the book on the same thesis-- no neo-Naziism in Germany-- especially since they had almost all just been bought by Bertelsmann, the powerful German publisher who had never had any connection to Naziism either, until they finally admitted they had. Herr Lohrbacher, a highly intelligent and obviously questing man, had suggested to the local schools not only that they examine the Holocaust-- Weinheim had been one of the three villages where Hitler did his out-of-town tryout for Krystallnacht, on September 22nd, 1940,rounding up the Jews of that village, along with those from Hemsbach and Mannheim, and sending them to Gurs, a leftover Pyrenees prison from the Spanish Civil War, to see if their neighbors would say anything(they didn't)-- but also introduce Jewish studies into the German schools, since he was himself a Lutheran, and felt as the minister did this morning, apparently accurately. that much of Christian gospel came from Jewish scriptures, and, in addition, that there was a morality in Judaism that would be helpful to Germans. After that Herr Lohrbacher got about 85 death threats a day. But there was no neo-Naziism in Germany.
Anyway I left the service with little feeling of uplift, so that one isn't for me. But I did get a chance this afternoon to go see my old(88) friend Betty Garrett perform the songs she had written, abetted by a company of players at Theater West, which included a still radiant Lee Meriwether, Miss America 1954. That year has significance for me which some who read this will understand, but Lee said not to tell anybody, I don't look it, and at Virgin Atlantic Airlines where I have Frequent Flyer Miles, that is the year I was born. In the audience was Connie Sawyer, who is 95, sharp, pretty, still driving, and living at the Motion Picture Home where she entertains at lunch, to which Betty and I will go.
So there is uplift in unexpected places. We have only to be open to it, with hearts full of hope and love, at least on occasion.
In spite of the Stagehands' Union going back to work, I am having trouble striking my Thanksgiving, as I really love my table, all my little Pilgrims sitting on pumpkins and a bed of leaves I keep adding to. Because of the lateness with which Spring came to my block, the trees are still dropping leaves of a wonderful color, as I hope I will, too, in my attenuated Autumn.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
The Executioner's Sort-of Song
Norman Mailer, two-fisted, ornery, and prodigiously talented, is dead at 84. I knew him, Horatio, not well, but colorfully, as he was truly a colorful man, and, more often than not, a really good writer.
I met him during the course of my flagrant and flighty success with The Pretenders, when he was running for Mayor of New York, and there was a fund raiser in the mansion of a Bryn Mawr friend of mine, a jillionaireness who was a character in the novel but too spacey to read it, so had no idea. Her husband, though, to whom I had introduced her, had been my doctor when I lived in NY, and although not too sharp medically, could read, so had read it, and said "You're a very naughty girl." But he wasn't angry, I don't think, just pleased he had seemed memorable, if somewhat silly and impotent.
I was standing on the second story of her marblelized manse, with an actual balustrade carved from the same, looking down at the party in the-- well, it wasn't quite a ballroom, but could've passed for one, certainly can in memory. Mailer was a few steps away from me, very short and thick and sputtering with bombast, in a sort of endearing way. I was being followed around town and interviewed by Marlene Nadel, a bright woman with the Village Voice, who was marking down my words and actions, thrilling to me at the time, of course, because I knew I was not just the mindless author of a sexy bestseller, but nobody else outside my immediate family which included my classmates seemed aware of that, but Marlene apparently did. It was at this point that I engaged in a verbal wrestling match with Mailer, who was having an affair with a writer friend's wife who was at the same time also having an affair with the wife of Mailer, material, rich as it was, unthinkable for me to use at the time, innocent that I really was beneath the sequins and high-level soft core, which Dr. Nahm, the philosophy professor at Bryn Mawr pronounced my work. I considered the writer whose wife it was a true friend, so put out of my mind the sexual proclivities behind their smart facades which apparently went pretty deep.
Anyway, there stood Mailer, and I engaged him. I don't remember what I said, but Marlene noted it and put it in the article-- Village Voice, 1969, I wonder if those records exist?-- but whatever it was pricked him. It was then I noted I was standing but a few feet away from the rather low balustrade, remembered that he had stabbed his wife, and that it would take but a quick swat of his muscular arm, and splat! There would go the rest of the books. So I shut up. But my feeling about him was rather tender, as I sensed a good soul beneath the bluster.
When an actual good novel I'd written, Touching, became the landmark libel case in fiction-- a very long story I have told elsewhere-- and Doubleday, having defended me all the way to the Supreme Court arguing the decision against me would have a chilling effect on fiction, once the Supremes declined to hear the case(except for Justices Brennan, Stewart and Marshall, the pro-1st amendmenters on the bench at the time)turned and sued me on the basis of the indemnification clause all writers sign holding the publisher blameless, it became necessary for me to try and get important writers to line up with me, asking Doubleday to withdraw the suit. I had to call writers I didn't know to ask for their help-- plead, really. Those calls
were made very early in the morning, as most of the writers were in the east. Besides, I didn't want my children to hear, as they were already in a state of fear and confusion that had fallen like a termiter's blue bag over our house, which we had to homestead so Doubleday couldn't take it away from us. Robert was delivering Herald-Examiners on his bicycle when I was on the front page, and thought I had committed a crime-- if you couldn't explain the First Amendment and Fiction to a jury in Santa Monica, how explain it to a ten-year-old boy? My daughter, seeing her floor being waxed, asked "Are you selling the house? Will I still be able to go to my school?"(In those ancient days, remember, people moved to the flats just so their children could be part of the Beverly Hills school system.)
