The Sheila Variations

Beaker rocking out ... to his own demise

I can't stand it it makes me so happy. I love how, even BEFORE things start to go south, Beaker looks terrified. It's like he knows, somewhere deep down, that this cannot end well.

Actresses

I am reading The Picture of Dorian Gray right now and immediately wanted to post the following passage. It is an affirmation of the power that actresses can have. To all my actress friends out there, this is for you!

From The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde:

"This play was good enough for us, Harry. It was Romeo and Juliet. I must admit that I was rather annoyed at the idea of seeing Shakespeare done in such a wretched hole of a place. Still, I felt interested, in a sort of way. At any rate, I determined to wait for the first act. There was a dreadful orchestra, presided over by a young Hebrew who sat at a cracked piano, that nearly drove me away, but at last the drop-scene was drawn up, and the play began. Romeo was a stout elderly gentleman, with corked eyebrows, a husky tragedy voice, and a figure like a beer-barrel. Mercutio was almost as bad. He was played by the low-comedian, who had introduced gags of his own and was on most friendly terms with the pit. They were both as grotesque as the scenery, and that looked as if it had come out of a country-booth. But, Juliet! Harry, imagine a girl, hardly seventeen years of age, with a little flower-like face, a small Greek head with plaited coils of dark-brown hair, eyes that were violet wells of passion, lips that were like the petals of a rose. She was the loveliest thing I had ever seen in my life. You said to me once that pathos left you unmoved, but that beauty, mere beauty, could fill your eyes with tears. I tell you, Harry, I could hardly see this girl for the mist of tears that came across me. And her voice - I never heard such a voice. It was very low at first, with deep mellow notes, that seemed to fall singly upon one's ear. Then it became a little louder, and sounded like a flute or a distant hautbois. In the garden scene it had all the tremulous ecstasy that one hears just before dawn when nightingales are singing. There were moments, later on, when it had the wild passion of violins. You know how a voice can stir one. Your voice and the voice of Sibyl Vane are two things that I shall never forget. When I close my eyes, I hear them, and each of them says something different. I don't know which to follow. Why should I not love her? Harry, I do love her. She is everything to me in life. Night after night I go to see her play. One evening she is Rosalind, and the next evening she is Imogen. I have seen her die in the gloom of an Italian tomb, sucking the poison from her lover's lips. I have watched her wandering through the forest of Arden, disguised as a pretty boy in hose and doublet and dainty cap. She has been mad, and has come into the presence of a guilty king, and given him rue to wear, and bitter herbs to taste of. She has been innocent, and the black hands of jealousy have crushed her reed-like throat. I have seen her in every age and in every costume. Ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination. They are limited to their century. No glamour ever transfigures them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is no mystery in any of them: They ride in the Park in the morning, and chatter at tea parties in the afternoon. They have their stereotyped smile, and their fashionable manner. They are quite obvious. But an actress! How different an actress is! Harry! why didn't you tell me that the only thing worth loving is an actress?"

"Because I have loved so many of them, Dorian."

"Oh, yes, horrid people with dyed hair and painted faces."

"Don't run down dyed hair and painted faces. There is an extraordinary charm in them, sometimes," said Lord Henry.

Speaking of actresses, congrats to my "Fuji apple" of a cousin, Kerry O'Malley, who is babysitting my dear Hope as we speak (I miss her!!) for the spectacular review by Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal.

Happy birthday, Louisa May Alcott

"November is the most disagreeable month in the whole year," said Meg, standing at the window one dull afternoon, looking out at the frostbitten garden.

"That's the reason I was born in it," observed Jo pensively, quite unconscious of the blot on her nose.

-- Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott was born on this day, in 1832. (I just LOVE that picture of her above. The dress!!) This is perfect, because it was my birthday 2 days ago - and yesterday my whole family came over (aunts, uncles, cousins) and aunt Regina brought me a gift - two old old books (Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom) - probably editions from the early 20th century - and they were given to my great-great grandmother by her aunt Sadie (we could tell this from the inscription in the front - in the perfect spidery script of the 19th century). Precious gifts! Regina found them in a box in her elf house and brought them down for me for my birthday. It took some deciphering to figure out who the 'Regina Rogers' was in the inscription. It couldn't be my grandmother, could it? Nobody could remember an "Aunt Sadie" from that generation - so it had to be from the generation before. The generation that still spoke in brogues. Glorious!!

To me, Little Women is a perfect book (even with the whole Laurie debacle, and the advent of the German professor which never works for me, to this day) - it is a book I go back to again and again and again - always seeing something new in it, always finding new levels. The characters seem to grow up with me. When I first read it, when I was 10 years old, I was ALL ABOUT JO. And my love affair with Jo continues to this day. She is one of my favorite female characters ever written (it's a tie between Jo March and Harriet the Spy). Jo LIVES. No one can convince me that she is just a fictional character. Nope. You cannot do it.

But as I have grown up, and as I have continuously gone back to the book - the other sisters have come to the foreground - I see myself in all of them. Parts of me are like Amy, parts of me are like Meg, and I would like to think that parts of me are like Beth. But honestly: Jo is the one. Jo is the one I most relate to. She's the artist. The tomboy. The independent wild spirit. The one who is afraid to make the wrong choice. The one who sticks to her guns.

I still am not really reconciled to the fact that she and Laurie did not end up together - HOWEVER, I can see Jo's point. They were like brother and sister. But ... but ... but ... couldn't that have segued into a love thing? The intimacy they have together, the comfort?

When I was a kid, I HATED the professor. With his stupid German accent, and his goofy poetry as he wooed Jo. I resented the fact that he wasn't Laurie. I loved Laurie.

Now I know that Louisa May Alcott was forced by her publishers to marry Jo off. She wanted her to stay single. And if you really think about it, THAT would be much more logical - it makes much more sense that Jo, even with all her passion, and her ability to understand men (in a way that Meg, the one with all the love affairs, doesn't) - would choose to spend her life alone. She would marry her writing. In that day and age, those were the choices. It was the choice Louisa May Alcott herself made. She could not submit to the demands of wifehood and motherhood - it would infringe on her writing. She knew it, even when she was 15 years old, and wrote in her journal:

"I will do something by and by. Don't care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I'll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won't!"

Alcott grew up in Concord, one of 4 girls, and part of what we would now call an activist family. They were abolitinists. Social reformers. Her mother was a social worker. Her father was an educational philosopher (more on this extraordinary and, frankly, bizarre man here), and had a belief in communal living (Louisa May Alcott wrote some funny pieces about these experiments of her father's, and having to submit to them as a young girl.) Her father (Amos Bronson Alcott - also born on this day) was buddies with Emerson, and part of the Transcendentalist movement. At the time, her father's views on teaching were very controversial: He actually believed that students should enjoy learning. Heaven forbid! He thought that students should be actively involved in their own education, and not just sit back and be passive little drones. Her father thought it was very important to have a beautiful classroom - not just desks and a chalkboard. He poured his heart (and finances) into a school - which ran for a couple of years - but then went under, putting the family at financial risk. Louisa May Alcott eventually, many years later, would be pretty much the sole supporter of her parents. She made a ton of money DURING her lifetime, which is quite rare. Her parents just weren't the money-making types - obviously. As a young teenager Louisa May Alcott had a passionate girlish love of Emerson - a crush, if you will. His intellect, his library that she was allowed to use, whatever ... She adored him.

In 1862, Alcott (as always, determined to make a living - and to contribute financially to her family) traveled to Washington DC as a Civil War nurse. By this point, Alcott had already started getting stuff published - poems, short stories in the Gothic melodramatic vein ... She actually preferred Gothic melodramas to the kinds of books that later would make her name. (She despised Little Women and found the writing of it extremely tedious.) Her experience as a nurse in the Civil War prompted her to publish a book called Hospital Sketches. At that point, her publisher asked her if she would write a book "for girls". Never one to back off from a challenge, Louisa May Alcott sat down and wrote Little Women in two months. She had grown up with 3 sisters - and she put her entire childhood and life into that book, even as she hated doing it, and didn't think the book would amount to much.

Little Women was published in 1868 and was an immediate rip-roaring success. The publisher, within only a couple of weeks of its publication, begged Alcott to get to work on a sequel. So Alcott did. Another smash success. Louisa May Alcott had become a star.

Every book she wrote after that was eagerly awaited for by a breathless loving public. Success had, indeed, come - her childish ambitions to be 'rich and famous' came to fruition tenfold ... but 'happy'? Was she happy?

She never married. She ended up taking care of her sister May's daughter - after May died from complications in childbirth. Being a surrogate mother to this young girl was one of the most fulfilling experiences of Alcott's life. She kept writing, kept publishing ... although she began to get more and more ill from mercury poisoning she had received years earlier during the Civil War (she had, like many other Civil War nurses, contracted typhoid fever - and at the time, the proscribed cure was something called "calomel" - a drug laden with mercury).

Near the end of her life, Alcott became active in the suffragette movement. Her father (an extraordinary man in his own right) had always been a feminist himself:

His passion was to see that his four daughters were educated, well-rounded, and part of the intellectual community he lived in. (Some heavy-hitters there - Emerson, Thoreau, etc.) Louisa's father kept detailed diaries during the raising of his 4 girls, chronicling everything about each one of them. His whole thing was early education - the importance of the first couple of years - and again, you don't ever get the sense that he thought this was only good for BOYS. On the contrary. Here's a snippet of a letter Louisa's father wrote to Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1869, which gives you some idea of who this man was:

Woman is helping herself to secure her place in a better spirit and manner than any we [men] can suggest or devise, it becomes us to take, rather than proffer Consels, readily waiting to learn her wishes and aims, as she has so long, and so patiently deferred to us.

In 1879, Louisa May Alcott was the first woman to register to vote in Concord - for the school committee election. Pretty awesome, huh?

Her beloved father passed away on March 4, 1888. Louisa May Alcott died two days later.

An extraordinary woman.

She didn't care for the book that made her name ... and probably wished that her legacy was different ... but that's okay. It is not for the artist to decide what the audience will react to, what the reader will respond to. She created something with Little Women that transcends the ages, that pierces through the centuries. It is a classic book. And perhaps it's fitting, in a way, that she wrote it for hire, pretty much - it was not her idea, and yet - look at what she was able to create. Look at what she was able to bring out!!

Those 4 girls are immortal.

When I was 16 years old, one of the assignments we had in our Drama class was to do a one-person show - maybe 15, 20 minutes long - based on either a real person from history, or a fictional character - and we had to come into the class as that character, and do a monologue - based on our research - and then take questions from the class - in character. I still remember my core group of friends and their projects: Beth came in as Mae West. She was incredible. She had on a blowsy blonde wig, and wore a tight sparkley dress - and I still remember the shock when Beth started telling us all about birth control options - because Mae West was an early champion of birth control for women. It was awesome. Beth was fearless. Betsy did Paddington Bear (although she has no memory of this! But I SWEAR it is true!!) (and I still remember how one of the questions for Betsy was: "Why don't you eat some of your marmalade?" and Betsy - who despises marmalade - had to dip her hand into the jar, take out a big scoop of it, and eat it - pretending she liked it. Now that's dedication to the acting craft!). Michele did Marilyn Monroe. Unbelievable. Michele was an amazing actress, a natural. She got the sadness beneath the blonde glamour of Marilyn.

And I did Louisa May Alcott.

One of my first forays into the one-person show format ... I did hours and hours and hours of research for a mere 20 minute piece - because I had no idea what questions people would ask, and I had to be ready for anything!

It was great, because I had known nothing about her before that. I had just read Little Women and we had also visited her house in Concord on a family trip (a great thing to do if you are in the area). Orchard House:

Once I learned all this stuff about her, my admiration for her grew. I loved that our birthdays were almost the same. She was a Sagittarius too.

Little Women. Here's the excerpt I posted from it - an excerpt that still, after so many times reading it, brings a lump to my throat.

I don't know if I would call Little Women a great book - but I would say that it is something much better than "great": it is beloved. And that is a rare and precious thing.

Happy birthday, Louisa May!

Speaking of trolls:

2 things:

I spoke with Alex the night before Thanksgiving and we guffawed with laughter about our respective trolls. Did we discuss their views of us? No. Did we discuss the points they made? Absolutely not. Did we rage at their viciousness or howl with angst about their awfulness? No, no, no. What we DID do is howl with laughter about their terrible grammar. Alex was like, "Some person called me a 'tranny-loser' and I decided to just talk to them about their inappropriate use of the hyphen."

Secondly, although this has nothing to do with trolls - except that it strangely affirms what I am doing here - there is this.

Exeunt

The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

-- King Lear, Shakespeare (spoken by Albany or by Edgar, depending on the version you read. They are the final lines of the play)

My father and I share a love of marginalia. I suppose I inherited it from him. He would pull down one of his books from the shelf and point out to me the markings that so-and-so had made, and what it might mean. At a certain level, marginalia becomes not an annoyance, an intrusion from a bossy reader - but something that makes the book priceless. Like Thomas Jefferson's cross-outs and markings on his draft of the Declaration of Independence.

This morning, at about 5:30, he asked me to look for a book for him. "It'll be on the top shelf. It's a Shane Leslie book." I stared at the shelf, scared that I wouldn't be able to find it. Dad said, "They're all Shane Leslie books up there." Oh, okay, so that makes it a bit simpler. I pulled down the first five books from the shelf. "Open them to the title page and let me see," said Dad. I opened the first one, he took one glance, "Nope, that's not it." Hysterical. He could tell in a second. I opened the second one. Nope. Third one. Nope. Fourth one. Nope. Fifth one ... BINGO.

On the title page of this book (The Passing Chapter) was a quote from King Lear, the one above. Dad showed me how on the page before there was a stamp - someone had stamped the book to show ownership. It was from a Jesuit house (in Ireland) called St. Ignatius (naturally). Okay, so I'm oriented as to what I am looking at. The book was published in 1934, and a Jesuit house obviously had the book in their library.

Now back to the title page.

The quote from Lear sat there beneath the title, in smaller typeface. But it read like this:

The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel and what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

Instead of "comma NOT what we ought to say" - the typo made it all one thought, as though one part of the sentence agreed with the other (when it does not, in the original). The original is a sentence of diametrical opposites, it pits one way of being against another. That is the point of the "comma not". But the typo took away the comma and replaced "not" with "and". The typo completely negates the sentiment.

But here is what my dad wanted to show me:

The Jesuit had crossed out the word "and" and had put the word "not" over to the side - in pencil. He hadn't even made it into the book itself before the typo had immediately become apparent to the learned Jesuit, and he had to correct it.

I love that man.

There were markings in pencil through the rest of the book, and my dad (who has given papers on Shane Leslie, and also bibliography and marginalia) had put on the blank first page a list of page numbers where the markings occurred. We looked through those as well. These were more your standard markings - paragraphs marked with an X, sentences underlined (all in pencil) - but it is the stunning correction of a typo and what it all signifies that interests my father, and interests me.

Dad said, "Here's this Jesuit - he hasn't even gotten into the book yet - and he notices a typo on the title page ..."

And not just a typo, but a word-change which totally alters and irons out the original meaning.

It MUST be "not", it cannot be "and". If it is "and" then it becomes a benign toothless saying on a cross-stitch wall-hanging. Nothing threatening, nothing really profound, the equivalent of "I'm okay, you're okay." If it is "not" then it has teeth, it has life, it is a difficult profundity - full of grace and tragedy, and it makes demands on you the reader (or, listener, as Shakespeare would have thought of it). It is a command. It indicts those who feel they must speak "what they ought to say" in hard moments, when the "weight of sad times" buries them. If you speak what you feel "you ought to say" in those moments, then no, you are not "obeying" the weight of sad times. It is when you have the courage to "speak what you feel" in such moments that you can come close to touching divinity, to the eternal. There is much we can never understand, especially those of us who are young, who "shall never see so much", but at least we can decide to not be "polite" in sad times and speak only the accepted words. Even if we are young, we can decide to speak what we feel. And that is what it means to truly "obey".

The Jesuit's note of correction has all of that in it.

It makes my dad's copy of the book an important one.

Snapshots

-- Justin came over with his three kids. Cashel and the three kids were playing down the hall and we could hear some ruckus going on. Justin went to check, came back and said, "It's fine. They're just playing Somali Pirates."

-- My father gave each of us a copy of the book he wrote in 1989. He had been keeping the copies for us - not wanting them to get ruined in all of our various moves. But now we each have a copy. Beautiful. Dedicated to my mother, of course. Cashel, good little boy, flipped through the book and said, "When was Ulysses published?" What a sweetie. Talking with the adults, being interested in what was going on. Bless you.

-- Bren, Cash, Siobhan and I went to go see Bolt the night before Thanksgiving. It was great!! So much fun! We all just fell in love with that obese awesome hamster. Great great character.

-- Cashel made me a great card for my birthday. He's a very good artist. I stand there in a real bad-ass pose, and I am wearing a fedora and cracking a bullwhip. I am flanked by two enormous statues - kind of like the lions on the steps of the New York Public Library - only these are two giant turkeys. Above my head is an open book on a pedestal, and it has a question mark on the pages and is called "Untitled". It is addressed to SHEILA O'MALLEY AND THE FUTURE NATIONAL BESTSELLER. I was really touched.

Happy birthday, William Blake

He was a poet (virtually unknown in his own lifetime), and also an engraver (I've put some of his startling work in the extended entry - but if you want to see more of his work, check out this link). He did illustrations for children's books, religious books, volumes of poetry ... and now his stuff is considered priceless.

William Blake was born in 1757 in London, the third of five children. He went to school until he was 14 and then had to go to work. He got a job as an apprentice to an engraver, which is how he ended up making his paltry living. He lived in pretty much poverty for his entire life. He married at 25 the illiterate Catherine Boucher. Blake taught her how to read, and they ended up becoming collaborators in bringing out volumes of his poetry. He did engravings to illustrate his poems. Catherine was the one who bound the books, and got them ready for publication. The entire thing was a joint production. They did all the work themselves.

The two of them never had any children. They were extremely unconventional, and visitors tell of stopping by the Blake house to find the two of them sitting out in their back garden completely naked. Just hanging out, reading, working together, NUDE. They had a whole philosophy about nakedness, and sex, and innocence - that there was nothing dirty about any of that stuff. It actually all was quite holy, and it was human prudery that made celebration of the body a dirty thing.

William Blake had visions. He speaks about them openly and much of his work has a phantasmagorical religious feeling to it. When he was a young boy, he said he looked up into a tree and saw that it was full of winged angels.

His view of God, the Spirit, the Holy Trinity is so inspiring to me. It's vital, it's alive, and it seems to be all about love. There are not too many people I would call "genius" - but Blake I most certainly would.

However - again - William Blake, despite these astonishing works of poetry he put out during his lifetime - died unrecognized.

Now, though, he is considered to be one of the greatest poets in the English language.

He's one of my all-time favorites.

His poem about the little lisping chimney-sweep is in the "canon". If you took any kind of sweeping Poetry 101 course, you probably would have encountered it. I'll post it below. But it's really his long form poems, especially the SPECTACULAR "Marriage of Heaven and Hell", where the guy literally has no equal. None. Blake has no peers.

Here's the one about the chimney sweep, which is an indictment of the society in which he lives, a society that treats its most innocent members with brutality and uncaring indifference. He is a visionary poet, yes, but he did not turn his eyes away from earthly matters. Far from it.

"The Chimney Sweep" - from Songs of Innocence

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved: so I said,
"Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."

And so he was quiet; and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight, -
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an angel who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins and set them all free;
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.

Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind;
And the angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father, and never want joy.

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.

And here ... for those of you who are interested ... is "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" in its entirety (accompanied by more of Blake's engravings).

Just go with it. Just succumb.

As you can see, the guy was so ahead of his time that he is timeless. He predicts the Beat generation (and Allen Ginsberg was partially responsible for bringing Blake back into vogue), he predicts modernism, he would fit in with the poetry slams of today (except that he is, well, you know - GOOD). He was a man who plumbed his unconscious for material. He brought what was within him OUT. His poetry is the literary version of Van Gogh's Starry Night. Van Gogh was not interpreting the sky. Van Gogh was actually painting what he saw. William Blake is the same way.

Thanks, Blake! Wish I could have visited you and your wife in your back garden, and sat around with you all, nude, drinking tea, and talking about angels.

Here are some quotes by and about William Blake. Enjoy!

"He had no public: he very early gave up publishing in any serious sense. one obvious consequence, or aspect, of this knowledge is the carelessness that is so apparent in the later prophetic books. Blake had ceased to be capable of taking enough trouble." -- F.R. Leavis

Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius. -- Blake

"I mean, don't you think it's a little bit excessive?"
"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. William Blake."
Pause.
"William Blake?"
"William Blake!"
"William Blake???"
"William Blake!!!"
-- Bull Durham

"I do not condemn Pope or Dryden because they did not understand imagination, but because they did not understand verse." -- William Blake

"The prophetic robe with its woof of meekness and its warp of wrath was forced on [Blake] by loneliness and his modest station in life." -- Robert Graves

"In his youth, [Blake] had a gift of simple and fair speech; but he lost it. Although he could always catch the heavenly harmony of thoughts he could seldom mount them on a fitting chariot of rhythm and rhyme. His fine passages were the direct gift of the Muse, and are followed by lines of other origin." -- Edward Thomas

"It is an honesty against which the whole world conspires, because it is unpleasant." -- T.S. Eliot

"Think of a white cloud as being holy, you cannot love it, but think of a holy man within the cloud, love springs up in your thoughts, for to think of holiness distinct from man is impossible to the affections. Thought alone can make monsters, but the affections cannot." -- Blake

"He is very eighteenth century." -- T.S. Eliot

"The emotions are presented in an extremely simplified, abstract form. This form is one illustration of the eternal struggle of art against education, of the literary artist against the continuous deterioration of language." -- T.S. Eliot on "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience"

"In America in the late 1940s Allen Ginsberg, interested in Supreme Reality, alone and suffering a 'dark night of the soul sort of,' his lover Neal Cassady having sloped off, and having himself just masturbated, with a volume of Blake before him - 'I wasn't even reading, my eye was idling over the page of "Ah, Sun-flower," and it suddenly appeared - the poem I'd read a lot of times before.' He began to understand the poem, and 'suddenly, simultaneously with understanding it,' he 'heard a very deep earthen grave voice in the room, which I immediately assumed, I didn't think twice, was Blake's voice.' This 'apparitional voice' became his guiding spirit: 'It was like God had a human voice, with all the infinite tenderness and anciency and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.' On Ginsberg this 'anciency fathered Howl, though the Blake simulacrum was aided by the hallucinogens popular at the time, the recipe for Part II of the poem including peyote, just as for Kaddish he was assisted by amphetamine injections. 'The amphetamine gives a peculiar metaphysical tinge to things, also. Space-outs.' Blake managed his visions without substance abuse. Ginsberg's appropriation of the poet of innocence and experience did much to promote Blake to the alternative culture of the 1950s and 1960s." -- Michael Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets"

"a completely and uncompromisingly individual idiom and technique ... individual, original, and isolated enough to be without influence." -- FR Leavis

"You cannot create a very large poem without introducing a more impersonal point of view, or splitting it up into various personalities. But the weakness of the long poems is certainly not that they are too visionary, too remote from the world. It is that Blake did not see enough, became too much occupied with ideas." -- TS Eliot

"Romantic writers glorified childhood as a state of innocence. Blake's 'The Chimey Sweeper', written in the same year as the French Revolution, combines the Romantic cult of the child with the new radical politics, whichcan both be traced to social thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is the boy sweep, rather than Blake, who speaks: he acts as the poet's dramatic persona or mask. There is no anger in his tale. On the contrary, the sweep's gentle acceptance of his miserable life makes his exploitation seem all the more atrocious. Blake shifts responsibility for protest onto us." -- Camille Paglia, "Break, Blow, Burn"

Some of William Blake's extraordinary engravings below:

Christ in the sepulcher guarded by angels - 1805

Whirlwind of Lovers (Illustration to Dante's Inferno)

The Ancient of Days - 1794

Isaac Newton - 1795

Today in history: November 26, 1942

Casablanca premiered at the Hollywood Theatre in New York City.

It was not expected to be a long-lasting mythical evocation of the quintessential American ideals we all aspire to, from generation to generation. It was just supposed to be another one of the pro-war propaganda movies the studios were churning out at that time. It went on to win the Academy Award the next year - but again, lots of films win Academy Awards and don't go on to achieve legendary status.

The legend around the film began growing in the late 50s, a couple of years after Bogart's death. The stories about the Casablanca showings at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge Massachusetts are now famous ... and make me wish for a time machine.

Aljean Harmetz, author of Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II, explains:

Humphrey Bogart died in 1957. The cult of Casablanca was born three months later. If Cyrus Harvey, Jr., was not the father of the phenomenon, he was certainly the midwife. In 1953, Harvey and Bryant Haliday had turned the Brattle Theatre across from, Harvard University into an art cinema. Harvey, who had spent much of his Fulbright scholarship year in Paris watching movies at Henri Langlois's Cinemathique Francaise, programmed the Brattle with European classics and the early films of Fellini, Antonini, Truffaut, and Ingmar Bergman, for whom Harvey and Halliday became the American distributors.

"At some point, we thought that we ought to bring in some of the American films that hadn't been shown that much," says Harvey. "And my partner and I both thought that the Bogarts were vastly underrated. I think Casablanca was the first one we played. It was my favorite. I thought that Bogart was probably the best American actor who ever lived. And the picture caught on very rapidly. The first time we played it, there was a wonderful reaction. Then the second, third, fourth and fifth times it took off. The audience began to chant the lines. It was more than just going to the movies. It was sort of partaking in a ritual."

Casablanca played at the Brattle for the first time on April 21, 1957. It was so successful with Harvard students that it was held over for a second week. Then the Bogart festivals began, with six or eight of his mopvies playing each semester during final-examination weeks. The festivals would culminate with Casablanca. It was at Harvard that the relevance of Casablanca to a generation that had no relationship to World War II became apparent.

So. Happy birthday to a film that has done so much to shape how we think about ourselves. It has meant different things to different generations - and that's the definition of a good piece of art. If you watch a lot of the other WWII movies made at that time - they seem dated, overblown, propagandistic, and overly simplistic. Not this one. Not this one.

I have a feeling (just a hunch) that if Ilse had not gotten on that plane with Victor - if she had stayed with Rick ... the movie would not be remembered today. It might be still watched, on late-night movie channels, but it would not have taken on that mythical quality. It is the vision of self-sacrifice that taps into our deepest held beliefs and hopes. It is who we hope and aspire to be. It is a noble outlook ... and yet, at the center of the film, is the Rick character, who says he is not good at being noble. If you make a big deal out of your own nobility, then you are just a jackass who thinks way too highly of yourself. But if you quietly, and with no fanfare, do the right thing - abdicate your own wants for a greater cause, practice the art of letting go ... then you truly deserve to be called noble.

Hokey? Sure. Sentimental? Absolutely.

If you're a fan of this movie - enjoy the quotes below!

Billy Wilder says:

"This is the most wonderful claptrap that was ever put on the screen ... Claptrap that you can't get out of your mind. The set was crummy. By God, I've seen Mr. Greenstreet sit in that same wicker chair in fifty pictures before and after, and I knew the parrots that were there. But it worked. It worked absolutely divinely. No matter how sophisticated you are and it's on television and you've seen it 500 times, you turn it on."

Sociologist Todd Gitlin writes:

Casablanca dramatizes archetypes. The main one is the imperative to move from disengagement and cynicism to commitment. The question is why Casablanca does this more effectively than other films. Several other Bogart films of the same period -- Passage to Marseilles, To Have and Have Not, Key Largo -- enact exactly the same conversation. But the Rick character does not simply go from disengagement to engagement but from bitter and truculent denial of his past to a recovery and reignotion of the past. And that is very moving, particularly because it is also associated with Oedipal drama. But there is also a third myth narrative, a story about coming to terms with the past. Rick had this wonderful romance; he also had his passionate commitment. It seems gone forever. But you can get it back. That is a very powerful mythic story, because everybody has lost something, and the past it, by definition, something people have lost. This film enables people to feel that they have redeemed the past and recovered it, and yet without nostalgia. Rick doesn't want to be back in Paris. And the plot is brilliantly constructed so that these three myths are not three separate tales, but one story with three myths rushing down the same channel.

Aljean Harmetz, author of Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II writes:

I was in elementary school during World War II; I did my part in the war by rolling tinfoil and rubber bands into balls and bringing them to the Warners Beverly Theatre on Saturday mornings. World War II had receded with all its certainties and moral imperatives, leaving muddy flats behind. The world is a cornucopia of grays. I believed the romantic interpretation of Casablanca then -- love lost for the good of the world -- and believe it now. But it is the very ambiguity of Casablanca that keeps it current. Part of what draws moviegoers to the movie again and again is their uncertainty about what the movie is saying at the end ...

Casablanca's potent blend of romance and idealism -- a little corny and mixed with music and the good clean ache of sacrifice and chased down with a double slug of melodrama -- is available at the corner video store, but Casablanca couldn't be made today. There is too much talk and not enough action. There are too many characters too densely packed, and the plot spins in a hard-to-catch-your-balance circular way instead of walking a straight line. There is no Humphrey Bogart to allow the audience a permissible romance without feeling sappy. And the studio would insist that all the ambiguity be written out in the second draft.

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

"Bogart had competence," says Billy Wilder. "You felt that, if that big theatre where you were watching Casablanca caught on fire, Bogart could save you. Gable had that same competence and, nowadays, Mr. Clint Eastwood." But Gable is too heroic for a disillusioned world. Three decades after his death, Bogart still seems modern. "He wore no rose-colored glasses," wrote Mary Astor. "There was something about it all that made him contemptuous and bitter. He related to people as though they had no clothes on -- and no skin, for that matter."

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Of the seventy-five actors and actresses who had bit parts and larger roles in Casablanca, almost all were immigrants of one kind or another. Of the fourteen who were given screen credit, only Humphrey Bogart, Dooley Wilson, and Joy Page were born in America. Some had come for private reasons. Ingrid Bergman, who would lodge comfortably in half a dozen countries and half a dozen languages, once said that she was a flyttfagel, one of Sweden's migratory birds. Some, including Sydney Greenstreet and Claude Rains, wanted richer careers. But at least two dozen were refugees from the stain that was spreading across Europe. There were a dozen Germans and Austrians, nearly as many French, the Hungarians SZ Sakall and Peter Lorre, and a handful of Italians.

"If you think of Casablanca and think of all those small roles being played by Hollywood actors faking the accents, the picture wouldn't have had anything like the color and tone it had," says Pauline Kael.

Dan Seymour remembers looking up during the singing of the Marseillaise and discovering that half of his fellow actors were crying. "I suddenly realized that they were all real refugees," says Seymour.

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Bogart and Rains admired each other, and that admiration comes through their scenes together. What seems to be a genuine friendship between Rick and Renault takes the sting out of the ending of Casablanca. "My father loved Humphrey Bogart," says Jessica Rains. "He told me so." The cockney who turned himself into a gentleman was unexpectedly compatible with the gentle-born son of a doctor and a famous illustrator who turned himself into a rowdy. "Professional" is the word the people they worked with pin, like a badge, to both men. "Bogart never missed a cue," says script supervisor Meta Carpenter. "He was completely professional." Rains, says assistant director Lee Katz, "was very professional altogether." To the Warner hairdressers, said Jean Burt, Bogart and Bette Davis were "the real pros. They were on time; they knew their lines; they knew their craft."

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

[During shooting] Bogart was snappish and moody. Love scenes were uncharted waters for him. "I've always gotten out of my scrapes in front of the camera with a handy little black automatic," he told a journalist who visited the Casablanca set during production. "It's a lead pipe cinch. But this. Well, this leaves me a bit baffled." The interview is typically frothy and insubstantial as Bogart plays with the idea of becoming a sophisticated lover or a caveman lover. But, even as he jokes about it, his uneasiness is obvious. "I'm not up on this love stuff and don't know just what to do."

According to a memoir by Bogart's friend Bathaniel Benchley, before Casablanca began shooting, a mutal friend, Mel Baker, advised Bogart to stand still and make Bergman come to him in the love scenees. Bogart appears to have taken the advice, but his reticence may have been as much innate as calculated. Nearly a dozen years after Casablanca, Bogart told a biographer that love scenes still embarrassed him. "I have a personal phobia maybe because I don't do it very well," he said.

"What the women liked about Bogey, I think," said Bette Davis, "was that when he did love scenes he held back -- like many men do -- and they understood that." Miscast as an Irish horse trainer in Dark Victory, Bogart had tried to make love to Davis, who played his rich employer. Said Davis, "Up until Betty Bacall I think Bogey was really embarrassed doing love scenes, and that came over as a certain reticence. With her he let go, and it was great. She matched his insolence."

However distant Bogart and Bergman may have been from each other in real life, and however uneasy Bogart may have been with Bergman in his arms, their love scenes have the poignancy and passion that Hollywood calls chemistry. "I honestly can't explain it," says Pauline Kael, "but Bogart had that particular chemistry with ladylike women. He had it with Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen and he so conspicuously had it with Lauren Bacall -- who pretended to be a tough girl but really wasn't -- in To Have and Have Not. But he didn't have it with floozy-type girls."

Critic Stanley Kauffmann explains the match between Bogart and Bergman as the resonance of a relationship between brash America and cultured Europe. "She was like a rose," he says. "You could almost smell the fragrance of her in the picture, and you could feel his whiskers when you looked at the screen. It was intangible."

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Of the stars, Bergman had the more difficult job. Bogart had only to play a man in love. Foreshadowing without giving away too much, Bergman had to let the audience know that love wasn't enough.

ILSA. And I hate this war so much. Oh, it's a crazy world. Anything can happen. If you shouldn't get away, I mean, if something should happen to keep us apart. Wherever they put you and wherever I'll be, I want you to know that I -- Kiss me! Kiss me as though it were the last time.

And Bergman had to hold the audience even when she was saying dialogue that was so richly romantic that it was almost a parody, including, "Was that cannon fire? Or was it my heart pounding?"

Her voice and her face could make almost anything believable. In 1947, several top sound men agreed that Bergman had the sexiest voice of any actress. "The middle register of her voice is rich and vibrant, which gives it a wonderfully disturbing quality," said Francis Scheid. "It's sexy in a refined, high-minded way." "The face is quite amazing," says Pauline Kael. "I think she had a physical awkwardness on the stage and in her early films, but I think somehow that the beauty of her face obviated it. Even in Casablanca, her physical movements are not very expressive. But you didn't really care."

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Casablanca started on Stage 12A with the flashback to Rick and Ilsa's romance in Paris. It was an accident that Bogart was required to make love to Bergman almost before he was introduced to her. Originally, production was to start in Rick's Cafe on Stage 8, but the intricate clockwork that matched actors, scripts, stages, and sets had been thrown off because Irving Rapper was two weeks behind schedule on Now, Voyager. Claude Rains didn't finish his role as the wise psychiatrist in Now, Voyager until June 3. Paul Henreid was not free until June 25. So the [Michael] Curtiz movie began with the scene in the Montmartre cafe. The first day, a lovestruck Richard Blaine -- "His manner is wry but not the bitter wryness we have seen in Casablanca" say the stage directions -- pours champagne for himself, Ilsa, and Sam while the Germans march toward Paris and Sam plays, "As Time Goes By".

According to Geraldine Fitzgerald, Bogart and Bergman had lunch together a week or ten days before Casablanca started production. "I had lunch with them," she says. "And the whole subject at lunch was how they could get out of the movie. They thought the dialogue was ridiculous and the situations were unbelievable. And Ingrid was terribly upset because she said she had to portray the most beautiful woman in Europe, and no one would ever believe that. It was curious how upset she was by it. 'I look like a milkmaid,' she said.

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

"I remember," says film critic Pauline Kael, "my friends and I talked about when are the executives going to discover this guy [Humphrey Bogart]. It was early in his career, when he appeared in horror movies and all sorts of stuff that Warners threw at him. We liked him years before he got the leading roles. he was small, but he knew how to use every part of himself. By the late thirties, he was quite in charge of everything in his performance. He had a tension, like a coiled spring. You didn't want to take your eyes off him."

In The Maltese Falcon, as Dashiell Hammett's detective Sam Spade, Bogart carried to the right side of the law the wary watchfulness, the cynicism, and the ambiguities that had infused his deadliest killers. "I think it was his very best performance," says Kael, who was twenty years old in 1941 when she saw the movie for the first time. "Because you got a sense of the ambivalances in th eman, and he used all the tensions marvelously physically. I don't think he could have been as good as he was in Casablanca if he hadn't done the Falcon first, because he really discovered his powers in the Falcon. he created more tension in his scenes than he ever had before. And I think afterwards he drew on the qualities he had discovered in himself in the Falcon. So I think it was [John] Huston who brfought those things out. And [Michael] Curtiz benefited from them."...

