THE HILLS ARE ALIVE...

...if not with The Sound of Music, a sigh of relief to be back here.  In the distance, from the little balcony in my room at this beautiful hotel where my old friend Frank Bowling is the elegant as always manager, I can see the Hollywood sign.   Having been afloat in a world that pretends it loathes the trivial, but compensates for thinking itself serious (New York,) by dismissing compassion and the needs of other human beings, except on fund-raiding occasions or the celebration of that rare citizen who really cares about civilization(Dan Greenberg,) I awoke to a beautiful day, water shortage notwithstanding.  If I knew how to work my iPhone after all these years or an Apple store that was not so overcrowded because it was named the #1 tourist attraction in New York,  I would take a picture of how beautiful it is from a distance, while in my mental heart, holding it close. 

    There is something curiously peaceful about Beverly Hills, phony as it is supposed to be, and maybe is if you buy into it.  But after my most recent attempt to love New York, and failing, especially as far as the theatre I have always loved and yearned to be a part of, it is beyond a relief to be simply comfortable.  Age cannot wither nor custom stale Southern California, especially with all its plastic surgeons. 

     So now begins my quest for the right apartment, something that sounds so trivial and maybe is.  But being able to sleep at night does count, and being able to look out the window if you are lucky enough to wake up in the morning factors in, much less being able to walk comfortably to the Rite-Aid on Canon Drive where if you couldn't find the right apartment you could actually live.  I confess to loving my pharmacist at the Duane Reade on Sixth Avenue, sharp, kindly, father-of-many-Frank, who actually seemed to care who you were over the counter. But except for him and the staff at the Hampshire House, darling doormen, Indefatigable Jeannie in the basement, and adorable Ava, five, down the hall with her lovely mom, human contact seemed below a minimum.  I have never felt more alone in my life, except for The Angel Carleen, a direct representative of God, no matter how cynical you might have become.  

     Even the rooftop I thought I was lucky enough to be able to look out on and over at what used to be Marlon Brando's building on 57th Street, now obscured by the endless construction by what you would hope would be Arabs you could have contempt for, except they are Jews, is strung with ropes and ladders and barrels and workmen who show up when you're trying to do your yoga naked, on the little balcony it became suddenly too cold to stand on even for a breath of air that isn't that good anyway.  If at least the theatre I so aspired to be a part of is uncomfortable was uplifting, or even really entertaining.  Glenn Close was wonderful in her play, along with John Lithgow, but it was revived Edward Albee, and it would have been more fun to see her in a musical, so I could tender to my hope of finding someone unexpected to play Sylvia WHO? the musical based on my mother, the party crasher.  I just didn't have the fortitude to make it to one more theatre where allegedly there was an enjoyable experience.  I did like Jersey Boys, but that was a while ago, as was youth and the energy to put up with the

insensitivity.  Both onstage and in the audience.

      I see where I sound old and crabby only one of which I am, but that surfaces more clearly because I am SO relieved to be here.  So lucky with all that is happening in the world, and in our poor country, politically,.. the prospect of yet another Bush, probably the one that Should Have Been instead of the moron, Jr., that I am able to take a real breath, even of fetid air.  Thematically, it would seem that I am critical of the air everywhere, which I didn't have to be in Amsterdam, bathed as it was by ocean winds they built a city on the water just to show how clever they were and think the world a place they are still in charge of, where I truly loved Daniel and his bairn and a small cluster of friends all from other places, except for Peter who lost charge of his illegitimate children which most of the children there seem to be, because the courts are less than fair.  Oh, it is a world that would confuse even the most judicious of beings, which I am still trying, lamely, to become one of. 

     Mostly I am grateful to be still alive, looking over at the distant mountains, having survived the plane trip where the moronic or maybe just spiteful man was sneezing into the air, or when reprimanded, his sleeve, --but we'll see how I am in 21 days.

Life, it seems to me, is simply something to celebrate daily if you are up to it, having been here so long I can't understand or negotiate all the new e-things, including why Tim Cook, the head of Apple had to come out, because who cares who those guys go to bed with?  

