Letter From Elba

Author’s Note: Hanukkah is upon us and I think it only fitting to mention that my son Nick doesn’t have a prayer of being buried in a Jewish cemetery.  Paging Larry David…

Every year when flu seasons rolls around, I invariably ask my son, “Did you get a flu shot?”  And every year he invariably winces, instictively recoils, and flatly declares, “Dude. You know I’m needle-phobic.”

Yeah, I know.

Then how do you explain that prison tat on his calf (a crude baby with a screw through its eye done by a fellow “inmate” at his boarding school) something Native American inked on his shoulder, and down his arm,  an entire “sleeve” of pine green- a tribute to the rugged glory of the Colorado national forests?

(I’m not exactly sure which arm because when he proudly unveiled it, I nearly fainted.  I’ve never asked for an encore.)

Wassup with that?

Remember when we were teenagers and we horrified our parents with pierced ears, long hair, side burns, mustaches, bleached blue jeans, cut-offs, extra-wide bell bottoms, mini skirts?  In 1967, I vowed to stay cutting-edge, fashion forward and to never trust anyone over thirty’s dress code.

I knew that I would beat the odds and stay forever young, forever in blue jeans, forever hip and forever relevant. And I knew that I would never visit any fuddy-duddy, old fogey beliefs on my offspring.

They would live free; that very freedom forged by my own peer group’s struggle with the generation gap.  I fought the good fight so that my children could someday express themselves in any way they saw fit.  And I promised that I would always be okay with all their decisions.

OMG! and WTF!  How stupid, unsuspecting, naive, idiotic was I?  I never realized that it is every new generation’s sacred mandate to up the ante and stick it to the older one where the sun don’t shine.  (Like in the Colorado national forests.)

To be fair, my daughter Natasha never rebelled by way of her clothing.

Conservative by nature and reinforced by boarding school, I never saw her in anything that wasn’t navy blue, forest green, or khaki.  (Sometimes she would go totally crazy and maroon or gray might make an appearance in her William F. Buckley-approved closet.)

But she does have pierced ears.  When she was in first grade, I myself had taken her to get them done.

I hadn’t planned it.  It was just a go-to response when yet-another bad haircut robbed her of what little hair she was born with in the first place.

(Sidebar: I had tons of hair so I always knew that any offspring I eventually had would be blessed with luxuriant locks.  Wrong again.  Both my kids inherited the “bad hair” gene from their father. You could almost see them thinking.  So much for the domination of the “strong over the weak”  theory.  Thanks a lot, Gregor Mendel.)

She looked so pathetic with this moth-eaten pixie cut that I asked her if she wanted to get her ears pierced- now that you could see them.

Natasha eagerly assented and we immediately drove over to Claire’s Boutique, home to millions of earpiercings nationwide.  The gal with the stud gun explained what she was going to do.  Natasha bravely agreed but clasped my hand for support.

Boom!  The first earring shot into her ear lobe.   But before the tech had time to reload, I found myself holding onto a limp body.

It hadn’t hurt her but the noise had startled her and she passed right out.  I grabbed her to keep her from hitting the floor.  And when she came to she still needed the other ear done.

She bravely agreed to another go and no, she didn’t pass out- then.  As I was paying at the register, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her start to sag.  I whirled around and made a Ron Swoboda shoestring catch.

I did not want a repeat performance from my son.

And besides, he had no real earlobes. (I pointed this defect out every time he toyed with the idea.)  And it wasn’t too hard to dissuade him.  He hated the thought of needles and he repeatedly assured me that he wouldn’t be going to Claire’s Boutique any time soon.

I rested easy. Ha!  It was just a plot to throw me off the scent.  He had much bigger fish to fry.

(Second sidebar: Along with the “bad hair gene,” their dashing father had also passed on the “peacock” gene.  If Natasha was the plainer, littler pea hen, then Nick had been endowed with all the instincts of the rampant male of the species.)

First, when he was thirteen, Nick dyed his hair Nedlog neon-orange.  Awful, but not permanent and besides, as he pointed out with Beavis-like glee, “Chicks dig it!”