The arc of Bogart's career at Warner Brothers can be seen in how and when he chose to fight Warner -- and with what success. Bogart was suspended for refusing to play the part of the outlaw Cole Younger in Bad Men of Missouri ... His suspension ended in June 1941, when George Raft, whose career decisions at Warners were unerringly wrong, refused The Maltese Falcon because "it is not an important picture." And what would have happened if Raft had agreed to play Sam Spade? The odds are high that Bogart would have made a breakthrough in some other movie. The disillusionment, stoicism, and weary aloofness that he brought to the screen fit the heroes of a new kind of movie melodrama, film noir, too well to have gone unnoticed ...

Warner Brothers could overuse and misuse its actors. It could dump Van Johnson and Susan Peters in 1942 and let MGM build their careers. But the studio would not have remained in business if it had missed the obvious. The Maltese Falcon had been immensely profitable, and George Raft was becoming more difficult with every role he was offered. In January 1942, Bogart demanded $3,000 a week and the right to do ten guest radio appearances a year. He was given a new contract, starting at $2,750 a week. After six years at Warners, Bogart finally had a star's contract. Warner Brothers was stuck with him for seven years, and the studio began to look for a role that would turn him into a romantic lead.

On February 14, [Hal] Wallis sent a memo to Steve Trilling: "Will you please figure on Humphrey Bogart and Ann Sheridan for Casablanca, which is scheduled to start the latter part of April." Six weeks later, Jack Warner wrote Wallis that George Raft was lobbying him for the role. Wallis held firm and Casablanca had the first of its three stars.

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Much of the major work on the Casablanca screenplay was done between April 6, when Howard Koch was assigned to the movie, and June 1, when a revised final script was mimeographed ...

Each subsequent script for Casablanca became leaner and sharper, more economical, the scenes rearranged for greater dramatic effect and the speeches polished and clipped. Within the confines of a studio that both Koch and Julie Epstein describe as 'a family", Koch rewrote the Epsteins to give the movie more weight and significance, and the Epsteins then rewrote Koch to erase his most ponderous symbols and to lighten his earnestness.

This kind of survival-of-the-fittest script is unlikely to happen today, when writers, director, and studio executives come insecurely and suspiciously together to make a single movie, the original writer is rarely brought back after his work is rewritten, and screen credit means that someone gets extra money from television and videocassette sales...

At the beginning of May, the Epsteins finished the second section of the script of Casablanca, while Howard Koch turned in his revision of the Epsteins' first act. Earlier, in nineteen pages of suggestions of "Suggestions for Revised Story", Koch had warned:

There is also a danger that Rick's sacrifice in the end will seem theatrical and phony unless, early in the story, we suggest the side of his nature that makes his final decision in character. It would be interesting to have Renault penetrate the mystery in his first scene with Rick when he guesses that the cynical American is underneath, a sentimentalist. Rick laughs at the idea, then Renault produces his record -- "ran guns to Ethiopia", "fought for the Loyalists in the Spanish War." Rick says he got well paid on both occasions. Renault replies that the winning side would have paid him better. Strange that he always happens to be on the side of the underdog. Rick dismisses the implication, but throughout the picture we see evidences of his humanity, which he does his best to cover up.

Koch's script of May 11 also deepened Rick's character and underlined the political tensions in subtle ways. For example, Koch makes the man Rick bars from his gambling room -- who was an English cad in the play -- into a representative of the Deutschebank. When the owner of the Blue Parrot offers to buy Rick's Cafe, Koch has added dialogue in which the character played by Sidney Greenstreet also offers to buy Sam, and Rick says, "I don't buy or sell human beings." (In their rewrite of Koch's script, the Epsteins would build on Koch's line by having Greenstreet respond, "That's too bad. That's Casablanca's leading commodity.") If Koch layered the politics rather heavily -- in his version, Victor Laszlo forces Renault to toast liberte, egalite, fraternite -- the Epsteins would remove those speeches in the script of June 1. With delicate balance, Koch managed to hold down the gags while the Epsteins managed to cut out the preaching.

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

In the Epsteins' first script, Lois is still Lois and Renault's womanizing still has an unpleasant edge. However, the groundwork has been laid for the relationship between Rick and Renault, which may lie as close to the emotional heart of the film as the relationship between Rick and Ilsa. The Epsteins have created a bantering between equals, an admiration at the edges of the frame.

RENAULT. I have often speculated on why you do not return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Did you run off with the President's wife? I should like to think you killed a man. It is the romantic in me.

RICK. It was a combination of all three.

RENAULT. And what in Heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?

RICK. My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.

RENAULT. Waters? What waters? We are in the desert.

RICK. I was misinformed.

Says Epstein today: "My brother and I tried very hard to come up with a reason why Rick couldn't return to America. But nothing seemed right. We finally decided not to give a reason at all."

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

The sixty-six pages of script, labeled Part I TEMP., were mimeographed on April 2. The Epsteins had written the first third of the movie, the section preceding the flashback to Rick and Ilsa's Paris romance. Ilsa and her Resistance-hero husband had come to Casablanca, and at the end of the Epsteins' script, Rick was sprawled drunkenly in his empty cafe, waiting for her to return.

"That first part was very close to the play," Epstein says. "It was with the second half that we had trouble."

Those sixty-six pages mirror the final movie. The Epsteins even begin with a spinning globe, an animated map, and a description of the refugee trail that leads to Casablanca. Everybody Comes to Rick's took place inside Rick's Cafe, and Rick was the first character to be introduced. The Epsteins start by creating the feel of Casablanca: A man whose papers have expired is short by the police; a pickpocket warns his victims that vultures are everywhere; refugees look up longingly as an airplane brings the Gestapo captain (a few scripts later he was promoted to major) Strasser to Casablanca and lands beyond a neon sign that reads RICK'S. Inside the cafe, a dozen desperate refugees try to buy or sell their way to freedom. Rick is not introduced until page 15, when a hand writes "Okay -- Rick" on the back of a check and the camera pulls back to a medium shot of Humphrey Bogart. And the plot is driven by an invention of the Epsteins: the Letters of Transit were being carried by two German couriers who have been murdererd.

Of the four major characters in Everybody Comes to Rick's, only the noble Victor Laszlo remains essentially the same in the movie. Rick, who in the play is a self-pitying married lawyer who has cheated on his wife, takes on Bogart's persona of wary, hooded toughness. Says Jules Epstein: "Once we knew that Bogart was going to play the role, we felt he was so right for it that we didn't have to do anything special. Except we tried to make him as cynical as possible."

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

However, there was no mistaking the fact that Casablanca, with its snappy dialogue, eccentric characters, witty cynicism, wary anti-hero and liberal political message was definitely a Warner movie. Casablanca is a less raw and angry melodrama than the studio might have made a few years earlier, but it has the same distrust of authority and suspicion of human nature. America's entry into the war was already softening movies by requiring them to throb with patriotism, but the milieu of Casablanca is still corrupt, and the little people still don't get a fair shake.

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Bogart's response to the success of Casablanca was more typically sardonic. He enjoyed telling his fourth wife, Lauren Bacall, how Charles Enfield, the studio's head of publicity, had had the amazing revelation that the actor had sex appeal. Says Bacall, "Bogie would say, 'Of course, I did nothing in Casablanca that I hadn't done in twenty movies before that, and suddenly they discover I'm sexy. Any time that Ingrid Bergman looks at a man, he has sex appeal.'"

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Warner Brothers was the most frugal of the studios, and little was wasted there in 1942. World War II gave the studio's president, Harry Warner, an excuse to pick up nails dropped by careless carpenters. But he had obsessively picked up nails before the war made iron scarce. Casablanca moved onto the French Street created for The Desert Song the day after that film moved off. A few signs and two live parrots turned the French Morocco of heroic freedom fighter El Khobar into the French Morocco of heroic freedom fighter Victor Laszlo. And half a dozen bit players with foreign accents got a full week's work by straddling the two films. More than half of the movies Warners made in 1942 dealt in one way or another with the war, a bonanza for actors who had fled from Berlin or Vienna. Casablanca was filled with those Jewish refugees, many of them playing Nazis.

Film critic Stanley Kauffmann wrote:

"Bogart absolutely encapsulates permissible romance. In this disillusioned, disenchanted world here was a romantic hero we could accept. I think that that disenchantment began with World War I and the emergence of what could be called the Hemingway -- the undeluded -- generation. And I think that that revulsion with the romances and the lies of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century has persisted. There have been plenty of representatives of the lovely bucolic strain of American life on the screen. Bogart was someone urban -- in a sense more jagged and abrasive than Cagney -- who you felt was suffering. Cagney was triumphant. Bogart was tough, but he had sensitivity. Certainly the epitome he stood for was in Casablanca. I was misinformed. That's the twentieth century."

Roger Ebert - who provides the commentary to the DVD (and I highly suggest you check it out, if you haven't already - it's marvelous commentary, true goosebump material from someone who has STUDIED and also LOVED this movie since it first came out) - wrote the following article about Casablanca for his "Great Movies" series:

If we identify strongly with the characters in some movies, then it is no mystery that ``Casablanca'' is one of the most popular films ever made. It is about a man and a woman who are in love, and who sacrifice love for a higher purpose. This is immensely appealing; the viewer is not only able to imagine winning the love of Humphrey Bogart or Ingrid Bergman, but unselfishly renouncing it, as a contribution to the great cause of defeating the Nazis.

No one making ``Casablanca'' thought they were making a great movie. It was simply another Warner Bros. release. It was an ``A list'' picture, to be sure (Bogart, Bergman and Paul Henreid were stars, and no better cast of supporting actors could have been assembled on the Warners lot than Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Claude Rains and Dooley Wilson). But it was made on a tight budget and released with small expectations. Everyone involved in the film had been, and would be, in dozens of other films made under similar circumstances, and the greatness of ``Casablanca'' was largely the result of happy chance.

The screenplay was adapted from a play of no great consequence; memoirs tell of scraps of dialogue jotted down and rushed over to the set. What must have helped is that the characters were firmly established in the minds of the writers, and they were characters so close to the screen personas of the actors that it was hard to write dialogue in the wrong tone.

Humphrey Bogart played strong heroic leads in his career, but he was usually better as the disappointed, wounded, resentful hero. Remember him in ``The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,'' convinced the others were plotting to steal his gold. In ``Casablanca,'' he plays Rick Blaine, the hard-drinking American running a nightclub in Casablanca when Morocco was a crossroads for spies, traitors, Nazis and the French Resistance.

The opening scenes dance with comedy; the dialogue combines the cynical with the weary; wisecracks with epigrams. We see that Rick moves easily in a corrupt world. ``What is your nationality?'' the German Strasser asks him, and he replies, ``I'm a drunkard.'' His personal code: ``I stick my neck out for nobody.''

Then ``of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.'' It is Ilsa Lund (Bergman), the woman Rick loved years earlier in Paris. Under the shadow of the German occupation, he arranged their escape, and believes she abandoned him--left him waiting in the rain at a train station with their tickets to freedom. Now she is with Victor Laszlo (Henreid), a legendary hero of the French Resistance.

All this is handled with great economy in a handful of shots that still, after many viewings, have the power to move me emotionally as few scenes ever have. The bar's piano player, Sam (Wilson), a friend of theirs in Paris, is startled to see her. She asks him to play the song that she and Rick made their own, ``As Time Goes By.'' He is reluctant, but he does, and Rick comes striding angrily out of the back room (``I thought I told you never to play that song!''). Then he sees Ilsa, a dramatic musical chord marks their closeups, and the scene plays out in resentment, regret and the memory of a love that was real. (This scene is not as strong on a first viewing as on subsequent viewings, because the first time you see the movie you don't yet know the story of Rick and Ilsa in Paris; indeed, the more you see it the more the whole film gains resonance.)

The plot, a trifle to hang the emotions on, involves letters of passage that will allow two people to leave Casablanca for Portugal and freedom. Rick obtained the letters from the wheedling little black-marketeer Ugarte (Peter Lorre). The sudden reappearance of Ilsa reopens all of his old wounds, and breaks his carefully cultivated veneer of neutrality and indifference. When he hears her story, he realizes she has always loved him. But now she is with Laszlo. Rick wants to use the letters to escape with Ilsa, but then, in a sustained sequence that combines suspense, romance and comedy as they have rarely been brought together on the screen, he contrives a situation in which Ilsa and Laszlo escape together, while he and his friend the police chief (Claude Rains) get away with murder. (``Round up the usual suspects.'')

What is intriguing is that none of the major characters is bad. Some are cynical, some lie, some kill, but all are redeemed. If you think it was easy for Rick to renounce his love for Ilsa--to place a higher value on Laszlo's fight against Nazism--remember Forster's famous comment, ``If I were forced to choose between my country and my friend, I hope I would be brave enough to choose my friend.''

From a modern perspective, the film reveals interesting assumptions. Ilsa Lund's role is basically that of a lover and helpmate to a great man; the movie's real question is, which great man should she be sleeping with? There is actually no reason why Laszlo cannot get on the plane alone, leaving Ilsa in Casablanca with Rick, and indeed that is one of the endings that was briefly considered. But that would be all wrong; the ``happy'' ending would be tarnished by self-interest, while the ending we have allows Rick to be larger, to approach nobility (``it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world''). And it allows us, vicariously experiencing all of these things in the theater, to warm in the glow of his heroism.

In her closeups during this scene, Bergman's face reflects confusing emotions. And well she might have been confused, since neither she nor anyone else on the film knew for sure until the final day who would get on the plane. Bergman played the whole movie without knowing how it would end, and this had the subtle effect of making all of her scenes more emotionally convincing; she could not tilt in the direction she knew the wind was blowing.

Stylistically, the film is not so much brilliant as absolutely sound, rock-solid in its use of Hollywood studio craftsmanship. The director, Michael Curtiz, and the writers (Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch) all won Oscars. One of their key contributions was to show us that Rick, Ilsa and the others lived in a complex time and place. The richness of the supporting characters (Greenstreet as the corrupt club owner, Lorre as the sniveling cheat, Rains as the subtly homosexual police chief and minor characters like the young girl who will do anything to help her husband) set the moral stage for the decisions of the major characters. When this plot was remade in 1990 as ``Havana,'' Hollywood practices required all the big scenes to feature the big stars (Robert Redford and Lena Olin) and the film suffered as a result; out of context, they were more lovers than heroes.

Seeing the film over and over again, year after year, I find it never grows over-familiar. It plays like a favorite musical album; the more I know it, the more I like it. The black-and-white cinematography has not aged as color would. The dialogue is so spare and cynical it has not grown old-fashioned. Much of the emotional effect of ``Casablanca'' is achieved by indirection; as we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do after all amount to more than a hill of beans.

Doing your best

I suppose that life is all about being tested. Some tests are obvious, some not so obvious. I know that I am cagey on my blog about my "real" life - and that is by design. This is why I am very picky about who I "friend" on Facebook so don't take it personally. I am not deliberately deceitful, but I certainly withhold. Especially recently. My blog is for me, essentially, and posting every day keeps me sane. Personal posts have, for the most part, gone by the wayside in the last year, because first of all I am really busy with my off-line writing and also I have no words or no desire to share all here. I think I'm smart. Because every time I write a post expressing uncertainty, someone always swoops in instantly and tries to give you the answer. They do not understand that living in the uncertainty is what I am about, and pondering things, and NOT coming to rock-hard conclusions. I like to leave things open for interpretation. I have learned that a blog is not always the best venue for such things, and I have decided to protect myself from those misunderstandings. I can't afford the energy to be explaining myself right now. And yet I still need to share things here. I still love to talk about movies and books and that passion shines through. It makes it a nice place to hang out. I know that, and I am proud of it. The fact that people still like to show up and read what I write is a blessing to me.

I am being tested right now. My whole family is. It is part of life. It sucks. I feel surrounded by their love and support and Facebook has completely changed my life because I chat with my cousins on almost a daily basis and so every day I get a message of love from one of them, letting me know that we are being thought about, prayed for. A candle was lit for us in Bruges, for example. I weep reading these messages.

A couple of days ago I wrote a post about going to Lydia's baby shower and how, in the middle of the maelstrom, I got a sensation of the goodness of people, how everyone is "doing their best". I do believe that. Perhaps it is because I am wounded right now. Being wounded gives you a different perspective on other people's misbehavior (or so it seems to me). Maybe that frustrated woman in line at the grocery store has a dying husband at home. Maybe that teenager acting out just lost her mother. You just don't know. You don't know. And it is better not to assume. It is better to cut people slack, rather than condemn them for their surface. This is my philosophy.

And so I know what it takes to just get up and keep going, to "do your best", to meet your obligations, to "show up" at events you are going to, to not reject life - but try to accept it. In all its complexities and tragedies. It was such a strong feeling that I got at that shower. Not to mention the fact that, again, I was surrounded by family, who love me, and support me, and are THERE for all of us in this terrible time. It is always in our minds. I meet up with other friends now and sometimes it is forgotten, what I am going through, because life is busy and people have their lives to live. This is not the case now, actually - but it has been. But with my family, it is front and center. As it should be. We hunker down. We put up the barricades. We cling to one another, and we try to be there for each other. The strong protect the weak. That is the way it should be. Not those who are weak perpetually, but to someone who is wounded ... it is good to have protection. To have people looking out for you, cutting some slack. Who know that you freaking out about how you have to get your car inspected is really about something else, and who are gentle with you in your distress, guiding you in the right direction. For example, I know that I am being thought about right now by many. many. people. I can feel it. Perhaps that is the meaning of grace.

The day after I wrote the post about the baby shower, I wrote the post about my 7 weird reading habits. And people started sharing their own habits - we're up to 44 comments now - and early that morning I got the following comment:

That whole commute line is such a crock of unauthentic crap. You're a liar. Poor ugly Shiela. Give me a break. Maybe if you didn't lie, your life would be easier.

I get comments like that from time to time (complete with misspellings of my name - even though my name is the URL so how could you miss it), usually from people who are not regular commenters. It's always people who appear to have been lurking - and sometimes people lurk with love and fear because they don't know how to leap in to the established conversation - but sometimes others lurk with hatred. I have had a couple of those. These are not comments that have to do with some political opinion I've expressed, where I could expect to be abused. These are personal and go right for the jugular. These people have been lying in wait. There aren't many of them but when they hate me they hate me. They judge me. They are obviously not my kind and I don't have people like that in my regular life, so I don't worry about it too much, I just delete their filth and move on. But this one on Monday took me aback a bit. I emailed back and forth with Tracey about it, and my cousin Kerry, and they were properly outraged, mama lions on my behalf. To me, there is something actually satanic in that comment, in its breathless hatred, its obvious glee in expressing it ... but there's also something ridiculous because hyberbole is part of my writing style, and the "chickens and goats" bit was hyperbole. People who are very literal do have a problem with how I write, but again, I don't worry about that too much because you can't please everyone, and I learned very early on that I can only write for myself - and "if you build it, he will come". I attract people who have the same sense of absurd humor, who "get" it. But there are always the holdouts. The ones who play "devil's advocate" on purely personal posts ... like - what? What is so threatening to you that you can't just be in the conversation that is going on rather than trying to dominate? But it happens all the time. I know people don't like uncertainty. I get that. But I won't BE dominated - not by blog commenters anyway who don't know me ... and having deep conversations about all the multi-faceted sides of one issue is how I like to talk. I have found my kind on this corner of the web - some have found me ... you know, it happens naturally. That's the beauty of it. And now those who can't stand uncertainty are outnumbered by those who can tolerate it. This is good. It's a good balance.

This commenter from yesterday has never commented on my site before (not that I can tell anyway) and I imagine their hatred of me is so acute that they would be unable to disguise it in a casual way. Who knows.

But what interests me about the comment is that only the day before I had written my post about realizing that everyone, after all, is just doing their best. It has made me feel gentler towards others, certainly, people who cut me off while driving, for example ... I just don't let those things get to me right now. There's a lot of free-floating rage and hurt out there and it doesn't always come out in helpful or rational ways. I know that is the case with me as well.

And so. What to say. Is that person who left the comment "doing their best"? You know what? I do think so. I really do. There has got to be so much anger there to leave a comment like that, and this person needs a place to put it. I represent something to this person - I don't know what - and the knowing-ness of the comment, the feeling that this person has been reading me a long time and has formed an opinion of me - is very clear to me. This person feels they have me down. And maybe, in their mind, they do.

But it did not escape my notice that just one day after I wrote a post about realizing everyone was doing their best that I would be attacked, from out of the blue. How do I feel now? How do I feel now? Comments like that are meant to diminish, soil, hurt, and demean. They are meant to destroy. I didn't feel on the verge of destruction reading it, because like I said - I've had comments like that before. I was called a "starfucker" once although - please - enlighten me - what star did I fuck and why wasn't I there?? I was called a "stupid cunt" because I wrote openly about a guy I loved. I was told "well, no wonder you're single", after writing a long post about some heartbreak I had had. (It also does not escape my notice that these comments have all been from men who have gone straight to my sexuality or womanliness or my LACK of power as a woman in their insults - in the same way that the commenter from yesterday did by calling me "ugly". These people mean business.) I've also had people get obsessed with me and want to be involved with me personally and while I have made many friends through this blog - it has always happened organically. Lisa, Emily, Bill McCabe, Stevie, Tracey, Tommy, De, Jonathan, Ken, Dan ... you all know who you are. I have recognized that a sycophantish tone in comments is the first warning. That situation will go south and FAST. They will turn on you, look out for the boomerang! I have not been wrong yet.

But I stray from my topic.

I feel that when you are wounded - yes, sometimes you lose perspective, and you find yourself freaking out in line at the bank, or flying into a rage because the printer won't work - but I also feel that you can be more aware of the beauty of life, its fragility and complexity. I do not think it is an accident that that person left that comment on that particular day, when I was feeling fragile and upset. There are larger forces at work out there than any of us can know.

I do not know why that comment came, and I am actually not interested in that person's reasons. Because the whole question seems larger to me.

I declared the day before: people are just doing their best. I am doing my best.

The next day came the test.

It is not always that the test is so immediate. But this is not just about me. This is about whatever twisted hatred this person has that would make them lash out like that.

The typical line is, "If that's your best, then your best ain't good enough." But that's cold comfort when you are wounded, as I believe this person who left that comment is wounded. Maybe no, it ain't good enough, and maybe yes, there are just malevolent people out there in the world who just want to hurt others - I do believe that, too - but here, in this moment, I choose to believe my earlier thesis: that everyone, in general, is just doing the best they can.

Lorrie Moore: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

Reading Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital. I've written about how much I love Moore before. I have only read her short stories.

Never read this, one of her novels.

A magnificent excerpt:

We'd started working at Storyland in May, on the weekends, through the Memorial Day rush, until school let ou tin early June. Then we worked six days a week. Up until then we had met during the school week in the cemetery to smoke. Every day we would have what we called a "cemetery lunch". I would clamber up over the hill, past the blue meadow of veronica and flax, past the broken stick-arbor and the Seckel pear, down the gravel path, into the planked swamp and on up to the gravestones, where Sils would be waiting, having arrived from the other end. She lived on a small oaky street that dead-ended into the cemetery (next to which she lived). "Is this street symbolic or what?" Sils would say to anyone who visited. Especially the boys. The boys adored her. She was what my husband once archly referred to as "oh, probably a cool girl. Right? Right? One of those little hippettes from Whositville?" She could read music, knew a little about painting; she had older brothers in a rock band. She was the most sophisticated girl in Horsehearts, not a tough task, but you have to understand what that could do to a girl. What it could do to her life. And although I've lost track of her now, such a loss would have seemed inconceivable to me then. Still, I often surmise the themes in her, what she would be living out: the broken and ridiculous songs; the spent green box of Horsehearts; the sad, stuck, undelivering world.

Ouch.

Pink Martini: "Hey, Eugene"

"Hey Eugene", a song by the band Pink Martini, totally captures a certain kind of experience and environment with such an exactness that it makes me feel like I could have written it. I know I am not alone in that. That exact night hasn't happened to me, but it's close enough!

Not to mention the sad yet comic situation of feeling like you have had a profound experience with a boy and then ... he doesn't call! But the tune of the song is not melancholy (although there may be an undercurrent there - but the main feeling of the song is grooving) - or "oh woe is me" ... It's kind of sexy and chatty and there's a breathlessness to it, like the narrator of the song is trying to remind "Eugene" who she is - member we did that? And member we did that? And member that moment?

Poor Eugene was obviously too drunk to remember much of it. But she keeps trying to jog his memory loose!!

Here are the lyrics to "Hey Eugene":

Hey Eugene do you remember me?
I'm that chick you danced with two times through the Rufus album Friday night at that party
On Avenue "A"
Where your skinhead friend passed out for several hours on the bathroom floor
And you told me
You weren't that drunk, and that I was your favorite Salsa dancer you had ever come across in New York city

Eugene
Eugene
Eugene
I said hello
Eugene
Are you there Eugene

Hey Eugene, then we kissed once we lugged your friend into the elevator and went to write my number on a soggy paper towel
And the car went down
And when we were finished making out we noticed that your skinhead friend was gone. Long gone.
And you looked into my bloodshot eyes and said, "Iis it too soon if I call you Sunday?"

Eugene
Eugene
Eugene
I said hello, Eugene
Are you there, Eugene

I said hello Eugene
Does any of this ring a bell Eugene?

Sigh. Heart-crack.

Pink Martini is a band from Portland, they've been around for years. An interesting mix of people of different backgrounds, with China Forbes as lead vocals - they have had a slow but steady journey. Their group is too largeto play really small venues (and any Youtube clips of them seem to show them playing in huge Hollywood Bowl-type places). They have an entire string section, and bass drums, and cellos and trombones ... Their sound is really cool, sometimes delicate and simple, and then sometimes full-bodied and orchestral. I love them.

Next year, they are playing Carnegie Hall. Gotta put that date on ye olde calendar and see about tickets when the time comes.

And again, I know I'm not the only one to say this - but ... I think I might know Eugene, too! I think I might have even been there that night!

Last year they appeared on David Letterman, performing "Hey Eugene".

Clip below.

The kindness of Farley Granger

Jonathan has a terrific post up about a recent showing at AFI of Strangers on a Train ... Farley Granger was there. Go read the whole thing - and do not miss the clip at the end. Really touching.

Cathy Come Home, 1966

A spectacular review by Jeremy over at Moon in the Gutter.

I love his site.

Fishing at dawn

Some photos.

7 weird reading facts about me

Got this from ricki.

1. I am very sensitive to typeface. I will NOT read a book if I find the typeface grating or unfriendly. I have bad eyes, too, so a good typeface is important. Penguin Classics USED to have terrible typeface, small, cramped and smudgey - so I would never buy their books. They have now gone through a redesign - and not only do they have some of the best cover art now (their covers used to be kind of stuffy and precious - but now? Brill!!) Some examples here:

I own a couple of those already - but based only on those gorgeous covers, I want to own Penguin's version!!

So not only have they recommitted themselves to eye-catching and evocative cover but their typeface has gone through an upgrade as well. I like it much better. It flows with the eye. Vintage International has consistently great typefaces. The Modern Library collection has great typeface - especially for long dense books like Middlemarch or Bleak House.

2. I will never leave a book open, face-down. The thought of it makes me shiver.

3. I can count on one hand the times I have been stranded without a book. Actually, there was one time the other night but that was only because I had finished the book I had in my bag earlier that day so when I had an hour to kill later that night, I was reduced to fiddling around with my blackberry and answering emails as the wind whipped across Houston Street, as opposed to losing myself in a book. I ALWAYS have a book on me.

4. I have certain books that are okay for my commute, others not so much. (I usually am reading multiple books at the same time). My commute involves me smashed into a tiny bus, surrounded by illegal immigrants wielding chickens and goats, with loud Spanish radio blaring in my ears. Strangely, I find that reading something difficult really works for me on the commute, something engaging and perhaps way out of the realm of my own life. Like the book I read about what's going on in Darfur. Perfect commute book. But I find that short stories or contemporary fiction is harder to get into in that environment, so it's usually rigorous non-fiction for the commute.

5. I write in pretty much every book I read. I underline passages (how do you think I can pull up quotes so easily for the blog? Because I've marked it for safe keeping!), keep lists of vocabulary in the back blank pages, leave exclamation points or asterisks in the margins next to passages I particularly love. It's compulsive - I don't feel right if I'm reading without also having a pen in my hand.

6. If the book has the following words in the title, or if it even just clear that the book is ABOUT these things, I will buy it sight unseen. My shelves are lined with books I haven't read yet which involve the following topics:
-- ancient silk road
-- Iran / Persia
-- the Caucasus
-- Balkans
-- Ireland
-- Mongolia
-- speculative stock market bubble
-- cults (Jonestown, Manson, Co$, The Family)
-- Alexander Hamilton

I also will buy any book written by the following people:
-- Margaret Atwood
-- John Irving
-- Michael Chabon
-- Lorrie Moore
-- Robert Kaplan
-- Jeanette Winterson
-- Madeleine L'Engle (well, THAT'S done ... boo hoo - but for YEARS before she died it was the case)
-- A.S. Byatt
-- Cormac McCarthy
-- Elinor Lipman

7. I like to read out loud to myself. I find it relaxing. But not just anything. Here are the things I always gravitate to when I feel like reading out loud for an hour or so:
-- Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters (excerpt here)
-- Jeanette Winterson's The Passion (excerpt here)
-- Nancy Lehman's Lives of the Saints (excerpt here)
-- Susan Daitch's The Colorist (excerpt here)
-- Madeleine L'Engle's Ring of Endless Light (excerpt here)
-- Joy Williams's State of Grace (excerpt here)
-- Margaret Atwood's Life Before Man (excerpt here)
-- Norman Rush's Mating (excerpt here)
These books feel good to read out loud. I also read Shakespeare's sonnets out loud, which almost becomes an act of meditation.

Tonight

Curling up in bed under my fleece blanket and watching Barfly, sent to me by my dear Michael. Hope is wreaking havoc in the kitchen, she appears to feel that the kitchen rug is a mortal enemy that must be stalked and crept up on MERCILESSLY. I am tired and a little bit wiped out. I did two loads of laundry yesterday and my sheets are clean and I have on fleece pajamas. I can't do much else. I was hoping to do some editing but I just can't right now. I can get back to work tomorrow. For now, I need to be still and passive. I need to unplug my brain.

Meanwhile, I will leave you with this.

It is important, sometimes, to step outside the whirligig of life, breathe deeply, and then lie under a pillow on the floor, and have a long thorough bath.

Apparently.

Random

This photo makes me insanely happy.

Michael took that photo. The boy I was making out with on a nightly basis with such feverish passion that we wrecked entire rooms, leaving carnage in our wake. You know, the Mickey Rourke fanatic.

Please note that I have a BURN above my left eyebrow. That's because I curled my hair for the show every night with a hot curling iron and got a bit too overzealous.

I just love how the two of us seem caught, in the middle of something else ... almost like we are already famous and the paparazzi are hounding us. I seem more pissed off about it than he does, frankly. He seems to be taking it in stride.

My teeth seem unusually large to me.

Love

I drove over the Brooklyn Bridge this morning. It was my first time. The Bridge is my favorite one in this city of bridges, it has a grandiosity to its architecture and yet a democratic energy with the throngs of people walking across on the walkway, stopping to stare at the harbor stretched out below, the Lady Liberty in view over by the southern corner of Manhattan. I couldn't linger over the beauty, obviously, or I would have plummeted to my death, but I felt a thrill ... a real thrill ... at the sheer size and beauty of the bridge, with the giant towers flanking the ends and the huge swooping cables coming up, coming down ... not to mention the view, which is enough to take your breath away.

I had left plenty of time ... too much, actually, and was an hour early for the baby shower. Brooklyn Heights is so beautiful and quiet, with wooden houses beside brownstones, and dormer windows, and tiny cafes, closed on Sunday morning, and the sound of church bells in the air. I found a parking spot, and grabbed my book and took a walk. I did find a tiny hole-in-the-wall cafe that was open and grabbed a cup of coffee, and then went to sit in the park. It was pretty cold. No one was in the park. I sat on a bench, gloves on, and drank my coffee, reading Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore. It was still early enough that not too many people were out and about.

Then I went back to my car to get my giftbag. As I closed the door, I saw a woman walking down the empty street holding an enormous box with a pink glittery bow. I figured, she's going where I'm going and followed her directly to the shower.

It was held in a gorgeous house, full of light and artwork and beautiful artifacts, gorgeous old books, and everyone was nice and friendly. I hadn't really wanted to go because this has been the raw-est week to end all raw weeks - and I feel exhausted - but this is family. I knew there would be people there who knew what was going on, my sister would be there, and really, when you get right down to it, it's all about showing your love. It's important. There was food laid out, and wine and coffee ... weird to have a glass of red wine at 11:30 a.m., but what the hell. More people came. My uncle Tony and aunt Marianne arrived. They are here in town for the shower but also to go see their daughter Kerry in White Christmas (for, what, the 8th time?) ... a one-two punch. The second I saw Tony in the lobby I lost it and he hugged me and we both started crying. I was so right to come. The love of family. You do what you have to do. You are there for each other. That's just what you do.

My aunt Regina arrived, my sister Siobhan ... so we all stood around talking, and it was just so good to be there, to be with people who love me, and who are there for me. I have the best family.

Lydia was wearing a black knit dress and looked fabulous. From the front you couldn't tell she was pregnant at all. Her friends are really nice, I chatted with many of them ... and then came the gift-opening extravaganza. These teensy onesies on display, these adorable little pajamas, so small you can't believe a human body would ever fit into them ... all these women, beautiful, all of them, some mothers, some not ... all oohing and ahhing and making comments. You know, it's easy (too easy) to get cynical sometimes about such events. I think that's a great mistake. I have done it myself. Or I let my self-pity balloon into something monstrous, which ruins the whole thing for me. It clouds my perspective. But when I looked around the room at all the faces, I just saw love. Love for Lydia, love for Liam, and love for the baby that was soon to make its appearance. Lydia's mother crocheted the baby a beautiful blue and white blanket, and everyone went nuts over it, which then sparked a whole conversation about crocheting, knitting, and crafts, in general.

In that room, I could feel the goodness of people. Almost like a light was emanating from everyone.

Because you know what? In the end, even with all the bullshit and difficulties of life, people, in general, are just doing their best, and it is really important to remember that. I am doing my best right now. It may come out awkwardly, or emotionally, and I may forget to call people back, or need more alone time than I normally do ... but honestly. I am doing my best. I think it is important to cut each other lots of slack. Even if someone appears to be freaking out or over-reacting. Because you know what? Maybe that person is just doing her best.

Longfellow wrote:

Believe me, every man has his secret sorrows,
which the world knows not; and oftimes
we call a man cold, when he is only sad.

And so with all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.

Things I've done

The things I've done are bolded. Got this from De. Long day yesterday. Long day today. I've been up for hours already.

1. Started your own blog
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than you can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sang a solo
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown your own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitch hiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a Marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught yourself a new language
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelos David
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had your portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten Caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had your picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had chickenpox
89. Saved someone’s life (maybe. See #64)
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee
100. Read an entire book in one day

Carole Lombard Double feature

last night at the Film Forum.

8 p.m.:

9:45 p.m.:

It did my heart good to see that both shows were sold out. The line was down the block, and last night was a pretty bitter windy night, so to see the throngs huddled up in front of the Film Forum for a Carole Lombard double feature gave me hope for humanity! The old things do not have to die, or suffer in obscurity. They can LIVE forever! I had gotten to the box office as early as I could and scored two tickets, for me and Jen. We met up at a wine bar around the corner, and had some bruschetta and some wine, crammed in in the tiny joint, a buffer of warmth against the cold. Then, tickets clutched in gloved hands, we walked over to the theatre to start our double feature. I've seen both films (although never on the big screen) and Jen had seen neither so I was SO EXCITED for her to experience them. I was lucky enough to score ourselves spots in line close to the front, and just in time, too because people were POURING into that line from every direction. There was an altercation in line. A rowdy group of 22 (or so) year-old boys were behind us, and one dropped his soda and it splashed all over my calves. They all burst out laughing. No apology, nothing. Jen said to them, "An apology is in order." The guy looked at me and said, "I did apologize." Okay, sociopath, how can you say that with a straight face? I said, "Morons." and turned away. Graceful, Sheila, good work!! So basically we were in a fight with people in line. I hate it when that happens. Sorry, boys, it ain't my fault you weren't raised right and don't know how to say, "Oh my gosh, miss, I'm sorry!" It's called good manners. You should try it some time. But we all moved on, and it didn't ruin our night. Jen was getting hot about it, angry, and I was like, "Jen, these people will NOT ruin this night for me!" She stopped, and said, "Okay. Got it. You're right." And then we all were fine.

