IN THE CITY OF ANNE FRANK

    Yesterday I heard a taxi driver tell someone in a foreign language I understood anyway, that he was bringing “a nice old lady,” which is what I guess I am.  As much as I appreciate the “nice,” I was of course offended by the “old lady,” though I made no fuss about it, even inside my own soul, as we must remember that I am here while Bryn Mawr will be having a reunion of my class the number of which I am reluctant to put into e-letters.

    Speaking of which, I have written an e-song, that I hope I can find a singer to record, as it seems to be to be truly of the moment, even though I no longer am. Here you are:

IT’S AN E-WORLD

AND I AM E-ALONE

I USED TO HAVE U

BUT NOW I HAVE E

IT’S AN E-WORLD

NOT EVEN A TELEPHONE

SO HERE I AM

ALL AT C

WILL MY SHIP EVER COME IN?

WILL IT BE AGAIN THE WAY IT’S BEEN?

OR AM I DOOMED TO B  LOST

FOR ALL ETERNIT-E.

Put that in your Smartphone and smoke it,

The cafes here are terraced with active dope smokers. Yesterday I saw a still-young woman walking down a busy street sucking devotedly on a glass pipe, nothing in her eyes, and I would guess, very little on her horizon.  Much as I have enjoyed the occasional toke, it seems even more hazardous to me than the staircase, as I don’t really know who anyone is, or what their true motives are.

    Let us begin with Roberto, an Italian waiter at the Majestic cafe in Dam Square, who seemed sincere to me even though Italian. I understand everyone here is on the Hustle, but as I also understand Italian, and he actually said he would help me find an apartment, I borderline believed him. The beauteous, overpriced apartment I am thinking of taking in the event I commit myself to long-term here, which I am considering, as I do seem to be able to write well, though not sleeping at ALL, is not available until June 2.  Where I am staying now at a HUGE week’s rental is hazardous, to put it mildly.  Many levels of steps, shabby, endless places you could get hurt, and… well, you’ll see the terrace as soon as I can get back to the Apple Store and learn how to attach the photo from my iPhone.  I went there this morning to wait for Roberto’s call, which never came (SURPRISE!) 

Paul (see yesterday’s REPORT) was great as before, but the SIM card he sold me so I could make calls at less than a fortune, doesn’t work in my iPhone, so we have to call AT&T to unlock it and we can’t do that till 4 o’clock, as we are six hours ahead of the U.S.

   It is now only 1:06.  I would take a nap, but as explained, sleep is completely elusive.  Everything so far that has happened has come with a footnote of great difficulty to get past before I could get on with what I hoped would be a great adventure, the option I took to my college reunion, which seemed, and is, about the past.

 I wanted to be about what was ahead, if anything is.  I thought that might be a new kind of inspirational saga, different from all those offered by these charlatan religiosts who seem to be holding forums at enormous prices everywhere, the God they are offering: SUCCESS!! (The last one I know of before I left “home” was in New York, being held by Ariana Huffington, who scares me, because she is so obvious and people still pay attention) Among others I wanted to inspire was myself, because I hate to think my audacity is over. WITHOUT RISK, it says in the window of the Nike store here in Amsterdam, THERE IS NO VICTORY.  But of course, you have to live through it to win. 

    In Dam Square at the Majestic, yesterday, while I was hoping to get something sincero from Roberto, who was carrying a tray of sandwiches, I connected with a cantor from Israel.  He was a truly lovely gentleman, but he does not believe there was a God in Europe or the Holocaust wouldn't have happened.

    I have a different theory.  Some years ago, In a prior bout of audacity, probably closer to madness, I attended the Aryan Nations Congress, in Hayden Lake, Idaho.  Besides the registered out-and-out Nazi propaganda and committed Nazi storybooks, they were selling paintings by Hitler. I know that Hitler's mother didn't like him, and his stepfather was physically punishing, and possibly he was a Jew.  But besides that, the KunstAcademie, I think you spell it, the art academy in Berlin turned the young Adolf down for admittance.

      His paintings, as displayed at the conference were laughable, a number of them of cows.  But it occurred to me that if his mother hadn't been abusive, and the art school had let him in, six million Jews might be alive.  Rage at being unloved and unappreciated, it seems to me, was what made him crazy.