And then there were some interesting expressions vis–a–vis his clothing.  Although he, too, had attended the same prep school as Natasha, my son manipulated its stuffy dress code to the breaking point.

Sports jacket, tie and khakis were required-wearing.  But Nick had ditched all his J. Press approved garb the minute he hit Newport.  He found a local thrift store and loaded up on zoot suits, ratty old tweed blazers, cast-off vests and mildewed sports jackets in colors like dried Zingerman’s mustard and Exorcist pea green.

And he bought one Mickey Mouse tie that he slip-knotted over his head every school day for two years.

(By the way, this up-the-establishment way of dress has stuck with him ever since.  His clothes may have improved enormously since boarding school days, but once that Mickey Mouse tie- in every sense of the phrase- was off, it was off.

Today Nick’s in the tech industry, and at thirty-two, the eminence grisé of his firm.  And  he has never again had to put on a tie.  A major part of his job requirement.)

(Third sidebar: Nick has also mentioned to me, on more than one occasion, that if he ever finds the guy who invented “preppie,” he is going to kill him.  Hey, does anybody know a good defense attorney?)

I never even thought to put out a zero tolerance policy on tattoos.  Nick hated getting shots.  He was violently needle-phobic, just as I had been as a kid.  Nick would never, ever, ever get a tattoo.  If there was one thing I was absolutely sure of, it was this.  ALL my mother’s intuition told me I didn’t have to worry.  I would have bet the farm.

So here I am today farm-less.  Somehow Nick conquered his fear and looks like just the kind of bro Queequeg would be proud to hang with.

Well, it could have been worse, I suppose.  Nick could have gotten the earrings and Natasha the tattoos.

I guess I’m going to have to take a trip back to the sixties and mellow out.

Peace, brothers and sisters.  Or should I say mothers and fathers?

Just the other day, I saw Lincoln.  No, not the movie- the man.  All kidding aside, I can truly say that when I emerged from the theater, I felt that I had just spent two hours with the world’s most troubled soul since Job.

This poor guy’s time was divided up with the need to pay attention to his unhinged, tormented harridan of a wife, grieve for a lost son, play with a young living one, stand firm with a defiant older one, arm-twist, speechify, amuse, spin a yarn, cajole, threaten, josh and deceive.

In short, practice “politics- the art of the possible.”  Not to mention, negotiate the last days of the Civil War and race to pass the Thirteenth Amendment before the conflict’s close.

And the experience was awesome.  In the purest (not surfer) meaning of the word.  Think of what you’ve got here.

In the beginning there was the Word.  And here all the words are exquisitely written by that Angel in America himself- Tony Kushner.  And he knows lots of them.

Some are lofty, some earthy, some moving, some hilarious, some hurtful, all brilliant, and all perfectly-chosen.  And he harnesses his majestic talent to serve a great biography, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals- the “bible” of this endeavor.

(Sidebar:  When I worked for Pioneer Press my boss, the wonderful Dorothy Andries, invited me to hear Doris lecture.  What a treat.  No surprise that she was a brilliant and entertaining speaker.)

Then you have the prodigious talents of Daniel Day-Lewis.  Academy Award winner twice in the past, his Lincoln performance is a shoe-in for the hat trick.  To compare this guy’s acting chops to anyone else’s this year is just not fair.  They ought to give him the Oscar and then permanently retire him to an Actor’s Hall of Fame and let the other boys have a chance.

And last, but in no way least, is the Wizard of Jaws himself, the legendary Steven Spielberg.  The majesty and scope of the subject- Abraham Lincoln- and the subject matter- The Civil War and slavery-  this is the stuff he was born to direct.  He needed every bit of his genius, talent, know-how and money to do this film justice.  And does he ever bring it.

But as he pans over the carnage and we think back to other attacks on American soil, it is hard to comprehend that this slaughter was not the work of a crazy terrorist jihad or a mean-minded hurricane with the cheerleader name- Sandy.