The place was packed. Sold out. Again: so exciting! Carole Lombard is not forgotten! Or who knows, maybe some of those people had never heard of her before, and this was their first taste of it. That's exciting, too!

The movies just HIT. They WORK. People were HOWLING with laughter at John Barrymore ("I close the iron door on you!" LIke - what??) ... but the real star of the night was My Man Godfrey, which started, after a 10 minute break, at 9:45. What a movie!!

It starts out strong and never lets up.

William Powell is a movie star of the highest order. From the first second you see him in that city dump, with his 5 o'clock shadow, and the intensity of his eyes, you can't look away from him. He does his close-ups the way actors of today do close-ups. He is timeless. He does not have a "style" of acting, he does not come across as old-school ... he comes across as nothing short of real. Not to mention sexy, and powerful and deep. Of course we are supposed to be seeing him through Carole Lombard's wacky eyes from the beginning and she falls in love with him instantly - and so we do, too. Powell plays that perfectly. This is a man with secrets, with regrets ... but we don't know what they are until long into the picture. But he's playing it from the start. God, isn't he something else? MARVELOUS actor. He's got sex appeal, too. It's those eyes.

Carole Lombard basically falls apart over the course of the movie. She is just so into him and she doesn't know how to behave because of it. But there she is, her eyes following him across the room, just DYING because she loves him so much. It's so touching but also so funny. Even in the scenes where she is not the focus, you can see her in the background, trembling with repressed feeling, staring longingly at William Powell. She just plays it so right. She does not sacrifice reality for the comedy - and yet she is never less than 100% HYSTERICAL. In their one-on-one scenes, she can barely concentrate on what he is saying because she is too taken up with drinking him in with her eyes. You want to slap her out of it. FOCUS, Irene ... FOCUS. But she can't! She's in love!

My Man Godfrey perfectly captures the sort of manic-family genre that was so popular in the 1930s, with scripts like The Man Who Came to Dinner and Philadelphia Story and You Can't Take It With You. EVERYONE is insane in these scripts. The family is made up of a bunch of lunatics and eccentrics, and they all wheel through their large houses, following through on every impulse, pursuing their myriad obsessions ... creating a cacaphony of lunacy and hilarity. You can't get a moment to think in such a household. There isn't time. People run in and out of rooms, they suddenly stop and make inappropriately sincere and insane comments, they ruminate on the meaning of life and then immediately skip off to lunch ... and this is all happening with multiple people at the same time. My Man Godfrey is a runaway train of NOISE and dialogue that never lets up. It is relentless.

The audience at the Film Forum last night (yes, obnoxious 22 year olds and all) were HOWLING with laughter from start to finish.

Jen and I at one point were pretty much writhing in our seats (and the seats are really really thin at the Film Forum, none of this super-size seating ... so once you're there, you're kind of trapped, like it's an airline seat) ... tears streaming down our face ... particularly because of Carlo, the "protege", played by the "mad Russian" Mischa Auer, who lives in the house with the family. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance. A melancholic and yet manic Italian, who does an ape impression that goes on for what feels like 10 minutes - it gets to the point where everyone in the room is screaming and talking at once, and in the background, you can see Carlo, STILL GOING, being an ape all over the parlor, leaping up and grabbing onto two doors and hanging there in the middle ... as the rest of the scene goes on around him. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life and I found it difficult to recover. I was still laughing about him three scenes later, it kept coming back to me, and I would find myself in tears all over again. We LOVED Carlo. I mean, come on, who doesn't love Carlo?

A brilliant movie, with not one weak note ... featuring strong performances from everyone. Everyone is at the top of their game.

But in the center of it circle William Powell, with his strong serious face, and Carole Lombard, with her undone-by-love stare ... and it's one of the greatest romances on the screen.

Beautiful night. One of those nights when the city itself - meaning New York - seems to have a sense of camaraderie. We were all in it together, there at the Film Forum, for our double feature ... and we, for that brief couple of hours in time, became one. I love nights like that.

The whole movie is on Youtube - and the Carlo scene can be seen in the clip below - at around the 2:30 mark.

I am still laughing.

A Book of Days for 1931: November 22

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

NOVEMBER 22, SUN. 1931

A Gentleman having led a company of children beyond their usual journey, they began to be weary, and joyntly cried to him to carry them; which because of their multitude he could not do, but told them he would provide them horses to ride on. Then cutting little wands out of the hedge as nagges for them, and a great stake as a gelding for himself, thus mounted Phancie put metall into their legs, and they came cheerfully home.

-- THOMAS FULLER, The Holy State (1642)

I love that. That is charming. That's the best thing about this "Book of Days for 1931" book. The entries are unexpected, and not always strictly inspirational (although some are). They are interesting ... a commonplace book published.

White Christmas news

A great compilation of photos from the production is in Playbill.

An interview with the cast of White Christmas in Backstage. I love this one comment from Kerry:

Well, it is a showbiz musical in that it's about entertainers who are doing numbers, but it's not self-mocking in the way that so many shows are of this time. We're not making fun of show business.… It's living in the style, as opposed to commenting on it.

How refreshing! And the show does work on that level: a sweet sincere and un-ironic level. It's gorgeous.

A Book of Days for 1931: November 21

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

NOVEMBER 21, SAT. 1931

He did delight to be in the darke, and told me he could then best contemplate. He had a house at Combe, in Surrey, where he had caves made in the earth, in which in summer time he delighted to meditate.

He was wont to say that man was but a great mischievous baboon.

He would say, that we Europeans knew not how to governe our women, and that the Turkes were the only people used them wisely.

He kept a pretty young wench to wayte on him, which I guess he made use of for warmth-sake as King David did, and took care of her in his will.

I have heard him say, that after his booke of the Circulation of the Blood came out, that he fell mightily in his practize, and that twas beleeved by the vulgar that he was crack-brained.

-- JOHN AUBREY, Brief Lives

Another frightening thing about Facebook:

... is that same friend also uploads a photo of you and her, backstage, at our college's acclaimed production of Anne of Green Gables. I played Anne Shirley, and she played my arch enemy, Josie Pye.

However, judging from this photo: I am playing a hungover Ma Joad or a stoned-out-of-his mind Yasir Arafat and she is playing a kooky Southern belle getting ready for the spring ball.

We are obviously singing something. And eating candy.

Backstage.

We are ALL ABOUT our hair.

To explain my get-up: I cannot explain the trench coat, but the scarf on my head is due to pin curls (what Mitchell called "the horror and humiliation of pin curls") because I, as Anne, wore a wig, and needed my hair to be pinned down. I looked ridiculous. The chairman of our theatre department and director of the show glanced at me once during a dress rehearsal, me in my pin curls, and she said, "Sheila, you look like a Roman frieze."

So when I was out in public (and this was, although backstage, public - because we were competing in the ACTF with the show - so it was a MADHOUSE backstage) I would put on that stupid scarf.

But still.

I cannot explain the trench coat. Maybe it was cold?

One of the most frightening things about Facebook is:

... old friends from college upload photos from way back then showing you, as a youngun, imbibing far too much underage liquor and wearing inappropriate huge watches in a dank basement.

Despite the OBVIOUS intoxication, and the DESPICABLE hand gestures, I remember that party well. That's me, Mitchell and Mitchell's brother Steven. It was New Year's Eve, we were at my friend Julie's boyfriend's house, and he was playing with his band in the basement all night, and we all hung out down there. And our friend Emily (yes, the "Santa is a racist mothahfuckah" Emily) was cornered in the kitchen by a frightening man who was a BLATANT racist and refused to shake hands with her. It was so obvious and so bizarre. Of course, we were all wasted, but I know a douchebag when I see one!

Speaking of Emily: Mitchell pointed out to me that you can see her hair coming into the photo on the right-hand side. There she is!

Sheila.

Take off the watch.

Also, you are a Virgin of the Highest Order. Why are you posing like Jenna Jameson?

The Books: "Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art" (Gene Wilder)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art, by Gene Wilder

There's a magic about Gene Wilder. It is hard to describe or pin down, and maybe that's the biggest part of the magic: it can't really be expressed. He came and talked at my school and the man is truly riveting in person, but it's odd the impression he has: he gets laughs where you can't believe there's a laugh. Or he would say something serious, deeply serious, in such an amusing way that we would all burst into laughter - and he said at one point, "This always happens to me. I wasn't trying to be funny right there!" He's funniest when he is most serious. If you think about his best parts - it's not a manic funny energy that he has - it is a desperately serious energy, and when he's in a movie that is worthy of him, like The Producers or Young Frankenstein or all the movies he did with Richard Pryor ... it's pretty near genius. Because not once do you think that what this guy is going through is not serious and real to him. It is so so funny, and yet - the character may as well be in King Lear, that's how high the stakes are.

His book has a little bit too much therapy in it for my taste - and you can tell from the title the sort of book it will be ... but in terms of the choice anecdotes, the moments that make up a good career - he has no equal. For instance, my favorite, when he was basically accosted by Cary Grant:

Silver Streak was a big hit and was chosen as the Royal Performance for the queen of England and the royal family. I couldn't go to London because I was filming The World's Greatest Love at the time, but a month later, when Prince Charles came to visit 20th-Century Fox, I was invited to attend a luncheon in his honor, to be held in the Fox commissary.

As I was walking along the small street that leads from the office buildings to the commissary, a taxi pulled up and I heard someone shouting, "Oh, Mr. Wilder! ... Mr. Wilder!" I turned and saw Cary Grant stepping out of the taxi. My heart started pounding a little faster, but I didn't throw up this time, as I did when I met Simone Signoret. Cary Grant walked up to me, and after we shook hands, he said, "I was sailing on the QEII to England with my daughter, and on the second day out she said, 'Dad-dy, I want to see the Silver Streak -- they're showing it in the Entertainment Room.' And I said, 'No, darling, I don't go to movies in public.' And she said, 'Dad-dy, Dad-dy, please - I want to see the Silver Streak.' So I took her to see your film. And then we saw it again the next day, and the next. Tell me something, will you?"

"Of course."

"Was your film in any way inspired by North by Northwest?"

"Absolutely! Collin Higgins, who wrote the film, loved North by Northwest. It was one of his favorites. I think he was trying to do his version of it."

"I thought so," Mr. Grant said. "It never fails! You take an ordinary chap like you or me ... (An ordinary chap like you or me? Didn't he ever see a Cary Grant movie?) ... put him in trouble way over his head, and then watch him try to squirm out of it. Never fails!"

That makes me LAUGH. Cary Grant comparing himself to Gene Wilder - as though they would ever be cast in the same roles. An ordinary chap!! Beautiful!

I think, too, that there is a deep and lonely sadness about Gene Wilder, which sets him apart from most other mainly comic actors. And again, when he is allowed to tap into that in his roles - even if it comes out in a funny way - it's marvelous. He's one of my all-time favorites. I basically just love him.

He was dominated by his mother as a child, and he never felt he could express anger. Ever. (Like I mentioned: lots of therapy in the book.) But what he could do was make his mother laugh. It became his entire reason for living. Interestingly enough, he started out in New York studying at the Actors Studio, with so many others ... and he started to get bit parts in shows, where he always made some kind of impression. I mean, honestly, is there any one like Gene Wilder? I guess you could say he is a "type" but the personality beneath the type is 100% original. He got noticed.

Arthur Penn, a bigwig at the Actors Studio, was filming Bonnie and Clyde and he asked Wilder to do the small (but my God memorable) part of the undertaker who is kidnapped by Bonnie and Clyde, et al. To me, that scene still packs a punch. Isn't he awesome? It was his first movie.

Wilder talks about his experience on Bonnie and Clyde in the book. One of the things I really love about the book is how he lingers on what I would call his "A-ha Moments", when he started to understand the craft, and how to do it ... and it all started mixing together in a big pot in his subconscious. Here is him on Bonnie and Clyde:

My first scene began with Evan and me sitting in the back of her car, supposedly chasing the Barrow Gang. I waited for Arthur Penn to call "Action". Arthur was sitting alongside the camera - out of frame, of course - but not more than five or six feet away from me. As soon as I heard him say, "Action," I started to act. Sounds sensible, doesn't it? But Arthur immediately called out to the camera operator, "Keep rolling," and then he gave me my first revelation of what it means to be an "actor's director". While the camera was rolling, he said, "Gene, just because I say 'Action', doesn't mean you have to start acting - it just means that we're ready. I could see you had something cooking inside, but you weren't ready to act yet. Film is cheap. Keep working on whatever you're working on and start acting when you're ready."

The scene went very well.

When we took a break, the assistant director came up to me and said, "Don't get used to what just happened - you're not going to find many directors who work like Arthur."

Oh, and speaking of "A-ha Moments" - when Gene Wilder spoke at my school he told the following story about his response to seeing Charlie Chaplin in The Circus. You could almost say that Gene Wilder got the revelation for his entire career from watching what Chaplin did in that part:

I saw Charlie Chaplin in The Circus at a Chaplin film festival in New York.

Charlie has just gotten out of prison (one assumes) and is starving. He wanders onto the circus grounds and sees a father carrying his baby over one shoulder. The baby is holding a huge hot dog. The father - whose back is to Charlie - is talking to the man selling the hot dogs. The father looks back at Charlie once or twice.

Charlie makes the sweetest faces at the little boy, and - just when the father isn't looking - he takes a big bite out of the baby's hot dog. The father turns quickly to Charlie, who immediately stops chewing and makes sweet faces at the baby. When the father turns back to the hot dog salesman, Charlie takes another bite of the hot dog. The father turns around again, suspecting something fishy. Charlie stops chewing and makes wonderful googley faces at the baby.

The acting lesson from this film seems so simple, yet it inspired me for the rest of my career. If the thing you're doing is really funny, you don't need to "act funny" while doing it.

Wonderful stuff. Gene Wilder followed up Bonnie and Clyde with a project he had been working on for a long time with his insane friend Mel Brooks. Originally it was called Springtime for Hitler which, of course, became The Producers.

The Producers put Gene Wilder (and pretty much everyone involved) on the map. Wilder was nominated for an Oscar. It was an insane year for him. He became a giant and important star, and from then on was pretty much a huge playah. You list out some of his movies and you just shake your head, thankfully, that there were people around who knew how to utilize this talent. Thank God. If it were now, would it have happened? The material for wacko people like Wilder is just not as good. Who knows. Mel Brooks obviously was a big part of the whole story, and it's a collaboration that really stands alone. Look at what they did together!

But Wilder was not dependent on just one director after The Producers. He was a commodity. Everyone wanted him. Woody Allen cast him (hilariously) as the dude who falls in love (for realz, yo) with a sheep in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex ... and Wilder, in the book, is so funny about how he made that real for himself. He used his Actors Studio training, and would sit with the sheep, off-camera, staring into her (actually, I think the real sheep was a he) eyes - and finding the beauty there. It's hysterical. He goes into great detail in his book about the look of that sheep's eyelashes, and how - once he really started studying her (him), he saw that those eyes were actually sexy. I am laughing out loud as I type this. But see, that's what sets Wilder apart. He works on these ridiculously comedic parts with a seriousness that serves him. Yes, the result is so so funny ... but for him the "way in" was always through the reality of the moment.

I mean, think about his total FREAK OUT in that first scene of The Producers when he's running around Zero Mostel's office jibbering like a lunatic. That is REAL. That is not just a guy being all antic and high-energy ... It is highly specific. He is not giving us a lot of bluster and sound and fury trying to INDICATE panic ... he really IS panicked. Funniest scene ever.

His collaboration with Brooks gave us some of his most memorable parts - but in the 70s he hooked up with an unlikely partner, Richard Pryer, to make a movie called Silver Streak (which I love so much I can't even tell you). And a new partnership was born. Who would have thought that those two would have such chemistry? It's amazing to watch. I've seen all their movies - I think they made four of them altogether - and it's a friendship captured onscreen, it's like you're watching something real - like watching To Have and Have Not and knowing that Bogie and Bacall were falling in love during the filming of that movie. Watching Silver Streak is to see the birth of that friendship. One of the best movie friendships captured in history.

You just LOVE to see them together. Partly because it's so bizarre and you wouldn't expect it. Pryor seems like such a solitary guy, and Wilder seems so almost surreal ... but together? Manic hilarity. Pryor was so quick, too - he needed a co-star who could keep up. Wilder could MORE than keep up. Most of those films were improvised, and seriously - I still watch some of them now and tears of laughter stream down my face. LOVE THEM.

Gene Wilder's book is rather touchy-feely, but if you can wade through that and get to his series of "A ha moments" about acting, it is well worth it. He's really an original. His career is unlike most other people's and although he seems to have pretty much retired from movies, he is still very active in the theatre, directing, adapting, etc.

I think one of the things that I get about Gene Wilder that a lot of movie stars don't have is that people really love him. Perhaps it's just because he was a widower so young and that generated sympathy for him but I don't think that's it. I think there is something about him in The Producers, and Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein and all the rest that people just flat-out love. Big romantic leading men are awesome, too, but sometimes they have a short shelf-life. Gene Wilder's shelf-life is long, long, long, and it's because of that warmth that he brings up in people. You can see it when you bring his name up.

The excerpt I wanted to choose today is kind of famous. Gene Wilder has told it often, and other people who were there have also told the story. I post it here because it's a great story.

It illuminates, for me, what I think of as Gene Wilder's genius. Not everyone is a genius, and I've said it before - I think there are very few genius actors. I think there are a lot of actors with great skill and talent ... but geniuses don't come along that often. I think Gene Wilder is a genius. Not just because of what he is able to do while acting onscreen, although that is a part of it - but because of how he approaches things, how he looks at things, and how he sees things.

He was offered the role of Willy Wonka, and he thought about it, and came up with an idea, a thought, an image ... he didn't go any further than that, but he certainly knew where he wanted to start. It's not in the book. It came from Wilder's own imagination and it's brilliant. It MAKES the movie, in my opinion, and for exactly the reasons Wilder describes. Notice, too, how the director filmed - shot for shot - what Wilder said.

EXCERPT FROM Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art, by Gene Wilder

Although I liked Roald Dahl's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I wasn't sure if I wanted to play Willy Wonka. The script was good, but there was something that was bothering me. Mel Stuart, the man who was going to direct the movie, came to my home to talk about it.

"What's bothering you?"

"When I make my first entrance, I'd like to come out of the door carrying a cane and then walk towards the crowd with a limp. After the crowd sees that Willy Wonka is a cripple, they all whisper to themselves and then become deathly quiet. As I walk towards them, my cane sinks into one of the cobblestones I'm walking on and stands straight up, by itself ... but I keep on walking, until I realize that I no longer have my cane. I start to fall forward, and just before I hit the ground, I do a beautiful forward somersault and bounce back up, to great applause."

" ... Why do you want to do that?"

"Because from that time on, no one will know if I'm lying or telling the truth."

Mel Stuart looked a little puzzled. I knew he wanted to please me, but he wasn't quite sure about this change.

"You mean - if you can't do what you just said, you won't do the part?"

"That's right," I answered.

Mel mumbled to himself, " ... comes out of the door, has a cane, cane gets stuck in a cobblestone, falls forward, does a somersault, and bounces back up ..." He shrugged his shoulders. "Okay!"

When I got to Munich - where the filming had already begun - Mr. Stuart showed me the entranceway to "Wonka's Chocolate Factory." I had practiced my forward somersault on a gym mat for three weeks before coming to Munich. The Scenic Department had made three Styrofoam bricks that looked just like cobblestones, which they laid into my entrance walk. That way I wouldn't have to hit the exact same brick with my pointed cane every time we did the scene. On the day they filmed my entrance, I did the scene four times, in just the way that we had planned. Then Mr. Stuart asked me to do just one without the cane. I took a deep breath, swallowed my better instincts, and did the scene without the cane. The next day, David Wolper - the head of the studio - watched the rushes of my entrance. As I was coming out of the commissary after finishing my lunch, Mel Stuart ran up to me.

"He loved it! David loved it!"

"What if he hadn't loved it?" I asked.

"Well, I would have used that take without the cane."

It's not that David Wolper doesn't have good artistic judgment - he does, and he loved what he saw. But if it had been Joe Levine who was bankrolling the film, I think he probably would have said, "What the hell's that guy doing with a cane? Where the fuck does it say that Willy What's-His-Name is a cripple?" I understood better why artistic control is so important to directors.

My Activity Log

It's a diverse group. People use my Search box on my site to look for all kinds of things. I figured I'd give a helping hand where appropriate.

-- Dubliners (here's one)

-- science fiction (good luck with that)

-- The Crucible (weird. I have no posts on that play.)

-- Aristotelian (I love you)

-- Al Pacino Godfather (sadly no)

-- Christian (why do you want to know? Also: LOOK AT MY NAME and take a wild guess)

-- Gallipoli (sadly no)

-- Smith sister murder (I really should write something on that, come to think of it)

-- la dolce vita (I only have this, sorry)

-- syphilis (WTF??)

-- chicago pub (how much time do ya got? This'll have to do for starters)

-- Kirsten Dunst (This is all I came up with, sorry)

-- strip clubs (again: WTF??)

-- pinter (how 'bout this excerpt of my favorite of his plays)

-- Solaris (sorry, no, I just have this)

-- Oxiana (sorry, no, although I adore you for the attempt. This book, however, is on my To-Be-Read pile, so hang in there.)

-- graham greene (Here you go)

-- prom (what about prom? - to quote Molly Ringwald. Sorry, nothing. I only went to one prom and it was a disaster of the highest order)

-- Hepburn + Clift (hmmm. Very specific. Hope you found something.)

-- lindberg (check your spelling, maybe you'll get better results, pallie. Here's one post you might like.)

-- Teahupoo (Here you go. Strangely enough, considering my confessed ignorance on the entire topic, that post probably generates more random Google traffic to my site than any other.)

-- another woman (I love you - will this do?)

-- bismarck (I love you. This is all I got. Sorry.)

-- Rilla of Ingleside (I love you. Here you go.)

-- you know how to whistle (why, yes I do. Maybe this will whet your whistle)

-- It by Stephen King (Here you go)

-- optimism and depression (Interesting. I have not posted on that topic - but I think this book would be really helpful for whatever you are looking for. It really really helped me.)

-- pheromones (maybe this will do?)

-- blurpy (this is probably what you're looking for)

-- cummings (maybe this?)

-- o'hara (speaking of blurpy ... Here is THE O'Hara post. If you're looking for another O'Hara, you could try this or this)

-- ballet shoes (here you go)

-- heath ledger (let's remember happier days. Here you go)

-- 1984 (here you go!)

-- batman (Maybe this? You're probably looking for my thoughts on the latest one, but frankly, I can barely remember it. It was a let-down, except for the aforementioned Heath Ledger. Sorry to disappoint)

-- country girls (Here you go)

-- obama (good luck with that)

-- mother in law (huh? I'm not married.)

-- machiavelli (Here you go)

-- offside (LOVE that movie. Here is my review)

-- burke (I love you. Here you go)

-- raise high the roof beams (Here you go)

-- leslie van houten (As I have mentioned before, any time that bitch comes up for parole, I notice a spike in traffic to this post, and it is my hope that it is some moronic sympathizer looking for information and they come across THAT.)

-- crying pictures (Not sure - maybe this?)

-- Declaration of Independence (hard to choose when there is so much, but you can start off here)

-- for esme with love and squalor (Bless you. Here you go)

-- Sarah Palin (good luck with that - you really haven't figured out the lay of the land here, have you?)

-- soul ached (hm. PAST tense ... did I say at some point that my soul ACHED, as opposed to ACHE ... I have no idea. Hope you find what you're looking for and that your soul doesn't ache forever!)

I'm out of my league in the Mickey obsession

From an email from Michael:

here's one of many stories/anecdotes/observations of Mickey:

when i moved to LA for the first time, back in my early twenties, i was renting a piece a shit car from a place called Rent-A-Wreck and i desperately wanted to just BUY my own piece of shit. a friend of a friend of a that kind of thing led me to a purple 50's stunt car from a low-budget movie that the production company was selling for far more than it was worth. but when the woman selling it told me that it was the car Mickey Rourke drove in the movie they just wrapped, i told her i'd buy it, sight unseen. to her credit, she basically told me it was lemon, don't bother, but i said i'd like to take it for a spin. which i did, all by myself, cruising West Hollywood with my mirrored cop glasses on, saying to myself, "i'm sitting in the same place Mickey Rourke sat in, touching the wheel that Mickey touched," soaking in his vibe. later i saw the movie (on video, of course. it was in the mid 90's, his dark days) and it was called FALL TIME. avoid it. it sucks. and Mickey was in his lazy, whispering, touching his lower lip with every line and always wearing sunglasses phase. he needed the paycheck.

have you seen FRANCESCO? Mickey Rourke plays St. Francis of Assisi. yes. you read that right. i don't remember it much but i know Helena Bonham Carter was in it and at one point you can see Mickey's biker tattoo (in the 1200's!).

Ah yes. The 'touching his lower lip on every line' phase. I know it well.

But that's why I love Michael. Because we have that same level of obsessiveness that leads us to things like driving purple stunt cars around wearing cop sunglasses. Or flying to Taos and crashing Dean Stockwell's party. Either one.

Mitchell, I wonder if Helena says "Crockit ... Oim a joooonkie" in that movie?

Sin City tonight.

Also, in other news, slightly braggy: it's kind of awesome when the managing editor of one of the best literary magazines in the country remembers you from when you submitted to them three years ago. Yes, they turned me down, but not after a prolonged and agonizing cut process ... I was getting little slips in the mail every couple of weeks: "You made it thru the first round ...." I finally had to write to them and ask them to come to a decision because they don't accept "simultaneous submissions" and as long as they were considering it I couldn't send it elsewhere - and I really wanted to move on (if they weren't going to take it). The managing editor wrote me a really nice letter (that I still have), singing the praises of the piece but saying they wanted to pass. Okay, fine! I placed it in the next place I submitted to. I KNEW that piece had legs!! Just submitted another piece to her again 2 days ago, and she remembered me. Now, come on. That is something.

I need every little bit of self-propelled confidence I can get.

Beyonce is a superstar

I post this for Siobhan and Mitchell and Jean and all those huge Beyonce fans out there. Her latest video ("Single Ladies, Put a Ring On It") is addictive (the tune, the beat, and then the video itself) and there are a couple of moments that are goosebump-worthy and I'm not sure why.

I will say this: How wonderful it is to see a dance video that shows THE WHOLE DANCER at all times - not cutting between her body parts to give an impression that dancing is going on, but somehow fearful, a la Flashdance of showing the whole girl at the same time. Beyonce - and her two dancers - are shown in full body throughout, and there are times where it actually feels (to me) like it's done in one take. It's not - but the impression is there: that we are seeing a performance, entirely - what the energy and synchronicity of these girls bring to it is NOT from editing or cutting to give an impression ... it is because they worked their asses off on that dance and are performing it brilliantly. I love the black and white, too, and I love the final seconds of the video, where the sound goes away, the song ends, and you can just hear the heavy breathing of the girls, breathless from the major WORKOUT they just went through.

The whole thing feels real to me, in a way that is so rare these days in filmed dance performance - it feels like a moment of live performance was actually captured by the camera. And there are no distractions either - no change of costume, no swirling lights, no set ... It's kind of old school and looks like it could be on Judy Garland's old television show. Just the stark black dancers against the white background - so all you have to look at is the girls performing.

Well done, all around.

Here's a nice review of it at House Next Door - he says what I wanted to say, just expresses it much better!

Video below the jump:

The Books: "Orson Welles: Volume 2: Hello Americans" (Simon Callow)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Orson Welles: Volume 2: Hello Americans, by Simon Callow

The second volume of Callow's huge Orson Welles project (excerpt and discussion of the first volume here), this takes us through a chaotic (or, more so than usual) period in Welles' life. He had been brought to Hollywood in the wake of the War of the Worlds brou-haha, and had been referred to left and right as the "boy genius". His first movie - Citizen Kane - which took on William Randolph Hearst, a thing you just didn't do - was a debacle. Time has vindicated the film but nobody saw it when it first came out, because it was not distributed widely. It was buried, for fear of unleashing the wrath of Hearst himself. In this second volume, we see Welles trying to pick up the pieces. He went back to New York and did theatre, he directed his second film - The Magnificent Ambersons - World War II broke out, and he was sent down to Rio de Janiero to film Carnival, as a way of promoting friendship between Brazil and America.

That turned into a complete runaway train, along the lines of Francis Coppola filming Apocalypse Now for two years, with no end in sight. Welles had the time of his life in Brazil, and yet the memos flying back and forth from the studio to Brazil and back speak to the increasing anxiety of the bigwigs at what their "boy genius" was really doing down there. You can start to feel the larger forces of "the industry" at work. Because there is nothing more fun in Hollywood than pulling someone DOWN whom you have once built UP.

Volume II is more upsetting than Volume I, because, in a way, you can feel his demise approaching. And you wonder what that will mean for him, how he will handle it.

He was not just a victim of circumstance, of course. He could be wild and uncontrollable, and many times he didn't understand (or didn't want to understand) the rules of the game. Perhaps he understood the rules, but he had always felt that the rules didn't really apply to him. And for so many years they DIDN'T. I mean, if you spend your teens and early 20s having the most extraordinary journey of anyone ever, where you repeatedly do the impossible and are praised for it, you certainly can't be blamed for having an expectation that the rest of your life will go like that. Orson Welles was a giant man, a big lumbering man - but inside, he could be quite immature. He liked to party, to eat, to drink. He didn't really have discipline, he liked to work when HE wanted to work, and when he wanted to party - well, let's all party. He would have spurts of unbelievable productivity - it's like he never slept - and he had entire productions of things trapped inside his head, so when he would go to direct them - out it would all come. Set design, lighting, costumes, blocking - he had it ALL inside his head. Amazing imagination.

But let's talk about Callow's book for a moment. Volume 1 ends with Citizen Kane in 1941. Volume 2 goes from 1941 to only 1947. It is almost 450 pages long. This gives you some idea of the level of detail Callow goes into that I mentioned before. He seems incapable (and this is not quite a criticism) of discerning what is more important than something else. Volume 2 covers only six years. Orson Welles died in 1985! Of course Callow had to push it to three volumes, but judging from the first two - he might have to push it to 5, 6 volumes. There are times when I do think: "Okay ... I don't need to know anymore about this particular topic, thank you very much ... let's move on ..." But I cannot help but be awed at the amount of work he has done, and, frankly - although I knew the major events of Welles's life, Callow's book shows me that I didn't know the half of it. What happened between is given as much face-time as the big famous moments. I enjoy Callow's thoroughness. One of the reasons I enjoy it is because his writing is so good. You can hear his voice, first of all - it gives the book an almost warm feeling. You are in the presence of a guide, a guide who knows more than you do, but who can spin a yarn in a way that you want to keep listening. Callow analyzes everything. He, an actor, knows that much of what happens in an actor's life is the downtime, so he doesn't skip over it. But still: just know going in: This book is 444 pages long and it covers only six years.

To be honest, I don't care if it does go to 6 volumes. I'd read them all. It is a bit much, excessive, really ... but then again: I think Welles warrants that. It's a singular type of career, its own thing ... nobody else had a journey like his ... there is nothing in it that is similar to anybody else's. And THAT is worth noting at length. Which, God love him, Callow does.

I do think the strength in the books - and why they will last, and why they are important - is because of the analysis of events, not just the telling of them. Callow analyzes things. He looks at Welles's work, and is not such a fan that he cannot discern what doesn't work. But he doesn't ever just stop with "this doesn't work" - he goes into WHY. Now that, for me, is like blood to a vampire. I want MORE of that in these types of biographies, not less.

While Welles was whooping it up in Brazil, he left his film The Magnificent Ambersons in the hands of the editors at the studio, a tragic mistake. Famously, the film was butchered, and all of the existing prints - of Welles's version of it - were destroyed. A horrible loss. One which Welles never recovered from. His spirit was broken, in a way, by that experience.

He went on, though, and made Lady From Shanghai, a film I adore - with his then-wife, the troubled Rita Hayworth (whom he made a blonde).

The excerpt I wanted to choose today (and again: there are so many! I didn't know what to pick!) - has to do with Welles' filming of Jane Eyre, with Joan Fontaine as Jane. Welles played Mr. Rochester. It was a troubled shoot, and it showed one of Welles's weaknesses: he wasn't directing the film, and so all of his energies had to go into his acting - but he found that to be boring and frustrating. It was not in his nature to just be an employee. He was meant to LEAD. So without that "leader" role ... who would he be? The situation at that time, in Hollywood, was not set up to congratulate and reward "auteurs" and the guys who did end up making names for themselves as personal film-makers (John Ford, Howard Hawks, others) - were company men, and able to work within the system. They loved the system. Hawks has said he never did a damn thing he didn't want to do. I believe him. But for Welles, it was more difficult. He had a problem with authority - unless it was him in charge. You can see the ego at work here, the ego that had served him so well up to that point - making it possible for him to break barriers and do the impossible ... but now it's starting to harm him. You can feel it happen in the book. You want to quietly pull him aside and speak with him seriously ... but alas, it is already too late.

Dying for the next volume to be published, Mr. Callow, even if it's a 700 page book about a two-week period. Let's get a move on.

EXCERPT FROM Orson Welles: Volume 2: Hello Americans, by Simon Callow

Whatever the ill will between Welles and RKO, Hollywood at large had not dismissed him; he was still a huge figure in the landscape. But what to do with him? In 1942, the producer David O. Selznick was planning another of his grandiose literary adaptations; unlike his recent triumphs, Gone With the Wind (1939) and Rebecca (1940), this one was to be drawn from a truly great source, Jane Eyre. He decided that Welles should play Jane's moody employer, Edward Rochester. Welles had known the producer since they had dined together after a performance of Doctor Faustus in 1936, when Selznick had offered him the job of head of his story department. (Welles slyly suggested that his then business partner, John Houseman, might be better at it). As was his wont, Selznick sought to throw every particle of talent he could muster at the project. Jane Eyre was the dream of the English-born director Robert Stevenson, who had been under contract to Selznick for some time without actually making a film for him. His biggest success in America had been Tom Brown's Schooldays; he had just completed a decent and financially productive French Resistance movie, Joan of Paris, for RKO, and was preparing to join the Forces himself, as soon as Jane Eyre was shot. Selznick had equipped him with an army of writers, including Aldous Huxley (not hitherto noted either for his expertise in the work of the Brontes or for his skill as a screenwriter) and John Houseman, now indeed (just as Welles had suggested he should be seven years before) part of Selznick's permanent staff.

Selznick was not, in fact, technically speaking, the producer of Jane Eyre: having packaged the film, he had sold it to Twentieth Century Fox, who appointed William 'Bill' Goetz - another son-in-law, like Selznick himself, of Louis B. Mayer - as producer, but Selznick kept a sharp eye on the production from beginning to end. It was Selznick's idea to cast Orson Welles as Edward Rochester to Joan Fontaine's Jane; he may have hoped that some of Welles's genius would rub off on Stevenson. Such was his regard for Welles's work as a director that he had begged RKO to deposit a copy of Welles's original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a tantalising prospect that, needless to say, never materialised. Selznick had long admired him as an actor and thought him, with some reason, peerless as a director of dramatised novels on radio; he had vexed Alfred Hitchcock during preparations for Rebecca by constantly referring to the version of the novel that Welles had just made for The Campbell Playhouse: 'if we do in motion pictures as astute a job as Welles did on the radio,' he had told Hitch in one of his celebrated memos, 'we are likely to have the same success the book had and the same success that Welles had.'

From Welles's point of view, Jane Eyre was from the start a questionable enterprise, compromising as it did his status as a so-called quadruple-threat. His profile as producer-director-writer-actor had been perceived by his advisors (and to an extent by him) as being the sine qua non of his reputation. In the end, financial considerations - the money he owed RKO, his alimony, his tax arrears, the extravagance of his lifestyle - demanded that he accept the job, but he and his representatives did everything they could to protect his position. Anxious that Welles might be mistaken for a mere actor, Herb Drake told Look magazine that Welles was only doing Jane Eyre 'in the interest of Uncle Sam's tax department,' demonstrating a dangerous contempt for acting on Welles's part. Perhaps Welles thought that by affecting to despise his job, he would win public sympathy; the opposite is invariably true, as in the case of Marlon Brando's similar statements of some twenty years later. Why should anybody want to pay money to see someone do something for which they have contempt? Welles's attorney Lloyd Wright took issue with Twentieth Century Fox's proposed contract, insisting that 'he must not deviate from his well-earned position, that of a recognised independent producer,' even if he was only to act in the film, and had nothing whatsoever to do with its physical realisation. Wright suggested a credit for him: PRODUCTION DESIGNED BY ORSON WELLES. Merely acting in a film was clearly regarded by Welles and his team as a dire demotion: how could he, who had done every job on a movie, simply take direction from some lesser mortal?