     One speaker at that Nazi Congress, a supposed minister, intoned "Harbor hatred only for Jews." Many of those attending had shaved heads, including the women, but with long braids hanging down the backs of their necks, a sort of style that seems to be in evidence here in Amsterdam among some of the young, as well as close-clipped on the sides, and spiked up and heavily gelled on top.  

     I had been followed carefully through the conference with regular check-ins via phone, as it used to be in that Age before texting,  by my wonderful friend the late Joe Wershba, a producer at 60 Minutes.  I knew I it was beyond risky to go there, but Don had died, and I was looking for my next novel.  When I had written it, or almost all of it, I went away for a weekend in the desert.  There was a great rainstorm in L.A. and a flaw in the roof over my desk. Water poured in and the manuscript was completely destroyed.  So though there may have been no God in Europe for the Holocaust, I think there was one in Southern California.  A man in Chicago who had been writing a book about the American Nazi party was found hanged outside his office  window, the other end of the rope attached to his desk.

     I had been joined at the conference towards the end by a friend living nearby, Tomi, a holistic masseuse I'd gotten through best pal Jamie Lee Curtis.  Tomi heard one of the hate speeches and asked me how I could stand it, as she wasn't even Jewish and her skin was crawling.  I made it literal and developed eczema.  We got out of there before the final night, when, I'd heard, a microphone fell out of a man's sleeve during the Nazi 'SIEGHEIL!' with which the gatherings always started. They'd discovered he was with the FBI, and killed him, or so the story went.  I had already left so I can't confirm that. 

     But I went directly from the conference to the actual lake, where I parasailed, for the first and last time, as fearful as I am of heights.  There was nothing to be afraid of, comparatively, just breaking your neck.  I made it through that parasail by looking up instead of down, and singing.  I mean, if there is God, maybe He/She likes  audacity.

  

ANXIOUS IN AMSTERDAM

Last night as I struggled for sleep, a condition that has eluded me for all the days I have been here, eight now I think, or nine, very protracted for Jet Lag, but then I have a lot on my mind, which seems reluctant to slow down, even as my body does, to put it mildly, I wrote the following pome:

Struck by a pram
In Amsterdam
Where nobody pays attention
She flew quite high
Towards an azure sky
And entered a new dimension
Where the air was clearer
And God seemed nearer
And none of the people were slobs
All was sameness, parity
Total clarity
And running it was Steve Jobs
You had but to click
And the air was thick
With the certainty all would be well
With nothing surprisin’
On any horizon
And everything being just swell
And it turned out that she’d gone to Hell.