So there I was, at six in the morning, calling those I admired and was intimidated by but had never even met(Truman Capote: "THat's TERRIBLE!" he mewed. "I shall call Nelson this very morning!" "Mr. Capote," I said, "thank you. But Nelson Doubleday doesn't own it anymore.") Then I called the fierce Mr. Mailer. His secretary got back to me. "You can add his name to the list, but he said for you not to do that anymore. He was a character in somebody's novel and he didn't like it."
Warm-spot-in-my-heartedly, I stepped up to see him decades later, when he and George Plimpton(another Helas!) were doing their Fitzgerald-Hemingway thing at the 92nd Street Y. By then Mailer was on two canes. I introduced myself, and did a quick summary, cutting to my gratitude at his having supported me.
"I SUPPORTED YOU!" he actually shouted, planting himself somewhat uncertainly on his feet, and lifting both canes in the air, waved them like the capricious little boy he still was, even old.
So there goes another one who was just the man you'd hoped he'd be. I am happy he got to write his last piece declaring God creative, and probably a writer, maybe not unlike Mailer himself. I hope Mailer welcomes Mailer.
I met him during the course of my flagrant and flighty success with The Pretenders, when he was running for Mayor of New York, and there was a fund raiser in the mansion of a Bryn Mawr friend of mine, a jillionaireness who was a character in the novel but too spacey to read it, so had no idea. Her husband, though, to whom I had introduced her, had been my doctor when I lived in NY, and although not too sharp medically, could read, so had read it, and said "You're a very naughty girl." But he wasn't angry, I don't think, just pleased he had seemed memorable, if somewhat silly and impotent.
I was standing on the second story of her marblelized manse, with an actual balustrade carved from the same, looking down at the party in the-- well, it wasn't quite a ballroom, but could've passed for one, certainly can in memory. Mailer was a few steps away from me, very short and thick and sputtering with bombast, in a sort of endearing way. I was being followed around town and interviewed by Marlene Nadel, a bright woman with the Village Voice, who was marking down my words and actions, thrilling to me at the time, of course, because I knew I was not just the mindless author of a sexy bestseller, but nobody else outside my immediate family which included my classmates seemed aware of that, but Marlene apparently did. It was at this point that I engaged in a verbal wrestling match with Mailer, who was having an affair with a writer friend's wife who was at the same time also having an affair with the wife of Mailer, material, rich as it was, unthinkable for me to use at the time, innocent that I really was beneath the sequins and high-level soft core, which Dr. Nahm, the philosophy professor at Bryn Mawr pronounced my work. I considered the writer whose wife it was a true friend, so put out of my mind the sexual proclivities behind their smart facades which apparently went pretty deep.
Anyway, there stood Mailer, and I engaged him. I don't remember what I said, but Marlene noted it and put it in the article-- Village Voice, 1969, I wonder if those records exist?-- but whatever it was pricked him. It was then I noted I was standing but a few feet away from the rather low balustrade, remembered that he had stabbed his wife, and that it would take but a quick swat of his muscular arm, and splat! There would go the rest of the books. So I shut up. But my feeling about him was rather tender, as I sensed a good soul beneath the bluster.
When an actual good novel I'd written, Touching, became the landmark libel case in fiction-- a very long story I have told elsewhere-- and Doubleday, having defended me all the way to the Supreme Court arguing the decision against me would have a chilling effect on fiction, once the Supremes declined to hear the case(except for Justices Brennan, Stewart and Marshall, the pro-1st amendmenters on the bench at the time)turned and sued me on the basis of the indemnification clause all writers sign holding the publisher blameless, it became necessary for me to try and get important writers to line up with me, asking Doubleday to withdraw the suit. I had to call writers I didn't know to ask for their help-- plead, really. Those calls
were made very early in the morning, as most of the writers were in the east. Besides, I didn't want my children to hear, as they were already in a state of fear and confusion that had fallen like a termiter's blue bag over our house, which we had to homestead so Doubleday couldn't take it away from us. Robert was delivering Herald-Examiners on his bicycle when I was on the front page, and thought I had committed a crime-- if you couldn't explain the First Amendment and Fiction to a jury in Santa Monica, how explain it to a ten-year-old boy? My daughter, seeing her floor being waxed, asked "Are you selling the house? Will I still be able to go to my school?"(In those ancient days, remember, people moved to the flats just so their children could be part of the Beverly Hills school system.)