Selznick was aware of the anomaly and, when he wrote to Goetz telling him that he'd like to be present at a forthcoming casting meeting for Jane Eyre, he added, 'I should like also to urge you to have Orson there, because I know few people in the history of the business who have shown such talent for exact casting, and for digging up new people.' There was from the beginning some confusion about exactly what Welles would be doing on the film, a confusion that Welles did nothing to dispel. This was a pattern that would be repeated many times throughout his career: the creation of a suspicion that he might have had something of a guiding hand in the realisation of another director's film. In the case of Jane Eyre, the impression is even more insistent because, in addition to the casting of three of Welles's actors - Erskine Sandford, Eustace Wyatt and the great Agnes Moorehead - two of his key collaborators worked on the film: Bernard Herrmann (a great deal of the music, as it happens, is recycled from Herrmann's score for Welles's radio version of Rebecca); and, no doubt to Welles's considerable displeasure, John Houseman. In the event, Houseman - to the relief of both himself and Welles - was not present at any point during either filming or the pre-production period.

There was an active move on Welles's part, or that of his representatives, to secure a formal credit for him as producer of Jane Eyre, a move that Selznick equally actively resisted. 'I don't believe Orson himself would any more think of taking this credit, once he had all the facts and understood what he might be doing to Stevenson, than he would think of taking directing or co-directing credit,' he wrote to Goetz. 'Actually, direction or co-direction credit would be no more damaging to Stevenson in this case than production credit for Orson, for the latter places Stevenson in the position of simply having carried out Orson's plans, than which nothing could be more inaccurate.' Selznick had already conceded Welles's first billing over Joan Fontaine (an undisputed star since Rebecca), because an acting-only credit would 'reduce' him from his status as a producer-director-actor-writer. For him to have associate producer status would thus be 'a double injustice - to Stevenson, and to Joan's status as a star of the first magnitude ... I do not think that he will want anything that is not his due, as the expense of another man for whom he has professed - very sincerely, I am sure - great admiration.' Interestingly, only a few weeks after sending this to Goetz, Selznick wrote to Joe Schenck of Twentieth Century in very different terms, agreeing to Welles receiving credit as producer, while Fontaine gets first billing. Among the various practical reasons he cites, there is, he says, 'general disbelief' that they would not give first billing to Fontaine, ceding second billing 'to a man who, whatever his prestige, is clearly not in the same category as a star'. Conversely, it was thought absurd to lose the prestige of Welles's name as producer in the credits; in their eyes, his stature was clearly unaffected by the RKO debacle. Stevenson, Selznick continued, was going into the army, so Welles's credit would not damage him; the publicity department, meanwhile, had reported that 'there can be no wide-spread belief that Mr Stevenson is not the director of the film in every sense of the word'. So much for appearances. More significantly from Welles's perspective, Selznick reports that they have just learned that 'Welles did a great more producing on the picture than we had previously known. We have been informed by people from your studio that Mr Welles worked on the sets, changes in the script, in casting, among other things, and that he had charge of the editing.'

All of this is extraordinary, but what is conveyed by the last phrase (my italics) is simply sensational. To edit another man's movie is to cut his balls off, as Welles had better reason than most to know - to edit creatively, that is, rather than merely functionally. In the technical sense, moreover, at this point Welles was scarcely the master of editing that he later became, having only directed Citizen Kane (largely edited in the camera) and The Magnificent Ambersons (on which Welles's editing contribution amounted to precisely three days - and nights - in Miami). And yet: he had charge of the editing. The letter ends: 'please understand that we are in no sense pressing this [the suggestion that Welles should receive a credit as producer], and are extending it purely as a courtesy to 20th Century-Fox.' For whatever reason, it never happened: Welles received no producer credit, and he had to settle for second billing to the star.

On the set, however, he hardly composed himself as a mere actor, according to Joan Fontaine's not entirely objective account. 'Orson Welles was a huge man in 1943. Everything about him was oversize, including his ego,' she wrote in her autobiography, No Bed Of Roses. 'Orson's concern was entirely for Orson: Jane Eyre was simply a medium to show off his talents.' She describes how, on the first day of filming, the cast and crew were assembled at one o'clock; at about four, the stage door suddenly burst open and Welles whirled in, accompanied by his doctor, his manager, his secretary and his valet. 'Orson strode up to a lectern ... placing his script on it and standing before our astonished group, he announced to the director and cast, "Now we'll begin on page four!" ' Stevenson - 'slight, timid, gentlemanly' - was 'suddenly demoted to director-in-name-only.' The journalist Sheilah Graham wrote a profile of Welles during the making of the film, in the course of which she reported that 'Welles has four secretaries, two offices, and is making a government "short" in between takes of Jane Eyre. At the same time he is scripting one broadcast a week and cutting Journey Into Fear. Also,' she added, with casual savagery, 'he is directing the director of Jane Eyre on how to direct.'

It is worth noting that at this stage Welles had never been directed by anyone else on film - indeed, he had hardly been directed by anyone else in any medium, at least since his youthful days at the Gate and the slightly later period with Katherine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic. It must have been a hard adjustment for him, one that he did not handle with grace. It signals the beginning of his essentially awkward relationship with the film community: if you hired him as an actor, you got so much more - more perhaps than you wanted. It is fair to observe that, in this particular case (perhaps unbeknownst to Fontaine), he had been involved in both the screenplay and the casting, so it is hardly surprising that he expected to be treated differently from everyone else. But this behaviour (no doubt exaggerated by Fontaine, though there are plenty of comparable reports, then and later) suggests a childish determination to demonstrate his importance. It also marks the beginning of the long sulk that so often coloured his work in other men's films: they won't let him make his own movies, so he's damned if anyone else is going to enjoy making theirs.

This attitude was not, however, inflexibly maintained: 'Orson couldn't keep up to the position he assumed,' wrote Fontaine. 'He was undisciplined, always late, indulged in melodrama on and off the set.' On one occasion he failed to show up on time for a photo shoot: 'He'd been lying in the bath sulking because I didn't trust him to show up on time.' This aspect of Welles - the infantile tyrant - is widely attested, and coexists with the passionate and high-flown broadcaster, the political writer, the master-craftsman and the inspiring leader. They were all Welles, and the different personae could succeed each other with bewildering speed, or could indeed be on display simultaneously. At the time, Welles was having an affair with Lena Horne, who was singing in a nightclub on Sunset Strip, and he liked to report his wilder activities to Fontaine while they were shooting. (Shorty Chirello, Welles's chauffeur-valet, confided in her that in fact Welles sat in bed every night with a tray, 'which didn't jibe at all with Orson's version of his nocturnal exploits.' For once, Welles's version of his own life may be more reliable than his chauffeur's.) Despite everything, Fontaine realized, he wanted to be liked. Eventually she warmed to him. Moreover, she noted that, despite all Welles's peacock displays, Stevenson quietly and slowly regained the directorial reins. With filming completed, however, he joined the army and Welles was presumably able to assert his authority in the editing suite.

Whatever the truth of this, the film - though certainly dominated by Welles's startling interpretation of the character of Edward Rochster - is not especially Wellesian in style; indeed, to a large extent it is actually opposed to his aesthetic. The very opening of the film, showing a bookshelf laden with great tomes of the past, proudly declares itself a literary adaptation, which might be thought to have been anathema to the radical educationalist in Welles. The film ends with a photograph of a bound copy of the novel with the slogan 'Buy yours in the theatre'. The cinema as a route to literature, not an art form in its own right. If Welles stood against anything as a movie-maker, that was it. The cinematography, by the distinguished cameraman George Barnes (who had just shot Rebecca for Hitchcock), is of great refinement of tone, softly focused, evocative and painterly in a way that Welles and Toland - formerly Barnes's assistant - had utterly set themselves against in Citizen Kane; The Magnificent Ambersons, too, though aspiring to a period look, uses depth of focus and a kind of energy in the camera movements to engage the viewer critically with the way in which the story is being told. Barnes's work in Jane Eyre, by contrast, contrives to create a world in which the viewer can forget that he or she is watching a film and simply marvel at the expressive beauty of the pictures. In his own films, Welles did everything he could to prevent this. It is not a style ideally suited to Welles's talents as a performer. Indeed, it might be argued that Welles's acting is always at its best with the cinematographic style that came to be associated with his name - one of unexpected angles, sudden distortions, epic perspectives (the style Carol Reed adopted for The Third Man, in which Welles gives arguably his finest performance). The performance he chooses to give in Jane Eyre is on the brink of the grotesque, in much the same manner as his aged Kane: curiously doll-like, strapped into corsets, a great beak of a nose imposed on his own, his facial skin pulled back by the gum of his wig. Interestingly, the image he creates is not unlike the one he invented for himself as a thirteen-year-old playing Richard III. He wears the make-up, which reproduces Bronte's 'stern features and a heavy brow ... gathered eyebrows,' like a mask, affecting a highly theatrical, consciously stentorian vocal delivery; his British accent is not that of an English squire, but of an English actor (sometimes tipping over into the lordly Anglo-Irish tones of his youth in the Dublin theatre); it is part of a theatrical gesture. His Rochester is an impersonation, not an interpretation; with Welles, the outside never goes in.

This is by no means to say that the performance is uninteresting; on the contrary, Welles sees the character as a kind of tortured monster, physically strange, clumsy, only half-human. It is exactly the sort of line on the character that another actor, Charles Laughton, might have taken. Had Laughton done so, he might well have created an equally extreme physical life, but he would (at his best) have transfigured the portrait, touching some universal chord, provoking pity as well as terror, giving us the man within. With Welles, the interpretation is an idea, put on (like a suit of armour), very striking, very powerful, but merely a thing manipulated by the actor, and thus incapable of moving us. It betrays, as much of his acting does, the influence of German Expressionism, the most theatrical of all filmic styles. This, his first conscious bid for movie stardom, was not a promising calling card; the gesture is so extreme that he only suffers by comparison with the rest of the acting in the film, which in its straightforwardly realistic manner is excellent, ranging from the childish charms of Elizabeth Taylor and the remarkable skill of the teenage Peggy Ann Garner (as the young Jane), through the stalwart and strikingly accurate character work of Henry Daniell and the human warmth of the Abbey Theatre veteran Sally Allgood, to the uptight vulnerability of Joan Fontaine in one of her best roles. In this company Welles seems distinctly out of place. So, it might be argued, is Edward Rochester, but Welles's massive presence and anguished histrionics have a distinctly unbalancing effect on the film. Jane Eyre was not released till 1944, a long year after Journey Into Fear finally hit the screen in February of 1943; as far as the public was concerned, they scarcely knew what to make of him as an actor. Up to that point Orson Welles's performances on film had consisted of the many-faceted but not necessarily many-layered Charles Foster Kane, and the preposterously corny Colonel Haki. The release of Jane Eyre was something of a moment of truth for him as an actor.

Welles moodily told Robert Stevenson that the notices he received for the performance had been 'the worst accorded to an American actor since John Wilkes Booth'. On the whole, in fact, the reviews were baffled, as well they might have been, though respectfully so. The Hollywood Reporter detected 'certain over-emphases that are occasionally offensively flamboyant and approximate', while Variety noted Welles's 'declamatory delivery'. Only James Agee in the Nation really took the gloves off, describing Welles's 'road-operatic sculpturings of body, cloak and diction, his eyes glinting in the Rembrandt gloom, at every chance, like side-orders of jelly. It is possible to enjoy his performance as dead-pan parody; I imagine he did.' Unkindly Agee adds that he might have enjoyed it himself, 'if I hadn't wanted, instead, to see a good performance.'

Friends were not much more supportive. Welles was not encouraged by receipt of a telegram from Micheál MacLíammóir praising him for his performance of Mr Rochester as Count Dracula, though that sharp little sally has a bit more in it than pure malice. Welles's performance is indeed in his line of tortured monsters, of which his radio Dracula is the most remarkable. The problem is that his desire to provoke pity is a notion, an intellectual ambition: he does not take the steps necessary to effect it in the viewer, such as connecting with his own experience or allowing his imagination to engage at a deep (as opposed to a merely pictorial) level. Welles defended himself on curious grounds: 'There are about eight or nine parts that every individual actor can really play and the Rochester role is one of my eight or nine,' he told an interviewer. 'I don't agree with those sedulous character actors who study and "live" a role for seven months in advance of playing it. If they have to work at it that long, it's a sure thing they aren't fitted for it. They can only ... detract from the true possibilities of the role ... if the role doesn't fit the actor then he's fake no matter if he lived it 100 hours a day, and no matter how great his talent for mimicry. I'm striking a blow for realism.' Realism was not a characteristic that either the press or the public were much inclined then - or ever - to associate with the name of Orson Welles, and his comment suggests that self-knowledge continued to elude him.

My friend Allison

About 10 years ago my friend Rebecca was getting married on Block Island. I worked with Rebecca at an internet site called The Hub (it used to be a channel on AOL, the old AOL) and we had become good friends. A group of New York people (one of whom I knew, and two of whom I knew only slightly) rented a car to drive up to Rhode Island together. It was me, Felicia, John, and Allison. Felicia and I were good friends (she also worked at the Hub). I had met Allison once at a party in Brooklyn at this fantastic loft/warehouse space where Rebecca lived and she and I had taken the subway back into the city together. I remember we talked about religion as we sat waiting for the train. I liked her very much. She was Rebecca's best friend.

So here we all were, on a road trip, connected to each other only through Rebecca.

It's a trip that was so memorable that we all still reference it. We had gotten rooms at one of the big old-fashioned hotels on Block Island. And you just never know what traveling with someone is going to be like, especially people that you don't know all that well. But the four of us just CLICKED. We worked together as a group. We split up the driving. There wasn't one drip in the group. Also, kudos to John. It was three girls and him. We eventually were all tormenting him by throwing references to "tampons" into the conversation, because we would get such a predictable response. He was hilarious - we loved him. "Oh, come on, do we have to talk about THAT stuff?" he'd say as one of us would start raving about our ovulation, just to get a rise out of him.

We took the ferry out to Block Island. It was a rough windy day, and I remember John got us all beers on the ferry and we, being naive, thought it would be awesome to drink them out on the deck, so we all walked out on the deck and - whoosh - our beer foam was lifted bodily off each of our beers and flew, willy nilly, into each other's faces. John's beer foam flew right into my face. It was hilarious - because all of the locals (and what is even more ridiculous - I AM a local) were drinking their beers inside the boat, because they obviously knew the danger of beer-foam-flying ... so they must have watched our naive stumbling outside with some humor. "Watch ... they'll be back inside in 2 seconds ..." Covered in beer foam, the four of us staggered back inside the ferry, laughing hysterically.

It was autumn, which is my favorite time to go out to Block Island. My sister taught out there for a year and my visits to her were in the fall and also the early spring. It's a whole different place out there then than during the tourist season. The ocean was a deep dark blue, and there was that light in the air - the long low autumn light - we were all exhilarated. First of all, to be out of the city on a little road trip, but second of all, because the surroundings were so beautiful.

Our hotel was a big rambling Victorian structure that you can see when you get off the ferry in Block Island. It had an enormous wraparound porch with Adirondack chairs, and the stairways were thickly carpeted and narrow, the lobby filled with gee-gaws and clutter. Felicia and I shared a room, and Allison and John shared a room. Again, hilarious. They didn't even know each other. But I swear - within an hour of our drive, we had become siblings.

Cashel was just a baby at this time - Maria was a friend of Rebecca's too (she also worked at the Hub) - so it was so cool to see Maria and Cashel strolling up Main Street. Or, actually (hard to imagine now), he was probably in his stroller. He was still just a white-haired little chubb-ball at this point, obsessed with cars of any kind (all of which he referred to as "da-bwah" - except for one startling moment when he pointed at a vehicle going by and said clearly, "JEEP.") Cashel lived in Brooklyn at that time, so I saw him almost every weekend.

That night was the rehearsal dinner, that we were not invited to, so we went to a local dive bar - and Rebecca and her husband-to-be ended up joining us there after the rehearsal dinner. It was a crazy joint. Most places in Block Island are. There was a great juke box. And I remember it was that night that Allison and I first really clicked. We were having so much fun. Just with each other. We were like sisters. The place wasn't packed, because it was off-season, and we had this whole area upstairs to ourselves, and we all got pitchers of beer and whooped it up, a happy foursome. At one point, Allison and I started doing some interpretive dance, and once we started, we could not stop. We would make up stories: "Okay, so you're a bitchy girl in high school and I'm a shy girl who wants to be your friend ... GO." And we would act it out to, oh, the Steve Miller song that was playing. It was so stupid and so fun. It was like being a little kid.

And I still find that with Allison - she, my dear beautiful blonde-haired friend of many years now ... when we are together, we can go into a zone of childhood, we are free with each other that way ... It's not a polite grown-up-friend kind of relationship, although of course we have very deep conversations and she has really been there for me in SO many ways over the years. But when I think of the two of us and how we became friends ... doing interpretive pantomime dance in a dive bar on Block Island - acting out various scenarios - for HOURS, guys - HOURS ... it makes so much sense, because in many ways that is still who we are to each other. We give each other that freedom.

Later that night, the four of us were staggering back to our hotel, a little bit worse for the wear, and WAY TOO LOUD for our environment. Someone screamed at us from a nearby house to keep it down. Ooops. Sorry. We are being bad guests.

And I remember for some reason, as we walked down the street, I was pontificating about instances of racism seen on The Real World (shut up, Sheila) - and out of nowhere - I fell. This was a wipeout of epic proportions. One minute I was up, the next I was down. I broke the fall completely with my palms and I skidded on the sidewalk. For the rest of the weekend, I kept referring to "my stigmata". I was feeling no pain, though. As I got back up, Allison (who was laughing hysterically) said, "What happened, Sheila?" I said, "I have no idea. I think I just fell on a crack in the atmosphere." Allison still, to this day, says that to me on occasion. Or she will remind me of it. "Member when you fell on a crack in the atmosphere and got stigmata?" Only in my life would a sentence like that make any sense.

The wedding was outside on a beautiful golden field in the center of Block Island. Cashel wore a blue velvet suit. The memory of him, now a Boy Scout, and 11 years old, is killing me!

The reception was outside, under a tent. There was a huge orange harvest moon, rising up out of the black ocean. The beauty was almost too much. It's like having a too-rich dinner followed by too-many lavish desserts. Too much beauty. We would step out from under the tent and stare up at the moon and just say, "God. Look at that."

Felicia, who is a photographer, had brought her old-fashioned Polaroid camera, and we took many pictures, many of which I still have. For some reason, I so remember one of the photos that I, or someone else, took. Felicia was squatting, she had no shoes on by that point, and she was talking to Cashel. I showed Felicia the picture, and she, a gorgeous black girl with little braids on her head, said, in dismay, "I look like a squatting native." We all still say that phrase. Squatting native! We all howled about it. "No, you don't, Felicia!" "Look at me, with the bare feet and the braids - God! I am totally a squatting native!"

The weekend was so magical it was hard to let it go. Felicia, John, Allison and I were all kind of sad and quiet as we packed up to go home the next morning. Who would we be without each other?? It felt like the four of us had been traveling forever. We NEEDED John there, to talk about girlie things like menstruation and vaginas, just to tease him. "You know what, John?" "What?" "I was just thinking about my vagina ..." "Oh, for God's SAKE!" He would get so embarrassed so of course it was impossible NOT to tease him. Our dynamic as a group was magnificent! The four of us did go out a couple of times after that, trying to recapture the group glory. It was an unlikely group, but it worked. It's not easy to travel with people, either. There always seems to be someone who is too anal, or someone who is too irresponsible and doesn't pick up the slack ... someone who ruins it. But with us four ... we all were equals, hovering and managing and doing what needed to be done.

Most of the best friends I have made in my life - the ones that are still here in my life - are the ones I made between the ages of 10 and 18. Beth, Betsy, Meredith, Michele, Mitchell, Jackie, David, Liz ... these are friends from grade school, high school and college. These are forever people. Once you become a true adult, it seems like it's harder to make friends like that. I, however, have been very lucky. When in Chicago, as a woman in my 20s, I made friends with Ann Marie and Kate - and these women are truly DEAR to me, like they are two of my best friends ... and I met them after I was already "formed", if you will. It's such a blessing. While in Chicago, I also befriended Ted - a man I am still close to, after all these years. I don't know who I would be if I couldn't get together with Ted every couple of months, and drink wine, and talk about ... well ... everything. I cherish all of my friends, and I know I am lucky to have such a great group of them. And the ones I made as an adult have a special place in my heart. Because it means the heart has not atrophied ... it is still capable of letting someone in. You can see the opposite happen with many adults, and I feel very lucky that that has not happened to me. Or perhaps luck has nothing to do with it. I think it might be something I have actually chosen, I'm not sure.

And Allison, from that weekend in Block Island, became one of my closest and dearest friends. There have been times over the years when either she or I will consider leaving New York - and that still might happen - and I get a bolt of stress at the thought of not being able to see her whenever I want.

Our relationship runs the gamut. We love to talk about movies and Celebrity Rehab and Charles Manson and men. We have mentioned to each other that we would like to do more - meaning: read the New York Times, see that something interesting is going on, an exhibit, whatever - and go check it out. We want to go to The Cloisters. We have PLANS, as friends. I cherish that. We have these epic sleepovers at her house (accompanied by her dog Oscar and her cat Charlie) where we climb under the puff on her bed and watch ... whatever ... late into the night. We like to 'show each other' movies. It's one of our favorite things to do. Like, she made me watch The Family Stone, a movie I really had no interest in seeing - but she had seen it and fell in love with it and KNEW I would love it too (she was totally right - Love that movie) so she wanted to see it with me. We are now in the middle of watching Slings & Arrows together - halfway through the third (and final) season. The second I saw the first damn episode, I could barely hold myself back from calling her up immediatley and inviting myself over. She HAD to see this. It's exhilarating to share something you love with someone else - who has the same level of appreciation for things as you do, the same kind of humor.

In 2005, we went to Ireland together for 10 days, and our trip encompassed her birthday (we flew out of New York on her birthday) and mine. The adventures we had were without number, and it was reiterated to me again that we really travel WELL together. When I get serious or antsy, she laughs in my face, lightening the mood (the episode with the blue pen as we landed in Dublin comes to mind). We shared the driving, 50-50, and kind of just went where we wanted to go, and we lingered when we felt like lingering. We ended up sleeping over in Glendalough because it was late and we didn't want to drive out of the mountains in the dark ... we ended up lingering in Kinsale for three days because it was just so pretty there ... we took the train up to Belfast to hang out with Carrie and her husband ... and it all just worked out. We were excellent companions. You never know with travel.

She's a beautiful person, a voracious reader, an intelligent critic (our discussions are awesome), and she's a person where I always want to know what she thinks. Books I read, movies I see ... what will Allison think?

But more than that: I cherish her friendship because when I am with her, I remember what it was like to be 10 years old again.

Happy birthday (belated), Allison.

I love you. You are essential to me.

The Books: "Orson Welles: Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu" (Simon Callow)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Orson Welles: Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu, by Simon Callow

The first volume of actor/writer Simon Callow's gigantic Orson Welles project. Volume II came out last year, and there will be a third and final volume. I am blown away by what he has done here. I am blown away on so many levels. This is not a surface biography. This does not just deal with events, although it certainly does do that as well, in intimate detail. This is a highly articulate book of analysis, and I just have to say: To anyone who is interested in Hollywood, Orson Welles, the craft of acting, the craft of directing, Shakespeare, the history of America, movies in general ... these books are MUST-HAVES.

There are times when you can tell Callow is so in love with his subject that he goes on for what I think is too long ... but that's part of the beauty of these books. Callow is under a spell. He is under Orson Welles' spell. He does not judge one thing to be more important than another. A play that Orson Welles wrote when he was 14 years old gets just as much face-time as his Voodoo Macbeth, one of the most important moments in American theatre. (Let's not forget that as a mere teenager he published a book - in conjunction with his acting teacher at school, Roger Hill, called Everybody's Shakespeare - Three Plays Edited for Reading and Arranged for Staging, which showed Welles' early theories as a director, and adaptor). I mean, there is a lot to discuss there - Welles was a prodigy.

(That's him at school.)

This is probably why there needs to be three volumes.

Nothing gets short-shrift. Callow is not an uncritical eye, let me not paint it incorrectly. This is not a fanboy. This is someone who is obsessed. And I understand obsession. It is not about LOVE. It is about CURIOSITY that will never ever ever end. Even the bad moments, the awkward moments, the failures have their interests ... or, perhaps to a true obsessive, the failures are even MORE interesting, because then the character of the person you are obsessed with can truly be revealed. Who knows. Callow is unafraid to criticize Welles, and he does so in a voice that is truly his own. We all know Simon Callow's acting. He has a distinctive speaking voice, kind of snotty and humorous. You can hear that in the prose here. You know, he'll include an excerpt from one of Welles' schoolboy compositions and say, "This is dreadful stuff, really, but it has good energy." (or something like that). He does not think that by criticizing Welles he is diminishing him. He does not feel he needs to protect or defend Welles. On the contrary. Someone as complex as Welles deserves to be taken seriously, and deserves to have his work be looked at on its merits - without all the myth and legend and brou-haha that normally is erected around it. People tend to be positional about Welles, and that does diminish him. Callow does not go that route (and he is eloquent about his reasons for this in the introduction to the book.) He weighs in everyone else's opinions, but he is trying to get at the whole man, in all his infuriating excess, and shining brilliance and crashing failures. Callow is absolutely wonderful. I cannot get enough of these books and I am dying for volume III to come out. Good work, Mr. Callow. These are MAJOR contributions to the Welles library - major major biographies ... and you deserve every accolade you receive for these extraordinary books.

Much of the Welles story is difficult to put together because he himself was such a teller of tall tales. You know, he went to Morocco when he was 16 years old and the stories he told of his time there, hanging out with a sheik in a freakin' tent and chillin' with the Arabs smoking a hookah pipe in the mountains, stuff like that, have just grown in the telling, and Callow just throws his hands up trying to corroborate some of the stories. All he can do is tell what Welles told, and then get eyewitnesses, if possible ... but a lot of the times he just says, "We'll never know what really happened in Morocco." Then there are times, like his time in Ireland as a teenager (which really is amazing) when he basically strolled into an audition at the up-and-coming Gate Theatre (trying to rival the Abbey) and got a part. Welles made it seem, in his letters home, and then later in his life, that he was given a lead INSTANTLY. That's not quite how it went, but he did, indeed, take the Ireland theatre world by storm as a teenager. He was the toast of Dublin at age 17. Like - what??

But for Welles, truth was never as interesting as fantasy, and he is at his best when he can project himself into his own fantasies - I mean, isn't that what Citizen Kane was all about, and War of the Worlds? If you build it, he will come. But still: Welles always had to embellish, even if the truth was already so fantastical it beggared belief! So Callow wades through all of Welles' elaborations, and tries to put together what really happened in Ireland, etc. He is a detective. This is never about tearing Welles down. This is not about, "See, Welles told us THIS happened, but now we know that THIS is what REALLY happened, so everything that Welles ever did can now be seen as suspect!" I hate that kind of biography. It seems to resent contradiction, it seems to resent life itself, with all its ups and downs. Biographies that praise consistency above all else are terrible. What - is the biographer always consistent in his own life? Does he never contradict himself? Is he not large, does he not contain multitudes? I've had people who read my blog who want to catch me in inconsistencies - it seems to be the #1 reason that some people read blogs. "You said THIS in 2003, and now you say THIS in 2007?" Well, first of all, get a life. And second of all, yes. Because I felt THAT way in 2003, and I feel THIS way in 2007. You've never changed your mind? What the hell is your problem? I am not thrown off by inconsistencies. At least not in a private citizen like myself or like Welles. We do want consistency in public figures, in politicians ... inconsistencies THERE should be analyzed and questioned, since these people are actually trying to LEAD us, and create LAWS, etc. that affect us. But a blogger like myself who writes about boys she kissed in 1988 and movie stars she loves? What is the point of playing "Gotcha" with someone like me? Retarded. The same goes for biographies. I think it is in the inconsistencies that you can actually approach the source of life. That's where the real good stuff is: the gap between reality and fantasy, the gap between what really happened and what we SAY happened: Isn't that when we really can see someone?

I have to say that there were times, reading both of Callow's books, that I actually felt exhilarated, and that is a rare sensation indeed when reading a book. I was exhilarated by the detail, sure ... of these famous events I have already heard so much about - the Cradle Will Rock experience (which John Houseman describes so wonderfully in his own memoirs), the voodoo Macbeth done in Harlem with all black actors in the 1930s - Welles directed it at age 22 - boy was a phenom ... the Mercury Theatre, the War of the Worlds broadcast, the precedent-breaking deal with RKO which led to Citizen Kane ... and I was also exhilarated by how in-depth Callow went! He really tries to understand, not just what happened - but where it came from, and also the source of the success. Why was Welles' voodoo Macbeth so groundbreaking? And let's not just stay on the surface (black actors, Harlem) ... but let's look at his adaptation of Macbeth, what he chose to cut, how he rearranged things (Welles saw Shakespeare not as a great man to be revered and feared - but as a guy who wrote some awesome plays and they could certainly stand to be mucked up with a bit) - and what the adaptation said about where Welles was at that time. What interested him? Let us look at what he chose to cut, and speculate on why he felt that had to go?

Another reason why this massive biography of Orson Welles stands out is because Simon Callow is an actor. He writes like an actor. His concern is not intellectual, he is a man of the theatre - so he knows, in his bones, what an audition is like, what a first night is like, what rehearsals are like - but more than that: what the life of an actor really is all about. It's not fame, obviously, although it seems as though Welles HAD to be famous, there was really no other way. It is also the source of Welles' tragedy. But the life of an actor - trying to bring a text to life, and what that actually DOES to a person who lives that particular life. It's not a regular life. We all know that. It leaves wide swathes of space for creativity and fantasy - it HAS to. It's like the life of a writer which needs to leave wide swathes of space for solitude. Callow knows the camaraderie of being part of an acting company and his writing has ultimate authority. He also is a learned man of the theatre, having played Shakespeare and restoration comedy and every other thing for years - so he is on totally sure ground when he analyzes Welles' own interpretations of classic texts. He has that history at his command, which other biographers do not. Or if they do, it remains intellectual. When Callow says something like (and there's a certain phrase SOMEWHERE in these books that I am looking for, but I can't find it, so forgive the paraphrase), "This is one of the most difficult roles to bring to life in all of Western theatre, and it has sunk many an actor, from Olivier to Gielgud" - you know he speaks from deep experience. Perhaps he worked on that part and it sank him, too. Who knows. I LOVE that aspect of the book.

David Thomson, in his gigantic Biographical Dictionary of Film, has an enormous entry on Welles, and he closes it with:

In his last years, Welles did more commercials, he narrated documentaries, he attempted to launch fresh projects and to complete old ones. He appeared in It Happened One Christmas (77, Doald Wyre), The Muppet Movie (79, James Frawley), and Butterfly (81, Matt Cimber). But none of those matched his provocative role as the wise man in the back row of the theatre in his friend Henry Jaglom's Someone To Love (87). In short, he presided over the special chaos of his life as it closed, apparently seeking help and friends, yet secretly sealed against trespass. His unfinished films are now seeing the light of day - even pieces of It's All True. But so little about the life and work of Welles is all or anywhere near true. He inhaled legend - and changed our air. It is the greatest career in films, the most tragic, and the one with most warnings for the rest of us.

While much of Welles' journey was well-known to me, there was much I didn't know. He was clearly a prodigy of some kind, albeit a messy one. As a young boy, he was already on his way, and he was lucky enough (or persistent enough) to find mentors who could push him further and further along. He was doing summer stock as a teenager, appearing in Shakespeare, and he was also a student at an elite boy's school which had a stellar drama department. Welles remained connected with that school all his life. He did not forget his influences, and he did not forget where he came from (although he also would speak of things in retrospect and always put HIMSELF at the center of everything. It reminds me a bit of how Howard Hawks talked. Every great idea in Hollywood, every unpredictable yet ultimately successful casting decision was originally Hawks' idea. It's kind of endearing. It makes it hell on a biographer, but still: these men were storytellers and artists. If you're looking for literal truth, I don't know why you would look for it in show business and the people who practice it!)

Welles went to Ireland as a teenager, as I mentioned - and became highly involved in the Gate Theatre, which still exists, run by a fascinating guy named Micheál MacLíammóir. Look him up. Guy has as much interest as Orson Welles, and just as intense a reinvention of self. Welles was one of the most self-regarding of all artists, it was about the power of his personality - it always was - and how his voice (no surprise that Welles made his real mark in radio) could bring his personality (and others) to life. MacLíammóir's stories of Welles' first audition for them ("There's an American teenager in the lobby ... he says he wants to audition ... what should I tell him?") are laugh-out-loud funny. MacLíammóir in one of his autobiographies (he wrote several, and rightly so - what a life!!) describes being told about the American teenager in the lobby who was saying he was a lead actor at the Guild Theatre in America (none of it true) and that he wanted an audition. MacLíammóir says sure, send the kid in. In walks Orson Welles. MacLíammóir describes what happened next:

'Is this all the light you can give me?' he said in a voice like a regretful oboe. We hadn't given him any at all yet, so that was settled, and he began. It was an astonishing performance, wrong from beginning to end but with all the qualities of fine acting tearing their way through a chaos of inexperience. His diction was practically perfect, his personality, in spite of his fantastic circus antics, was real and varied; his sense of passion, of evil, of drunkenness, of tyranny, of a sort of demoniac authority was arresting; a preposterous energy pulsated through everything he did. One wanted to bellow with laughter, yet the laughter died on one's lips. One wanted to say, 'Now, now, really, you know,' but something stopped the words from coming. And that was because he was real to himself, because it was something more to him than a show, more than the mere inflated exhibitionism one might have suspected from his previous talk, something much more.

Isn't that absolutely gorgeous?

Here is a photo I found that I love from 1950 - of Eartha Kitt, MacLíammóir, and Welles. The two stayed friends their whole lives. And it wasn't an easy friendship - I suppose it never was with Welles - but they remained colleagues and collaborators til the end.

Welles' journey in the 30s, with the Federal Theatre Project, is well known. He hooked up with another young ambitious guy, John Houseman, and they began to put together projects, the first of which was what is now known as "the voodoo Macbeth" - a Macbeth put on entirely with black actors, mostly non-professional, at a big theatre in Harlem. Welles set the Macbeth in Haiti, with a stage full of crazy voodoo goddesses in headdresses, massive crowd scenes, drum beats - Welles was always about creating an impression, rightly or no. You can see clips of the voodoo Macbeth on Youtube, I think - and I've seen clips of it in the documentary I have about Welles at home. It may be a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing - all style, no substance - hard to say - but it was a giant hit and it put Welles on the map. White people were flocking to Harlem to see the production. Black people came out in droves. It electrified the New York theatre world. Amazing. If I could have a time machine to go back and see certain productions, "voodoo Macbeth" is in my top 5. (If you must know, Laurette Taylor as Amanda Wingfield in Chicago in 1945 is # 1). But God, to see some of those productions!!

Welles' notoriety grew with the shutting down of The Cradle Will Rock (go read Houseman's memoir for an account - that was the excerpt I posted of his book) - and eventually he and Houseman decided to strike out on their own and form the Mercury Theatre. The Mercury put on stage productions - Doctor Faustus and others - they got a deal for a weekly radio show where they would read classic literature, all adapted by Welles (did the man ever sleep?) - and of course, eventually, the "War of the Worlds" craziness came out of that - which then led to Welles being famous not just in New York but around the world. Hollywood took notice and pretty much air-lifted the entire Mercury Theatre company (Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Everett Sloane, and all the rest) to do basically whatever the hell Orson Welles wanted. And what he wanted to do was a fictionalized life of William Randolph Hearst. The envy in Hollywood was intense. Who is this Orson Welles character and why was he given such a deal, while I slog along in my ridiculous contract having to do whatever the studio says?? There was never a lot of good will towards Welles.

Citizen Kane which, naturally, got its props eventually - was barely seen at the time, because William Randolph Hearst sparked a war against the studios, saying that he would instruct every one of his papers to BURY the movie, or ignore it completely ... if it were to go forward. Nobody wanted to alienate William Randolph Hearst. Citizen Kane was given a premiere, but that was pretty much it. It would be decades before anyone could see it again. Amazing. And so Welles made enemies from the get-go, and in a funny way, his career never really recovered its luster - although he would make some pretty damn fine movies (The Magnificent Ambersons comes to mind - although that film was so butchered by the studio that Welles, 40 years later, still couldn't talk about it without welling up with tears. I love that movie, but it is truly a tragedy what was done to it - and, seen in the light of retrospect, you can see the viciousness of the studio heads, sticking it to their young prodigy who had already caused so much trouble ... There is something personal in their attack on Welles. Well, you know how mediocrity hates genius! They set out to destroy him. Welles never really recovered emotionally from what was done to him with Magnificent Ambersons.)