This is one American killing another.  “Brother against brother” in the parlance of the day.  Simply incomprehensible.  If some foreign nation wreaked one thousandth of the havoc on our citizenry that this whirlwind did, we would have obliterated them from the face of the earth.  But these soldiers and military masterminds were ALL American.  An unbelivable concept to grasp.

I urge you all to go see this.  I hesitate to call it a movie.  Skyfall is a movie- and a fun one.  This is an experience in time travel and a lesson in making hard moral choices.

On a different note, one of my own personal heroes, “Marse Robert,” the very noble and tragic Robert E. Lee, has a cameo appearance near the end of the movie.  The moment I saw them lead in old Traveler, his almost-equally famous horse, I knew General Lee would not be far behind.

His talents and abilities matched Lincoln’s.  As number one cadet in his graduating class at West Point, he was a model soldier and a brilliant engineer.  Did you know that President Lincoln offered him the command of the Union Army first?  Think about that. He did.  Long and hard.  The generals he was going to have to face and kill were his college classmates, chums, and old Army comrades.

His father, “Light Horse Harry” was an officer in the Revolutionary War.  His wife, Mary, was a relation of Martha Washington.  He fought valiantly in the Mexican-American War, and he himself had been the “Supe,” Superintendant of the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Your blood doesn’t get more red, white and blue than that.  But he was a Virginian first and an American second.

Much to his ever-lasting sorrow.  In a way, his end game was more tragic than Lincoln’s. He didn’t die after Appomattox Court House.  He lived to see everything he loved and revered destroyed.

Starting with his beloved home, Arlington.  As punishment for his war crimes, Lee’s stately home and magnificent grounds were not only seized, they were turned into a cemetary.  His family, never able to return to a property that had belonged to them for generations, had to suffer the horror of watching it being turned into a mass graveyard for the “enemy” dead.

Today we only think of Arlington National Cemetary as a sacred place where JFK, RFK and other distinguished vets are buried with pomp and circumstance.  And it is.  But imagine if someone took your dear house and did this right in front of your horrified eyes.

I guess I’m saying that the whole nation paid a huge price for that war.  Concepts won. Freedom won.  Right won.  The evil and abomination of slavery was abolished, thank God. But the cost in human misery was incalculable- and in many ways continues to this very day.

Blue State?  Red State?  At least 625,000 American boys died back then because of that very same divisiveness.  And can we honestly say that their deaths settled things today?

It all depends on your point of view.  One day, the famous film triple threat and six-time Academy Award winner, writer-director-producer Joe Mankiewicz came upon his Austrian-born wife reading a book and crying her eyes out.

“What’s wrong?” he asked her anxiously.

“Oh, Joe,” she sobbed.  “I’m right in the middle of Gone with the Wind and if the South loses, I’ll kill myself!”

I know Abe Lincoln, the Great Emancipator himself, would have grinned at that one.

As this post happens to fall on Thanksgiving, let me take the opportunity to wish you- my dear friends and readers- the happiest and healthiest of holidays.  I am so thankful for your generous support of this endeavor.  It’s so nice to be appreciated.  God bless you one and all.

And speaking of Him, do you ever watch Inside the Actors Studio?  The host, James Lipton, always ends each celebrity interview by asking his guest “If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you enter the Pearly Gates?”

My go-to answer has always been, “Come on in, Ellen.  Most of your husbands- and all of your dogs- are here.”

But lately I find myself recanting.  These days I want God to tell me, “Don’t worry, Ellen. Van Gogh knows.”

You see, on behalf of all the creative people past, present, and future who have gone to their deaths unsung, or worse- vilified or laughed at- to me Heaven is the place where they finally get their due.

In 2002 I came in from Aspen to see the Art Institute’s Van Gogh/Gauguin show.  The two painters had been, by necessity, roommates in Arles, France for a brief time.  Their works-sometimes of the same subject- were hung together in an exhibition called “The Studio of the South.”

It was a transformative artistic experience for me.  I don’t know if it was the power of the glorious paintings themselves- coupled with the tragic back stories- or my own personal demons, but when I saw Vincent’s “The Starry Night,” I was overwhelmed.