So there I was, at six in the morning, calling those I admired and was intimidated by but had never even met(Truman Capote: "THat's TERRIBLE!" he mewed. "I shall call Nelson this very morning!" "Mr. Capote," I said, "thank you. But Nelson Doubleday doesn't own it anymore.") Then I called the fierce Mr. Mailer. His secretary got back to me. "You can add his name to the list, but he said for you not to do that anymore. He was a character in somebody's novel and he didn't like it."
Warm-spot-in-my-heartedly, I stepped up to see him decades later, when he and George Plimpton(another Helas!) were doing their Fitzgerald-Hemingway thing at the 92nd Street Y. By then Mailer was on two canes. I introduced myself, and did a quick summary, cutting to my gratitude at his having supported me.
"I SUPPORTED YOU!" he actually shouted, planting himself somewhat uncertainly on his feet, and lifting both canes in the air, waved them like the capricious little boy he still was, even old.
So there goes another one who was just the man you'd hoped he'd be. I am happy he got to write his last piece declaring God creative, and probably a writer, maybe not unlike Mailer himself. I hope Mailer welcomes Mailer.
Friday, November 09, 2007
Order Your Thanksgiving
I passed Whole Foods this morning on the way back from Mimi's outing, and they had a sign up that said 'Order Your Thanksgiving.' It seemed to be not what it seemed, not simply 'Sign up for your turkey,' but 'Put Everything in Order so you know what you are Thankful for.'
Thanksgiving was always my favorite holiday, because I could do it up brown, and orange(pumpkin soup in a pumpkin shell) and it was the single meal for which I received unqualified praise from my family, including Robert when he was little and already a critic("Gourmet, again? Why can't we have hamburgers like every other family!") Whatever there was of the maternal in me reached full court press at that time, and the house was afloat with fabulous smells for days, besides the rigor of making home made pumpkin seeds as croutons for the soup, and the horror of cleaning up afterwards, which I tried not to think about and besides, there was Maria. I loved Thanksgiving, because it combined in me love of country, love of family, and love of beautiful colors, which are never more beautiful than in autumn, even if you live in a place where there really isn't any, but you could always find a few trees on Carmelita that shed their leaves and they changed enough so you could decorate the table.
When Don got sick I asked the doctor if he would still be with us for Thanksgiving, and the doctor, being his friend who had missed it when he might have been able to save him, more in denial than Don, said "which Thanksgiving?" but he left us on the 14th of November, coming up fast I notice out of the corner of my psyche. I made Thanksgiving anyway, with the family joined by a friend who loved him and was a little crazy, too, Susan Swanson, who went out in the backyard in between courses and came back in and said "I just had a talk with Don." In those days I believed everything, so I thought she probably had.
My life since then has been nomadic and erratic, to say the least, but anywhere I was where there was a kitchen and some orphans I could have for a sitdown, I made the glorious meal, usually with colorful plates and even more colorful food. This year I will have my grown son, still critical and contentious but basically sweet in heart, his wife-- I really like her-- Lukas, who is 7 and more argumentative than Robert was but just as bright(all Harry Potters read, the last one without moving his lips) and Silas, 4, with whom I am very much in love.
The hunger for romantic love has finally left me, the reluctant-to-let-go vestige of teenager vanished, replaced with a sense of peace because the last man for whom I thought I yearned is still good for a laugh, which turns out to be more important. But I am very frightened for my country, which I loved with a passion and poetry, both. I am putting an article from today's Times underneath my jade statue of Kwan-Yin, the Goddess of Compassion, hoping she will activate what's in the piece, and they will indict Bernie Kerik this afternoon, and that will impact on Rudy, because I am really scared. I mean scared. I think it was Will Rogers who said the Lord must have loved the ordinary man because he made so many of them. But I don't know Who loved the lunatic fringe, because there seem to be a lot of them, maybe enough to tilt the election the wrong way. I am afraid of Hillary, not because I think she will do wrong, but because I don't really believe in my heart that the country as a whole will believe her. And that Giuiliani got the endorsement of Pat Robertson is chilling. We are in an economic downslide, and that will affect everybody except the ones who have steered the ship of state onto a sandbar.
But, hey, it's Autumn, and there's one tree on Montana that sheds its leaves as they turn all the colors of Vermont, and I have collected and put them in the center of my table, underneath little pumpkins and one majestic Turban squash, with two little Teddy Bear Pilgrims, a man and a woman in appropriate attire for being grateful atop the colorful pile. And there's a cornucopia, which of course life really is, with all kinds of things falling out of it, in this case all manner of fall flowers, which there wasn't anybody on duty yesterday at Whole Foods to determine the price, so the manager made a mistake and let me have it for a song ("Keep your Sunny Side up," I think was the name of the number)
So I am, in spite of the news, really happy as Thanksgiving approaches, knowing there is much to be grateful for. I will clean up my apartment and my act, and put everything I can in order, including my cortex which the paper said today is strengthened by exercise so you don't lose memory. They told us at the Mindfulness seminar I went to at UCLA some weeks back that meditation thickens the cortex, oh at least they think it does, but it's hard to measure. Still, every once in a while, when I remember, I think of my cortex growing thicker, and that, in a way, is a kind of mediation. It beats the skin growing thick.