     All I would like to have in what is left of my life is a heated pool  , some people I can really trust, and the right apartment.  Love is something I was lucky enough to have at its most elusive and earnest: a man who cherished me no matter what, supported my dreams and made them his own, and didn't mind my being a woman.  As a matter of fortunate fact, seemed to rejoice in it. 

NOT SO SWEET SURRENDER

So I have given up my conquest of New York, never really having started it, except in mine own imagination.  I have made more inroads in Amsterdam over my chilled, wet stay there, and Paris in one weekend than I have made over the years in all these intermittent stays in New York, where all my buddies are those I made at Bryn Mawr. The great songwriters I was privileged to know, Frank Loesser, (a shit, but he thought me gifted at twenty and flattered me, I guess, by stealing a couple of my songs for an out-of-town tryout in Boston that never made it onto the Great-Not-so-White-Way) and the truly wonderful Yip Harburg, who was the father I'd never really had, and with white hair, yet, so long vanished that nobody knows who they are anymore.  I have a hard time believing how old I am, as I was always the youngest one, and that was my handicap.  Had I but known! 
     At any rate(what does that phrase mean exactly?) I have just made my reservations to go to LA for the winter, maybe more, as if I were an old Jewish woman, which I guess (how is it possible?) I am, though spiritually I am Buddhist, which means Jack wouldn't get mad at me if I wasn't devoted.  Don used to(SOOOOOO long ago) tell me to tell them that at Bryn Mawr reunions, that I am a Quaker-Buddhist-Jew, and see what they made of that.  It's the truth, but only if you don't have to observe any of the above.  The Quakers that I loved, and I did, were observant only in their silence, which amazingly I could honor, the Buddhists in their retreats, to which I stopped going but still admired, as Jack is a great teacher and became a truly trusted and helpful friend, and the Jew you can't stop being no matter how little attention you paid to your religion, because when the Nazis came-- as sadly, they still do-- denying your Judaism would not keep you from being rounded up.  
   In the meanwhile, another one of those phrases, I have made treasured new friends in a place I don't have the strength to live (Amsterdam) and am returning(if all goes wells) to LA so can get my things out of storage, including a keyboard I bought but rarely tried to play (will do better this time) above which I will hang the gorgeous bag Jamie gave me with my initials on it, as part of the decor.  I no longer hope for or even more plan for a conquest of Broadway, as I am the wrong sex, and the world, as some poet said, is out of time, meaning, I would hope, not over, but not allowing for something from another period to happen in this one.  It is enough, I hope, as I am no longer that crazy, that there is a welcomed and cheered revival of ON THE TOWN, where my once great(I thought) dancing teacher Gene Kelly became a star, the first to screw me, in the spiritual sense, taking my young inspiration, WHAT A WAY TO GO, and bringing it to the screen via Arthur Jacobs who thought it was me who screwed him (in the show business sense) as MCA threw the blame my way, a lie, but that was MCA.  All these things were terrible surprises, as I really loved show business and other people, and apparently was sufficiently wounded that I never forgot any of this, but now I can, along with everything else that vanishes into some kind of elder fog.
  The weather here is enough to drive me away, along with the bad theatre and the lack of compassion.  I spoke last night to Shan Cretin, the soft and loving high-posted officer in the Quaker not-exactly-hierarchy, who is in Philadelphia, and admitted, gentle and brilliant as she is (also speaks Chinese) that when she comes to New York she feels a certain harshness-- didn't use that word-- in the attitudes of the people.  This, a woman who doesn't judge.  But almost all the friends I have made are either leftover and treasured ones from Bryn Mawr, or strangers from other countries I have picked up on street corners or at the opera.  There will be a song in ON THE TOWN which I will hurry to see, called LONELY TOWN, and it IS, it IS!  I was born out of time-- that is to say I should have been here to emerge in the period when it was still all right and exciting to have been a gifted lyricist, and nobody noticed you were a woman.
    But I am just about finished lamenting what I have missed, and will set out to try and realize, in the realization sense, what it is I can still make happen, if anything.  So I will leave the town to Comden and Green, whose place it really was, and apparently still is.  Better them than Lady GaGa.