Anyway, there is obviously a lot to talk about when we talk about Welles. And this is only the first volume! The first volume of the book takes us up through the short-lived release of Citizen Kane. I was tormented as to what excerpt to choose! His time in Ireland? Voodoo Macbeth?

The book is so juicy, so unbelievably interesting on every level ... you just let the book fall open and you dissolve into the events on the page, it's that engrossing.

That's a sketch Welles did, around age 13, of a young William Shakespeare. And that leads me into the excerpt.

I decided to go with the excerpt of the Mercury Theatre's famous modern-dress production of Julius Caesar. Again, where the hell is my time machine? It was 1937 when that play went up. A terribly uneasy time in the world at large. The cataclysm was already happening elsewhere, and the mood was very very tense. Welles decided to set Macbeth in fascist Italy. This was not necessarily a new or an original idea, many companies had been doing putting classic works in a fascist European setting - however, many of these were out of New York, and so word would not have reached Welles about them. It appears to have been original to Welles, or perhaps just an expression of the universal mood at the time. Welles' gift was never, by the way, in being original. It was in being able to take the dream that was in his own head and create it out in the world in whatever production he was involved in. He was never strictly an innovator, although much of cinematography as we now know it imitates what was done in Citizen Kane. But much of that was Gregg Toland's contribution, not Welles's. Welles's contribution was in believing in the sheer size of the project, and making it happen. He was a showman of the old school, a PT Barnum, a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't genius. He played tricks. There's a reason why this guy was obsessed with magic for his entire life. Welles had no reverence for Shakespeare. Instead, he had something better: he had love and passion. Shakespeare was just a fellow showman, as far as he was concerned, another practical man of the theatre. Welles chopped scenes up, deleted characters, he rearranged the order if it suited him - pulling things forward when normally they happened at the end, whatever ... You can tell that he would be a movie director, which is more of a non-linear medium (or can be, with its potential for flashback, or dreams, etc.) Welles kept the stage huge and black with billowing black curtains. Most of the characters wore the black military uniforms of Mussolini's jackbooted thugs, and there was an intense air of uneasiness and violence around the production. People were blown away by it. It seemed to speak directly to their time, directly to what was going on in Europe. It took New York by storm. Voodoo Macbeth had been earlier that year - so to then come out so quickly with this Caesar so soon after, so different from the Macbeth, and Welles was only 23 freakin' years old?? Unbelievable. Unprecedented. The voodoo Macbeth was all about the spectacle. It was all about crowd scenes, and traffic control, and creating an impression of madness, noise and controlled chaos. The Caesar was about giant empty cold spaces, and dwarfed human beings - the black of their costumes blending into the black of the drapes - so that their white faces shone out, in a tiny frightening way ... Such a different conception, look, feel ... from what he had done only 8 or 9 months previous.

Here is a series of images from Welles' Caesar, including some of his sketches for the costumes, setting, and lights (he did everything ... the whole production was in his head). I also included a Hirschfeld cartoon of the time.

Callow devotes an entire chapter to Caesar, going into detail Welles' own thought process, his adaptation, the casting of the roles, the rehearsals. It's a 40 page chapter. This is not a book for those who just want the author to get on with it already ... To Callow, there is nothing to "get on with" ... It is the journey. Let us now look at the fascinating composition Welles wrote when he was 10, and see what it might reveal about his concerns. Let us devote an entire chapter to his burgeoning interest in magic and what that signifies. Let us try to piece together his trip to Ireland through letters and diaries and interviews and let us do it over the course of 30 pages. He skips over nothing. Actually, if he skips over anything, it is Welles's personal life - which is actually a lovely change! Welles's personal life was always on the backseat to his career, so it takes a backseat in the book. Good.

The generosity of Callow stuns me. He leaves no stone unturned. He is able to speak about the craft of acting openly, without shame or embarrassment (lots of biographers do not know how to talk about acting - even when their subject was an actor, the writer gets baffled when they try to describe what the subject was doing, you can tell they are out of their league) - Simon Callow takes acting seriously, sure, but he also knows the buffoonery and fun of a rehearsal process and how ridiculous it can be. He knows how to talk about all of it. He takes his obsession to the most logical conclusion (three volumes), and there isn't one page that isn't interesting or illuminating. Bravo, bravo. THANK YOU, Mr. Callow, for these books and I cannot wait for volume III! Get cracking!

EXCERPT FROM Orson Welles: Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu, by Simon Callow

By 1937, though he didn't go so far as to propose changing the title, he had come to the conclusion that Brutus was very much the central figure of the play. The Mercury, the weekly bulletin that was in effect Welles's mouthpiece, stated: 'As those familiar with the play are aware, Julius Caesar is really about Brutus.' Welles himself added: 'Brutus is the classical picture of the eternal, ineffectual, fumbling liberal; the reformer who wants to do something about things but doesn't know how and gets it in the neck at the end. He's dead right all the time, and dead at the final curtain. He's Shakespeare's favourite hero - the fellow who thinks the times are out of joint but who is really out of joint with his time. He's the bourgeois intellectual who, under a modern dictatorship, would be the first to be put up against and wall and shot.'

He had concluded that the play was 'about' the anguish of the liberal in an age of dictators. This emphasis meant that a great deal of the political complexity of the play was sacrificed in order to focus on one man's dilemma. The version Welles fashioned by no means fulfilled Houseman's claim for the production that 'the stress will be on the social implications inherent in the history of Caesar and on the atmosphere of personal greed, fear and hysteria that surrounds a dictatorial regime' or indeed Welles's own claim at the same time that 'it's a timeless tragedy about Caesarism and the collapse of democracy under Caesarism.' Lepidus was axed entirely; Octavius and Antony downgraded, and the mob, so graphically individualised by Shakespeare, relegated to a largely choric function - in the text, that is.

Its function in the staging was heightened, streamlined; but it became a many-headed hydra, losing the dynamics of individuals in a crowd. 'Here we have true fan psychology,' he told The New York Times. 'This is the same mob that tears the buttons off the coat of Robert Taylor. It's the same mob, too, that hangs and burns negroes in the South, the same mob that maltreats the Jews in Germany. It's the Nazi mob anywhere.' Significantly Welles's version starts, not with the scene analysed by a million schoolchildren ('Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home!') but with Caesar silencing the crowd. 'Bid every noise be still!' We are in the presence of the Great from the start; there is no context. Rome is its leaders; a distinctly bourgeois reading of history.

Whatever the interpretation, the result was nothing if not effective; a great deal of the Mercury version, in fact, was devised for no other reason than to generate theatrical excitement. The text gives every appearance of having been shaped to accommodate the production, rather than the other way round. His adaptation is exactly comparable to those reviled eighteenth-century adaptors, Garrick and Cibber, his purposes exactly the same as theirs: to exploit the possibilities of their stage-craft and to fit the play to the temper of the times. 'In drastically cutting the last twenty minutes of the play,' wrote Hank Senber in The Mercury, 'Welles was working to clarify the personal aspects of the tragedy and to liberate the play from such concessions to Elizabethan tastes as drums, alarums and mock battles on stage.' And of course, those things did look and sound ridiculous when the warriors in question were wearing long black leather overcoats and jackboots. Welles certainly wasn't going to lose the stunning effectiveness of the uniforms because some of the play didn't fit. Cut it! The lurid theatricality of the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler was an essential element in choosing the context for the play, and the physical look of the production was absolutely clear in Welles's mind from the beginning. There seems, however, to have been some conceptual confusion. If the play - or at any rate the production - is a critique of Caesarism, what does Antony represent? He, surely, is the demagogue, not Caesar; he's Hitler, he's Mussolini. Is Caesar then Hindenburg? Somewhat defensively, Welles told The Mercury: 'I produced the play in modern dress to sharpen contemporary interest rather than to point up or stunt up present-day detail. I'm trying to let Shakespeare's lines do the job of making the play applicable to the tensions of our time.' It was a general feeling of contemporaneity that he was after; not a blow-by-blow parallel.

His absolute certainty about the physical realisation of the concept made his collaborators' work quite cut and dried. Jeanne Rosenthal wrote: 'Welles dictated very clearly and exactly the kind of look he wanted the production to have, a very simple look, based on the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg. The patterns implied in the Nuremberg "festivals" were in terms of platforms, which were the basis of the scenery, and light which went up or down. The uplight was really taken from the effect the Nazis achieved.' (And which Houseman had used before in Panic.) Welles described his concept of the physical production in The Director in the Theatre Today the following year: 'I wanted to present Julius Caesar against a texture of brick, not of stone, and I wanted a color of red that had certain vibrations of blue. In front of this red brick wall I wanted levels and places to act: that was my conception of the production.' Welles's visual confidence is rare among directors. His own skills as a graphic artist, coupled with his experience in designing and building for the Todd Troupers and the Gate Theatre, made him a daunting prospect for a designer. Young Sam Leve, fresh from triumphs with the Federal Theatre Project and the Yiddish Art Theatre, in his own words 'oozing imagination', found that Welles was uninterested in his suggestions. In order to get them even considered, he had to convey them to Houseman, who might, if he liked them, pass them on, a 'humiliating process' for the young designer, in his own words. However, when Welles asked him for sketches, from the hundreds Leve would produce, on Leve's admission he would unerringly choose the best, dismissing the less good ones: 'Sam, you can do better than that.' The two men were exactly the same age, but as usual Welles immediately and automatically assumed command.

'At the Mercury,' wrote Jean Rosenthal, 'nobody else had any identity for him at all. You were production material. If he liked you, the association could be pleasant. If not, it was injurious. As a director, he approached other talents as he did his gargantuan meals - with a voracious appetite. Your contributions to his feast he either spat out or set aside untouched, or he ate them up, assimilated them, with a gusto which was extraordinarily flattering.' And fun: 'the initial stages of anything with Orson were immensely entertaining, which carried everything along ... he never counted the cost of anything to himself or to anyone else.' Rosenthal, who became one of the crucial figures in the development of American theatre lighting before her early death in the sixties, was keenly aware of the growth of the power of directors, and identified Welles as one of the first to dominate every single aspect of a production. Rosenthal avoided confrontation with Welles, but he never doubted her strength, demanding much of her within a framework of respect. Her final judgment, though, on her work with him is a chilling one: 'I do not think Orson made the utmost use of his collaborators' talent, although he often inspired their achievements. He did make the utmost use of his talents at the beginning, but perhaps his lack of respect for others accounts in some measure for the ultimate dissipation of his multiple talents.'

For the time being, the actors were not complaining. Few of them would have been aware of his psychological baggage. What they saw was a man with very determined ideas putting them into practice with a disarming combination of ruthless drilling and amiable anecdotalising, plus a good deal of horseplay. Exuberant, in some ways still a very young man, almost a boy, he dictated the pace and regularity of work according to his personal mood. 'When he felt like rehearsing, we rehearsed. When he felt like sleeping, we didn't rehearse. If he felt like rehearsing from 11.00 at night to 6.00 in the morning, damn stage hands' overtime, full speed ahead,' according to his then stage manager Howard Teichmann. 'He was a brilliant, inventive, imaginative director ... in a class all by himself. He would sit generally at a table in the centre aisle behind the table, and he would have a microphone on the table. And he would whisper his directions into the microphone. This table also served as his dining table. When he was hungry, he would send people out and they would bring in the steaks and the french fries and the ice cream and pots of coffee a foot and a half high, which he would consume with great relish. And when he was tired, he would say, "All right, children." Now mind you, he was younger than most of the people but we were his children.'

'There was no doubt in anyone's mind that Orson was the big star,' said Teichmann. 'He was a year or two older than I am, and he was slim, with a big head and round cheeks and very boyish. And "boy genius" was a term if he didn't create, he didn't fight it off ... You had to be a certain kind of personality to work with Orson. You either had to worship him or you had to meet him on an equal level, or you had to crumble. And a great many people, you know, would end up with ulcers and he was a great one for giving them. He loved everybody, but, boy, he was tough. "Who me, tough? I'm a pussycat." You know, that was his thing ... he played people off against each other.' His manner was calculated to be humorously high-handed, shouting out admonitions - 'shame on you!' a favourite - if the actor's work wasn't to his liking. He was not averse to having a whipping boy: young William Alland, later famous as the producer of The Creature of the Black Lagoon, and known to movie buffs as the shadowy reporter in Citizen Kane, had, when the Mercury was being set up, more or less thrown himself at Welles's feet, and that's more or less where he stayed, as actor, stage manager, gofer and pimp. Welles would roar his name o ut, abusing and cajoling him. It was good-humoured, but only just: a throw away from bullying. If you weren't on the receiving end, it could be fun; to Peg Lloyd it was cheap: 'he seemed a prep school boy with the cheap humour that preppies have. A genius preppy, that's what he was: the ringleader of the bullies on the corner.'

Rehearsals for Julius Caesar took place, initially, not in the theatre (the stage was still being reconstructed) but in an abandoned movie studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, 'the place where the movie industry began' in the words of Elliot Reid. Under a couple of worklights, while the incessant rain dripped into strategically placed buckets and the plaster tumbled from the roof, Welles arranged his cast on the platforms which Sam Leve had found in an old Shubert warehouse, and which were the essential element of the set that he and Welles had devised. There were four platforms: the first fourteen foot deep (the downstage playing area), the second a narrow high step, the third an eight foot deep plateau, the last a narrower platform rising to a total height of six and a half foot above stage level; there were two flagpoles on either side of the stage. Within this framework, Welles laboured to create the images that he had in his mind. Despite the great informality with which he worked, the stories and the atmosphere of wild, almost boyish fun that he engendered, he was always straining towards a specific and precise visual notion, what Norman Lloyd (playing Cinna the poet) described as 'the shot'. 'Every scene had to have a production idea. Is it a shot? Is there something interesting in it?' He improvised the physical action, constantly altering the moves to achieve the desired shape; the scene wasn't worked out in advance, in the Reinhardt manner, every eyebrow, every sniffle planned. But the effect was much the same: there was no discussion of character or motivation, simply a dedication to discovering what Brecht had called the 'gestus', or gesture, of the scene.

Debate over his methods constantly raged amongst the company, though rarely to his face. Moody, sardonic Coulouris (who during breaks from rehearsal would throw tennis balls against the wall, muttering 'Be a singer, be a singer! Don't be an actor! Acting's horrible') openly challenged Welles, but he became, Jaques-like, a sort of licensed melancholic within the group. For the most part the actors worked happily at the service of Welles's invention. Nor was he intent simply on imposing his ideas on them. Norman Lloyd reports Welles as saying, 'I may not be able to direct actors very well, but once an actor gives me something, I know how to stage it.' Lloyd himself fretted over the absence of any sort of methodology, feeling that the essence or the truth of the scene was sometimes sacrificed to effect; he was none the less delighted by the opportunities Welles's staging afforded him. Welles's instinctive sense of how to release an actor and a scene in physical movement was the equal of his English contemporary, Tryone Guthrie, with whom he shared a revulsion for dealing with the inner life of the character, or indeed, the actor. 'Your problem!' Guthrie would briskly tell his actors as they wrestled with difficulties of this kind; the phrase could just as easily have come from Welles.

The concomitant of this external, linear approach was that if the scene was effective, it succeeded; if it wasn't, it was nothing. Welles struggled for weeks with scenes which resisted his best efforts; this process continued up to the very opening. One such was the scene in which Cinna the poet is killed by the mob. There was from the start a disagreement between actor an director over interpretation, Welles seeing the poet as a version of Marchbanks, all long hair and floppy ties, Lloyd, playing the part, seeing him rather as the sort of man who wrote letters to The New York Times, a prototypical liberal, brilliantly able to see both sides of the situation, congenitally incapable of deciding between them; Archibald MacLeish, in fact. Lloyd hoped to achieve, as he says, an 'essence'. 'I thought you could say "this is what it is to not take a position." ' Welles quickly gave in over the characterisation, because he was obsessed - 'consumed' is the word Lloyd uses - by an idea of how to stage the scene, a musical, choreographic conception of how to show a mob destroying an innocent man. First of all he needed more lines than Shakespeare had provided, so, after experimenting with improvisation, he drafted in a few from Coriolanus; then he enlisted Marc Blitzstein to orchestrate the voices using a beating drum to indicate the rhythm. Welles rehearsed 'this goddam chanting and boom boom boom' for over three weeks. Sometimes Blitzstein took over; neither of them spent any time on the characters or the acting as such.

As for Welles's own performance, it was a low priority. A stage manager stood in for him throughout rehearsals. The result was that by the time of the dress rehearsal, he had barely acted with his fellow players (which can scarcely have helped them in creating their own performances); nor, never having run the scenes himself, was he very clear about where he should actually be standing. No one knew where he would be coming from or where he would be going to and he was frequently shrouded in darkness. To add to the uncertainty, he was very shaky on his lines, having scarcely uttered them during rehearsals. Throughout his career, on film and on stage, he was never entirely in command of his texts. He was not a quick study and rarely had the time or the inclination to ensure that the words were so securely lodged in his memory that they would spring spontaneously to his lips at the appropriate moment. Fortunately, he had considerable powers of iambic improvisation, and could sonorously if meaninglessly coast along for minutes at a time until a familiar line would, to the relief of the actor who was waiting for his cue, emerge. Since he had not rehearsed the part of Brutus, he had of course no opportunity to explore the character, to experiment with his approach, or to open himself to anyone else's view of his work. He had decided at some earlier time who Brutus was - who his Brutus was - and simply slotted it in to the production. Brutus, he said on several occasions, was above all intelligent (the character description for Marcus Brutus in Everybody's Shakespeare reads: 'he is a fine patrician type, his face sensitive and intellectual'). It was Welles's belief that he had a special gift for playing 'thinking people': not, as he expressed it in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, 'that they're thinking about what they're saying, but that they think outside of the scene ... there are very few actors who can make you believe they think ... that's the kind of part I can play.'

Happy the actor who knows his own gift. He has at least a chance, given a moderate amount of luck and a shrewd choice of work, of playing straight down the centre of the character to create a vivid and clear image of a particular human being. If he is struggling against type, to express things not in his personal experience or make-up, then he will almost certainly miss the core of the character, however interestingly he may embellish its surface. Though Welles was unquestionably intelligent, the most striking feature of his acting persona is not intelligence but power; he described himself, quite accurately, as 'he who plays the king'. Curiously enough, his portrayals of 'thinking people' often lack intellectual conviction: what he demonstrates is thoughtfulness. Partly this stems from a lack of structure in his own thinking; mostly it derives from the simple technical fact of not having completely mastered the text, and thus the thought. Welles, instead of actually thinking, acts it. It would seem that what really drew Welles to the role of Brutus was not so much his cerebral nature, but rather his nobility: this dark, wild, immature, titanically possessed young man wanted to present himself as the very soul of dignity and responsibility. His method of doing so was - according to his own formula - simply to suppress the ignoble parts of himself. Easy.

This cavalier attitude to his own performance is partly explicable by absorption in other responsibilities; but there is a strong suggestion that he became involved in his other responsibilities in order not to have to immerse himself in his own performance. He didn't want to evolve his performance; he didn't want to talk about it, or think about it. In Lehman Engel's acute words: 'His own performances happened suddenly for good or ill. They were or were not at the very outset.' In none of his utterances on the subject of acting does Welles ever speak of the work that goes into a performance. The assumption is that you can either play the part or you can't; if you can, then that's it: you play it. It is a complex matter: he seemed to want to be acclaimed for his acting, but not to have to work on it. He expected to be acknowledged as a major actor, while insisting that acting wasn't a terribly important thing anyway.

"If we could beat the fire to the top, we might make it home without singeing our toenails."

You're trying to beat the fire to the top??? Alex and Chrisanne drive into the belly of the beast.

Snapshots from Today

-- Shoeshine guy called out at a passerby, a middle-aged man with greying hair, "Young man! You are in a sorry situation, my friend!" I glanced at the man's shoes, and saw that they were brown and horribly scuffed. It made me laugh. Excellent and very specific marketing technique by shoeshine guy. I also loved how he called him "young man".

-- I sat in the waiting room of my ob/gyn. She was running 45 minutes behind schedule. The place was packed. There were pregnant women - some alone, some with their husbands, the wait was so long that many people had their laptops out, there was a woman with a small baby boy toddling around the joint, there were single women on cell phones, and there was also a woman who looked like this, reading Cosmo. I pulled out the book I am reading right now - Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh. I am tearing through it. Something happens at one point in the book - a woman sleeps over another woman's house - and they have just come from a costume party and the woman sleeping over arrives at the snooty breakfast table still in her costume, which is a Hawaiian costume ... and the episode is so hilarious that I started laughing so hard tears were streaming down my face in an embarrassing manner and I had to get up and go walk around on the chilly sidewalk for 5 minutes or so, guffawing where the gynecologically-inclined crowd would not be disturbed by my random shrieks of laughter. The exact same thing happened to me when reading Waugh's Scoop, only that time it was even worse because I was trapped on a bus, and my face had frozen into a comedy mask and I didn't know what to do about it! I ADORE Vile Bodies (a movie was made of it - Bright Young Things). Not only is it funny but it is scary brilliant. Prophetic, really. As prophetic as Magic Mountain was of the cataclysm to come, only the veneer is not one of decay, but gaiety and laughter. This is, I think, my third Waugh this year. Love him to death.

-- Facebook is kind of blowing me away right now. I can't believe the people I am reuniting with.

-- I am still working on putting my computer back together. I still need to re-install my iTunes library, which I am avoiding, due to, well, terror. The problem is that half of my songs did NOT come from iTunes, but from my old CD collection, and so the stupid program will not recognize them as MINE. Ridonk. I have to go to "music recovery" and blah blah blah, and hopefully it will be fine but I am avoiding it.

-- I have also been reading the second volume of Tennessee Williams' letters. Amazing. It goes up until 1953, after the failed production of Orpheus Descending and also probably his biggest box-office hit in the theatre - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The correspondence between him and Elia Kazan about the scripts and the problems therein have to be read to be believed. These men had TRUST, man, they TRUSTED each other. They could be brutally honest. I am blown away by it all. Kazan would push Williams in one direction, and Williams, a practical man, could be flexible but there came a point when no, he could not. And Kazan was, of course, not a conventional man ... but when their tastes differ, boy, do the sparks fly. Their correspondence is my favorite in the whole book.

-- Starting to watch Year of the Dragon now, with Mickey Rourke as a rumpled prematurely grey cop trying to battle the gangs in Chinatown. I saw it years ago and remember very little of it.

Mickey Rourke homework from Michael

Quoted from one of the many emails that have been flying back and forth:

MUST-SEE MICKEY MOVIES YOU HAVEN'T COMMENTED ON YET (that i'm sure you've either seen or know you should):

POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE: most guys love this movie and it seems to be THE Rourke movie for most.
RUMBLE FISH
SPUN: good late Rourke. he's billed as a supporting character, but he's actually the lead.
SIN CITY: you may have already commented on this already.

MEDIOCRE MICKEY MOVIES YOU SHOULD STILL SEE:

BULLET: i remember thinking this Tupac movie was OK, but i was desperate for a silver-lining.
HOMEBOY which he co-wrote and starred his wife at the time. an interesting performance as a dim-witted boxer.
HARLEY DAVIDSON & THE MARLBORO MAN: campy bad, but if you want to see Mickey try his hand at comedy, worth seeing.

GOOD CAMEOS:

THE RAINMAKER as "Bruiser Stone." what a perfect name for late period Mickey.
BUFFALO 66
HEAVEN'S GATE

IF YOU GOT NOTHING BETTER TO DO:

DESPERATE HOURS
GET CARTER
DOMINO

xo
G.

He's basically annoyed that I am not posting more. I love his kind of judgey parenthetical: " (that i'm sure you've either seen or know you should)" .

It's the "know you should" that kills me.

Sadly, Barfly is not available on Netflix and if you want to buy it on Amazon it starts at 70 bucks. I remember seeing this in the movie theatre and I must see it again. (Naturally I am working on a huge Mickey Rourke project in anticipation of the premiere of The Wrestler on December 17). So I emailed Michael in a panic about the Barfly situation and Michael popped his copy of the CD in the mail this morning.

At least ex-boyfriends are good for something.

I kid.

I've had a tremendously long day involving Actors Equity, gynecology, and almost zero food. Tonight I watch Michael Cimino's Year of the Dragon.

Happy Place

... a publicity still from To Have and Have Not, the picture where they fell in love.

The crucial difference between "avec" and "et"

This post, with its description of a trip to Paris, made me laugh out loud from beginning to end. I was guffawing by the time he took us to the restaurant when he bravely made his order to the waitress, causing much consternation and concern. So funny.

And then there is this:

It must be said that Paris, pound for pound, contains the most undiluted concentration of hilarious crones that I've ever seen anywhere in my life. They are, quite honestly, incredible. On any given afternoon on the streets of Paris, you will witness the most astonishing collection of grotesques, gargoyles, termagents and just plain caricatures than you would believe; this was just at the Marche cafe. I saw things such as an upswept dye-blond beehive-cum-pompadour with half-inch long visible roots, wraparound designer sunglasses, pleather jackets with "NO MERCI" on the back, and high-heel leather boots with a crosshatched rhinestone design. Unfortunately, I saw all of these on the same woman at the same time.

I love him. And I love how, when his error in the wording of his drink order was finally realized, the entire waitstaff was in hysterics. The waitstaff is probably still laughing at the poor American who said "avec" instead of "et", causing such a brou-haha.

Go read the whole thing.

A Book of Days for 1931: November 17

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

NOVEMBER 17, TUESDAY 1931

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
He who has suffer'd you to impose on him, knows you.
Where man is not, nature is barren.
Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.

-- WILLIAM BLAKE, Proverbs of Hell

Oh, Blake, I love you so.

From Cork to Kinsale

I was working on a piece yesterday that reminded me of something I had written on the blog a couple of years ago, after Allison and I came back from our trip to Ireland. Thought I would post it again with a couple of wee edits.

We were headed for Kinsale. We were very close, only 20 or so miles away. We knew our way to Cork, and after that, all we knew was: we needed to head almost directly south. And there would be Kinsale.

In our dreams.

I was Driver at this point, and Allison was Navigator. It was dark now. It was about 6:00 pm, and I had promised Jimmy at the B&B in Kinsale that we would be there by 7, because he had to leave at 7. Cork, obviously, is a city, and I find that driving in the city is far more stressful than a long inter-county roadway, even with all the roundabouts. So we pretty much promptly got lost. We didn't know where we were, or how to get where we were going, etc. I also had to pee. So I did one of those highly dreaded RIGHT HAND TURNS and we pulled into a gas station.

Allison asked a young guy pumping gas for directions. (One thing: I found, in my experience over there, that the Irish are incapable of giving bad directions. We got absolutely awesome directions from no matter who we asked, but this particular time was particularly good)

The young guy started telling Allison where she needed to go to get to Kinsale, and then almost immediately stopped himself. "My mother's inside - we should wait for her to come out. She's great at directions."

Boy, was she ever.

Allison and I LOVED these people.

This mother was so unbelievably generous with us, she gave us sterling directions, and we didn't realize how sterling they were until we were on the road again, and at every single point when we COULD have got confused, then there would come the landmark she had told us about, with tips on what to do and how to handle it.

"Wait - where are we?"
"Oh ... there's the river and the trees ... she told us we'd see that when we came round the bend ... this is the right way ..."

She even got into our heads, in anticipation of what we might be thinking at any certain point. "Now, you're probably gonna think that you should bear to the left, but that is not the case. Keep goin' straight. Stay firm."

She drew us an awesome map. Her son hung around with us, too, validating his mother. "Yeah, that's right ... then you go through the Tunnel ... right ..."

Oh, and a sidenote about Americans driving in Ireland: a couple weeks before we arrived, two Americans were driving along somewhere in Ireland, blithely on the wrong side of the road, and crashed head-on into a car coming the other way. This is probably not noteworthy at all, as Americans are always driving on the wrong freakin' side of the road all over Europe (there were stickers placed throughout the car reminding us in panicky huge letters to "DRIVE LEFT"), but what made this one kind of funny (and it was mentioned to us time and time again during our travels) was that the car they crashed into was being driven by a Minister of Parliament. Everyone kind of cackled with glee over that one. "Did ya hear about those Americans who crashed into the Minister of Parliament??" Again, it's not funny because the two Americans (in their tiny car) were badly hurt while the Minister of Parliament, in his enormous official car, was untouched. I believe the Americans are still in the hospital.

So the lady we met at the gas pump in Cork was the first person on our journey to tell us about the Americans crashing into the Minister of Parliament. She would not be the last.

We stood by the gas pumps, as she drew her map, all of us chatting up a storm: how did we find it driving on the other side of the road, where have we been, what our plans were. "Oh, you'll love Kinsale. It is very sweet indeed." We also chatted quite a bit about something that she called "the hairy roundabout", which was basically between Cork and Kinsale. She gave us profuse warnings about this "hairy roundabout", and put the fear of God into us. It was south of Cork, and apparently many many many cars have crashed there, it is a notoriously dangerous roundabout, famous all over Ireland, and she made it sound like a shrieking chaos of hell. She reiterated to us endlessly: We had to get ourselves into a certain lane, otherwise we would get stuck in the roundabout forever.

And we followed her instructions to the letter, and lo and behold, we were in Kinsale at 7:01. With poor Jimmy waiting for us at the door. Not too shabby!

As we stood around the car, and she walked us through the directions, another car drove up. She glanced up and waved. Informed us, "That's my husband."

Then another car pulled up to one of the other pumps, she waved to the driver of that car, and informed us, "If I weren't married to my husband, I'd be married to him."

And one by one, all of these various people - her husband, and the guy she'd be married to if she wasn't married to her husband, joined our little coterie and looked at the map, and gave us suggestions, adding detail and contrast to what was already there. We were a small jovial party by Gas Pump # 2.

Our ring-leader woman would introduce us to every new arrival: "These two American girls are trying to get to Kinsale ..."

Every new arrival informed us of the "Americans crashing into the Minister of Parliament". And every new arrival put the fear of God into us about "the hairy roundabout".

More suggestions came in, adding, clarifying, until we had the most specific set of directions EVER GIVEN for a 20 mile drive. She even gave us emotional directions for "the hairy roundabout":

"Just stay calm ... stay calm ... get yourselves in the right lane, and stay calm ..."

Allison and I drove off waving hail and farewell (or should I say Ave atque vale) to all of our new-found friends at the gas station in Cork.

After making our way successfully through the "hairy roundabout" (we did yoga breathing to stay calm, and yes, it was just as bad as she had warned), we started to see signs, finally, for Kinsale. Our destination. We had time constraints. Jimmy needed to go somewhere at 7, and so we needed to reach the B&B before then.

Allison drove us to Kinsale. The road was a two-way road, and yet by US standards, the road was only big enough to for one car. Thankfully, everyone still pretty much drives very small cars over there because an SUV on this road would be an utter disaster. The headlights shrieked up at us through the dark, the road was winding, it was night-time, there were no street lamps, and a line of cars stretched out behind us because we were driving so slowly (Allison: "I'm sorry, I just can't drive any faster than this." Me: "You do what you need to do. They can just wait.") we were a bit stressed.

The "hairy roundabout" had chafed our nerves tremendously.

But then, at last, Kinsale. I could smell the salt air when I rolled down the window, so I knew we were very close. We still needed to find our way to Jimmy's B&B, but from our street map of Kinsale the Town, it seemed like a pretty wee place, not too difficult to navigate.

It was now 6:50.

We immediately found ourselves in the middle of town, which was so adorable that it made my heart ache. I mean, we had heard about the quaintness and the beauty of Kinsale, and I had been there as a young girl, only retained no memory of it, but the reports of its beauty were almost under-played. It is one of the sweetest prettiest places I have ever seen. However, we could not ogle the sights, or the harbor, because we had to find Jimmy. Time was running out.

Randomly, we took a left-hand turn, and as we both glanced to our right, we saw an odd sight. We saw a line of people stretching down the sidewalk, there had to be hundreds of people (not an exaggeration) clustered along the street, all standing in line. But for what?

Allison wondered, "Is that a night-club or something?"

But ... it was only 6:51? A line into a nightclub at 6:51? In Kinsale?

We left that mystery behind us, drove around for a bit, on streets that were teeny, lined with shops, sudden curves, sudden hills, all adorable, but confusing, with no street signs.

At last, we asked a couple of people for directions. True to form, they gave us awesome directions. Directly to Jimmy's door. They knew Jimmy. Of course they did. "Give 'im my best, won't you girls?"

The B&B was right next to a massive Catholic church, and we parked in the church parking lot. It was 7:01. I could see a man standing in the golden glow of lamplight coming out of the open door of the B&B, and cried, "That's Jimmy!" There was a wintry breath in the air, the bite of the nearby water, a different feeling in the air than the windy mountainous energy of Wicklow. The moon was high, and waxing. Beautiful. Soaring above the church.

Allison and I left our bags in the car and ran up the steps of the B&B, apologizing. "I am so sorry - we truly thought we would be here at 7!"

Jimmy, of course, was lovely, kind, understanding. "I know how it is ... time when you're traveling and all that ..."

He said to us, "There's a funeral next door tonight at 7 ... A local guy died, so I'm going to go over to go to the funeral, and I'll be back in about half an hour..."

Good Lord, I felt like an ass. I had assumed he was maybe going out with friends. Instead, he had to go to a funeral. Jesus.

I said, "God, I am so sorry."

"Oh, no problem, Sheila, no problem ... You're fine parked where you are. Why don't you bring your bags in now, so that you won't have to walk through the procession ..."

I wasn't sure what he was talking about, but Allison and I went back to our car, shivering in the night-cold, to grab our bags.

And then came the procession he had told us about.

The "procession" was the huge crowd of people we had seen in the center of town.

We found out later that what happened was: they all gathered at the funeral home, almost the entire town, down on Market Street, and then walked, as a group (hundreds and hundreds of people) up to the church.

Allison and I didn't feel right walking through the funeral procession with our bags, so we stood back, in the shadows, and just watched.

It was cold enough to see everyone's breaths. The hearse had led the way, and then stopped outside the church. The procession, which filled the street in front of the B&B, and then curved away out of sight and down the hill, the procession must have been half-a-mile long, stood quietly, stamping in the cold, hands in pockets, clouds of frosty breath in the air. There were old people, little children, there were couples holding hands, there were teenagers with their parents. Everyone was there. Holding rosary beads, mass cards.

The coffin was lifted out of the hearse, and the pall-bearers lifted it up over their heads, so that it appeared to float through the air, and then they walked it up the long ramp into the lit-up brick church.

The procession didn't move, they had all halted as one to stand watch as the coffin was carried into the church. I could hear prayers being murmured, people crossed themselves. Everything trembled with silence and intensity. Allison and I were frozen to the spot.

We had come across a private moment. The private moment of a small community. Not for outsiders. The inner life of the small town revealed to us, observers. A rarity indeed. We didn't want to intrude, or break it up, or ignore it. We just watched.

When the gleaming coffin had floated its way into the church, the procession started to move. And that's when we really saw how many people there were. The line just kept coming from around the corner, as everyone walked up the steps and into the church for the funeral. More people just kept coming, silently, respectfully, maybe you would hear the chatter of a child here and there, but for the most part ... silence.

Jimmy later told me all about the man who had died. He was only 62, he was a musician, and played with a number of local bands. He knew everyone in town. He hadn't even been sick, but apparently he fell down over the summer, and X-rays revealed that he was riddled with cancer. Nothing to be done at that point, really, and he died in November.

Allison and I kept coming back to it, over the rest of our journey. "Member the funeral in Kinsale?" We felt that we had witnessed something very special, very private. I felt honored to be there, but also a little bit like it wasn't something for us to witness. All we could do was stand back, and be quiet and still. It was a town mourning its dead. With throngs and throngs and throngs of quiet chilly people coming up the hill, around the corner, up the hill, around the corner, up the hill ... in an endless flood.

Larry Clarke has "Perfect pitch" at the Roundabout

A revival of David Rabe's Streamers just opened here at the Roundabout, and Larry Clarke (great friend of my brother, and of the entire O'Malley clan in general, not to mention Cashel) plays Sergeant Cokes.

Larry and J.D. Williams

The review is up in the Times. It's a great review. I've been looking forward to seeing it. Larry played the role in a production in Boston at the Huntington that garnered such raves they have brought it to New York.

The review closes with these words:

“Streamers” is not perfectly put together. The play circles its themes for too long and becomes repetitive. And the monologue that closes it, delivered with perfect pitch by Larry Clarke as the gonzo Sergeant Cokes, is overwritten.

But this last, rambling speech contains a truth that sheds a hard light on all that has passed. Only the soused Sergeant Cokes, suffering from heart problems, achieves a measure of wisdom about what matters and what doesn’t, given the unpredictable coming and the unavoidable fact of death.