It seems a little hokey now and I am embarrassed to admit it, but that painting spoke to me.  (And to Don Mclean, it would seem.)  I found its message almost holy- and ineffably sad.  And somehow, it was an emblem of redemption and hope at the same time.

Come on.  How could one crazy guy do all that with just some paint and a piece of canvas?  It’s not even big.

There’s only one way to account for it.  Genius.  And the same was true for his other paintings in the show.  By now familiar and famous images that are so much a part of the culture, we take their beauty, power and grace for granted.  The fact that he only sold one of these masterpieces in his lifetime has become part of the Van Gogh lore.  Repeated almost as much as the “ear-cutting” bit.

But I can never get past it.  Neither he- nor his devoted and long-suffering art dealer brother Theo- ever knew that he would go down in history as one of the greats.

Difficult, mentally ill and unstable, hard to be around, drunk, unattractive, odd, it was easy to despise the man and dismiss the artist.  If not for the financial and emotional support of his saintly brother, Vincent’s fate would have been sealed long before he took that gun out to that field.

And when he died, his landlord burned his paintings.  He just wanted to get rid of the trash.  (The same thing happened to Toulouse-Lautrec, by the way.  But he’s a different case.  Born rich and noble, he lived just long enough to see his paintings hailed as masterworks and he did sell throughout his lifetime.  The dwarfism and the resultant absinthe addiction did him in.  Not the lack of artistic recognition.)

So sad.  And Van Gogh’s not the only one I worry about.

Do you think Maria Callas knows in what regard she is held today?  Or what about poor, poor, tragic Norma Jean?

Fired from her last picture no less.  Held up to ridicule by her indifferent-to-her-charms studio bosses.  Dismissed as a mere “movie star” by many members of the very same Actor’s Studio that started this post.  Desperately insecure and worried that Elizabeth Taylor was making more bank and getting more ink.

Do you think Marilyn knows what happened to her?  She might be the number one pop icon in the world.  She is worshipped by the likes of Madonna and Mariah Carey.  Her old gowns and out-of-tune piano go for more than she was ever paid in salary.  Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates wrote books about her.  Her ex husband, Arther Miller, cannibalized their marriage for play  She is inimitable.  A  legend.

She left this world alone on a Saturday night thinking she was a bad punchline to a dirty joke.

I’d like to think God told her how it all worked out.  And I bet she’d still have a hard time believing Him.

And then there’s John Kennedy Toole.  Have you read his comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces? It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981.  Its author knew nothing about that.  He had committed suicide in 1964.  At the age of thirty-one.

I stumbled on it right after it won the Pulitzer, I guess.  All I knew is that the book was set in New Orleans, and since I had spent some interesting times in the Crescent City myself, I grabbed up a paperback copy on a whim.

What a roller coaster ride.  First there’s the Walker Percy preface, telling the unsuspecting reader that the author of this great piece of literary zaniness never lived to see it in print.  The manuscript had been brought to him by the late author’s mother, Thelma, who insisted that he get it published.

Undone by her persistance- touched with a dash of crazy all her very own- Walker Percy reluctantly read a little bit of it.  Just to humor some dead guy’s poor grieving and obviously over-enthusiastic mother.

Then he read a little more.  Then a little more.  Then… well just buy the book.  Percy tells the story much better than I do, and you can also savor this comic triumph- the picaresque, hysterical saga of misunderstood literary protege, Ignatius J. Reilly and his employment problems, as a lagniappe.

I can think of other gifted people who died thinking of themselves as abject failures.  Judy Garland, Hank Williams, to name a couple.  Mozart was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave, for St. Peter’s sake.  I bet you can name a few.  They don’t have to be famous, you know.

I’d like to think that when they get to the Pearly Gates, God takes them aside and shows them their immortal futures.

That’s my idea of Heaven and I’m sticking to it.

Amen.