As I don't know where I'm going, and I don't know who's going with me, to give a new and slightly melancholy twist to the lovely folk song, I have decided to be open to any possibility and just allow it all to unfold, hoping it does.  
   I seem to be headquartered at the Apple Store, a bright and open duplicate of the one in London where I learned nothing, trying to lob myself into this century.   This is curiously still, like the one in London, nothing like New York's, where you can hear nothing, so busy and filled with international languages many of them in Baby, as there are carriages everywhere, true tots in them, some of them just learning to sit up and already at the iPads with games on them.  Terrifying, the swallowing of the world by technology, but I imagine a relief to the parents having the attention diverted so they don't cry or need their diaper changed.
    This store in Leidse Square is bustling in a peaceful way, like Amsterdam itself, except for the bicycles and trams which amaze me by not hitting anyone, including me.  It seems quietly perilous, the only thing harsh about it the language, glottal and ugly to the ear, but maybe that is because I don't understand it, or have Dutch antecedents, as does my landlord, a youngish man named Fred, whose parents were Dutch, so he's come back to connect with his roots, and also pick up a few bucks, making a career out of renting these less than lovely flats, for fairly exorbitant prices.  The one I slept in last night is a step-down into a basement, being careful not to hit your head on the concrete overhang.
   I am writing this the next day, moved to the flat I rented for a week for a fortune, relieved and somewhat surprised to be still alive with nothing broken as there are steps everywhere it is lucky/amazing I didn't fall down, including the ones to the loo, which, being older than I thought I was, I had to go to in the middle of the night, slightly this side of terrified.   Today, after a beautiful if over-lavish dinner last night with my new friend Daniel, met on my flight from Scotland, his beautiful and curiously respectful and interested teenage son and a neighbor who's still very mad at his ex-wife, I spent the first many hours of the day waiting to be connected to the Internet and have my phone work.  I shall probably go to my seeming Club, the Apple Store, to try and reconnect with Paul, a remarkable young black man who came to work at Apple to cut down his stress level.  He was in banking, and the business taught him by a genial uncle who used to stop by his clients' house for coffee and discuss how the world was and what might seem interesting as an investment has become driven and impersonal.  I was at the store yesterday (Tuesday) from the time it opened at ten in the morning, with everybody being allegedly helpful, after saying they will go ask a colleague for whatever it was I wanted or needed, they never appeared again.  He was not there yesterday, so I spent the whole time there trying to figure things out by myself, waiting for one of his colleagues.  They notified me every minute on my Mac that there were only 25 minutes till my One-on-One tutorial, then 24, and so on down to the moment the appointment came when no one did, nor was there a sign of anyone.  I had to go and get them to come up with one of their colleagues.
    No one seems to have friends here: they all have "colleagues."  It sounds very professional, but professional seems not exactly a key word in Amsterdam, where most of the young people, Paul excepted, seem to have little purpose.  My landlord who charges a lot of money for a barren apartment with a garden outside the bedroom window that would be nice if it had anything in it besides old boards and dead plants has a staff that seems to have been acquired mainly through Frisbee.  They are advanced Frisbee players which has a particular jargon that I will try and pick up this evening when I am taking one of Fred's colleagues' colleague, a most genial young man, who came to sort out my Internet problems, and is from New Zealand, so more generous of spirit than the Hollander Fred sent me earlier.  
   The apartment I am in, hazardous down steps and a long, narrow, dark and forbidding corridor, since taxes here were based in part on how wide the hallways were, is across the street from Ann Frank's house.  I am feeling a lot like her if she had lived to be old, as I am in a terrible state of anxiety caused by not-knowing, which is usually a blessing in life since it is the one that works best because that way you get surprises, hopefully some of them good.  But here I am not sure I will make it intact through this stay, what with the stairs and having already almost fallen down them once, caught by the second and more genial of Fred's colleagues, who just got engaged so I am taking him and his fiancé to the Asian restaurant I went to the other night, because I really liked him and he genuinely helped me, and I am very alone in this city.  I was here only once before when I was with the Journal, so everything was free and very First Class, so I learned little about what it's really like.  Hope to find out without losing my way, in many senses of that expression.
    This is enough of all that is dark and narrow like the corridor.  I am off now to try and discover a bit about Amsterdam on foot, since I have been given a map from Watsup, an App that the young New Zealander put on my iPhone that lets you make calls without being charged.  We'll see.  Remember, if anything happens, I loved you all, whoever you are.  That includes my daughter-in-law.

BAA LAMBS

So I am here in Middlebie, Scotland, outside Ecclefechan, pronounced as if you have something stuck in your throat, where Thomas Carlyle was born, visiting my beloved friend Rosie, met at my Quaker Meeting in Paris, when I lived there long-term, 1997.  She remembers the date better than I, as her life was in a memorable upheaval which is not my business to write about.  I of course had no concept of my life being in upheaval, too, imagining that I could simply get on with things even though my husband had died and my children were grown except in the wisdom and maturity sense, and publishing was getting crazy, and I had no idea what the future would bring, or if, indeed, I had one.  Shortly after that I called the Wall Street Journal Europe and connected with Jim Ruane, the editor, who had just started a travel section, and said “I have an idea: Swimming Through Europe,” about all the great hotels with pools.  He said “I like it.  Send me a couple of graphs.”  I said “What is that?” and so began my travel-writing career which lasted at the Journal as long as he did. 

     I can’t remember why exactly I moved back to Paris, where I had lived shortly after graduating from Bryn Mawr, sung at the Mars Club, with Bob Dorough at the piano, but it was a treat and a challenge and improbable, all three things my life has been. And ‘twas there I met Rosie, a great and insightful soul. It’s been a lot of years since we saw each other, so this is, I suppose you could say, a Godsend.  Not knowing what would be the rest of my life, should I have one, this fairly spontaneous plan arose to catch up, here at her cottage with a profusion of flowers outside the kitchen window, the names of which I don’t know but have written about to my grandsons.