Hearing Richie sobbing, he interrupts his tale of a fatal freak accident to ask what’s wrong. “He’s queer,” Roger answers. Unexpectedly, this bleary-eyed man’s man doesn’t flinch. “Boy, I tell you it’s a real strange thing the way havin’ these heart arrhythmias give you a lotta funny thoughts about things,” he says. “Two months ago — or maybe even yesterday — I’da called a boy who was a queer a lotta awful names. But now I just wanna be figurin’ things out.”

Good for you, Larry. Can't wait to see it.

Here's the whole review.

A Book of Days for 1931: November 16

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

NOVEMBER 16, MONDAY 1931

Words are wise men's counters - they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.

-- HOBBES, Leviathan

Huh, Hobbes?

Chillax, bro. Honestly. Everything's going to be okay.

I might say to you, in the snottiest tone I can imagine, "Pecunia non olet, Hobbes, okay?" although that might be stretching the sentiment.

I also might reply, "This may be your modus operandi but let me play advocatus diaboli and suggest that, Deo volente, velis nolis, Delenda est Carthago."

And then he would look at me like ... I beg your pardon?

Ave atque vale.

My favorite comment

"I think I know what became of these kids."

Post here.

The Books: "The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage" (Eli Wallach)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage, by Eli Wallach

Eli Wallach will be 93 years old on December 7. His career has spanned 50 years. An inspiration to many young actors (including myself), he continues to work, although more sporadically, and he and his wife, Anne Jackson (they have been married since 1948), also do performances together, of scenes and poems interspersed with their humorous banter (they're wonderful together - I've seen the show) - they perform at churches, schools, synagogues, YMCAs, benefits and charity functions ... it's really old-school what they do, almost vaudeville. It's charming.

In 2003, Wallach's agent called him and said that Clint Eastwood (his old colleague) wanted him for a small part in a movie he was directing. Wallach was nervous. He hadn't been in front of the camera in a while, at least not in a major motion picture, and he was old, and nervous about all sorts of things: remembering the lines, and also the possibility that his one scene would be cut (always a fear of any actor who plays only one scene in a film). I love how he describes his experience on Mystic River. It makes me love everyone involved - Eastwood, Kevin Bacon - for the respect they showed this giant figure of the American cinema, and how it all turned out:

I flew up to Boston on a Wednesday knowing nothing of the story or the script. I found that I was to play a liquor store owner. I memorized the three pages of dialogue that were given to me and prepared to act in the scene the following day. On Thursday morning I walked out to the set. Clint greeted me warmly. "I'm happy you agreed to do the cameo," he said, and told me that I'd be playing opposite two wonderful actors - Kevin Bacon and Laurence Fishburne.

Clint waited patiently while the scene was lit, then walked over to me and whispered, "Any time you're ready, Eli." Not one word of direction was given. I felt relaxed and happy to be before the camera again. Bacon and Fishburne assured me that my scene would not be deleted in the final cut.

"You give us an important clue to the solution of the crime we're investigating," Kevin Bacon said.

It's a fantastic scene, I remember it well. One of the deals with this cameo was that Wallach would go uncredited, and that his name would not be used in any of the advertising. I think that was a smart move because I know that for those of us like myself - who love Eli Wallach, and who have been watching his movies since they were in their teens, who have the entire scope of his career locked in their brains forever - to suddenly see his twinkling mischievous face in the middle of that dark movie - was a wonderful surprise. It was like seeing an old friend. It really was. I remember feeling the audience around me respond to him. He has a couple of funny moments - not even lines that are funny, but the way he said the lines - and the audience, needing to laugh, was totally with him, every step of the way. It was beautiful to see him up there again.

In the old days of the studio system, character actors would work in movie after movie, essentially playing the same part, and it was very smart - because in that way the audience gets to identify with the person. They immediately think, "Oh. I know him. That's that guy. I love him." It is not a constantly rotating cast of people you've never seen before - there is the familiarity factor. Eli Wallach, in that moment in Mystic River was embodying what that old studio system used to be about. Even if people in the audience didn't know who exactly he was, they recognized him, they knew they had seen him somewhere before, and because of that - they warmed to him immediately.

Eli Wallach was born and raised in Brooklyn. His family was one of the only Jewish families in a primarily Italian neighborhood. I think it's interesting that Wallach played so many fiery Italians, onscreen and on Broadway, and if you think about it - even as a young man, he was an unlikely romantic lead. At least as far as his looks go. He was short, stocky, and not classically handsome. But women testify to his sex appeal time and time again in their own memoirs and autobiographies (Carroll Baker's comes to mind). He smouldered. He was one of those men who treated women with good humor and curiosity - which, naturally, made him a Chick Magnet. He wasn't cool or aloof, but emotional and impulsive - which really goes a long way to explaining his huge hit in Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo (excerpt here) - where he played Alvaro, the hot and fiery truck driver who ends up shacking up with Serafina, the lonely sex-starved mystical widow who speaks mainly in Italian (played by Maureen Stapleton, in the role that made her a star). Talk about unlikely casting!! The story of how Stapleton got that part is one of those situations where an actress, in the audition process, just kept "showing up" - with all her talent and powers at full force - and they really had no choice but to cast her. Even though, on the face of it, she was all wrong. Stapleton had a plain face, a dumpy body, and wasn't seen as a romantic lead in any way, shape, or form. Stapleton said, in regards to her lack of beauty, "People looked at me on stage and said, 'Jesus, that broad better be able to act.'" I love her. God, I would have loved to see her in The Rose Tattoo!!

After Maureen Stapleton won an Oscar for her portrayal of Emma Goldman in Reds (well-deserved), she was asked if it was exciting to be acknowledged for her chops as an actress. She replied, "Not nearly as exciting as it would be if I were acknowledged as one of the greatest lays in the world." So you can see that Stapleton was perfect for Serafina, even if her looks weren't! Hilarious!

Wallach went to college in Texas and it was around that time that he started contemplating being an actor. It was really the only thing he wanted to do. He moved back to New York and studied acting at the famous Actors Studio, which helped him make all the contacts which would really matter to him in his career. He was one of those actors where it just as easily couldn't have happened, as could. He was on the cusp of the change in the acting world. If he had been a studio player in the 30s and 40s, he would have played crotchety small character parts (or, who knows, Bogart - with his shortness and his lisp and his toupee became a leading man - so I suppose anything is possible) ... but in the 50s, things were changing. A new style of acting was being practiced, made famous by people like Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando. Wallach was a part of that. Not to mention the fact that very early on, he got himself connected to Tennessee Williams, which was one of the most important relationships in his entire career.

Wallach did a bunch of plays in New York, one of the most formative being Tennessee Williams' short haunting play called "This Property is Condemned" (excerpt here). A young vivacious funny actress named Anne Jackson played the female lead (there are only two parts in the play). They hit it off. They hit it off so well that they moved in together (quite ahead of their time, in the 1940s!) and were married the following year. They have been married for 60 years. (So much for the old saying, "Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free" huh?) Amazing. They are good friends. You can feel their friendship when you see the two of them now.

Wallach spent his days studying sense memory at the Actors Studio, and his nights playing small parts on Broadway. There are very funny moments in the book where he talks about trying to meld what he was learning at the Studio with the more practical concerns of being in a show that played 8 times a week. Once, he was so fired up from his own emotional preparation, that he just couldn't wait - and said his line onstage - cutting 14 lines of his co-stars. He was devastated. How do you combine the two - your own needs and the need of the play? He went to Lee Strasberg, his teacher, upset. "I was ready to say my line THEN ... what should I have done?" Strasberg thought a bit and then said, "Wait for your cue." hahahahaha

Eventually, the big break came, with The Rose Tattoo, and he got spectacular reviews, as well as winning the Tony Award for Best Actor. Eli Wallach, the Jewish kid from Brooklyn, was off and running.

He made his screen debut in another one of Tennessee Williams' projects - the highly controversial (as in condemned by the Catholic Church controversial) Baby Doll. This was a screenplay based on Williams' one-act 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (excerpt here). I go into the differences between the two in that post, what was changed, altered. The movie is basically a comedy, albeit with its sicker elements (a grown woman lying in a crib sucking her thumb). In the play, she is obviously mentally disturbed, a stunted person who has the bodacious body of a full-grown woman - so she is treated like a sexual object when obviously, inside, she is about 10 years old. It is truly disturbing. In the play, Baby Doll (or "Flora") is ruined. In the film, she (played by Carroll Baker) is set free. It's still disturbing - obviously disturbing enough to cause the film to be protested widely upon its release ... but to see it now it's hard to imagine what the fuss was about.

Directed by Elia Kazan, they filmed on location (Kazan always liked to do that, he preferred it to using studio sets) - with locals as extras, which gives the film a true sense of place. Tennessee Williams called 27 Wagons a "Mississippi Delta comedy", which gives you some sense of where his mind was at - and I do think that Kazan and his cast (Eli Wallach, Carroll Baker, Karl Malden) do capture that. Karl Malden is a ridiculous cuckolded figure, Carroll Baker is funny and sweet and unconsciously sexy, and Eli Wallach is manipulative and sexy).

Eli Wallach never stopped going back to Broadway, even though his film career had also taken off. He appeared in premiere productions of Teahouse of the August Moon, Mr. Roberts, Tennessee Williams' Camino Real and others.

He was part of the troubled cast for John Huston's The Misfits, and he traveled to the desert of Nevada for the shoot, with his family in tow. I think his daughters were just babies. The shoot ended up being long-drawn-out and very problematic - and Clark Gable would die months after completion. The entire production was shut down so that Marilyn Monroe could recover in the hospital from her exhaustion (brought on by insomnia and addiction to sleeping pills) - and everything was insane and chaotic. A wonderful book has been written about that shoot, called The Making of the Misfits (I posted about that here)

I think, though, of all the things Wallach will be remembered for, it will be for his participation in the "spaghetti Western" genre - his roles are beloved, and his characters are quoted wildly. Sergio Leone cast him in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - probably one of his best-known performances. Wallach had already been cast as a Mexican bandit in The Magnificent Seven, and there are funny stories about Wallach trying to figure out how to ride a horse, and all that, while on location. You'd never know he was a novice. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly with those crazy close-ups, is a film fan favorite.

Eli Wallach's book is wonderful. It's not self-indulgent or badly written. He knows the power of the anecdote, the ba-dum-ching anecdote. The book is full of them. It's a great mix of the personal and the professional - how he and Anne Jackson, who both had careers, made it work - or, let's say, just endured through it ... Jackson doing plays, Wallach doing movies, trying to raise a family and keep the household going. You really get a sense of the two of them. Funny story: When Baby Doll came out, he and Anne Jackson went to the premiere. Afterwards, he wondered what she thought.

As for my wife's review of the film, Anne sat next to me at the premiere. The moment I played my first scene with Karl Malden, she observed, "Never have two noses filled the screen so completely."

It's a real actor's book, because, in the end, Eli Wallach - with his diverse and sometimes bizarre career - was always all about the acting. He was not a huge star. Not like Brando or McQueen. He had leading roles, and was a "playah", as they say ... but he never was in that heady echelon of actors who become symbols or manifestations of a Zeitgeist, or what have you. So Wallach was always focusing, pretty much, on the job at hand. Each job has its challenges. It is the actor's job to make all of that comprehensible, to face each day with a problem-solving attitude, to look at a scene that might not be working and think to himself, "What can I do to make this happen?" Wallach's book is all about moments like that.

I knew immediately which excerpt I wanted to choose. Tennessee Williams had written a new play in the early 1950s. It was called Camino Real (excerpt here). One of Williams' most difficult plays, it predicts the experimental theatre of the 1960s, embodied by the work of Lanford Wilson (especially in his Balm in Gilead - excerpt here). It's surreal, not a strict linear play - it takes place in an imaginary place, an end of the road kind of place, and the stage is filled with people at all times: the misfits, the beggars and whores of the fringe ... not to mention cameos by fictional characters like Casanova and Lord Byron. These people all hover on "the Camino Real", a way-station for the lost of the world, the lonely ... I love the play. I understand why it is difficult to stage, and difficult for an audience to relate to ... and I actually have never seen it done, more's the pity. But I love it. It also has, in it, my favorite lines that Williams ever wrote:

Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.

Wallach was passionate about Camino Real. He was cast as the lead - "Kilroy" (as in the grafitti messages of the time). To him, it was the most important project he had ever done, the one he was most passionate about. He turned down the role that Frank Sinatra ended up playing in From Here to Eternity (and won an Oscar for) in order to do Camino Real.

One of the reasons I love the following excerpt is because: Camino Real was not a hit. As a matter of fact, it was a flop. After the great run of hits Williams had written - Glass Menagerie (excerpt here), Streetcar Named Desire (excerpt here), Summer and Smoke (excerpt here) and The Rose Tattoo - all wonderful works, but with a more classical structure - Camino Real was seen as incomprehensible, self-indulgent, whatever. This was the typical story of Williams constantly being judged against his earlier work, as though he was supposed to just continue repeating himself. Williams was too good an artist for that. He is quite eloquent on that point. The critics were never kind to him after the 50s ... everything was like, "Well, this is no Streetcar Named Desire ..." and Williams would respond, "Of course it isn't. I was a younger man when I wrote Streetcar. I'm older now, I have different concerns and interests." God forbid he should try to stretch and grow as an artist. I think time has vindicated Camino Real. It is one of those plays that was ahead of its time. Its failure frightened Williams. He did "go back" to writing more traditional plays after that - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (excerpt here), Orpheus Descending (excerpt here), Suddenly Last Summer (excerpt here), Night of the Iguana (excerpt here), Sweet Bird of Youth (excerpt here) (I mean, honestly - even just writing all of that out right now gives me goosebumps) ... but I seriously think Camino Real is one of his best. That play haunts me. This past summer the director of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festiva (check out who's on their main page!) contacted me to write something about Camino Real for their catalog (Camino Real was one of the productions they were doing that summer). It was a thrilling opportunity for me, to write about that play for such an esteemed theatre festival!

Anyway, Eli Wallach's section in the book about Camino Real is my favorite part of all.

(That's Wallach and Jackson in a production of Major Barbara).

Onto the excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage, by Eli Wallach

Cheryl Crawford had fallen in love with Camino and was determined to bring it to Broadway, even though it seemed like quite a gamble. Camino was unlike any of Williams's other work. It was a fantasy set in a dirty plaza somewhere below the border. It was filled with gypsies, pimps, panderers, fascist police, and a host of legendary characters: Lord Byron. Margerite Gautier from Camille, the Baron de Charlus, Don Quixote. I was to play the role of Kilroy, an ex-boxer and ex-sailor who first appears at the top of a flight of stairs. On a crumbling wall, there is a message scrawled in chalk: "Kilroy is coming." Kilroy crosses out the word coming and replaces it with here.

I enjoyed working with Kazan; he often used sly means to build tension during rehearsal. One time during a rehearsal, he took me aside and told me to approach a group of strangers onstage. "You're alone and you're scared," he said, "so go on and make friends." Meanwhile, he told the actors playing a motley crowd of peasants, "Ignore this stranger; he's a gringo, and he has bad breath."

Kazan worked long and hard shaping Tennessee's play into a bold and startling fantastic extravaganza. Rehearsals were long and exhausting and yet strangely exhilarating. All of us in the cast felt we were embarking on a trip to a world we had never encountered before. Even though Camino was a fantasy, Kazan told us that the play would be stronger if each role was performed with a sense of truth.

For me, the play was very physically demanding. At one point, I had to jump offstage while police chased me, then run through the audience screaming, "Where the hell is the Greyhound bus depot?" I'd run up one aisle, then down another. People would have to stand to allow me to pass. Then I'd run up to the balcony, enter the box seats, climb over the rail, and jump directly onstage, just like John Wilkes Booth did after he'd shot President Lincoln. Once I was caught by the police, I was ordered to kneel onstage and a clown's hat was clapped over my head. Fastened to the hat were eyeglasses with long string attached to them; the nose was a red Ping-Pong-ball-shaped bulb.

"Light your nose," the policeman would say, and I would press the button to light my nose, which kept blinking on and off as the theater lights went down.

Audiences were puzzled by some of the scenes. And in early previews, many walked out. The play was savagely attacked by the critics. Leading the charge was Walter Kerr, critic for the New York Herald Tribune, who ended his review with a terse sentence: "Williams is our greatest playwright. And this is his worst play."

After the reviews had come out, Tennessee sat down and wrote a letter to Cheryl Crawford, the producer:

Dear Cheryl,
Whenever I talk about you I say, "Cheryl is a great fighter. She's always there when you need her." In China, in the old days, they used to give an old man an opium pipe. I suppose now they just shoot him. I think we should show fight in this situation. I'm enclosing a letter I just wrote to that critic Walter Kerr.

Mr. Kerr, I believe in your honesty. I believe you said what you honestly think and feel about this play. And I wouldn't have the nerve to question your verdict. But silence is only golden when you have nothing to say. And I still think I have a great deal to say.
Cordially,
Tennessee Williams

I don't believe Kerr ever answered Tennessee's letter. But there's one line in the play that affected Anne and myself so greatly that we decided to adopt it as our motto. "Lately," Lord Byron says, "I've been listening to hired musicians behind a row of artificial palm trees instead of the single pure stringed instrument of my heart. For what is the heart, but a sort of instrument that translates noise into music, chaos into order. Make voyages, attempt them, there's nothing else." Anne and I decided that we would always make voyages and attempt them.

Camino's end came quickly, with a crisp closing notice posted on the backstage bulletin board. We had just completed our fifty-sixth performance. The closing of a play is like a death in the family, and it leaves a deep scar on an actor's ego. I remember packing up all my belongings in the dressing room, then walking out into the rainy night. "Why me?" I thought. I loved the cast, the writing, the direction, but thankfully Camino didn't die. Over the years, many regional theaters have given Williams's fantasy a second chance.

I've never regretted the choice of doing Camino Real instead of From Here to Eternity. To me, Camino was the greatest experience I had in the theater.

Snapshots from last week

-- My hard drive crashed. It was totally traumatic. I turned my computer on and was greeted with a sickly blank grey screen, and on it was the image of a small folder with a blinking question mark on it. THAT IS NEVER GOOD. Eventual result: took it to the "Genius Bar" at the Apple store on 5th Avenue, they shipped it off to their Apple repair shop in the wilds of Kentucky or someplace where their oompa loompas could work on it and give me a new hard drive, and I just got it back yesterday, with a spanking new keyboard to boot. It's a total pain in the ass because I have to set everything up again - but I'm just glad it's back in my hands. The guys at the Genius Bar are totally awesome and I would like to marry all of them.

-- Slept over Allison's on Thursday night. We watched an episode of Celebrity Rehab, our favorite show on television, stopping it every 2 minutes to discuss the psychological ramifications of everyone's addiction issues, as well as to discuss our shared lust for Dr. Drew. We love that show. I adore Amber. I really hope she makes it. Gary Busey is insane. Jeff Conway needs to stop whining and take some responsibility. Rod Stewart's son is a total cupcake. Rodney King appears to be a nice man. Jeff Conway's girlfriend is an idiot bottom-feeder of the worst kind. But for me, right now, I am all about Amber.

-- Hope and I have had a big breakthrough in our relationship. It all started when I moved my bed and she started hanging out on the bed with me. But she's not a cuddler and I never knew where she slept. Out in the apartment somewhere, or sprawled out on my windowsill. But suddenly, about 5 nights ago, I woke up at around 3 or 4 am ... because something was different .... Hope had ensconced herself on my pillow, just above my head, curling her body perfectly around my head. Hope!! What are you DOING? I thought you didn't like to cuddle!! Amazing! Now, I could never cajole her into that position myself, she would not tolerate it. She has to choose when she gets on the pillow, and it has to be on her terms. It's a little bit annoying, because my pillow is small and frankly she was pushing my head off of it with her small purring body, but still, I think it is a great sign in our developing relationship. Every night since then, she sleeps there. I wake up in the morning and there she is, draped around my head. Good girl.

-- My parents teach me what marriage is (and should be).

-- The tree went up at Rockefeller Center yesterday. It was a madhouse. I love to see it on the first day it goes up - before the decorations, before anything - because it's surrounded by scaffolding, and workers are climbing all over the scaffolds - so the entire scene looks like an urban version of the barn-raising scene in Witness. It was raining yesterday too so all the workers were wearing huge flapping slickers.

-- Sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself at certain moments and think, "Wow. This behavior could be construed as you being a total asshole." I rarely am a total asshole on PURPOSE and whatever I do, I pretty much do sincerely, rather than for some EFFECT. That being said, at one point this week, I was sitting in the bar at the Plaza Hotel on a rainy afternoon reading a book of Latin and conjugating verbs in my notebook. I'm not even kidding. I was being totally sincere ... Latin is a project of mine right now (having taken 4 (or 3?) years of it in high school, but I want to get back to it. I also come from a family filled with Latin freaks as well as nuns - all of whom straddled Vatican II, but not before they had enough Latin poured into their brains for all time - as should be evidenced by this post from October, 2004, an important time to any Red Sox fan, so Latin was a part of my childhood) ... and I had some time to kill and the rain poured against the tall windows and what the hell, I started conjugating. But I had a couple of moments where I laughed at what I must look like and what an unfriendly observer might think. "That woman over there is such an ASSHOLE." And to that I might reply, "Nil desperandum. This is just my modus vivendi." Or, if I were in a more combative mood, I might reply, "Oderint dum meteant, suckers." Or, more likely, I might just say in a tired tone, "Look, you like to do sudoku in your spare time. I enjoy Latin. De gustibus non est disputandum, mkay?"

A Book of Days for 1931: November 14

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

NOVEMBER 14, SATURDAY 1931

What America imports from Europe is useless to her. It is torn from its roots; and it is idle to replant it; it will not grow. There must be a native growth, not so muc of America as of the modern era. That growth America must will. She has her prophet of it, Walt Whitman. In the coming centuries it is her work to make his vision real.

-- G. LOWES DICKINSON, Appearances (1914)

"Forgive my being silent: after Wilde, I only exist a little."

So wrote André Gide in a letter to Paul Valéry in 1891, after meeting Oscar Wilde in Paris.

The effect Wilde had on Gide, a young man of about 20 at the time, was tremendous and could, ultimately, have destroyed Gide. Wilde's effect was so unbalancing that it took away Gide's voice. He could not write, he could barely think anymore. He trusted nothing, all of the things he thought were true he now saw were not. He did not know which end was up. He had a nervous breakdown, I suppose, although he eventually recovered (obviously. He won the Nobel Prize in 1947) Gide remained a friend of Wilde - although a distant cautious one - until the end. Whatever his tendencies were already (Gide's), they were not 'set' and neither, of course, were Wilde's, who delighted in contradictions. To someone who is a bit more rigid, perhaps, or who is looking for the answer - (not to mention living in a society that requires, expressly, that you not be who you really are) to meet someone who "delights in contradictions" can be a ruinous event. It nearly was for Gide.

Oscar Wilde's epigrams are wonderful, cutting, funny - still surprising - and his plays are still sell-outs over a century after he first wrote them - but I think in many ways we all 'only exist a little" after Wilde, there is still something so brilliant about him that it is hard to get my mind around it. It's inconsistent, at times, and there's some balderdash (the opening paragraph of Dorian Gray for example) - but the body of the work is extraordinary, and the willingness to delve deep into the contradictions of his age (and, of course, of future ages, of our age) and let two things co-exist at the same time STILL strikes me as a bit dangerous. There is STILL something truly subversive about him. (To me, "subversive" is a compliment.) His goal is to upend convention. That's all fun and good when it means curling your hair when everyone else wears it straight ... but how far will one go? How far will society let you take it?

In his contradictions, in the way he closes his epigrams with exactly the OPPOSITE of what you would expect, lies the assumption that all of society's rules and morals are up for interpretation. You can believe in that crap as "true" if you want, but Wilde will stand there, shrugging his shoulders at you languidly, and go on doing what he wants to do, and that could cause outrage in conventional people - because it wasn't so much that he flouted convention, it was that he refused to believe in the reality of those conventions in the first place. Subversive stuff. An example of his epigrams and how they start out one way, and set you up - the reader - into thinking, "Oh yes, I know where we're going" - and then he pulls the rug out, but elegantly, smoothly. Not to mention the fact that the sentiment itself is slightly unbalancing, unsettling ...

To win back my youth ... there is nothing I wouldn't do - except take exercise, get up early, or be a useful member of the community.

If all of society behaved in the way he described here, we would all be lost. But that was part of his point. And that was part of why Gide felt so silenced after meeting him for the first time.

But - on the other hand - there is a kindness in Wilde which cannot be denied. I think people often characterize him as a shallow dandy who was "brought down" into the muck, but I don't find that to be accurate. Yes, he was the promoter of the aesthetic movement, and counseled people on what books to read and how to dress and interior decorate, but it was always for a deeper purpose. Also, anyone that funny could not be shallow. His kindness is not there so much in his early plays, and certainly not there in Salomé, but as a person - he was generous, patient, and unbelievably strong in the face of relentless viciousness. He handled the insults with good humor, skewering his opponents - until he finally came across someone (the damned 9th Marquess of Queensberry, a pox on his soul) who could not be stopped, who had a chip on his shoulder the size of the entire British Isles, and who was determined to "save" his fairy son from further corruption. (Meanwhile, and this I had not known - one of the Marquess' OTHER sons had also been caught in a compromising relationship with another male, and had killed himself - right around the time that Queensberry started harassing Oscar Wilde. So. Imagine. This short angry little man - who, I'm sorry, probably had some "tendencies" himself, his response is so vicious, so out of proportion - had two gay sons, both of whom were living in an openly gay manner, in 1895. TWO sons? Unthinkable! It had to have pushed all this guy's buttons. Not to mention the fact that also right around this time, his second wife had divorced him, claiming publicly that his penis was too small for effective intercourse, and also that he was impotent, that the marriage had remained unconsummated. So. Make of that what you will. His unresolved issues ruined another man's life - a man whose writing I happen to cherish, so I've got zero sympathy for the guy.)

And so Wilde found himself a pawn in a fiery family struggle between father (Marquess of Queensberry) and son (Lord Alfred Douglas). Lord Douglas was no shrinking violet in this, Lord Douglas was the main instigator, pushing Wilde further and further into it, forcing the confrontation, glorying in the fact that his famous lover was "sticking it to dear old Dad". Wilde, too, who had two pretty extraordinary people as parents (look them up. Amazing people.) just did not approve of how the Douglas family treated one another. Lord Douglas would send telegrams to his father, saying stuff like, "You are a silly stupid man" and Wilde would just shake his head and remark, "You shouldn't talk to a parent like that." Imagine the generosity of this. Here he is talking about a man who is threatening to ruin him, who leaves notes under his front door calling him a "sodomite" and every other nasty name in the book, who stages protests outside productions of plays Wilde has written - who is doing everything possible to make Wilde miserable - and here Wilde is, chiding the son for talking to his father in a disrespectful manner. He had class, that's why.

He, a man of exquisite manners and taste, who loved his parents and remained close to his mother all the days of his life (his father passed away much earlier) found himself embroiled in a brou-haha that would ruin him completely. Fate, doom, whatever you want to call it. Wilde was not an innocent bystander in any way... he had invited Lord Douglas into his life and, therefore, by proxy, invited the Marquess into his life who would ruin everything ... but Wilde (unlike Douglas) was not a vindictive person. Wilde knew Douglas could ruin him. Perhaps that was part of the thrill. The beautiful dangerous boy and all that. In reading about Wilde, in reading about all of the literary spats he got into, all of the verbal sparring with current authors of the day - I never feel that he is vindictive. Or cruel. He is clever, and intelligent - and yes, often merciless - but never needlessly cruel.

So to see the cruelty that was heaped upon him at the end ... it's just awful.

It's very rare that a biography can bring me to tears. Patricia Bosworth's biography of Montgomery Clift did, but I can't think of another one. I have wept often when reading the collected letters of so-and-so, or the diary of a famous figure - because it is immediate, visceral, first-person, personal history as it is happening. But a biography has a bit more distance to it. Even if the events are really sad, it usually doesn't move me to tears.

I just finished Richard Ellmann's biography of Oscar Wilde and cried pretty much non-stop for the last 30 pages. I had to take breaks, it was just too much.

Now, the last 5 years of Oscar Wilde's life are horrifying enough to make a person tremble and cross herself in fervent thanks that none of it happened to her, but it is Ellmann's deep compassion (not to mention intelligent piecing-together of events, through letters and diary entries) that brought it so vividly before my eyes that I found tears streaming down my face. I know the story of his downfall, I know the series of truly unfortunate events, but not to the detailed extent I do now. The court transcripts are included in the book, the letters written from prison ...

It's one of the most moving books I've ever read.

Ellmann is spectacular (as I already know - since I've read his biography of James Joyce, one of the towering literary achievements of the 20th century) - and not just spectacular in putting together all the pieces of this very public (and yet also very duplicitous) life ... but spectacular on analyzing Wilde's development as an artist.

But more than anything right now, I'm left really sad. Sad for the suffering of a fellow human being in 1897, 1898. I cannot even imagine his torment, and I have tears in my eyes now as I type this out.

So forgive my being silent: after Wilde, I only exist a little.

Today in History: November 14, 1732

On this day in history, the Library Company of Philadelphia (founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1731 - and still open today) hired its first librarian, and opened for "business".

Here is a painting of Benjamin Franklin opening the first subscription library - (painting by Charles Mill):

The Library Company was the brainchild of "The Junto", a group of local merchants and bigwigs in the community, who would gather periodically to talk about philosophy, politics, literature, whatever. Eventually, one of the things that came up in their conversations was the general need for more comprehensive libraries. Naturally having a library of your own at that time was the mark of a successful person, so there were private libraries, mainly in people's homes, and books, in general, were not always easy to come by. So at first, these Junto gentlemen wanted to expand their OWN libraries and thought if they pooled their resources (sharing book seller contacts in America and abroad) they could do that. But eventually, this idea expanded into the thought of creating a subscription library for the entire community.

Here are the "minutes" from the board of directors meeting where that decision was made:

[An] Extract from minutes of the directors of the Library Company of Philadelphia, dated August 31 st ., directed to the President, was read, as follows:

Upon motion, ordered,
That the Librarian furnish the gentlemen, who are to meet in Congress, with the use of such Books as they may have occasion for, during their sitting, taking a receipt for them.
By order of the Directors,

(Signed) William Attmore, Sec'y.

Ordered, That the thanks of the Congress be returned to the Directors of the Library Company of Philadelphia, for their obliging order.

Gives me goosebumps!

Here's a description of the plan from HW Brands' (not-very-good) biography of Ben Franklin: The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin:

Private libraries were common enough among men of wealth in the colonies. Franklin had taken advantage of a few himself. Nor were institutional libraries unheard of; these were usually joined to churches or other bodies heavenly bent. A secular subscription library, however, was something new. Subscribers would pool their resources to buy books all would share and from which all might benefit. Franklin floated the idea in the Junto; upon favorable reception he drew up a charter specifying an initiation fee of forty shillings and annual dues of ten shillings. The charter was signed in July 1731, to take effect upon the collection of fifty subscriptions.

Franklin led the effort to obtain the subscriptions. At first, in doing so, he presented the library as his own idea, as indeed it was. But he encountered a certain resistance on the part of potential subscribers, a subtle yet unmistakable disinclination in some people to give credit by their participation to one so openly civic-minded. They asked themselves, if they did not ask him, what was in this for Ben Franklin that made him so eager to promote the public weeal. To allay their suspicions, Franklin resorted to a subterfuge. "I therefore put myself as much as I could of sight, and stated it as a scheme of a number of friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought lovers of reading."

Within four months the Library Company had its requisite two score and ten commitments. Compiling the initial book order involved identifying favorite titles and consulting James Logan, the most learned man in Pennsylvania. Logan knew Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Italian and was said to be the only person in America sufficiently conversant with mathematics to be able to comprehend Newton's great Principia Mathematica. Before Franklin's emergence, Logan -- who was thirty years the elder and had been the personal protege of William Penn -- was the leading figure of Pennsylvania letters (and numbers). Naturally Franklin cultivated him as source of advice, patronage, and civic goodwill. Logan listed several items essential to the education of any self-respecting person; between these and the titles Franklin and the other library directors chose on their own, early purchases covered topics ranging from geometry to journalism, natural philopsophy to metaphysics, poetry to gardening.

Louis Timothée, a journeyman in Franklin's shop, was hired as librarian, and a room to house the collection was rented. Franklin and the other directors of the library instructed Timothée to open the room from two till three on Wednesday afternoons and from ten till four on Saturdays. Any "civil gentlemen" might peruse the books, but only subscribers could borrow them. (Exception was made for James Logan, in gratitude for his advice in creating the collection.) Borrowers might have one book at a time. Upon accepting a volume each borrower must sign a promissory note covering the cost of the book. This would be voided upon return of the book undamaged. The borrower might then take out another, building his edifice of knowledge, as it were, one brick at a time.

In 1774, they ended up making their entire library collection available to the first Continental Congress which was gathering in Philadelphia in Sept. 1774.

One of the things I am most impressed by, when it comes to our Founding Fathers, is that - unequivocally - each one of them would sense voids in the community (lack of newspapers, or libraries, or fire departments) and so would go about creating whatever needed to be created to fill that void, on their own. They did not look to others. They did not bitch about how there wasn't such-and-such yet. There are notable exceptions, obviously - they were, after all, men of THEIR day and age, not OURS - but in general: every single of one of them were can-do people. They did things themselves, without waiting. They were NOT like the people described in that excerpt above: the ones who were suspicious of Benjamin Franklin's enthusiasm and civic energy. Alexander Hamilton, working as a lawyer in New York, realized how his job was made so much more difficult because all of the laws in New York were not compiled and written down in one place. So, duh, he sat down and wrote that book. A huge undertaking, but SOMEONE had to do it. Nobody asked him to do it. He just sensed that void, feeling it at work in his own life, on a personal level, so decided to change the situation.

Ben Franklin realized that a public subscription library would be a wonderful thing for the community. And so he set about creating it.

So today in history: the Library Company hired Louis Timothée, as the first public librarian in the United States of America.

My father is a librarian. I cherish this date in history. I post it in honor of him.

Andrei Rublev: "Its barbaric greatness immediately evident ...

... this chronologically discontinuous epic and (largely invented) biography of Russia’s greatest icon painter was a Soviet superproduction gone ideologically berserk" ...

Awesome in-depth article about Andrei Tarkovsky at Book Forum. Two books just came out about Tarkovsky (and I was just flipping through one of them yesterday at the Drama Bookshop) and the article is a review of both books. A controversial figure to this day, Tarkovsky was a man of and outside his time. I find him totally fascinating, as a figure - a symbol - a man who straddles the 20th century of Soviet art - all of that stuff about him is very interesting, and there is obviously MUCH to discuss in his films, although I have to say, having just seen Andrei Rublev, I thought I would scream if I saw another shot where the camera moved slowly from a scene of violence and horror to a scene of some small flower petal or some such thing. It got monotonous. Although, I suppose, that could have been part of his point as well. And I think seeing it on a big screen would most definitely make a difference in how those shots come across to an audience member. They could, possibly, appear majestic and tragic, as opposed to trivial.

Regardless: his work should continue to be considered.

My thoughts on Andrei Rublev here.

"...you aren't so much trying to describe it as trying to locate it."

Wonderful interview of Seamus Heaney by Dennis O'Driscoll.

One of my favorite excerpts from the interview:

I had no particular gift for writing what were called "compositions", and no particular enjoyment of it. But I do remember a moment, early on at St Columb's, when the topic was "A Day at the Seaside" and I made a connection between the performative student in me and a more inward creature, the writer-in-waiting, if you like. In the middle of the list of usual, expected activities such as diving and swimming, neither of which I could do, I wrote about going into an amusement arcade to escape from a shower and being depressed by the wet footprints on the floor and the cold, wet atmosphere created by people in their rained-on summer clothes. This had actually happened to me, so the image and the recording of it had a different feel. Something in me knew that I was on the right, intimate track - but it took me years to follow up.

And I love his bit about trying to locate it.

A new book is coming out, a compilation of interviews with Seamus Heaney (and he's a wonderful interview, juicy, intelligent - always leaves you with something to chew on). I've seen him read a couple of times, once in a nearly empty classroom at NYU in the middle of the afternoon ... and he's wonderful "live". Just wonderful. Funny, mischievous, and sharp.

My cousin Kerry, the Broadway Diva

A great interview with her in Playbill.

Congrats!

White Christmas opens on Broadway tonight!