Recently Kirstie Alley’s new memoir has been a topic for discussion from The View to The Talk.  (Essentially the same program.  The Talk is just a raunchier, down-market caricature of The View that former child actress-turned talk show hostess Sara Gilbert pilfered as unemployment insurance.  I find them both egregious and unwatchable, but I dutifully check in to see what “hot topics” America’s housewives are supposed to be hot about.  They have replaced Oprah in this capacity in my life.)

I guess Kirstie divulges never-heard-before tidbits about her sex life- real and/or imaginary.  She confesses to lusting after the likes of Patrick Swayze (conveniently dead and can’t defend himself) and John Travolta (who desperately needs this kind of publicity just now for his own purposes.)

There might be juicier revelations contained within this latest example of faded-celebrity confessional, but I’ll never know.  I have no intention of wasting my money or eyesight on such claptrap.

I made that mistake once.  Because I had loved her in The Last Picture Show, Moonlighting, and Cybill, I immediately ran out to Aspen’s Explore Bookstore and plunked down hard currency for the hardback version of Cybill Shepherd’s bio, Cybill Disobedience.

I knew she was quirky and outspoken and had lived an unusual life.  Her cover photo coyly beckoned and I succumbed.

Big, big, mistake.  As quick as a naughty wink, I was plunged headlong into Cybill’s precocious and hectic teenaged sex life.  Then it was more lurid tales about one-night stands, quickies, brief encounters, and hops in the sack with the likes of (but not restricted to) famous ladies’ men like Elvis and Don Johnson.

You could say her take on her own sexuality was candid and refreshing.  But I was appalled and disgusted.  She and I are of the exact same vintage- born one year apart- and back in my day, no gentleman was supposed to kiss and tell.  There wasn’t a similar rule or admonishment for a lady because it was inconceivable that any woman would admit to these goings-on and brand herself- sorry, but there is no other word in my own antiquarian vocabulary- a slut.

Yep, that’s what we called them in high school.  Girls who were fast or put out or did it.  “Slut” was never to be used or confused with the word “popular.”

I was shocked and then, ultimately, bored by Cybill’s revelations.  I get it.  She was very, pretty and many, many men wanted to bed her.  And did.  And then found out, like I did when I read the book, that there was nobody behind the pretty face worth getting to know. They loved her and left her and so did I.

And imagine her surprise and chagrin when the “pretty” faded and the less-beautiful mantrap was suddenly left home dateless on a Saturday night.  I could well imagine that too.

We had that in common.  I had had more than my fair share of boyfriends, husbands, steadys and beaux, too.  But I’d like to think that it wasn’t because I was a slut, and since I’ll never tell and none of the aforementioned men have books, blogs, or talk shows, you’ll never know.

Hey, did you hear that? A collective sigh of relief just went out around the globe as men who I once fell for, dated, or married just breathed a whole lot easier.

Or are they sadly disappointed?  A few have good reason to be.  Believe me, I could write glowing, rapturous endorsements for some of my old paramours– if I were so gossip-inclined.

That is because I have been lucky enough to have known both sides of that side of romance.  The grand passions and the humdrum routine.  The “throw caution to the winds” and the “Not tonight dear, I have a headache.”

I have been disappointed and amazed.  Transported and bored.  I have despised the “hurly-burly of the chaise lounge” (to quote the inimitable Mrs. Patrick Campbell) and my love life has, on occasion, “frightened the horses.” (Same source.)

I have flown to the moon and gone through the motions.  I have been too young to know what it was all about and old enough to know better.  I have been the teenaged bashful bride and the fortysomething cougar.

It’s been hard on the woman but great for the writer.  Both ends of the passion scale have put me in touch with Anna Karenina, Blanche Dubois, Cora from The Postman Always Rings Twice, Daisy Buchanan, Natasha Rostova, Holly Golightly and Emma Bovary.

But name names?  Give out with the steamy details?  Never.  Those secrets go to my grave- and beyond.

Of course, on the other hand, if any of the men in my life really want me to tell the truth about their exquisite prowess, legendary stamina, Porfirio Rubirosa-like equipment, and sophisticated savoir faire… no,  no, sorry.  I could never, ever be able to blog about such personal things.

Pssst. The rest of you will just have to wait for the book party.