LEARNING TO RELIQUISH

My old agent, Owen Laster, head of Literary, such as it was, at the William Morris Agency, said what he loved most about me was that I never gave up.  But he is dead now, so that no longer seems a vital evaluation.

   What I loved most about me, if I really loved about me at all, was my conviction that if you were indefatigable in the pursuit of some worthy purpose, you would never grow tired.  But I am afraid I was wrong.  A few weeks in New York, darkening skies, and a darkening world have borderline sapped me of my energy, and very much robbed me of my childlike vitality and optimism, which really are hardly applicable to one of my years, which I have always discounted, but my bones begin to be aware of.
     Battles rage on the literary front, of which I am hardly conscious, except that Philip Roth, great writer and heartless narcissist, is on the front page of the Business section of the Times, decrying the battle for writers to get what is due them, via Amazon and Hachette.  I remember with something more than a mind's eye the wonderful recently visited bookshop in Amsterdam, savored only briefly, that had real books in it, stacks of shelves, a checkout counter, as in days of yore, and, even more yore-ly, my vanished youth, so much of it passed in bookstores.  I can conjure like the wounded child I was, shelves low to the ground I sat on, turning pages that made me smile or raise a tear or two.  As it is now, I do not even really connect with the vanishing book world, since the last thing I wrote was not even given serious attention by an agent who had no idea who I was, if indeed I was ever anybody.  So interesting, really, as the last few years of my life were spent trying to learn to live fully in the moment, as the moments vanished, struggling to give up attachment to wanting to be Somebody.  And now I no longer am.  I wonder at that not making me happier.
         Had lunch at the Metropolitan with Betty Srere and Suzie Habachy, friends from Bryn Mawr, and lifelong friends as it happily turns out, two excellent women who remind me how lucky I was to go to that great college, with its values that never desist.  Would that the world could hold to that level.
      

A POME

Struck by a pram
In Amsterdam
Where no one pays any attention
She flew quite high
Towards a sapphire sky
And entered another dimension
Where the air seemed clearer
And God seemed nearer
And there were both nabobs and slobs
There was kindness, charity
Perfect parity
Everything run by Steve Jobs.
But behind the illusion
Of little confusion
And fellows that wore yellow ties
There was need to return to
The land where you yearn to
Have no mayonnaise on your fries.
And the hunger for square ways
So Icelandic Airways
It carried her over the pole
To the country of drama
And poor, lost Obama
Where she once again felt almost whole.
But we'll see...