Thanksgiving was always my favorite holiday, because I could do it up brown, and orange(pumpkin soup in a pumpkin shell) and it was the single meal for which I received unqualified praise from my family, including Robert when he was little and already a critic("Gourmet, again? Why can't we have hamburgers like every other family!") Whatever there was of the maternal in me reached full court press at that time, and the house was afloat with fabulous smells for days, besides the rigor of making home made pumpkin seeds as croutons for the soup, and the horror of cleaning up afterwards, which I tried not to think about and besides, there was Maria. I loved Thanksgiving, because it combined in me love of country, love of family, and love of beautiful colors, which are never more beautiful than in autumn, even if you live in a place where there really isn't any, but you could always find a few trees on Carmelita that shed their leaves and they changed enough so you could decorate the table.
When Don got sick I asked the doctor if he would still be with us for Thanksgiving, and the doctor, being his friend who had missed it when he might have been able to save him, more in denial than Don, said "which Thanksgiving?" but he left us on the 14th of November, coming up fast I notice out of the corner of my psyche. I made Thanksgiving anyway, with the family joined by a friend who loved him and was a little crazy, too, Susan Swanson, who went out in the backyard in between courses and came back in and said "I just had a talk with Don." In those days I believed everything, so I thought she probably had.
My life since then has been nomadic and erratic, to say the least, but anywhere I was where there was a kitchen and some orphans I could have for a sitdown, I made the glorious meal, usually with colorful plates and even more colorful food. This year I will have my grown son, still critical and contentious but basically sweet in heart, his wife-- I really like her-- Lukas, who is 7 and more argumentative than Robert was but just as bright(all Harry Potters read, the last one without moving his lips) and Silas, 4, with whom I am very much in love.
The hunger for romantic love has finally left me, the reluctant-to-let-go vestige of teenager vanished, replaced with a sense of peace because the last man for whom I thought I yearned is still good for a laugh, which turns out to be more important. But I am very frightened for my country, which I loved with a passion and poetry, both. I am putting an article from today's Times underneath my jade statue of Kwan-Yin, the Goddess of Compassion, hoping she will activate what's in the piece, and they will indict Bernie Kerik this afternoon, and that will impact on Rudy, because I am really scared. I mean scared. I think it was Will Rogers who said the Lord must have loved the ordinary man because he made so many of them. But I don't know Who loved the lunatic fringe, because there seem to be a lot of them, maybe enough to tilt the election the wrong way. I am afraid of Hillary, not because I think she will do wrong, but because I don't really believe in my heart that the country as a whole will believe her. And that Giuiliani got the endorsement of Pat Robertson is chilling. We are in an economic downslide, and that will affect everybody except the ones who have steered the ship of state onto a sandbar.
But, hey, it's Autumn, and there's one tree on Montana that sheds its leaves as they turn all the colors of Vermont, and I have collected and put them in the center of my table, underneath little pumpkins and one majestic Turban squash, with two little Teddy Bear Pilgrims, a man and a woman in appropriate attire for being grateful atop the colorful pile. And there's a cornucopia, which of course life really is, with all kinds of things falling out of it, in this case all manner of fall flowers, which there wasn't anybody on duty yesterday at Whole Foods to determine the price, so the manager made a mistake and let me have it for a song ("Keep your Sunny Side up," I think was the name of the number)
So I am, in spite of the news, really happy as Thanksgiving approaches, knowing there is much to be grateful for. I will clean up my apartment and my act, and put everything I can in order, including my cortex which the paper said today is strengthened by exercise so you don't lose memory. They told us at the Mindfulness seminar I went to at UCLA some weeks back that meditation thickens the cortex, oh at least they think it does, but it's hard to measure. Still, every once in a while, when I remember, I think of my cortex growing thicker, and that, in a way, is a kind of mediation. It beats the skin growing thick.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
A Danish in place of a Madeleine
An enormous piece of my history vanished today: coalesced from several parts of my recollection and then clocked off, wiped from the planet, and even the orb of memory. All clicked away by the death of Robert Goulet.
I was very young, younger than I was, and for some reason I cannot recall, was going out with Billy Rose, the dwarfy little electric entrepreneur who had brought elephants onto the stage, married tall and often. He was at the time, I remember, also going out with my then best friend Sue Mengers, the soon-to-become-famous agent who was going out with him for reasons I CAN recall. Key to this scene is my mother, who got everything wholesale without seeming a cliche or particularly Jewish: she was elegant and beautiful and, at base, I think, an anti-Semite, though it was probably just ordinariness that she loathed, lack of education, bad grammar and ugly neckties, as she was later in life to hate fat people, old people and poor people. Anyway, Helen's dream of the perfect exit... well, I will put it in her own words: "If the H-bomb comes, I want to be in the Inner Room of Loehmann's." The Inner Room was where women of very high breeding, a lot of them, seized designer dressers with their labels cut out from each other to be able to buy them first. I tell you this so you will understand about the chiffon wrapper.