   Yesterday Rosie took me to the castle of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensbury and has eighty three other titles and 380,000 acres, three castles in Scotland, another down South and a house or two in London, and a guide who took us round the rather barren and cold (what a surprise!) castle, who is obviously a Republican, which does not mean the same thing here as it does to us, but rather, one who seems obviously embittered at the existence of royals, even though they can no longer afford a live-in staff.  There are a lot of bloodless portraits all over the walls, the one great painting, the Virgin and the Yarnwinder by Leonardo da Vinci having been stolen,  and found in the office of a Glasgow solicitor who was tried, his guilt not proven. But he was, as they say here, struck off, (disbarred) so he’s now suing the Duke for four million pounds because he’s lost his license to practice.  A funny country, including the birdyballs , diegestive biscuits and lard my darling friend Rosie rolls by hand and puts in the bird feeders hanging outside the kitchen window, above and alongside an endless glory of flowers with names I’ve never heard before, trollies, a kind of giant buttercup, clematis, a lavendar blossom, azaleas only they’re red, and on and on and up a little hill and down dale.  A unique experience, certainly for me.

    Rosie, being as wise as she is soft-voiced, has suggested I find myself a spot in Amsterdam, my next stop on this spontaneous and mainly unmarked journey, and set about writing my MEMOIR, (I capitalize it because the word seems pretentious to me though I hope and don’t imagine the writing will be,) which turns out to be the plan even though I didn’t originally have one.  England was a borderline disaster about which I will not write yet, except for the warmth and deep-voiced kindness of the fine actor, Simon Jones, in Blithe Spirit, and his lovely wife Nancy with whom I dined, as one does in England, after the play, which is still good, especially with Angela Lansbury, who defines indefatigable.  It was my thought, if any I had, which I didn’t really, to go all the way North as suggested by my great college president emeritus (I think you say) Pat McPherson to see the Summer Isles, but they are supposed to be very cold and isolated and I have left almost all my clothes in London so I will not have too much luggage, which I already do in my head.

     Rosie having taken pics of the BAA LAMBS as she colorfully calls them in her countrified Scottish, has posted them on her IPad which I would do if I had brought mine with me, and am too e-retarded to do on my Mac.  But I will work it out before I leave so you can see the best part of the Duke of Baccleuch's castle, which were the sheep grazing outside.  

   I am sad to hear that California is ablaze.  The real news is usually too bad to hear.  I remember once I was writing about a newspaper that printed only good news, so it went out of business.  As it is, even the newspapers printing the news that is bad, which almost all of it is, are going out of business as well.  So I shall make this trip along with the Wizard of Oz, and pay no attention to the man behind the green curtain.  Or the iron one, allegedly down, but now monitored by the biggest bully of my lifetime. 'Tis a better world when even the brightest people in it focus on the BAA lambs.         