SURVIVING A SUMMER

So having begun clearing off my desk in an attempt to sort out this last adventure, I find the history of a madness I must have been madder than usual to take on. Looking up the synonyms for 'adventure', as having described too many that actually were as simply that, not wanting to be repetitious as well as seeming foolhardy, which I really don't mind as long as I live through it, I come across  escapade, lark, ploy; act, action, deed, doing,feat; episode, occasion; baptism, ordeal, test, trial,tribulation; enterprise, risk, venture; expedition, exploration,mission, performance, quest, stunt.
Of all these, I would have to choose 'escapade,' though it was closer to 'ordeal' as it turned out, and only turned out as I got out in time. And that was my Nazi summer, I think was the season.
    I find pictures of the trees, tall pines rising high, a dangling Swastika hanging between their trunks, barely perceptible, as I was, of course, photographing in secret, frightened of being discovered, though not frightened enough not to go to the Aryan Nations Congress.  No kidding.  In Hayden Park, Idaho, where they had their colony.  Encampment, more accurately.  This was particularly resonant for me, an extremely non-observant Jew, because I had gone to Cherry Lawn School in Darien, Connecticut, the signature anti-Semitic colony in the USA, where most of the students were Jews, and the townspeople closed their blinds when we walked in to the village on Brookside Road to see a movie.
      Icing on the tasteless cake, 'Gentlemen's Agreement,' was filmed there while I was a student, eleven or twelve years old.  And as Gregory Peck was reportedly filming a scene in town, a lot of the students went into town to watch.   But by the time they get there, the train had pulled in, the scene been shot, and they all went back to school except me, so avid a movie fan that I sat on the bench sobbing at having missed it.   As it turned out, the train had pulled in too far, the star had gone back to Stanford to get on it and come in again, and I was the only one left in the station.  He signed my paper, leaning it against my front left-almost breast, and I never washed that flannel shirt again.  Many years later, the universe being orchestrated, I met him in Hollywood and became friendish, and when he came to Paris, where I was freelancing for the Wall Street Journal Europe at the time, he invited me to be his date for a dinner at the American Embassy in his honor.  Live long enough and everything works out in some literary way,  God being a compulsive storyteller.  
    Then when Mr. Peck, which I still think of him as, 'Gregory' seeming too intimate with Veronique, his wife, very eagle-eyed,  recorded the memorial poem I wrote for my Yorkie, Happy's, memory, my dog had greater honor than most people.  The book would have sold millions, except that Oprah didn't show it, still another semi-disappointing saga.  You are always lucky when you have a saga at all, even one that semi-disappoints, because that at least means you have lived through it.
    Such was the case with the Nazis of Idaho.  I tried to write a novel about it and them.  But for those who still are unbelievers in a beneficent universe, it rained through my roof on the (still then) typewriter I was writing the book on, and the manuscript was destroyed.  A journalist who had attended the same conference and planned to write a book about it was found hanging from his office window in Chicago.
    I don't believe I will live long enough to describe in indescribable detail that dark adventure, except to relate that Joe Wershba of Sixty Minutes was tracking me in case they found out that I was a Jew, and for what I was doing, a man was strung up from the burning cross there when a microphone fell out of his sleeve, raised in the Nazi salute that was called for from the assemblage I skipped because I had developed hives, and Tommie, the masseuse who had joined me because she lived near, said "I don't know how you can stand it, and I'm not even Jewish."  I'm sorry I never wrote the book but it would not have been uplifting anyway, and I'm glad to be alive.  And the Aryan Nations conference in Hayden Lake has been dissolved as its crackpot leader is dead, but you would be sadly surprised to find out how many colonies there are in America.  Maybe not.  I still have the pictures though, and they are very glossy and pretty except for the swastikas perceptible through the tree trunks.
     And maybe not if you watch this morning's Sixty Minutes, or look at the front of The New York Times.  There were certain advantages to living in Holland and not being able to, or have any wish to understand Dutch.