There hung in my closet, never worn, a see through chiffon not-exactly negligee, but what you would put over it if you still hoped to entice. It was shrimp colored, according to the manufacturer who was smitten with my mother, but I would call it coral, softer than vibrant a shade, with long feathers of the same hue all up and down the front and around the collar, so it might have been a boa worn today, being Halloween, by a drag queen, (though I understand they have cancelled the Gay Parade on Castro in San Francisco, which must be a terrible blow so to speak..) I was still, at the time this peignoir hung in my closet, a very innocent young woman, stupid, I suppose, as much as moral, waiting for my great love, having loved not wisely but not too well either, squandering some juicy years on Anthony Perkins who was as clever as he was handsome then, and whom I didn't realize and/or wouldn't acknowledge was gay.
So I had this apartment on East 73rd Street, and Billy Rose, already quite elderly but still incredibly famous which was catnip to Sue and somewhat poignant to me, as I saw him as more sad than important, took me home one evening after feteing me in his limousine via the Sixth Avenue Deli, following the premiere of Lawrence of Arabia. Or maybe it was Lord Jim. In any case, no moves had ever been made towards me on his part, the only crudities having fallen from his mouth, as opposed to what he offered Sue, an open fly and "Put your hand on my cock," all of which I was later to appropriate and use to great benefit in The Pretenders, my first and perhaps last novel to ever be a breakaway bestseller, larded as it was with sex and the pungent and piquant melancholy insight I was able to bring to this mythic little man as a character.
Anyway, there we were in my apartment, and he rolled back the mirrored door of my closet, saw the feathered coral peignoir, and said: "Who you saving this for, Robert Goulet?" He pronounced it with a hard final 'T', so I realized at once that in spite of all his success, money and connections, he had not an iota of suave, much less the ability to pronounce things in French. It was shortly after that that Sue and I were having dinner at Sardi's, and he walked in, and Sue said "with us sitting there like the Dolly Sisters," and I used that in the novel, too.
Also he had a mansion on Fifth Avenue he invited me to, a time or two, and in his front hall, up a winding staircase, he had Michelangelo's David, maybe the original which he could have afforded at the time before giving it back or perhaps his relatives squabbling for many years over his estate sold it to the Duomo. But there it stood, on the landing, and he said "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking you want to ball him, right?" To say the little man was limited is being very kind, but then, I was probably that, too, except when I hit the typewriter.
Still, it all came together with his death, and my being able to re-construct him as a crude but touching figure in The Pretenders, though Sue was and remains very pissed at my having conflated(Janet Malcolm might say) her character with mine, softening what was too hard about her, but creating-- it was a creation-- a memorable dramatis persona.
George Abbott, during his courtship of Maureen Stapleton-- they danced together into what I think was his hundredth year, when he dropped her because she was annoyed at his seeing other women-- wrote her a letter she read to me, in which he said "I have heard that this is supposed to be about Billy Rose." The fact that glittery people were actually corresponding about my novel was more thrilling, almost, than its being a bestseller. Best of all was Maureen's calling me in the middle of the night from the Beverly Hills Hotel, somewhat more than slightly wined up, saying "I've been robbed. They left my jewelry and they left my money, but they took my copy of The Pretenders. You're going to be very rich." It was true, I should have been, but my publisher wasn't prepared for its success, so was hundreds of thousands back orders behind and then went out of business before giving me my royalties, but that is another story, and according to my inner metaphysician, all for the best, as had I been as rich as was earned I probably would have bought a yacht and anchored it next to Harold Robbins' in Saint Tropez, and never become. Become what? we have yet to determine, or the Fates or the Furies do.
Maureen said she was going to go straight to Doubleday's on Fifth Avenue(it still was then) and say "Have you got a Child's Garden of Verses? And have you got The Pretenders? And if you do, why the fuck isn't it in the window."
I miss her. I never missed Billy Rose, but that is because I made him better and more interesting than he was, which I have a tendency to do with those I encounter. But I am touched by the loss of that moment, when the coral peignoir hung, and an old, powerful little man said "Who you saving that for, Robert Goulettttt?"