OVER MANY A QUAINT AND CURIOUS VOLUME

So finally having overcome my own apathy and disappointment with what the theatre (spelled the committed way) here has provided, I made my way to what I will have to conclude is the East Village, and the New York Theatre Workshop presentation of RED-EYE TO HAVRE DE GRACE, a title so complex and elevated it might have lit up a side street in Paris.  It is a dark and sort of delicious, in a sour way, presentation, starting with a man who pretends to be a fire inspector before he bursts into song, and whom I engaged in a bit of chatter as I believed the uniform, and, as everybody knows who talked to me lately, I lived in my 11th or maybe it was my twelfth year at 255 West 84th, on which site, it says in brass on the outside wall, Edgar Allen Poe wrote The Raven.  And as those who know me also know, I do not believe in coincidence, but imagine that almost everything is Divine Choreography, except the Middle East.  So I lived there because it was on that site that Edgar Allen Poe wrote The Raven, and I was given the gift of poetry because there had to be something to balance in my soul the way my parents tore each other apart.
   It was there that I first began writing songs as I lay in my foldaway bed in the living room, and my mother, hearing, when I told her what I was doing, said "Oh, my God, she's crazy as a bedbug!"  But I did write what became the school song for P.S.9, on 82nd and West End, which is now, according to my friend and (didn't know it at the time) schoolmate Hal Dresner, a school for the intellectually challenged, to put it kindly.  But then, ah then, it had Mrs. Schatteles for a principal, and she was a woman who loved education and gave her all to it and the children whose lives she touched, which happily included mine.  So, with her guidance, I chose a destiny that included serious education, and didn't go to the Hunter program for exceptional children when I was invited into it, because I knew I'd do better with Mrs. Schatteles staying in P.S.9.  Just as I chose to go to Bryn Mawr, even though Radcliffe shone glossier, because I got who and what Bryn Mawr had to offer: women who were smart who really cared.
   The play about Poe is shadowy excellent, and the man who plays him is inspired and perhaps already a little crazy.Or maybe a lot.  He is intensely dark-eyed and very sunken-cheeked handsome and has obviously fallen face forward into the role, so I hope he survives it.  But he is clearly gifted, and I'm glad I went.  It justified theah-tah and what we hope to get from it.  And in some cases, if we're lucky, give.
    And now, just as I get ready to go to London, and from there, Scotland to visit Rosie and then to the Isle of Man, Wight, Skye? one or all? I connect at long last with my wonderful, eloquent, and great-hearted teacher, Jack Kornfield, who calls from the start of a retreat in Yucca Valley, where I learned how to be still, the thing in life that was hardest for me. As always, Jack lifts, and, in this case, affirms that I am doing exactly the right thing.  All is in place.  Either it will happen or it won't.  Not up to me.
   GO, UNIVERSE!

WHILE I PONDERED WEAK AND WEARY

As I have writ in moments of elation and despair, I have long sought a literary legacy.  At moments I was sure I actually had one, being foster-papaed by Yip Harburg, in my opinion the best we had of lyricists, screwed by Frank Loesser in several senses of the word, having been born on Irving Berlin's birthday(May 11th) in Stephen Foster's birth city, which most will be stunned to find out was Pittsburgh, Pa., his having never, except in song, and for one boat ride, made it truly into the deep South, and living not very long, thirty-seven years, for all his marvelous output.   
    But during one of my parents' ferocious reconciliations, when my mother told me to call the police, and when they came, from half-hid from behind the door to apt. 12D I think it was, so they couldn't see her blackened eye, she told them "It's my daughter: she's crazy."  And so it began, the mythic part of my life, because I can't conceive of my reputation going downhill any earlier than eleven.
   All of this remembered because the building where I lived at the time, where that took place was 255 West 84th Street, on which there is now a plaque that reads, in brass, "On this site Edgar Allen Poe wrote The Raven." And on this Saturday, matinee time, I am going to see the confused but brilliant poet himself in his artistic rendering at least, in a play downtown.
    It is truly about time I went to see some theatre since I am about to leave New York.  But I have not been sufficiently moved to do much of that since coming back to New York, with the exception of the Frank Loesser revival of Most Happy Fella for obvious reasons I have written about in this blog-- why do they call it that?  The mere pronunciation of the word is an affront to the English language.  Oh well.
   Anyway, I look forward to seeing the Poe this Saturday all the way downtown, and going to London the 8th of May, where I shall see Angela Lansbury as Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit.  My once neighbor on Central Park South Simon Jones is in the show, and as it's England, I assume they still speak the language.  After that I go to Scotland to visit my lovely friend Rosemary Milne, from my Quaker Meeting in Paris.  My schedule is open-ended, since I have no plans for the future, besides my hope of having one.
    I am still upset for Stephen Foster, but he did have music in his life, as short as it was.