DEAD BEFORE ME

My son Robert, who continues to be very clever and has all his hair, a profusion of it, always the source of admiration but now envy in the eyes of his balding peers, called me on the occasion of Joan Rivers' exit, to tell me it was time for another entry to DEAD BEFORE ME, a book I once considered writing.  Many years ago, as it now turns out, when the first of my famous, really close(in terms of my experience with them) buddies, Stanley Kubrick died, or as they say now as if it will make it less lethal, passed, I thought of writing about him which I have somewhere I hope because he really was an experience, as was my connection with him, since he came to visit me in the Bay Area when I was in graduate school at Stanford, took me to the screening of SPARTACUS, let me read the preview comments, and got me to secretly begin to write the first draft of Lolita, as he had discovered to his horror that Nabokov couldn't write dialogue.  But to my horror I discovered he thought it was a love story, so I stepped away.  But I always loved him, crazy as he was, and dedicated one of my novels, not a very good one, to him and Christiane.  They were at my wedding, a most colorful addition, as Don at the time was producing the just launched football coverage of the Jets at the TV station where he was executive producer, and Stanley said he should keep the camera on the line, where the most dramatic action was, and Don said "Stanley, if you'll let me run a credit at the end "Directed by Stanley Kubrick," I'll keep the camera wherever you say." 
    I saw him last when I Thanksgivinged with Gary and Maxine Smith in Elstree and Stanley lived next door, so I went to show him my then little children, to illustrate the unexpected happiness of my life working out.  He opened the great wooden door (it actually creaked and groaned) in the darkness, and when I called out to him above the gnarling of his chained German Shepherds, he recognized my voice, and said "Gwen?  Gwen?"  When I answered 'Yes', said "I'd let you in, but the dogs would go for the children."
    So now Joan Rivers is gone, a sort of friend when I was first starting out in New York, and Lenny Gersh was producing an album called 'The Other First Family', on the tail of the Kennedys at home with Vaughn Meader doing JFK.  We were the Khruschevs.  George Segal was Nikita, I played Mrs., and Joan was my maid.  When she wrote one of her autobiographies she reversed that, and I was her maid, but she invited me into a big party where I had a good time, so I forgave her.  I forgive her even more now that she has passed, died, whatever you want to describe it as, sure she would be so over-whelmed by the front pages everywhere that she wouldn't really mind. 
   I on not quite the other hand am strangely lifted by her death because it got my son to call me, as great an event in my life as inspiration.  As it turns out, the best part of this last journey was connecting with the dashing and funny Brit, Daniel, who was the exact age of Robert now, and Don, my darling husband when he died much too soon, so it was as though I was being given the experience of having both of them, in a contemporaneous not-quite scoundrel.  Thus was it fine, even grand to have a call from my actual off-sprung, whom I really do love, and news of my grand-boys, whom I do really miss.  That was enough to make me think of soon moving back to LA.
     But my best not-actual-child, Jamie Lee Curtis, who is as smart as she is winning, called right after that and said I cannot leave New York till I get my musical on.  She says the reason I have lived this long, (even, I suppose, with Joan Rivers' dying,) is that I am supposed to get my musical on.  For those of you who have been kind enough to follow these ramblings, that IS my best work, the gift I was most grateful for and thought would be my career, (Frank Loesser and Yip Harburg thought so, too.)  I was diverted by the novel writing, doing it to pay the bills, and when I finally got an audition with Jimmy Nederlander, so long ago he was late-middle-aged, he said (with not much of an ear for music) "But you're a book writer!  What are you doing writing a musical?"
    So I have trudged and sludged into late middle age, if I'm lucky, with this joyful, funny musical comedy that might prove a woman could actually fulfill herself, and lift others at the same time.  We shall see.  And I hope hear.
    Meanwhile, thank all of you for hanging in, if you do.  And visualize Sylvia WHO?  opening if not quite on Broadway, at least in a room several stories above it, as gifted people read the delightful parts, and actual musicians play the (YOU'D BE SURPRISED!) at how fresh and funny, and just in time to lift the sagging spirit of our world, they are,  songs.
    I love you all, whoever you are.  Those who have held my hand, and my spirits.  Have an inspired weekend. 

RETURN TO CENTRAL PARK SOUTH

Lovely and welcoming.  Am glad to be Home, which I think it is, at least until the Republicans take over.

    Cleaning out my desk for what I believe will be the Final Encampment, I came across the following pome, which, helas, is still apt.

    I grieve for lost connection

    The friendships of my youth

    When we sought Love and Fame and Joy

     And some of us the Truth

     But not that dedicatedly

     We had a world of time

     And days shone trouble-free 

     And endless, now and then sublime

     Then we lost touch, the constant calls

      Shared hopes, rehearsal dinners

      Condolences when parents passed

      Auguri to the winners.

      But then came loss and grief and age

      So called on to mature

      We moved onto a different page

       That headlined: just endure.

       And so we have, and so we do

       Except for the deceased

       There's more of them of late, 'tis true

       We should have phoned at least

        Or asked an old friend out to lunch

        Because you just don't know

        When someone that you greatly prized

        Might be the next to go.

       So call the friend who might be lonely

       Melancholy, sick

       For no one lives forever

       Except for Cheney, that Dick.

THEN FOUND ALSO THIS:

     Tweet me no Whatsapp

      Rhyme me a rhyme

      Write me a letter

      While there's still time

      'Ere closes the post office

      Falters Fedex

      And nothing but Google

      Is left that connects

       Send me some roses

       Encloses a brief note

       Nothing excessive

       Just proof that you wrote

       You don't have to love me

        Or be too considerate

        Only show someone

        Is still somewhat literate.

ALL FOR NOW.  Will continue cleaning out my desk, my mind, and my heart.  Love, Gwen