I was very young, younger than I was, and for some reason I cannot recall, was going out with Billy Rose, the dwarfy little electric entrepreneur who had brought elephants onto the stage, married tall and often. He was at the time, I remember, also going out with my then best friend Sue Mengers, the soon-to-become-famous agent who was going out with him for reasons I CAN recall. Key to this scene is my mother, who got everything wholesale without seeming a cliche or particularly Jewish: she was elegant and beautiful and, at base, I think, an anti-Semite, though it was probably just ordinariness that she loathed, lack of education, bad grammar and ugly neckties, as she was later in life to hate fat people, old people and poor people. Anyway, Helen's dream of the perfect exit... well, I will put it in her own words: "If the H-bomb comes, I want to be in the Inner Room of Loehmann's." The Inner Room was where women of very high breeding, a lot of them, seized designer dressers with their labels cut out from each other to be able to buy them first. I tell you this so you will understand about the chiffon wrapper.
There hung in my closet, never worn, a see through chiffon not-exactly negligee, but what you would put over it if you still hoped to entice. It was shrimp colored, according to the manufacturer who was smitten with my mother, but I would call it coral, softer than vibrant a shade, with long feathers of the same hue all up and down the front and around the collar, so it might have been a boa worn today, being Halloween, by a drag queen, (though I understand they have cancelled the Gay Parade on Castro in San Francisco, which must be a terrible blow so to speak..) I was still, at the time this peignoir hung in my closet, a very innocent young woman, stupid, I suppose, as much as moral, waiting for my great love, having loved not wisely but not too well either, squandering some juicy years on Anthony Perkins who was as clever as he was handsome then, and whom I didn't realize and/or wouldn't acknowledge was gay.
So I had this apartment on East 73rd Street, and Billy Rose, already quite elderly but still incredibly famous which was catnip to Sue and somewhat poignant to me, as I saw him as more sad than important, took me home one evening after feteing me in his limousine via the Sixth Avenue Deli, following the premiere of Lawrence of Arabia. Or maybe it was Lord Jim. In any case, no moves had ever been made towards me on his part, the only crudities having fallen from his mouth, as opposed to what he offered Sue, an open fly and "Put your hand on my cock," all of which I was later to appropriate and use to great benefit in The Pretenders, my first and perhaps last novel to ever be a breakaway bestseller, larded as it was with sex and the pungent and piquant melancholy insight I was able to bring to this mythic little man as a character.
Anyway, there we were in my apartment, and he rolled back the mirrored door of my closet, saw the feathered coral peignoir, and said: "Who you saving this for, Robert Goulet?" He pronounced it with a hard final 'T', so I realized at once that in spite of all his success, money and connections, he had not an iota of suave, much less the ability to pronounce things in French. It was shortly after that that Sue and I were having dinner at Sardi's, and he walked in, and Sue said "with us sitting there like the Dolly Sisters," and I used that in the novel, too.
Also he had a mansion on Fifth Avenue he invited me to, a time or two, and in his front hall, up a winding staircase, he had Michelangelo's David, maybe the original which he could have afforded at the time before giving it back or perhaps his relatives squabbling for many years over his estate sold it to the Duomo. But there it stood, on the landing, and he said "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking you want to ball him, right?" To say the little man was limited is being very kind, but then, I was probably that, too, except when I hit the typewriter.
Still, it all came together with his death, and my being able to re-construct him as a crude but touching figure in The Pretenders, though Sue was and remains very pissed at my having conflated(Janet Malcolm might say) her character with mine, softening what was too hard about her, but creating-- it was a creation-- a memorable dramatis persona.
George Abbott, during his courtship of Maureen Stapleton-- they danced together into what I think was his hundredth year, when he dropped her because she was annoyed at his seeing other women-- wrote her a letter she read to me, in which he said "I have heard that this is supposed to be about Billy Rose." The fact that glittery people were actually corresponding about my novel was more thrilling, almost, than its being a bestseller. Best of all was Maureen's calling me in the middle of the night from the Beverly Hills Hotel, somewhat more than slightly wined up, saying "I've been robbed. They left my jewelry and they left my money, but they took my copy of The Pretenders. You're going to be very rich." It was true, I should have been, but my publisher wasn't prepared for its success, so was hundreds of thousands back orders behind and then went out of business before giving me my royalties, but that is another story, and according to my inner metaphysician, all for the best, as had I been as rich as was earned I probably would have bought a yacht and anchored it next to Harold Robbins' in Saint Tropez, and never become. Become what? we have yet to determine, or the Fates or the Furies do.
Maureen said she was going to go straight to Doubleday's on Fifth Avenue(it still was then) and say "Have you got a Child's Garden of Verses? And have you got The Pretenders? And if you do, why the fuck isn't it in the window."
I miss her. I never missed Billy Rose, but that is because I made him better and more interesting than he was, which I have a tendency to do with those I encounter. But I am touched by the loss of that moment, when the coral peignoir hung, and an old, powerful little man said "Who you saving that for, Robert Goulettttt?"
A Danish in place of a Madeleine
An enormous piece of my history vanished today: coalesced from several parts of my recollection and then clocked off, wiped from the planet, and even the orb of memory. All clicked away by the death of Robert Goulet.