HOW SHARPER THAN A SERPENT'S PRICK

...it is to have a loveless parent.  
    I was feeling somewhat disloyal at having told the truth about my father, the truth exposing him as less than a giant among men, or even among dwarves, his having turned out to be self-serving, self-loving and self-elfing whatever else are the unfortunate truths about most men, and a lot of women, too, probably, except for the few noble ones we are likely to encounter in these lifetimes, which I think we should regard as more precious than we do. Basically, as they say a lot in California, we would all like our forebears to be heroic, so when they turn out to be less than inspiring, we are disappointed, or, in the case of those of us who have words to make concrete our perceptions, pissed.  In the case of my mother, one of the most colorful creatures to have impacted on my cowering lifetime, I forgave everything because she was so original, though as she said to Liz Smith, who I am pleased to note is still sharp and unforgiving in her 90s, when she read THE MOTHERLAND, probably the best of my novels, Helen, my mom, wrote Liz that she "regretted not having committed infanticide."   Not many could have had that colorful a framework for their lives to unfold against.
Fortunately she married Puggy, a great gentleman who was surprised at how well he had come off in my novel of which he was the center, simply because he had been smart and kind, two reasons to love any character, whether in life or a book.  I am not sure if our lives are divinely guided, but it would seem I had been very fortunate in my mother's choice of partners, no matter how temporary.  When I had my great success my Junior year at Bryn Mawr with the show I mostly wrote and performed in, and I told Miss McBride, our formidable college president that I was leaving college because Bryn Mawr had taught me all it could, and "the theatre neede me," she drawled to me in her Hepburnesque tones: "Well, Gwen... Try to be back for exams."
    When I told my mother I was leaving college, she cried "They told me this would happen in the beauty parlor," and locked me in my bedroom.  But Puggy, coming into my room, pointed to a painting on the wall, and said "There's your reason to stay: all art will show itself in its time.  Don't rush the calendar." 
      Well I certainly haven't.
      I have this big birthday coming up and it has struck me for the first time in a very long lifetime that I must give up my dream of getting my musical on Broadway, my greatest ambition since I was a girl, all other talents and energies. the many published novels, the movies, seeming to me incidental and beside the point.  But seeing now what there is on Broadway, and having survived what is arguably the worst winter of my life, I realize how very lucky I am simply to be breathing and able to escape this dreary, dark, unloving city and having the option of someplace else to go.  Now, I must decide where.
   Lew the Mayor, as Mel Brooks called him, having left me only my own resources to sustain me, either imagining I was rich in my own right or not giving a shit, has suitably embittered me so I would be prepared to tell the whole truth about him if I thought anyone was interested, or that he had any of the true stature or inner magnitude of Puggy.  But he was a small man in spirit, and deed.  When I had a friend who moved to Tucson when Lew was mayor, was suicidal in her loneliness, and asked him to give her a helping hand, he said, having become a Republican(huh?) "I'm in the midst of trying to unseat a councilman."  Priorities.  How they do spring up in the minds(?) of men.
     When I was accepted to Bryn Mawr, he said "The University of Arizona is a better school."  That's because it would have been free for him to send me there.  So, again, how sharper than a serpent's prick, especially when it's small.  Thank God for Puggy, and his sending me to Bryn Mawr.
    I am disappointed with myself at still having this much anger in me, even after a long lifetime where Lew consistently walked away when the bills were due. I suppose I fantasied that when at very long last (as my favorite handsome friend Cary Grant said: "Hate will keep you alive longer than love will,") the virulent Selma, the woman to whom my mother introduced Lew, hoping, I think, that Selma would kill him, since she had cut her first husband's shirts into a hundred pieces each, finally died at 97, there would be some kindness and succor sent my way.  Not to hold one's breath.
    I remember when I wrote my novel about Billy Rose, whom I called Harry Bell in The Pretenders, Sue Mengers, who had dated him in real life said: "I only hope there is an Afterlife so he can see how much he was hated."   I do not hold that thought for Lew the Mayor, as I don't suppose he could have helped how small he was, coming himself from an unloving father correctly named Adolf, but I am still sad for little Gwen, the four year old who seems still to live inside me, that she is disappointed in her father.  I imagine that had he been the fine fellow I would have loved to have for a dad my creative output might have been less, just as if my mother had not been so colorful, there would have been a smaller slew of novels.  She wrote, when Liz Smith congratulated her on The Motherland, that reading it, she "regretted not committing infanticide."  As it turned out, she lived long enough to forgive and ultimately enjoy and be kind to me, and life being stranger than fiction, I do truly miss her.  And, as close friends know, I have made her into a musical, which may never see the light of orchestra, but brought me some joy and a few recordings by Rosemary Clooney, the wonderful singer now better known as George's aunt.
      The weather has turned truly foul but those of us who had forebears who left us someplace to take shelter have reason to be grateful, especially if the father who seemed ultimately a success by American standards consistently let us down even in the Afterlife, whether or not there is one, and stood tall only when having his picture taken.  How funny that I am still so disappointed. I mean, if you like your funny with irony on top.
    