Hudson

Hudson was my sister Jean's dog. She had him for years, and she counted it out last weekend - he had actually lived with her in nine different places. He was a beautiful black lab, and a member of our family. He came on our vacations with us. He swam in the lake or the ocean, feverishly chasing down sticks. A sweet friendly boy with big soft brown eyes, who would lie in the floor in the living room, wanting to be a part of everything, even as he gassed us out of the room.

He got sick very quickly over the last two weeks. He stopped eating and drinking. You could see the pain dulling his eyes. Even his face looked different, slimmer, more pinched.

Monday, Jean and Pat made the difficult decision to have him put down.

Hudson was sweet, warm, and funny as well. He had a squeaky fish toy that he loved so much that it was almost embarrassing to watch him play with it. He would escape and run through the woods, rolling gloriously in nasty substances. Once he was sprayed by a skunk. Once, he ate an entire blueberry pie that was left on the counter when Jean left the kitchen for 10 minutes. He had a very good life and he was very much loved.

In late September, he served as the ring-bearer in Jean and Pat's wedding. He wore a little pillow on his back like an elephant with the rings tied on with a ribbon. Mimi walked him down the aisle, and we could see his poor tail waving slowly ... first this way ... then a pause ... then that way ... pause again ... so different from his normally frantic wagging ... it showed that he knew it was a happy moment, but it also showed that he didn't know what the hell was going on. At the top of the aisle sat my parents, waiting to walk Jean down the aisle and as Hudson passed he walked right up to them, sniffing them, perhaps looking for a comforting scent in the weird world he now found himself in. But he did a great job. He sat on the grass beside Mimi during the ceremony and Siobhan and I both looked over at him during the service and he was lying there with his mouth WIDE open, panting for breath, but it made him look like he was totally blissed out, in a state of ecstasy. It was hysterical.

We love you so much, Hudson. You were a good good boy.

You saw to it that you stuck around long enough to see Jean happily married to Pat ... and then I guess you knew it was time for you to go.

We miss you already.

The Books: "Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth" (Lana Turner)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth, by Lana Turner

You know, you can open up George Eliot's Middlemarch and find a gem of language on every page. Not an exaggeration. It's almost overwhelming that book, you want her to slow down ... because her genius is just too much, I am just a mere mortal, George, let me catch up! One of the things I like to do is just flip open Middlemarch to any page and read the first sentence that I see. It's amazing how often it's a really good one.

Well. Lana Turner's autobiography is the same way.

Is this the first time in the history of the planet that Lana Turner was compared to George Eliot? I hope so, because it's about time.

You literally cannot open this book without finding an awesome sentence. I'm not being sarcastic - although there is much to make fun of here as well. But why I think this book is so awesome is its complete and utter lack of irony (which is really quite refreshing) - not to mention its open-faced assumption that we will care about every detail. Of course we do, Lana! You're Lana Turner! Give us the dish! And boy does she ever. I suppose if you only looked at this book thru a cynical lens, you'd find it irritating and self-involved.

YOUR LOSS, cynics, YOUR LOSS.

It IS self-involved. That is the REASON it is so good. Also, I have to ask: Why are you reading the autobiography of a famous film star and looking for calm reasonable detachment? That's YOUR problem.

She appears to remember every outfit she has ever worn, first of all, in head-to-toe detail. She is open about her foolishness in love - and every date she has ever been on is accompanied by the memory of what she was wearing. She cared about being a good actress and improving at her craft. She knew she was lucky to be "discovered" - she was the original "sweater girl" -

and she knew she needed to continue to get better if she would have a long career (and boy did she ever). She couldn't seem to stay out of trouble, though. You want to shout at the pages, "LANA, TRY BEING SINGLE FOR, LIKE, ONE SECOND. JUST TRY." But no, not Lana. She is all about love. And her clothes.

Again, if you're reading my words and assuming I'm making fun of all of this, you've totally got me wrong.

I love this book. I love every single word. There are plenty of "great" books out there that DON'T have an awesome sentence on each page - but this one does. Lana Turner and George Eliot, man, holding hands across the centuries.

Let's do an experiment. I will let the book fall open five times - and I will type the first thing I see each time. Sentence, paragraph, whatevs.

No cheating allowed. I promise to play by the rules.

Ready? Let's go.

Viewers of The Merry Widow may have noticed that all during the picture I wore long gloves or a very wide bracelet, or I carried a fur piece on my wrist. Filming of the picture began only a few days after my suicide attempt, and my slashed wrist remained bandaged for most of the shooting. No one at MGM seemed to doubt that my injury was an accident. I was bouncing back quickly, partly because of my natural resiliency. But I also had help. His name was Fernando Lamas.

That is an absolutely PERFECT paragraph. Beginning writers should study it.

Next.

I wore a full-length white fox coat and a silky white lace dress over a nude-colored slip. Before the ball a limousine drove us to the White House, and we filed into the room where Roosevelt delivered his Fireside Chats to the nation. The President sat behind a desk and greeted each person in turn. Fascinated, I studied his lined, handsome face and the marvelous grin I knew from the newsreels. As I approached I saw a look of recongition in his eyes. He didn't wait for an aide's introduction. He just extended his hand and said, "You are Miss Lana Turner." All I could say was, "Yes, Mr. President." He gave me a long look that seemed to take in everything.

Of course he did, Lana. I adore you.

Next:

Poor Liza (Minnelli) got twenty-one stitches in her leg, and her face was badly scraped from hitting the cement. The messy situation got worse when Sid Luft came home. He wanted to sue me, but Judy well knew that Liza had been sternly warned about the wall and the dog. As for Lex, he was so attached to Pulco that he refused to give him up, and in all fairness, he did have good reasons for wanting Pulco at the house. I'd been receiving some strange threatening letters, some of them worrisome enough to report to the police. And there had been that kidnap threat against Cheryl some years back. I no longer went out publicly as much as I had before, and when I did it would be to someone's home. Seclusion became important to me and Lex, and Acapulco appealed to us more and more.

Look, little Liza, Lana warned you about the wall and the dog, mkay?

Next:

Artie wasn't always surly. Sometimes he actually enjoyed life. One night there was an MGM bash at Earl Carroll's, a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard. Artie played the clarinet in the show, and I performed a dance number from Two Girls on Broadway. Phil Silvers did a comedy turn, and since he had no date, he tagged along with us after the show. At Artie's insistence, we headed home. I made drinks and went off to change. When I came back, Artie and Phil were smoking what they called "reefers". I'd heard of marijuana, of course, but I'd never seen it before. It was associated mainly with jazz musicians. Artie and Phil offered me some, and I said no.

Good for you, Lana. Good for you.

Next and last:

Our next stop was Rio, where we planned to arrive at Carnival time. I wasn't sorry to leave Buenos Aires. Argentina was torn by political strift. It was election time, and there were rough political rallies right in the plaza under our balcony. The Peronista guards would sweep into the crowd with their sabers drawn. It terrified and sickened me to see their battered victims, with blood streaming down their heads. Once, at three in the morning, someone threw a bomb into a service entrance of our hotel. The blast almost shook me and Sara out of our beds. For the rest of the night we sat up, terrified and shaking, in the living room of our suite. In Rio social life was far more pleasant. I had acquaintances there, who invited me to several posh parties. During Carnival the whole city throbbed with the seductive samba beat. We danced long and late. One night someone said, "Let's go into the streets!" Out there we were simply swept off into the crowds. Now it's forbidden, but at that time the men put a little perfumed ether on their handkerchiefs, which would be vaporized by the heat of their bodies. The air was sweet with intoxicating ether fumes. With that and the blaring wild music you just seemed to float on and on. In a seductive black satin halter dress, with flowers in my hair, I danced until dawn.

Of course you did, Lana. I wish I was there.

You know, I thought Don Delillo's supposed masterpiece Underworld was about 400 pages too long - but I wish Lana's book was 400 MORE pages long.

It's the lack of irony, like I mentioned - which gives it such a great zesty and ridiculous voice... and also the lack of self-consciousness. She does not come across as a dingbat, but she does paint herself in this way where you really can see her in all her self-dramatizing chaotic glory. It's self-serving, as all such books are ... but again - if she had laid down irony on top of her defensiveness, or even a sense of detachment or self-awareness- it would have been a terrible book. Here she is, and at times, it seems like she's putting her hands out up to heaven, shrugging at the reader, like, "How on earth can so much happen to one person?" (to paraphrase Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby) And I, the reader, looking on, feel like saying to her, "Lana, the reason so much happens to you is because you have atrocious taste in men and you leap right into intimacy without thinking: ' Hmmmm ... before I commit myself to this gentleman, let me ponder the ultimate question: will my daughter one day stab this man to death?' Just HOLD BACK a bit before you fall in love again, I beg of you Lana, please!!" But if she held back, she wouldn't be Lana, yo, so you just have to sit back and keep your mouth shut, shaking your head with fondness and yet also a bit of judgment. "Oh, Lana, Lana, there you go again ..."

I haven't even talked about her acting yet! Let me send you over to Alex's wonderful tribute piece - Lana Turner is one of her favorite actresses, and that's a wonderful post about why. Here is another insightful post about Lana Turner - a career deep and strange enough that it certainly deserves a second look.

Her star has faded a bit - she is now seen as a symbol of other things - but I've got to believe that someone whose career lasted that long (she may not have done a gazillion movies a year - but she worked steadily) had a hell of a lot of moxie, ambition, and ... maybe not smarts ... but survival skills. She started out as the "It Girl" because of how she looked in a sweater. "It Girls" are a dime a dozen. If you want to last beyond your big season of being the "It Girl", you need to have more going on than just looks, or luck. Will we ever have a Sienna Miller Blog-a-Thon day? Time will tell.

I am not saying I think Lana Turner is under-rated. I don't. I do think she might be remembered for the wrong reasons, and for those of you who haven't seen her big films, I suggest you go back and have a look. Because she has some damn fine moments when she is used well - when a director "gets" her - and I celebrate that part of her. I really like watching her act. It's a bunch of hoo-hah, really - breathy sleepy-eyed hoo-hah -but that's part of why I like it.

I think Turner is a great example of a woman whose personal life is what she is now remembered for, as opposed to her acting. I love it when people whine about how out of control celebrities are today. Seriously? TODAY they're out of control? Oh, really? Do you have any sense of history? Do you have any grasp on, oh, FACTS? Do you realize how much the studios controlled the publicity of their stars, so most of the really bad stuff was kept from the public? But also, gotta ask: it was better at WHAT point in history? The purer sweeter time of, oh, Fatty Arbuckle? The well-behaved proper time of, uhm, Lana Turner? Like THOSE times?

But oh well, some people just like to live in a fantasy that once upon a time things were BETTER than they are now, because then they always have something to bitch about!! But seriously, I do laugh sometimes when I hear that "now" celebrities are out of control. Dude. Google Lana Turner and check out what HER life was like, mkay? It makes it look like Lindsay Lohan was just blowing off some adolescent steam.

Lana Turner led one of the most exhausting public lives I can think of. I want to plead, Good GOD, woman, lie down!!

Or, you could give her the opposite advice as the wonderful Frank O'Hara does in his poem about her.

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

(My friend Mitchell has actually done this piece as a dramatic monologue and it is so funny you stop being able to breathe by around line 6. Speaking of which, Ted just wrote a post on Frank O'Hara ...)

Great book. Compulsively readable, far better than many serious works of literature I know, and also a book you can keep going back to, over and over again. I first read it when I was 14 (and I was WAY too young for the salacious nature of much of it!) and have read it probably 6 or 7 times ever since.

So ... lie down, Lana, or get up, Lana, either way, we love you.

Here's an excerpt. I basically just let the book fall open and decided to excerpt whatever I saw first, because it was just too hard to choose.

I just love how she defends herself here, and then starts a new paragraph with 'But I did go out a lot." Again, I'm not making fun of her. I am truly delighted at how, in every moment, she appears to be truthful. Even if the truth of one moment totally contradicts the truth of the moment before. But then, after a paragraph about her going beyond the velvet rope to her table, blowing kisses to people, etc. - she takes the edge off of us thinking she takes herself too seriously by writing, "Silly, I guess, but fun."

Yes, Lana, it IS silly, but fun!

LOVE YOU, LANA, PLEASE GET UP.

Put down Don DeLillo and pick up Lana. DeLillo will be waiting for you when you're done. Lana's book is a must-read.

EXCERPT FROM Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth, by Lana Turner

On New Year's Day, 1945, I became one of the most highly paid actresses in the world. My new contract paid me $4,000 a week, and by Hollywood ritual that meant it was time to buy a new home. I looked for a place in Bel-Air, a gracious section with handsome estates enclosed by Spanish-style adobe walls or ornate wrought-iron fences and sculptured hedges, and I found a lovely house hidden in the woods overlooking the ninth green of the Bel-Air Country Club. Sometimes golf balls smacked the windows or flew into the pool. Whenever I retrieved one I would fine the player a quarter for going out of bounds. It gives me a chuckle to remember those startled faces.

Now I was dating again. First it was Turhan Bey, an exotically handsome Turkish-Viennese actor. But when things turned serious, he introduced me to his mother, who seemed to dislike me on sight.

Once when I was dancing with Turhan at a party in Beverly Hills, Stephan appeared and tried to cut in. When I glanced at Turhan meaningfully he gallantly stepped aside to let Stephan take his place. I still wore Stephan's engagement ring, a three-carat diamond, which I'd had reset to my taste. Now Stephan told me he wanted it back.

"But it's been reset," I protested.

"I don't care. Give it back!"

He snatched my hand and yanked off the ring, then strode quickly away.

When Turhan saw me standing there, he asked me what had happened. I told him, then excused myself to recover. When I got back from the ladies' room, Turhan wasn't there, but everyone was rushing to the garden.

In the center of a knot of people were Turhan and Stephan, scuffling on the ground. the other guests pulled them apart before they could hurt each other. Thank goodness! But Stephan had dropped the ring and was searching frantically through the shrubbery.

The next day Anita May, who had given the party, called to say that her gardener had found the ring. I recovered it, but the story made the papers. The gossips inflated my connection with Turhan to the level of a grand passion. Those same busybodies linked my name to Rory Calhoun, Robert Hutton, and Frank Sinatra - the mention of Frank's name in this connection showed how little the gossips really knew about any of us. Yes, Frank had been a good friend for years, and I was close to his wife, Nancy. But the closest things to dates Frank and I enjoyed were a few box lunches at MGM. Despite our later differences of opinion about his relationship with Ava Gardner, I always found him warm and especially kind to me.

But I did go out a lot. The war had just ended, and the city was booming again. Affluence was in the air. Developers had bought up acres of land and dotted them with row upon row of small, brightly colored tract homes for returning servicemen. Almost overnight the orange groves and open spaces disappeared under the spreading blanket of suburbs, and the city got its first whiff of smog. But in Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Bel-Air, Holmby Hills set high in the Santa Monica Mountains, prewar glamour and opulence were reborn, with a modern flair. The magnificent homes were palaces of glass that let the light stream in, not the tile-floored haciendas or Tudor manors of the past. Light - that's my strongest impression of that postwar time. After th elong years of blackouts and conservation, the city was adazzle with blazing bulbs, brilliant and glittering and fun.

And the men were home. They seemed to catch your eye everywhere you went, like the first greening after a thaw. How I'd love to dress up and go dancing with a handsome dark man. Ciro's was a favorite haunt. I'd walk up the steps and through the glass door, and pass the velvet rope that barred the less-fortunates. And the headwaiter would spring forward - "Ah, Miss Turner ..." and escort me in.

I had a special table right by the stairs so I could watch the comings and goings. I'd head straight there, never glancing right or left. And then, when I was seated, I'd give the room a long casing, bowing to this one or blowing that one a kiss. Silly, I guess, but fun.

Ciro's was designed for dramatic entrances and exits because a long flight of stairs led down to the tables and dance floor. And at the top of the stairs - that's where the stars stopped, to let everyone see them come in. It was all part of the game. Everyone would stare, and you knew you were making an Entrance.

I'd usually be dressed in something clingy, black or white, sometimes gold, occasionally red. I'd wear diamonds and a fur of some kind draped over one shoulder. Often white fur, my favorite. Maybe ermine or silver fox, the fashionable furs at that time. Or sable. I had beautiful sables. I'd have jewels in my hair, or flowers, and every hair in place.

But talk about an Entrance! Hedy Lamarr holds the record for that. One Entrance she made at Ciro's is a vision I'll never forget.

Hedy was at the height of her beauty, with thick, wavy, jet-black hair. With that stunning widow's peak, her face was magnificent. We all looked up and there she was at the top of those stairs. She wore a cape of some kind up to her chin, and it swept down to the floor. I can't even remember the color of the cape, because all I saw was that incredible face, that magnificent hair - and a huge diamond. The most fabulous solitaire diamond on her forehead, just at the tip of her widow's peak. She was enough to make strong men faint.

How the hell did she keep that diamond on her forehead? Was it pasted on? You couldn't tell. Later, Sidney Guilaroff told me that he had taken jet-black wire, very fine, and woven it into Hedy's hair. He anchored it with a little spot of glue. But that diamond was absolutely real. It was breathtaking.

Norma Shearer and George Sanders:

Two appreciations by Dan Callahan, who is such a marvelous writer.

Here is his piece on Shearer - a measured and detailed examination of this controversial star. People hate her, people stick up for her, the gays love her ... Callahan looks at her filmography piece by piece, and attempts an evaluation of her faults and strengths. Wonderfully done.

As a twelve year-old, I vividly remember seeing A Free Soul on Ted Turner's TNT channel and being impressed, for the first time, with the idea of sex for its own sake, which Shearer expresses with total abandon, lounging around Wilfong's passion pit apartment in a half-open robe, sinking back on pillows and commanding, "C'mon . . . put 'em around me," to beckon her dangerous lover. There's a class basis to the hot tensions in A Free Soul, a sense that a well-bred upper-class girl is dying to experience the rougher, more animalistic side of sex. Gable shoves her down on a couch when she starts to high-hat him, growling, "Sit down and take it and like it!"

The daring thing about A Free Soul is that it presents a life of nothing but constant, mean sex as an option, and it's the thought of that option that gives the film its unusual charge, even when Shearer-isms begin to rear their ever-tilted head in the last half hour, including a not-to-be-believed "astonished" reaction, complete with popping eyes and hand to mouth, when she finds her father (Lionel Barrymore) stone drunk on the ground; it's as if Shearer is waiting for a silent film title to come on, so she keeps holding and holding and holding this completely ridiculous face. When her hands go to her head here, they become fists, which lets us know that there are actually gradations to her bad-acting spasms.

And:

Shearer's whole life is in Marie Antoinette, and it's the film that meant the most to her. It contains some of her fakest acting, but it also contains the best acting she ever did.

Don't miss it.

And then there's his fantastic piece on the exquisite George Sanders. So good!!

Lewin made use of this ice-cold figure in his version of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), where Sanders leaps on all the Wilde epigrams, chews them up, and spits them out at will, speeding up his usual languorous way of talking, which results in a technically dazzling performance. Sanders plays evil mentor to Hurd Hatfield's Dorian, looking down at the floor in excitement and shame as he speaks of temptations and how we must yield to them. As the film goes on, it's clear that Sanders' Sir Henry is all talk and no action; the faster he speaks, the more we feel his frantic heartlessness, his "wit" signaling nothing but emptiness and contempt. Again, there was no other actor of the time who would have had the equipment and the anti-heroic quality for a part like this. Sanders' mysterious and quintessentially Russian despair gave him the guts to play such men full out; paradoxically, it was also his oft-stated indifference to his craft as an actor that gave him untrammeled, unashamed access to the less seemly sides of human character.

Wonderful stuff. I highly recommend both pieces.

Another iPod shuffle? Why not. I'm restless.

I had a 4 hour drive today. The shuffle is preserved on the iPod. Hope is happy I am home. She is lying on my pillow, passive-aggressively faced away from me, to show she's not TOO happy to see me.

Long day. Long emotional weekend. Tired. Can't sleep.

The songs from my traffic-ridden drive on the highway:

The Crime of the Century - from the musical Ragtime

Leeds - Indigo Girls

The Jug of Punch - The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem

Ride - Liz Phair

All I Really Want - Alanis Morissette

Bigelow 6-200 - Brenda Lee

Outrageous - Britney Spears (yes, yes, we get it already, Brit, you're outrageous)

Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen

Time After Time - Cyndi Lauper

Give Me Your Life - Pat McCurdy

Perfect Young Ladies - from the Broadway musical "The Boyfriend"

Calamari - from the musical "A New Brain"

That's the Way I Remember It - Garth Brooks as Chris Gaines (I was the only person on the planet who loved this album)

Incomplete - Alanis Morissette

Extraordinary Girl - Green Day (this might be my favorite song off the whole amazing album)

Is There Life Out There? - Reba McEntire

Mesmerizing - Liz Phair

Chop Me Up - Justin Timberlake

My Name is Pat (I Play Guitar) - Pat McCurdy

Same Ol' Story - Cyndi Lauper (LOVE IT)

Crazy Little Thing Called Love - Queen

Hotel California - Eagles

Heartache Tonight - Eagles (off the same live album as the song before. Weird.)

My Baby Only Cares For Me - Brian Setzer & His Orchestra

Sway - Dean Martin

I Want You - Elvis Costello

Let It Be Me - Indigo Girls

Mountains of Mourne - The Irish Tenors

Allez-Vous-En - Martha Wainwright

The World That He Sees - Trans-Siberian Orchestra

In Your Honor - Foo Fighters

No One But You - Queen

Poor Little Pierrette - from the Broadway musical "The Boyfriend"

Safety In Numbers - you have got to be kidding me. Also from the Broadway musical "The Boyfriend"

Red Football - Sinead O'Connor (I don't know, it's a tough choice because I love her so much - but this might be my favorite of all of her songs)

New Way Home - Foo Fighters

Tea for the Tillerman - Cat Stevens

Sparkplug Minuet - Mark Mothersbaugh (from the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack)

Before Me - Pat McCurdy

Take A Look - Liz Phair

Holding My Breath - Hellogoodbye

Firedance - from "Riverdance"

Free Your Mind - En Vogue

It's Never Too Late To Fall In Love - from "The Boyfriend". It's a conspiracy.

I Won't Back Down - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

Gonna Leave You - Queens of the Stone Age

Fare Thee Well - Indigo Girls

Defying Gravity - from the Broadway musical "Wicked"

Morning Has Broken - Cat Stevens (the piano!!!)

Happy Feet - Manhattan Rhythm Kings (from The Aviator soundtrack)

Little People - from "Les Miz"

Mr. Bojangles - Nina Simone (brilliant!!)

Take a Chance On Me - from the movie Mamma Mia

Meathook - Tracy Bonham

Mama Said - Metallica (from "Load" - an album I love, much to the chagrin of another brand of Metallica fans)

Soldier Boy - The Shirelles

Tears Dry On Their Own - Amy Winehouse

Finale - End Credits - from the movie "A Star Is Born"

Justice - from the Broadway musical "Ragtime"

John Henry - Bruce Springsteen

Get Out the Map - Indigo Girls

I Can't Give You Anything But Love - Rufus Wainwright

Rock and Roll - Led Zeppelin

Colonel Fraser - Jerry O'Sullivan

Three Babies - Sinead O'Connor

Shitloads of Money - Liz Phair

Unconscious - Pat McCurdy

Somebody Else For a While - Pat McCurdy (LEAVE ME ALONE PAT MCCURDY)

When I Hold You In My Arms - Mike Viola

Mule Skinner Blues - Dolly Parton

Angie - Tori Amos

Baba - Alanis Morissette

Sharks Can't Sleep - Tracy Bonham

My Hero - Foo Fighters

Johnny Sunshine - Liz Phair

Seventy-Five Septembers - Cheryl Wheeler

The Only One - Evanescence

So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright - Simon & Garfunkel

Music - Madonna

I've Got Life - Nina Simone (thank you Mitchell!!)

All Over the World - ELO

All Because Of You - U2

Lindbergh Palace Hotel Suite - Mark Mothersbaugh (from The Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack)

Royalty in Exile - Pat McCurdy (argh!!!)

Turn to Stone - ELO

Disenchanted Lullaby - Foo Fighters

Prologue - ELO (what the hell with the ELO??)

Lonely Summer Nights - Stray Cats

Heaven on Earth - Britney Spears (great song)

You Don't Have to Believe Me - Eric Hutchinson

Sexy Back - Justin Timberlake (I mean, come on, does it get any better)

Empty Sky - Bruce Springsteen

Zoot Suit Riot - Cherry Poppin' Daddies

Completely Blue - Pat McCurdy (the universe is against me)

Ya Had Me Goin - L.E.O.

Van Lear Rose - Loretta Lynn (thank you Mitchell!!)

Another Woman's Man - Joe Tex

John Henry - Bob Gibson

Tonite - The Go-Gos

Give Me a Sign - Dean Martin

You Don't Know What It's Like - Nina Simone

Heaven On their Minds - Judas (from the movie "Jesus Christ Superstar" - I looooove this song)

Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy - The Andrews Sisters

Richard Cory - Simon & Garfunkel

One Of Those Girls - Avril Lavigne

The Sky Is Crying - Stevie Ray Vaughan

Next Time / I Wouldn't Go Back - from the musical "Closer Than Ever" (the 30something of musicals)

Luck In My Eyes - kd lang

I've Been To a Marvellous Party - The Divine Comedy (love him. Guess who gave me this album? PAT MCCURDY. ARGH! He is omnipresent)

My Immortal - Evanescence

Master Crowley's / The Jug of Punch - Joe Burke

Wish Lizst (Toy Shop Madness) - Trans-Siberian Orchestra

Magic - Yipes! (Yipes was the first band of a certain gentleman named Pat McCurdy. ARGH!)

Darlene - The Dreams

Just You, Just Me - Judy Garland

Little Cream Soda - The White Stripes (love love love this song)

Polyester Bride - Liz Phair

I Want You to Want Me - Cheap Trick

Tough Life - Pat McCurdy (say no more. Yes, I have about 500 of his songs on my iPod. It makes Shuffle a ridiculous event.)

Let Me Be There - Olivia Newton-John

Walk This Way - Aerosmith

The American and Florence - from the musical "Chess"

In Pursuit of Happiness - The Divine Comedy

A Sleepin' Bee - Barbra Streisand (never gets old)

That Thing You Do - The Wonders (from the movie "That Thing You Do")

Baby Yes It Does - Nina Simone

Circus - Lenny Kravitz

Something Beautiful - Tracy Bonham

Jolene - Dolly Parton

In the Chapel in the Moonlight - Dean Martin

NYC - from the movie Annie (with Victor Garber and Audra McDonald)

Bells on a Leper - Mike Viola and the Candybutchers

Miss Byrd - Sally Mayes (also from "Closer than Ever")

The Other Guy - Little River Band

C*m on Everybody - Eminem

This Land Is Your Land - Pete Seeger (having Pete Seeger follow Eminem is the #1 joy of shuffle)

Fall Back Down - Mike Viola and the Candybutchers

Let the River Run - Alexandra Billings

Going Through the Big D - Mark Chesnutt

Damn Girl - Justin Timberlake

Falling in love (is Hard On the Knees) - by the ever-florid Aerosmith

The Whole Shebang - Grant Lee Buffalo

Dumb - Nirvana

The Main Event - Barbra Streisand

Wicked Little Town - John Cameron Mitchell from Hedwig and the Angry Inch

World Without you - Beth Hart

Both Sides Now - Dolly Parton with Judy Collins (I like this version better than the original - wonderful!!)

Stranger In a Strange Town - Pat McCurdy (that's it. I'm going to throw myself off a cliff. Buh-bye.)

Finale - from 1776, Broadway musical (goosebumps!!)

Mack the Knife - Bobby Darin

Images of Ophelia

Here is a scene from the great Canadian television series Slings and Arrows. The company of actors is rehearsing Hamlet, and it is not going well. The actress playing Ophelia, Claire, is terrible and nobody knows what to do about it. She is a niece of a board member and nobody can get rid of her. She makes a mockery of Ophelia's mad scene, dancing around, letting daisies drop, singing in a fluttery voice, as though she actually believes this is American Idol. Jeffrey, the loose cannon director, fresh out of a mental institution, stops her during rehearsal.

CLAIRE [as Ophelia]
And will not come again
No no he is dead
Go to thy death bed ...

JEFFREY
Stop. For God's sake, stop.

CLAIRE
What?

JEFFREY
Where is this coming from?

CLAIRE
What?

JEFFREY
This staggering about with your mouth open.

CLAIRE
You're being sarcastic again with me. Please don't be sarcastic with me.

JEFFREY
Actually, I'm not. Sorry.

CLAIRE
Ophelia's mad.

JEFFREY
Right.

CLAIRE
I'm playing her madness.

JEFFREY
And how does staggering about with your mouth open suggest madness?

CLAIRE
I'm not mad.

JEFFREY
Right.

CLAIRE
And I never have been, so I have to simulate it.

JEFFREY
Right.

CLAIRE
I'm using sense memory. I'm remembering what it was like being stoned and I'm using that. I'm disoriented, my head is spinning, I think that's what it's probably like when you're insane.

JEFFREY
Right. Well. It's not. Trust me. That's what it's like when you're stoned.

CLAIRE
Oh, forgive me, I mean no disrespect, but I don't have your experience with insanity.

JEFFREY
Right.

CLAIRE
And this is hard, anyway, because I can't take any meaning from the text. Ophelia's just singing nonsense songs.

JEFFREY
Right. Claire. Claire, Claire, Claire with the hair. Ophelia is a child. She has been dominated by powerful men all of her life and suddenly they all disappear. Her brother goes to France, her father is murdered by her boyfriend and he is shipped off to England. She is alone for the first time, grieving and heartbroken and guilty - because, as far as she is concerned, it is all her fault. She ignored her brother's advice and fell in love with Hamlet and now her father is dead - all because of her - and the pain and the loss and the shame and the guilt, all of this, is gnawing away inside this little child's mind and it comes out as 'little songs'. 'And will he not come again? And will he not come again? No. No. He is dead. My father is dead and I killed him.' 'Kay? Now, let's try it again ... without the Vietnam flashback.

And now: the scene itself:

Hamlet, Act IV, scene 5

LAERTES
How now! what noise is that?
Re-enter OPHELIA

O heat, dry up my brains! tears seven times salt,
Burn out the sense and virtue of mine eye!
By heaven, thy madness shall be paid by weight,
Till our scale turn the beam. O rose of May!
Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia!
O heavens! is't possible, a young maid's wits
Should be as moral as an old man's life?
Nature is fine in love, and where 'tis fine,
It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves.

OPHELIA
[Sings]
They bore him barefaced on the bier;
Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny;
And in his grave rain'd many a tear:--
Fare you well, my dove!

LAERTES
Hadst thou thy wits, and didst persuade revenge,
It could not move thus.

OPHELIA
[Sings]
You must sing a-down a-down,
An you call him a-down-a.
O, how the wheel becomes it! It is the false
steward, that stole his master's daughter.

LAERTES
This nothing's more than matter.

OPHELIA
There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray,
love, remember: and there is pansies. that's for thoughts.

LAERTES
A document in madness, thoughts and remembrance fitted.

OPHELIA
There's fennel for you, and columbines: there's rue
for you; and here's some for me: we may call it
herb-grace o' Sundays: O you must wear your rue with
a difference. There's a daisy: I would give you
some violets, but they withered all when my father
died: they say he made a good end,--
Sings
For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.

LAERTES
Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,
She turns to favour and to prettiness.

OPHELIA
[Sings]
And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?
No, no, he is dead:
Go to thy death-bed:
He never will come again.
His beard was as white as snow,
All flaxen was his poll:
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan:
God ha' mercy on his soul!
And of all Christian souls, I pray God. God be wi' ye.
Exit

LAERTES
Do you see this, O God?

I went a little "insane" myself below. Images of Ophelia through the centuries: actresses who have played her, painters who have painted her ... the erotic ones, the violent ones, the pre-Raphaelite ones, the art Deco ones ... I couldn't stop gathering images. Once I decided to do this post (I've been reading a biography of Oscar Wilde, and most of his painter friends - the pre-Raphaelites and decadent aesthetes all did paintings of Ophelia, so I decided to look some of the paintings up - and as I started digging, I found myself getting further and further into the world and moved out of that late 19th century era and into other eras, until finally I was totally and utterly lost (in the best way) - and figured I would do kind of in imitation of this one I did about images of Moby Dick. I very quickly realized that I, to put it mildly, was NOT the first one with this idea. BOOKS have been written about portrayals of Ophelia in paintings and etchings! I also found many old photographs of actresses who have played the role (including one of Ellen Terry - see if you can pick her out!) - not to mention some more modern 20th century ladies.

I love to see all of the different sensibilities of the artists, and how they see it, how they enter in, what it is that calls to them about this particular character, especially her mad scene and her drowning scene.

The relationship in 9 1/2 Weeks

Ultimately, I think it is her sadness that makes the movie. She is sad from the start. She is sad before she met him. She's got a good game-face, and she's gorgeous in a head-turning way, but she's not really living a real life. You can see that in the one interaction she has with a guy who tries to hit on her in the store in Chinatown. He's a goof, yeah, but whatever, he's just trying to make conversation, and she is openly rolling her eyes at him, but it is not quite a successful rejection. She doesn't come across as a dame who knows how to handle the men (like a Lauren Bacall), she's insecure, one of those beautiful women who really can't own it, and has hostility towards men for the attention they give her. It's a subtle moment, and is really just setting up the entrance of Rourke - but I think it's illuminating in terms of her character. She doesn't really enjoy herself. She seems "off" to me. From the start.

And so it is not that he breaks her down. It is that he perceives that she was on that path anyway. That's the kind of woman he wanted. When they run into each other at a street fair, and he appears beside her as she oohs and ahhs over a French silk scarf, he stands right next to her, smiling down at her. There's something about him that moves her, but she has been too dominated and hurt by men in the past to let him "get to her" right away (there is the whole gnarly relationship with her ex-husband ... you can tell that she is the kind of woman who abdicates self in a relationship - Not ALL women do that, but she does ... I think he senses that willingness in her ... he makes it a game for her, with rules, as opposed to some scary passive-aggressive thing, so she can have fun with her already-existing tendencies of self-obliteration ... I don't think she realizes this about herself ... HE sees it, she does not). She walks away from him. He eventually follows her down the street, and takes the silk scarf out of his pocket - he has bought it for her. Her reaction is the key to the movie, I think. (Well, that, and Mickey Rourke's general hot-ness). She is not thrilled, or happy, or even tentative as to who this guy is and why he has done this. She looks tragically sad. It is as though the bottomless pit of need inside her has suddenly been touched, seen, by a total stranger ... and for the first second it seems, maybe, that someone could fulfill her. This is not a happy revelation. I speak from personal experience. After a long life of rejection, loneliness, unfulfilled dreams ... to have someone say, "Yes. I see that. Let me try to make it better" is actually quite awful. Or it can be. It's hard to be happy. (For some of us). It's hard for that character to be happy. He presents her with a gift, out of nowhere, and a look of unbearable sadness comes over her face. That's the key to the movie.

He sets her free. You can see that. But it comes with a price, which he will exact from her, bit by bit, over the course of the film.

It is a silly movie, and I am not, in general, a Kim Basinger fan (my favorite performance of hers is in Nadine, with Jeff Bridges - she's a wonderful and goofy comedienne, she reminds me of Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth in that movie, only with a Southern accent) but what elevates 9 1/2 Weeks from a movie like, oh, hm, let me think, Wild Orchid or the abysmal Another 9 1/2 Weeks where you basically want to tag Mickey Rourke with a stun-gun to put him out of his misery ("Tell me about Elizabeth" he says in the middle of some "erotic" sex scene and you know that he doesn't give a SHIT about "what happened to Elizabeth" - he just wants to get out of there!!) ... is the sadness underneath everything. Yes, it's about sex, but it's about sex that is connected to who we are, dreams, loss, hope ... That sex isn't in a vacuum (like it is in so many movies). It takes place in a larger context.

I know Mickey Rourke scorns this movie, or - no, he seems to have a complicated relationship with it. It made him a GIANT star, the sexiest man in Hollywood - although he had been doing stellar work for some time before that. But when people come up to him on the street, to this day, it is usually 9 1/2 Weeks they reference. He said, in the fantastic interview that appeared in last week's Entertainment Weekly (thank you, Michael), "That was when the whole pretty, sexy thing came about." He had mixed feelings about it. He says, in the interview, "I never saw myself that way, and I ran from it like wildfire. I don't know why. I don't ... know ... why."

Later in the interview, he is asked "if boxing was perhaps a subconscious attempt to destroy the good looks that had made him famous", and Rourke pauses to think. Then says, "There may be some validity to that."

Pauline Kael wrote, in her famous review of 1982's Diner:

[Rourke] has a sweet, pure smile that surprises you. He seems to be acting to you, and no one else.