I was very young, younger than I was, and for some reason I cannot recall, was going out with Billy Rose, the dwarfy little electric entrepreneur who had brought elephants onto the stage, married tall and often. He was at the time, I remember, also going out with my then best friend Sue Mengers, the soon-to-become-famous agent who was going out with him for reasons I CAN recall. Key to this scene is my mother, who got everything wholesale without seeming a cliche or particularly Jewish: she was elegant and beautiful and, at base, I think, an anti-Semite, though it was probably just ordinariness that she loathed, lack of education, bad grammar and ugly neckties, as she was later in life to hate fat people, old people and poor people. Anyway, Helen's dream of the perfect exit... well, I will put it in her own words: "If the H-bomb comes, I want to be in the Inner Room of Loehmann's." The Inner Room was where women of very high breeding, a lot of them, seized designer dressers with their labels cut out from each other to be able to buy them first. I tell you this so you will understand about the chiffon wrapper.
There hung in my closet, never worn, a see through chiffon not-exactly negligee, but what you would put over it if you still hoped to entice. It was shrimp colored, according to the manufacturer who was smitten with my mother, but I would call it coral, softer than vibrant a shade, with long feathers of the same hue all up and down the front and around the collar, so it might have been a boa worn today, being Halloween, by a drag queen, (though I understand they have cancelled the Gay Parade on Castro in San Francisco, which must be a terrible blow so to speak..) I was still, at the time this peignoir hung in my closet, a very innocent young woman, stupid, I suppose, as much as moral, waiting for my great love, having loved not wisely but not too well either, squandering some juicy years on Anthony Perkins who was as clever as he was handsome then, and whom I didn't realize and/or wouldn't acknowledge was gay.
So I had this apartment on East 73rd Street, and Billy Rose, already quite elderly but still incredibly famous which was catnip to Sue and somewhat poignant to me, as I saw him as more sad than important, took me home one evening after feteing me in his limousine via the Sixth Avenue Deli, following the premiere of Lawrence of Arabia. Or maybe it was Lord Jim. In any case, no moves had ever been made towards me on his part, the only crudities having fallen from his mouth, as opposed to what he offered Sue, an open fly and "Put your hand on my cock," all of which I was later to appropriate and use to great benefit in The Pretenders, my first and perhaps last novel to ever be a breakaway bestseller, larded as it was with sex and the pungent and piquant melancholy insight I was able to bring to this mythic little man as a character.
Anyway, there we were in my apartment, and he rolled back the mirrored door of my closet, saw the feathered coral peignoir, and said: "Who you saving this for, Robert Goulet?" He pronounced it with a hard final 'T', so I realized at once that in spite of all his success, money and connections, he had not an iota of suave, much less the ability to pronounce things in French. It was shortly after that that Sue and I were having dinner at Sardi's, and he walked in, and Sue said "with us sitting there like the Dolly Sisters," and I used that in the novel, too.
Also he had a mansion on Fifth Avenue he invited me to, a time or two, and in his front hall, up a winding staircase, he had Michelangelo's David, maybe the original which he could have afforded at the time before giving it back or perhaps his relatives squabbling for many years over his estate sold it to the Duomo. But there it stood, on the landing, and he said "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking you want to ball him, right?" To say the little man was limited is being very kind, but then, I was probably that, too, except when I hit the typewriter.
Still, it all came together with his death, and my being able to re-construct him as a crude but touching figure in The Pretenders, though Sue was and remains very pissed at my having conflated(Janet Malcolm might say) her character with mine, softening what was too hard about her, but creating-- it was a creation-- a memorable dramatis persona.
George Abbott, during his courtship of Maureen Stapleton-- they danced together into what I think was his hundredth year, when he dropped her because she was annoyed at his seeing other women-- wrote her a letter she read to me, in which he said "I have heard that this is supposed to be about Billy Rose." The fact that glittery people were actually corresponding about my novel was more thrilling, almost, than its being a bestseller. Best of all was Maureen's calling me in the middle of the night from the Beverly Hills Hotel, somewhat more than slightly wined up, saying "I've been robbed. They left my jewelry and they left my money, but they took my copy of The Pretenders. You're going to be very rich." It was true, I should have been, but my publisher wasn't prepared for its success, so was hundreds of thousands back orders behind and then went out of business before giving me my royalties, but that is another story, and according to my inner metaphysician, all for the best, as had I been as rich as was earned I probably would have bought a yacht and anchored it next to Harold Robbins' in Saint Tropez, and never become. Become what? we have yet to determine, or the Fates or the Furies do.
Maureen said she was going to go straight to Doubleday's on Fifth Avenue(it still was then) and say "Have you got a Child's Garden of Verses? And have you got The Pretenders? And if you do, why the fuck isn't it in the window."
I miss her. I never missed Billy Rose, but that is because I made him better and more interesting than he was, which I have a tendency to do with those I encounter. But I am touched by the loss of that moment, when the coral peignoir hung, and an old, powerful little man said "Who you saving that for, Robert Goulettttt?"