THE MOST HAPPY... WELL, NOT QUITE

I found a note among my scruffily unassorted papers that reads:
"A life well-lived, with all its pain, loneliness, silences when you would have noise, and noise when you would have silence."  I don't know if I wrote-- and thought-- that, or had heard it and it and wrote it down because it touched me.  This has been the most introspective winter of my life-- not that I meant it to be so, but the weather has kept me inside both my apartment and myself, and though the act of just being alive seems a positive one, I don't like having nothing to show for it.
   This is intensified by the fact that City Center is having one of its mini-revivals, "THE MOST HAPPY FELLA."  When I was 20, and in Hollywood trying to be discovered as a songwriter, which I very much was, there was an agent at MCA named Bobby Helfer, a genuinely kind man, a cousin of Elmer Bernstein, the top of the music-for-film chain, who really liked my songs but said he couldn't try to sell me because he couldn't ask enough money for me, whereas he could get many times the amount for Les Baxter, a hottie in the then marketplace.  But in the end he said "The hell with it, I'm going to do it anyway."  So he set me up with an audition with Frank Loesser.  
    Frank listened and said "Kid, you're the biggest talent since me." Pretty thrilling words, even without music.  He then courted me, minimally as I recall, but it was enough, and he took me to bed, in my furnished apartment on N. Havenhurst. Understand, those of you with a today mentality, that women, or more accurately, girls of that era did not do that, especially the good ones, which I more than
more than was.  But I was in love with Tony Perkins, who was the bright, clever, handsome young star of his day, and we had fun, and he loved my songs, and I didn't know who he really wanted was Tab Hunter.  So here I was with this great songwriter, and when we were finished making love, such as it was, he got up and went to my electric piano and played me the new song from his new show "MOST HAPPY FELLA."  It was called "Warm all Over" and I can still see him sitting there, naked, the crack of his bare butt on that grayish white bench, singing it badly but with great heart which I don't think he really had one of but could put into a song.
    But I believe I told him it was wonderful, because I don't know what else I could possibly have said, except "I hope you love me a little," as all of us girls wanted to feel in those days, which I can't believe were as long ago as they are.  And when it was over, he said "Write me a musical, kid."
   So of course I did.  It took me about three weeks-- I was very fast then, and, of course, thought I was in love.  Tony, who had never discussed or even hinted at his homosexuality, and surely didn't want me, was still pissed that I had been with Frank, and said, in one of his few bitchy moments--he was strangely kind to me-- "Did you think you would get more gifted through injection?"  But he admired the songs, so I sent them off to Frank, and waited to hear.
    And waited and waited.  Finally I called him.  "Great kid, Great," he said.  And I said "Well?"  And he said "Let me think about it."
    A while later, having taken another gulp of heart, I called Frank again, and asked what was happening with my musical.  And he said "Moss and I are doing a show we're working on in Boston, and I've used a couple of your songs."
     I said "What about money?"
    And he said "Write your family."
    The show Moss(I assume Hart) and he were working on never came to New York.  But I did see Frank one more time.  He was standing on a street corner, and a few feet away from him was Jo Sullivan, whom he had married, after his divorce from Lynn, who was known in show business as "The Evil of Two Loessers."   He saw me and whispered "Don't say anything," which I assume was because he didn't want her to know we had been together or just maybe was because he didn't want me to say anything about anything, which I haven't till now, all renewed and reminded because I am going to see his show this afternoon.
     There were many other young writers that I know he used, though perhaps not so thoroughly or in the same way.  But the music remains, and the lyrics, which were pretty clever, as clever as I wasn't personally. 
    Bobby Helfer, the dear agent who unexpectedly supported me, committed suicide shortly after that, on his 42nd birthday, by taking 42 pills.  There are worse things, obviously, than not having someone honor your music.
     Then yesterday I went to see THE MOST HAPPY FELLA, and there is no doubt it is a work of genius.  Frank, which I believe I can call him, having been intimate except on any meaningful level, wanted so much to be a true musician, that even though he could hardly play the piano, made it into a just-about-opera, and it IS wonderful.  Though what it really is is a number of sensational songs, about 22, connected by a few recitatives that I suppose sound operatic.  But it is a Great Great show, and I forgive him for being less than a Great Guy.
    You can't have everything.