That's part of the effectiveness of his work in 9 1/2 Weeks and why he is so unsettling to Elizabeth. He smiles at her and appears to close out the rest of the world, smiling at her and no one else. It is her undoing.

All Mickey Rourke stuff here

Happy birthday, Anne Sexton

Poems and quotes from and about her below - in honor of this amazing talent, who pretty much burst fully-formed onto the poetry scene. Kind of incredible. When you read the Complete Poems, you can feel her sliding off the rails at the end (I'm not talking about mentally - I'm talking about the quality of her work, although the two are probably related) ... some of those late poems are embarrassing. (I love Robert Lowell's quote below, and think it would have been very interesting - might have saved Sexton that embarrassment). But she was all about revealing her truth, as it was in whatever moment she found herself in. The clarity and almost frightening pure expressing of much of her work is gone at the end, and some of it sounds like a bad imitation of Jack Kerouac, a riff with no purpose, no cleverness ... like this, from one of her last poems:

I love you the way the oboe plays.
I love you the way skinny dipping makes my body feels.
I love you the way a ripe artichoke tastes.
Yet I fear you,
as one in the desert fears the sun.
True.
True.

This is terrible stuff, the voice of a sentimental undergraduate in a beginning poetry class, not a celebrated prize-winning American poet. It almost embarrasses me to type that out here. So I see there to be a regression in the gift - because her first poems are spectacular, and she wasn't like Sylvia Plath - a precocious academic poetess, getting published in Seventeen magazine when she was still a teenager, and winning prizes, and all that. Sexton was getting married, having kids, and struggling with her sickness.

She was a housewife, mother, and madwoman - who had spent time in mental institutions, and a psychiatrist suggested that maybe she "should write" as a way to get through the darker moments. Maxine Kumin tells the story:

Nevertheless, seven months after her second child, Joyce Ladd Sexton, was born in 1955, Anne suffered a second crisis and was hospitalized. The children were sent to live with her husband's parents; and while they were separated from her, she attempted suicide on her birthday, November 9, 1956. This was the first of several episodes, or at least the first that was openly acknowledged. Frequently, these attempts occurred around Anne's birthday, a time of year she came increasingly to dread. Dr. Martin Orne, Brunner-Orne's son, was the young psychiatrist at Glenside Hospital who attended Anne during this siege and treated her for the next seven years. After administering a series of diagnostic tests, he presented his patient with her scores, objective evidence that, despite the disapproving naysayers from her past, she was highly intelligent. Her associative gifts suggested that she ought to return to the writing of poetry, something she had shown a deft talent for during secondary school. It was at Orne's insistence that Anne enrolled in the Holmes workshop.

"You, Dr. Martin" came directly out of that experience, as did so many of the poems in her first collection, To Bedlam and Part Way Back.

The first poem Anne wrote, "You, Dr. Martin", reads:

You, Doctor Martin, walk
from breakfast to madness. Late August,
I speed through the antiseptic tunnel
where the moving dead still talk
of pushing their bones against the thrust
of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel
or the laughing bee on a stalk

of death. We stand in broken
lines and wait while they unlock
the doors and count us at the frozen gates
of dinner. The shibboleth is spoken
and we move to gravy in our smock
of smiles. We chew in rows, our plates
scratch and whine like chalk

in school. There are no knives
for cutting your throat. I make
moccasins all morning. At first my hands
kept empty, unraveled for the lives
they used to work. Now I learn to take
them back, each angry finger that demands
I mend what another will break

tomorrow. Of course, I love you;
you lean above the plastic sky,
god of our block, prince of all the foxes.
The breaking crowns are new
that Jack wore.
Your third eye
moves among us and lights the separate boxes
where we sleep or cry.

What large children we are
here. All over I grow most tall
in the best ward. Your business is people,
you call at the madhouse, an oracular
eye in our nest. Out in the hall
the intercom pages you. You twist in the pull
of the foxy children who fall

like floods of life in frost.
And we are magic talking to itself,
noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins
forgotten. Am I still lost?
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,
counting this row and that row of moccasins
waiting on the silent shelf.

Her first poem.

Whether or not you "like this sort of stuff" (and that is the main complaint you hear about Sexton and the other "confessional" poets) is not the point. The point is that the VOICE we meet in "You, Dr. Martin" is confident, strong, and unselfconscious. We know we are meeting the POET, not a persona, or a smokescreen of words and devices. It's not clever. Straight out of the gate, there was nothing between Anne Sexton and her expression of herself. Sylvia Plath's early poems suffer from precocity, they can come off as coy - arch - She was still working to find herself. Wonderful stuff, with some startling lines - but it wouldn't be until 1962, years into her career, when Plath would burst out with her original voice - that you would never ever mistake for anyone else's. Sexton STARTED at that point. Her voice didn't need to be developed, or honed. It came out fully-formed. There was much jealousy between the two, although they were also good friends.

Her life was not easy, she was a wild woman, and she made life hell for her husband, her kids, and anyone who really loved her. A mixture of drink, drugs, and a lifetime battle with mental illness took its toll on her relationships, certainly, but it also took its toll on her writing gift, which you can see in those later poems, which don't just read as hallucinatory or unclear - but as amateur.

Regardless: A remarkable journey. With some WONDERFUL poems.

My father saw her read her poetry in Cambridge, Massachusetts when he was in college. Her poetry readings were more like underground rock shows, with handmade posters, and an electric buzz of excitement running through the mostly-young crowd. They weren't poetry readings, they were events. Anne Sexton was gorgeous, and she would dress the part. When my dad saw her, she wore a bright red dress, slinked her legs around each other (so many of the photos of her have her twining those legs about), and chain-smoked. My dad said she was great, he remembers it well.

My favorite of hers is this one:

LIVE
Live or die, but don't poison everything...

Well, death's been here
for a long time --
it has a hell of a lot
to do with hell
and suspicion of the eye
and the religious objects
and how I mourned them
when they were made obscene
by my dwarf-heart's doodle.
The chief ingredient
is mutilation.
And mud, day after day,
mud like a ritual,
and the baby on the platter,
cooked but still human,
cooked also with little maggots,
sewn onto it maybe by somebody's mother,
the damn bitch!

Even so,
I kept right on going on,
a sort of human statement,
lugging myself as if
I were a sawed-off body
in the trunk, the steamer trunk.
This became perjury of the soul.
It became an outright lie
and even though I dressed the body
it was still naked, still killed.
It was caught
in the first place at birth,
like a fish.
But I play it, dressed it up,
dressed it up like somebody's doll.

Is life something you play?
And all the time wanting to get rid of it?
And further, everyone yelling at you
to shut up. And no wonder!
People don't like to be told
that you're sick
and then be forced
to watch
you
come
down with the hammer.

Today life opened inside me like an egg
and there inside
after considerable digging
I found the answer.
What a bargain!
There was the sun,
her yolk moving feverishly,
tumbling her prize --
and you realize she does this daily!
I'd known she was a purifier
but I hadn't thought
she was solid,
hadn't known she was an answer.
God! It's a dream,
lovers sprouting in the yard
like celery stalks
and better,
a husband straight as a redwood,
two daughters, two sea urchings,
picking roses off my hackles.
If I'm on fire they dance around it
and cook marshmallows.
And if I'm ice
they simply skate on me
in little ballet costumes.

Here,
all along,
thinking I was a killer,
anointing myself daily
with my little poisons.
But no.
I'm an empress.
I wear an apron.
My typewriter writes.
It didn't break the way it warned.
Even crazy, I'm as nice
as a chocolate bar.
Even with the witches' gymnastics
they trust my incalculable city,
my corruptible bed.

O dearest three,
I make a soft reply.
The witch comes on
and you paint her pink.
I come with kisses in my hood
and the sun, the smart one,
rolling in my arms.
So I say Live
and turn my shadow three times round
to feed our puppies as they come,
the eight Dalmatians we didn't drown,
despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy!
Despite the pails of water that waited,
to drown them, to pull them down like stones,
they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue
and fumbling for the tiny tits.
Just last week, eight Dalmatians,
3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood
each
like a
birch tree.
I promise to love more if they come,
because in spite of cruelty
and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens,
I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann.
The poison just didn't take.
So I won't hang around in my hospital shift,
repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
the dream, the excitable gift.

"All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out." -- Anne Sexton

"Untrammeled by a traditional education in Donne, Milton, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, Anne was able to strike out alone, like Conrad's secret sharer, for a new destiny. She was grim about her lost years, her lack of a college degree; she read omnivorously and quite innocently whatever came to hand and enticed her, forming her own independent, quirky, and incisive judgments. Searching for solutions to the depressive episodes that beset her with dismaying periodicty, Anne read widely in the popular psychiatric texts of the time: interpretations of Freud, Theodore Reik, Philip Reiff, Helena Deutsch, Erik Erikson, Bruno Bettelheim. During a summer-school course with Philip Rahv, she encountered the works of Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Thomas Mann. These were succeeded by the novels of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Kurt Vonnegut. But above all else, she was attracted to the fairy tales of Andersen and Grimm, which her beloved Nana had read to her when she was a child. They were for her, perhaps, what Bible stories and Greek myths had been for other writers. At the same time that she was being entertained and drawn into closer contact with a kind of collective unconscious, she was searching the fairy tales for psychological parallels." -- Maxine Kumin

"What Sexton suggested to Plath was the force of simple rhyme and simple rhythm, the magic of nursery rhyme darkened by time, of fairy tale where the happy ending somehow doesn't happen. Sexton showed Plath the way, and then Plath died first, stealing a march on her friend, which Sexton resented and envied. Four years Plath's senior, Anne Sexton survived her by twelve years, committing suicide in 1974. But Plath keeps hold of the laurels. There are wonderful things in the Complete Poems of Sexton, published in 1981, but many of them are things we associate, whatever their original source, with Plath, and Sexton's work seems but a footnote to hers." -_ Michael Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets"

"Criticism of 4 of my poems in Lowell's class: criticism of rhetoric. He sets me up with Ann Sexton, an honor, I suppose. Well, about time. She has very good things, and they get better, though there is a lot of loose stuff." -- Sylvia Plath, journal, March 20, 1959

"This then is a phenomenon ... to remind us, when we have forgotten in the weariness of literature, that poetry can happen." -- Louis Simpson on the publication of Anne Sexton's first book of poetry

"For a book or two, she grew more powerful. Then writing was too easy or too hard for her. She became meager and exaggerated. Many of her most embarrassing poems would have been fascinating if someone had put them in quotes, as the presentation of some character, not the author. -- Robert Lowell

"Have rejected the Electra poem from my book. Too forced and rhetorical. A leaf from Anne Sexton's book would do here. She has none of my clenches and an ease of phrase, and an honesty. I have my 40 unattackable poems." -- Sylvia Plath, journal, April 23, 1959

"I hold back nothing." -- Anne Sexton, 1969

"Retyped pages, a messy job, on the volume of poems I should be turning in to Houghton Mifflin this week. But AS [Anne Sexton] is there ahead of me, with her lover GS [George Starbuck] writing New Yorker odes to her and both of them together: felt our triple martini afternoons at the Ritz breaking up. That memorable afternoon at G's monastic and miserly room on Pinckney "You shouldn't have left us": where is responsibility to lie? I left, yet felt like a brown winged moth around a rather meagre candle flame, drawn. That is over." -- Sylvia Plath, journal, May 3, 1959

"Does Sexton imagine any way out of this impasse, any way to escape the debilitating terrors of a consciousness plagued by a conviction of its own evil? One possibility is to replace self-loathing with an open acceptance of evil—even admitting the likelihood that she is 'not a woman'. What is remarkable, however, is not this admission itself but the lively, almost gleeful tone in which it is uttered:

"I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming of evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

" 'A woman like that is misunderstood,' Sexton adds wryly, but the poem is a serious attempt to understand such a woman--her sense of estrangement, her impulse toward death--by internalizing evil and giving it a voice: a chortling, self-satisfied, altogether amiable voice which suggests that 'evil' is perhaps the wrong word after all. Sexton's witch, waving her 'nude arms at villages going by,' becomes something of value to the community, performing the function Kurt Vonnegut has called the 'domestication of terror.' Unlike Plath's madwoman in 'Lady Lazarus'--a woman at the service of a private, unyielding anger, a red-haired demon whose revenge is to 'eat men like air'--Sexton's witch is essentially harmless. Although she remains vulnerable--'A woman like that is not afraid to die'--she rejects anger in favor of humor, flamboyance, self-mockery. She is a kind of perverse entertainer, and if she seems cast in the role of a martyr, embracing madness in order to domesticate it for the rest of the community--making it seem less threatening, perhaps even enjoyable--it is nevertheless a martyrdom which this aspect of Sexton accepts with a peculiar zest." -- Greg Johnson on Anne Sexton's perhaps most-famous poem, "Her Kind"

Her Kind
by Anne Sexton

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

"Once, when I wrote to her about my terror of publishing a second book of poems, she answered: 'Don't dwell on the book's reception. The point is to get on with it--you have a life's work ahead of you--no point in dallying around waiting for approval. We all want it, I know, but the point is to reach out honestly--that's the whole point. I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any of us--or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem--a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer--it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem. You have the gift-- and with it comes responsibility--you mustn't neglect or be mean to that gift--you must let it do its work. It has more rights than the ego that wants approval.'" -- Erica Jong

"It would be hard to find a writer who dwells more insistently on the pathetic and disgusting aspects of bodily experience." -- James Dickey - the man who wrote "Deliverance", a book that had, if I recall, quite a few "disgusting aspects". I suppose when women write about their bodies it's just grosser to some people. Oh, boo-hoo. I love Dickey's poems, but I do not like this comment of his.

"[Sexton's poems] raise the never-solved problem of what literature really is, where you draw the line between art and documentary." -- Hayden Carruth

"My own struggle with Anne Sexton, for twenty years now, has not been about her subject matter (she is the one who taught me that you can write a poem about anything), but about the blatant deterioration of her talent. Sexton's Complete Poems appeared in 1981, edited by her daughter/literary executor Linda Gray Sexton. This volume includes the eight books Anne Sexton sent to press during her lifetime, as well as one hundred and thirty pages of posthumously published poems. Though fascinating as Sexton documents, the latter are shockingly sloppy and full of over-the-top, bad-trip imagery. This, coupled with the fact that the last three books she did publish (The Book of Folly, The Death Notebooks, and That Awful Rowing Toward God) saw an obvious decline in quality, has made it difficult to come to grips with her complete body of work. It also didn't help that, after her death, her former mentor Robert Lowell wrote that her writing had become "meager and exaggerated." I jokingly refer to Sexton's late period as "Bad Anne." How else to reconcile such slipshod lines as "I flee. I flee. / I block my ears and eat salami" with her amazing early metaphors ("leaves . . . born in their own green blood / like the hands of mermaids") and admissions ("Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself")? It's too painful to think of her simply as a brilliant poet who got bad. And too easy, somehow, to blame it on pills, alcohol, insanity, fame. Better, I recently decided, to think of her as a genius with demons, writing to beat the clock. " -- David Trinidad

"Her delineation of femaleness [is] so fanatical that it makes one wonder, even after many years of being one, what a woman is." -- Mona Van Duyn

"All I need now is to hear that GS [George Starbuck] or MK [Maxine Kumin] has won the Yale and get a rejection of my children's book. AS [Anne Sexton] has her book accepted at HM and this afternoon will be drinking champagne. Also an essay accepted by PJHH [Peter J. Henniker-Heaton], the copy-cat. But who's to criticize a more successful copy-cat. Not to mention a poetry reading at McLean. And GS at supper last night, smug as a cream-fed cat, very pleased indeed, for AS is, in a sense, his answer to me." -- Sylvia Plath, journal, May 20th, 1959

"Her vision of Him as the winner in a crooked poker game at the end of that book [The Awful Rowing Toward God] is a sporting admission of her defeat rather than a decisive renewal of the Christian myth." -- Estella Lauter

"One feels tempted to drop [Sexton's poems] furtively in the nearest ashcan, rather than to be caught with them in the presence of so much naked suffering." -- James Dickey

"NOW: the story about George, J-- and Ann, and the children. An insufferable woman (myself of course) gets involved in the separated family. She thinks G will be fondest of her, tells mad wife (she's sick, I mean, really sick) it is of course Ann, feels very clever. Then finds out, when A's book is accepted, it is really A, gets furious. Calls up society, or gets sociologist friend to call up society for prevention of cruelty for children, never really finds out if they get through. Day in park. Children can't speak, finds herself throwing peanuts to pigeons etc. Ducks, squirrels, children blank-staring and oblivious. Smell bad, girl urinates on bench. I wouldn't be surprised to read tomorrow in the paper how that little girl was killed falling from that roof. Of course she never does read any such thing. Her good will perverted, conditional on pity that would generate from self if G was her lover, when cheated of that, it becomes nasty busybodiness. THE OLYMPIANS. Poor, married poets in Ritz bar. -- Sylvia Plath, jotting down sketches for a story about Anne Sexton, journal, June 15, 1959

Sylvia's Death - by Anne Sexton
for Sylvia Plath

O Sylvia, Sylvia,
with a dead box of stones and spoons,

with two children, two meteors
wandering loose in a tiny playroom,

with your mouth into the sheet,
into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,

(Sylvia, Sylvia
where did you go
after you wrote me
from Devonshire
about rasing potatoes
and keeping bees?)

what did you stand by,
just how did you lie down into?

Thief --
how did you crawl into,

crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,

the death we said we both outgrew,
the one we wore on our skinny breasts,

the one we talked of so often each time
we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,

the death that talked of analysts and cures,
the death that talked like brides with plots,

the death we drank to,
the motives and the quiet deed?

(In Boston
the dying
ride in cabs,
yes death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)

O Sylvia, I remember the sleepy drummer
who beat on our eyes with an old story,

how we wanted to let him come
like a sadist or a New York fairy

to do his job,
a necessity, a window in a wall or a crib,

and since that time he waited
under our heart, our cupboard,

and I see now that we store him up
year after year, old suicides

and I know at the news of your death
a terrible taste for it, like salt,

(And me,
me too.
And now, Sylvia,
you again
with death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)

And I say only
with my arms stretched out into that stone place,

what is your death
but an old belonging,

a mole that fell out
of one of your poems?

(O friend,
while the moon's bad,
and the king's gone,
and the queen's at her wit's end
the bar fly ought to sing!)

O tiny mother,
you too!
O funny duchess!
O blonde thing!

"I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life." -- Anne Sexton

Hudson is:

A really really good dog.

When I yawn ...

... and make that little "oh" sound as I yawn, Hope completely flips out. She doesn't seem to connect that yawn sound to ME making it - it seems as though an alien being (invisible) has entered our little room and is tormenting her, taunting her. Her ears shoot up, her eyes bug out, she gets very very flat, and stares around her, trying to find the source of the sound.

It's hilarious.

I need to yawn more often.

A Book of Days for 1931: November 8

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

NOVEMBER 8, SUNDAY 1931

Non sunt ad coelum elevandae manus nec exorandus aedituus, ut nos ad aurem simulacri, quasi magis exaudiri possimus, admittat. Prope est a te deus, tecum est, intus est. Sacer intra nos spiritus sedet, malorum bonorumque nostrorum observator et custos.

[It is vain to raise hands toward heaven or to beg the sexton to admit us to the ear of the image, as though we might thus be heard the better. God is near thee, he is beside thee, he is within thee. The holy spirit lives inside ourselves, observer and guardian of our good and ill.]

-- SENECA, Epistles

Speaking of Mickey Rourke and the Irish:

Oh were we? Yes, we were. Where were YOU?

In this post about Laurette Taylor and her comeback, MrG and I start to discuss Mickey Rourke in the comments, and the possibility of his giant comeback - which seriously, if it actually happens, will be like a man resurrecting himself from the dead. But we started to talk about what roles would be wonderful - in a perfect world - for him (we were thinking of the stage, primarily). I was leaning towards Tennessee Williams (mainly because of the Laurette Taylor connection) - but MrG brought up O'Neill, which struck me as really insightful - he'd be wonderful in any of O'Neill's rough "plays of the sea", where the characters are rough around the edges, tormented, macho, tender ... all that crap that Rourke has going on in spades, but I have now decided that 10 years from now Mickey Rourke must play James Tyrone in Long Days Journey Into Night - BEAR WITH ME - (excerpt here) - just try to picture it, try to see it, and you will see how brilliant the idea is. Anyway, I'm going to fantasize about it with or without your permission. He couldn't do it now, he needs to be in his 60s ... but the thought of him playing that ruined bear of an actor, a man who sold out his divine talent to perform in TRASH only for the money, a man in denial about his own pain and his own contributions to his family's pain ... a man who can't even deal with the fact that he 'coulda been a contendah' in the theatre, if he had just had the courage to not sell out ... not to mention the man's staunch Irish Catholicism, which Rourke also shares, and the battle with alcoholism ... it's all there.

Well, frankly, it must happen, that's all.

I'm on it.

How else do you get things done in this universe except by putting the idea out there?? (Of course it would be wonderful if I could also do that for my OWN life, as opposed to focusing on what Mickey Rourke should be doing 10 years from now ... but that's besides the point. We all need our fantasies to get us through the dark moments, and I'm going to be fantasizing about an aging Mickey Rourke playing the bitter failed Irish patriarch if that's all right with you.)

The Books: "Jimmy Stewart: A Biography" (Marc Elliot)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Jimmy Stewart: A Biography, by Marc Elliot

I had misplaced this book and forgot about it - so even though we are now at "T" in the alphabet, I have to swoop back and include this book. I'm too OCD to let it slide.

Marc Elliot appears to be the new bigwig on the block, in terms of serious in-depth entertainment biographies. A couple of years ago, he came out with a detailed huge book about Cary Grant (Excerpt here), and he just came out with a book called Reagan: The Hollywood Years, which I am eager to read.

Here is what I think Elliot's gift is. He does not skimp on the movies themselves of his particular subject - he delves into the meaning of a career, rather than just its surface elements. So - what are the phases of Stewart's career? What did Capra bring out in him? What did Mann? What did Hitchcock? But I think his real gift (and I noticed this in the Cary Grant book too) is in breaking down for us, through meticulous research, all of the business decisions of the powers-that-be that made these men such giant stars (besides their talent, I mean). Elliot is brilliant on contracts and negotiations and the repercussions thereof. That stuff can be rather dry, especially for a fangirl like myself, but it's never dry with him. It becomes THE thing that sets his book apart from other books. Cary Grant had a precedent-breaking deal with a couple of studios - unheard-of at the time. He was basically freelance. How did he do that?? Elliot breaks it down for us, and makes us see just how prescient Grant was - he wasn't just lucky, he was smart - and he does the same thing here with Stewart. Stewart's agent got him a deal for the profits of the films he worked on - which catapulted him up into the highest echelon of salaries. He became a millionaire with that deal. Because the real money isn't in the salary you make as an actor. The REAL money is when you get a piece of the film itself. Actors nowadays all have such deals, it's part of being a star. You produce the film, or you help produce it - you negotiate for a portion of the gross profits. I remember when Jack Nicholson somehow got that kind of deal for himself when he played "The Joker" - not only did he get a portion of the film, but also a portion of all the memorabilia surrounding the film. It made front-page news at the time. That is a gargantuan sum. But back in the 30s and 40s, even though these people were huge stars, they were still, essentially, contract players. Now, naturally, they made a lot of money - but the deals of Stewart and Grant changed the industry. It was a prophecy of things to come, of the studio collapse, of all actors going freelance, and the result being that salaries skyrocketed. When Stewart got the deal for the profits of the film, every actor in Hollywood started pressing their agents to get them similar deals. The pressures on the studio were enormous. "If HE can have that, then I want it, too!"

I love this story that Quincy Jones tells, which is relevant. He and Grant were good friends. Grant came from a poverty-struck lower-class background, and Jones and he clicked on that level - Jones said something like, "The lower class in England was looked down upon like black people were in America - we understood each other." And once, he mentioned to Grant his theory of "horizontal money":

Sometimes I would get into a lot of mixed metaphors. The way I expressed things cracked Cary up because it was so un-British. For instance, I would say, 'I'm getting to the age where I've got to start making some more horizontal money.' He asked me what that meant. I explained, 'Well, when I'm up in the studio conducting, that's vertical money. But when you're at home watching TV and An Affair to Remember comes on, that's horizontal money.' Cary talked about that for years. He told all his friends.

The real money to be made is not the vertical money. That's just you WORKING for your living. But when you lie down to rest, and you STILL make money, then you're in the horizontal bracket, and you're then all set. Very few actors make horizontal money, although it's a little bit better now because of residuals. Although, let's be honest - those only really matter for the stars, the Bea Arthurs and the David Schwimmers and the Julia Louis-Dreyfuss who honestly never have to work again because of their residuals. My friend and I were recently laughing - her husband had a small part on The Sopranos, he appeared in one episode. He recently got a check - a CHECK - for eighteen cents. So that's what residuals are for your basic day-players - so that's not REALLY "horizontal money". My friend's husband was laughing like, "Do I CASH this? This is an insult!" Most actors, even successful ones, still have to hustle to sing for their supper. But people like Stewart and Grant saw the opportunity in that horizontal money - Grant was an independent spirit, he didn't even have an agent, for God's sake - he negotiated that deal for himself! In the 1930s! Unheard of. Stewart had a shark of an agent who did it all for him - but nevertheless there is a similarity in the two men's trajectories, in terms of horizontal money.

So Elliot is really really good on that level. Hollywood opens its secret doors of negotiations when you read him and you start to get a sense of how things actually work.

But he is also good, like I mentioned earlier, in describing the feel of a person's career. Not just "what happened", but what it MEANT. What was Jimmy Stewart's persona? How did it change? What did he mean to people? And how did THAT change? Elliot sometimes falls into the trap of analyzing Stewart's films in terms of how they fit in with Stewart's biography - and I'm not wacky about that because it seems to discount the creative spirit. Meaning, Elliot will say things like, "Stewart was probably attracted to the role because it showed a character who had unresolved issues with his father, and Stewart had those same issues." Uhm, not so fast. How about he was attracted to the role because it was a good part? Acting is NOT an exorcism of personal demons. Or, it can be - but that seems to me to be a byproduct, not a goal. Stewart may have been releasing some demons in some of his best parts (it is apparent that he was) - but the choice to DO the role is often more complex (or simple) than: "Let me work on this because I went through the same thing ..." Acting can be rather mysterious, especially for those who have a gift for it. You don't always know WHY you are attracted to something. It may just feel like a good role and then in retrospect you realize how much it dovetails with your own experience. I'm not saying Elliot is wrong - it just becomes too simplistic at times.

Regardless, his analysis of the development of Stewart's career was really interesting and although I have always loved Stewart, I did not know a lot of his story. Much of this was new to me. I've seen most of his great movies and love him quite a bit, but I didn't know about the subtle change in him over the years, from naive idealist to dark torment ... or I noticed the change from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to Vertigo but never really thought much about it. Jimmy Stewart was not a sex symbol. Women loved him, but they wanted to mother him. His early roles show that. He has a slow delivery of his lines, deliberate, he doesn't waste his energy. He doesn't push. He was a leading man, but not like Gary Cooper was a leading man, or Cary Grant. He had something different going on.

Capra illuminated the idealist, the man willing to almost destroy himself in pursuit of an idea, a goal - a shining martyr to America ... but how fascinating - you never could have predicted this: Anthony Mann saw something else in Stewart after WWII - and it probably saved his career. Stewart in a Western?

This now seems so obvious, because he made so many good ones - but back in the early 40s that was not the case. Stewart was a small-town guy, totally present-day, a shambling slow-talking sweetheart, maybe a little too naive - but not idiotically so. Mann saw that Stewart could bring a cold intellectual quality to a role, there was something in him that was NOT passionate - and while in certain roles that made him the sweet man that he was, put into another context it could be quite threatening. Mann revived Stewart's career and gave it new life. It's interesting to consider that so many of Stewart's movies that are now seen as classics were not hits at the time. It's A Wonderful Life flopped. Vertigo didn't flop, but it wasn't a success. Stewart was one of those actors lucky enough to live long enough to see the development of television totally revive his career - he was in his twilight years when It's a Wonderful Life started its unstoppable juggernaut on holiday television, and it catapulted him back up into the stratosphere. Same with the film nuts of the 70s and 80s - famous people now - Scorsese and the like - who saw the depth and breadth of his work and ran film festivals of the films he did with Hitchcock or Mann. Stewart did not die in obscurity, only to be re-discovered with the advent of cable television and TCM. It's a Wonderful Life on television made him a huge star all over again.

I know there are so many great moments in Jimmy Stewart's long and illustrious career, but I have to say - that that phone call scene in It's a Wonderful Life is my favorite bit of all. You just ache watching it. So so good.

Elliot is also very interesting on Jimmy Stewart's experiences in WWII and how it changed him forever. Here's a really nice tribute post about Stewart as a pilot - very inspiring (and that looks to be a really nice site, in general. I've been scrolling through his archives and I am very impressed and moved). Jimmy Stewart, post WWII, was darker and more tormented than he had been before. Scorsese writes:

If the prewar Stewart stood for something essentially American, the postwar Stewart stood for something truly universal. It's difficult to think of another American star who remade his own image so thoroughly, or so bravely.

It's a Wonderful Life came out after WWII, and it was thought it would be a huge hit, that the American populace would respond lovingly to its message, after so many years of fear and hardship. But that was not the case. Films after WWII got darker, more overtly political and paranoid, film noir became the next thing, and home and hearth were definitely not what the audiences were responding to. VERY interesting. Stewart realized that after the flop of It's a Wonderful Life and looked about for something to revive him, a new path, something different.

It was directors like Mann or Hitchcock who allowed him to express all of this new stuff - even though he didn't appear in war pictures. Stewart, after WWII, refused to ever appear as a soldier on film. There might have been one or two pictures where he caved on this stated principle of his - but in general, he did not want to be in a movie that depicted war, or glorified it. He had had it. He was a staunch lifelong Republican, he was proud of his service, and he was also proud of his son for serving (his son ended up dying in Vietnam, which shattered Stewart) - but he didn't want to participate in any way in films that glorified war. So he didn't. He also never spoke about his experiences (although the tributes given to him by men who served with him are eloquent and very moving), and whatever it was that had changed him remained private - but we can see the result in the films following WWII. Elliot analyzes the difference in the persona, pre- and post- and I hadn't really thought about it before, but you can really really see it in the films. Thank goodness Stewart had directors who saw something in him other than the aw-shucks idealist, because his career would have been short and boring otherwise. He's wonderful in romantic comedies - I love him in the sweetness of those old movies - but Hitchcock, in the same way he did with Cary Grant, saw something else in Stewart. And look at how different the two men are. You can't really picture Stewart in To Catch a Thief and it's hard to imagine Cary Grant in Vertigo. Hitchcock was brilliant in his perception at what was beneath the glitter in these two huge stars. Hitchcock kept coming back to Stewart. He was honing his own idea of the man, and you can see that in the development of the pictures they made together.

Fascinating.

Jimmy Stewart is a great American actor, and it was really fun for me to get to know him as a person a little bit better. I admire him even more now. I don't think his longevity was an accident. I think he was a practical man, who thought practically about his choices as an actor, and was willing (especially in things like Vertigo) to show himself as weak, human and conflicted. This is not the case of most giant male stars. They get more cautious as they get older (phone for Robert DeNiro, a call for Robert DeNiro) - not Stewart. He got braver ... and braver ... and braver ... and braver ...

Remarkable.

Here's an excerpt from the book about the byzantine negotiations that went in to the making of Philadelphia Story. It shows Marc Elliot's gift for making clear and real the contractual issues and back-and-forth that happens when getting ready to do a movie.

EXCERPT FROM Jimmy Stewart: A Biography, by Marc Elliot

In 1939, Cukor was then hired by Katharine Hepburn to make a movie out of Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story, a project she and Howard Hughes, her secret investor (and lover), had commissioned Barry to write for her and had taken to Broadway in an attempt to reestablish her popularity. Hayward, meanwhile, who had navigated Hepburn out of her free-fall and anticipated a major comeback with the film version of her smash-hit Broadway vehicle, looked to play the role of fixer for Jimmy as well by getting him a role in what was shaping to be on the most anticipated movies of 1940. If anything could save Jimmy's career, Hayward figured, it was The Philadelphia Story.¹

Not that getting the film made was all that easy. Despite The Philadelphia Story's soaring success on stage that made it the talk of the 1939 Broadway season, its New York-based cast of actors and actresses - Joseph Cotten as C.K. Dexter Haven, Tracy Lord's (Hepburn's) divorced first husband, Van Heflin as Macaulay Connor, the sardonic gossip columnist; and Shirley Booth as Macaulay's wisecracking sidekick, Elizabeth Embrie - failed to impress Hollywood when the studios came looking to buy the rights for a film version. Nobody wanted Cotten, Heflin, Booth, and especially Hepburn. When Selznick initially wanted to buy the property as a star vehicle for Bette Davis, Hepburn adamantly refused to sell to him. When MGM wanted it for Joan Crawford, Hepburn again said no. When Warner Bros. wanted it for Ann Sheridan, ditto. When independent film maker Samuel Goldwyn was willing to take Hepburn to get the rights to the play, but only if Gary Cooper were her co-star and William Wyler directed, Hepburn flatly turned him down. She then made it clear to one and all: either George Cukor directed her in the film version of The Philadelphia Story or there was not going to be a movie version.

Finally, Louis B. Mayer put an offer on the table that Hepburn liked - $175,000 for the rights, $75,000 for her to reprise her Broadway performance as Tracy Lord, and George Cukor at the helm. Mayer envisioned Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy (whom Hepburn had not yet met), or Robert Taylor in the role of C.K. Dexter Haven, and in the role of the gossip columnist Macaulay Connor (as a favor to Hayward, after the agent suggested to Mayer he could make the deal happen), James Stewart.

Gable, Tracy, and Taylor all turned down the film, presumably because they each felt it was still too risky a career move to star opposite box-office dud Hepburn. (Besides, Gable was already looking ahead to play Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind and didn't want to work with Cukor, anyway, who was gay, and who the homophobic Gable believed favored filming female stars over their male co-stars.)²

Jimmy's reactio to being offered the role of Macaulay Connor was, on the other hand, one of pleasant surprise. "When I first read the script," he said later on, "I thought I was being considered for that fellow engaged to Hepburn. But as I read it, I thought to myself, ooh, that reporter part [Connor] is a good one. I'll be happy to play it."

Unfortunately for Jimmy, Grant wanted to play Connor rather than the part he had been offered, of Lord's ex-husband Dexter Haven, believing, although it was essentially a supporting role rather than the male lead, it was better written and funnier. However, as far as Cukor and Hepburn were concerned, Grant had to be her romantic co-star. In the context of the film's re-worked script, so as not to impede too much on the film's romantic track, the role of Connor was reduced to little more than a foil to Grant's star turn as Tracy's disgruntled but still-in-love, once-and-future husband.³

Stewart accepted the role of Connor without hesitation, even after he learned from Hayward how much more money Grant and Hepburn were being paid. Grant, four years older than Stewart and with a far more established screen presence, had become the first actor to successfully overcome the hitherto-ironclad studio salary system in 1936 by not renewing his original five-year deal with Paramount. Instead he signed two nonexclusive multiple-picture deals with Columbia and RKO, and reserved the right to negotiate his fees and percentages on a per-film basis. When Mayer offered him The Philadelphia Story, he agreed to sign on with two conditions. The first was that he be paid $137,500 - twice what Hepburn was getting, figuring correctly that she would make her money on the back end if the film proved a hit. The second was that he receive top billing, to which Hepburn also agreed.

For Mayer, it was a sweet deal, especially considering that for all he was paying for Hepburn and Grant, he had Jimmy under a tight financial rein. He was paying him $3,000 a week, which meant that for the five weeks the film was in production, from July 5 through August 14, Jimmy would earn a total of $15,000. Although he was not happy about the discrepancy in salaries, he also knew he was in no position to complain and said nothing. But he wouldn't forget either when, two years down the line, it would be time to renew his own contract with the studio.

¹ Generally credited with resurrecting Hepburn's career, Cukor always claimed to have "discovered" Cary Grant, although Grant had made twenty movies before Sylvia Scarlett, and had developed something of a name for himself playing opposite Marlene Dietrich for Josef von Sternberg in Blonde Venus (1932) and opposite Mae West two times, in Lowell Sherman's She Done Him Wrong (1933) and Wesley Ruggles's I'm No Angel (1933). In 1954, Cukor, at producer Sid Luft's urging, performed another female career resurrection a la Hepburn, this time for Judy Garland, against Warner Bros.' wishes, after she had been released by her contract at MGM, by casting her as the female lead in A Star Is Born.

² Cukor was hired to direct Gone With the Wind, but was quickly fired at Gable's insistence, replaced by his friend, macho film veter