I was very young, younger than I was, and for some reason I cannot recall, was going out with Billy Rose, the dwarfy little electric entrepreneur who had brought elephants onto the stage, married tall and often. He was at the time, I remember, also going out with my then best friend Sue Mengers, the soon-to-become-famous agent who was going out with him for reasons I CAN recall. Key to this scene is my mother, who got everything wholesale without seeming a cliche or particularly Jewish: she was elegant and beautiful and, at base, I think, an anti-Semite, though it was probably just ordinariness that she loathed, lack of education, bad grammar and ugly neckties, as she was later in life to hate fat people, old people and poor people. Anyway, Helen's dream of the perfect exit... well, I will put it in her own words: "If the H-bomb comes, I want to be in the Inner Room of Loehmann's." The Inner Room was where women of very high breeding, a lot of them, seized designer dressers with their labels cut out from each other to be able to buy them first. I tell you this so you will understand about the chiffon wrapper.
There hung in my closet, never worn, a see through chiffon not-exactly negligee, but what you would put over it if you still hoped to entice. It was shrimp colored, according to the manufacturer who was smitten with my mother, but I would call it coral, softer than vibrant a shade, with long feathers of the same hue all up and down the front and around the collar, so it might have been a boa worn today, being Halloween, by a drag queen, (though I understand they have cancelled the Gay Parade on Castro in San Francisco, which must be a terrible blow so to speak..) I was still, at the time this peignoir hung in my closet, a very innocent young woman, stupid, I suppose, as much as moral, waiting for my great love, having loved not wisely but not too well either, squandering some juicy years on Anthony Perkins who was as clever as he was handsome then, and whom I didn't realize and/or wouldn't acknowledge was gay.
So I had this apartment on East 73rd Street, and Billy Rose, already quite elderly but still incredibly famous which was catnip to Sue and somewhat poignant to me, as I saw him as more sad than important, took me home one evening after feteing me in his limousine via the Sixth Avenue Deli, following the premiere of Lawrence of Arabia. Or maybe it was Lord Jim. In any case, no moves had ever been made towards me on his part, the only crudities having fallen from his mouth, as opposed to what he offered Sue, an open fly and "Put your hand on my cock," all of which I was later to appropriate and use to great benefit in The Pretenders, my first and perhaps last novel to ever be a breakaway bestseller, larded as it was with sex and the pungent and piquant melancholy insight I was able to bring to this mythic little man as a character.
Anyway, there we were in my apartment, and he rolled back the mirrored door of my closet, saw the feathered coral peignoir, and said: "Who you saving this for, Robert Goulet?" He pronounced it with a hard final 'T', so I realized at once that in spite of all his success, money and connections, he had not an iota of suave, much less the ability to pronounce things in French. It was shortly after that that Sue and I were having dinner at Sardi's, and he walked in, and Sue said "with us sitting there like the Dolly Sisters," and I used that in the novel, too.
Also he had a mansion on Fifth Avenue he invited me to, a time or two, and in his front hall, up a winding staircase, he had Michelangelo's David, maybe the original which he could have afforded at the time before giving it back or perhaps his relatives squabbling for many years over his estate sold it to the Duomo. But there it stood, on the landing, and he said "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking you want to ball him, right?" To say the little man was limited is being very kind, but then, I was probably that, too, except when I hit the typewriter.
Still, it all came together with his death, and my being able to re-construct him as a crude but touching figure in The Pretenders, though Sue was and remains very pissed at my having conflated(Janet Malcolm might say) her character with mine, softening what was too hard about her, but creating-- it was a creation-- a memorable dramatis persona.
George Abbott, during his courtship of Maureen Stapleton-- they danced together into what I think was his hundredth year, when he dropped her because she was annoyed at his seeing other women-- wrote her a letter she read to me, in which he said "I have heard that this is supposed to be about Billy Rose." The fact that glittery people were actually corresponding about my novel was more thrilling, almost, than its being a bestseller. Best of all was Maureen's calling me in the middle of the night from the Beverly Hills Hotel, somewhat more than slightly wined up, saying "I've been robbed. They left my jewelry and they left my money, but they took my copy of The Pretenders. You're going to be very rich." It was true, I should have been, but my publisher wasn't prepared for its success, so was hundreds of thousands back orders behind and then went out of business before giving me my royalties, but that is another story, and according to my inner metaphysician, all for the best, as had I been as rich as was earned I probably would have bought a yacht and anchored it next to Harold Robbins' in Saint Tropez, and never become. Become what? we have yet to determine, or the Fates or the Furies do.
Maureen said she was going to go straight to Doubleday's on Fifth Avenue(it still was then) and say "Have you got a Child's Garden of Verses? And have you got The Pretenders? And if you do, why the fuck isn't it in the window."
I miss her. I never missed Billy Rose, but that is because I made him better and more interesting than he was, which I have a tendency to do with those I encounter. But I am touched by the loss of that moment, when the coral peignoir hung, and an old, powerful little man said "Who you saving that for, Robert Goulettttt?"
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