Partying Ways

All this talk about the 1% and the 99% percent has finally piqued my curiosity. It is time to see how the other half lives. Unfortunately, I haven’t been invited into the home of a billionaire since that pride weekend party where Lance Bass’ boyfriend mistook me for a bartender and the highlight of my adventure was buttoning the front of Michael Holtz’s denim shorts. Those were the days. But in that spirit I journeyed a few blocks away from my radio studio to the penthouse birthday party of Penthouse pet Krista Ayne.

Krista has been a frequent guest on our show over the years. Romaine might be so captivated that a photo of her hangs in Romaine’s dressing area so she can gaze upon her naked form while naked herself. That’s devotion. I like Krista, but as a friend, who wears clothes. And has birthday parties in fancy bars in midtown.

That's Entertainment

I used to work in the entertainment industry and to this day I still doing understand it. It all seems like such a waste. Gore Vidal talks about a conversation he had with Jackie Kennedy where they talked about all the money the campaign spent on opposition research to dig up dirt they knew they could never use. “All that money,” she lamented, undoubtedly knowing hundreds of better ways to spend it. I guess I feel the same way about entertainment. I like to watch TV and movies and I really appreciate it when they spent a fair amount of money on it and it turned out good. So why waste it all?

I watch a lot of cable shows that I enjoy like Eureka, the 4400, the L Word and Psych and as much as I enjoy them, the topography of British Columbia is starting to get to me. I know these kinds of shows are set in places like Santa Barbara and Washington State or weirdly enough the heart of West Hollywood (not exactly a lesbian mecca but I digress). But they end up looking exactly like what they are: shot within blocks of each other. I know it’s about cutting costs but we can tell! Paul Monette wrote about feeling instantly comfortable when he moved to Los Angeles and later on a picnic with friends where Lassie had been shot, he realized why. It was the land of his TV childhood. I suppose if I ever go to Vancouver, it will feel like returning to the womb, if that is what my 30s can be called now that 50 is the new 30.

But speaking of the 4400, it has been ignominiously cancelled. Now we will never know what the future had in store for the human race. The same goes for the secret organization that built Jaime Sommers now that the Bionic Woman has been cast onto a digital garbage heap somewhere. And they had just introduced the hot son of Beau Bridges who barely had time to take his pants off and get comfortable.

Unfortunately, changing a show isn’t enough to save it these days. Back To You fired an eleven year old girl and replaced her with an even more adorable ten year old (off to a lifetime of broken relationships and therapy for you grandma!) only to find out that FOX did not want to go Back To You after all. Moonlight on CBS transformed their vampire hero who solves crime into a mortal who solves crimes. Groundbreaking! I guess I won’t miss that one after all, even though it appears it has been replaced by foxy Simon Baker as a fake psychic who helps solve crimes (ummm.. Psych II?). I hope he at least has the courtesy to take his shirt off more often than that James Roday. But the real crime is the end of Women’s Murder Club, a not great show, but still a satisfying one. Like Sprite. You wouldn’t choose it outright but on a hot day if it is over ice, it can hit the spot.

To me, it all seems like such a waste. What is the point of getting emotionally invested in a show, only to watch it disappear before your very eyes. Why can’t my love for TV be like Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward? Why do the networks keep giving us John Doe and Journeyman and Playing It Straight and then pulling a Love Story on us and expecting us to keep coming back? No wonder ratings are continuing to fall on the networks. At least with a cable show, they give you the whole season of Rome or Deadwood before they give up on it.

And the worst part is the waste. What a waste of money and talent and time and effort. It is one thing if everyone tries their best and you end up with Jezebel James, but Back To You is a great sitcom with the top talent in the business. Yes it doesn’t have the ratings of American Idol, but guess what FOX, neither does anything else on television. So the answer is to cancel a great show and keep another Bataan death march of a season of According To Jim, living proof that the devil is still willing grant immortality in tinseltown in exchange for a human soul or two. Or maybe it is proof that this is actually Hell itself.

So now we will never know why Journeyman was a journey man or what kind of sandwich Claire was always eating on Women’s Murder Club (I suspect a sensible PB&J because it can sit in a purse for hours without going bad). Those secrets will be kept locked away upstairs along with Bonnie Hunt’s other daughter and Richie Cunningham’s older brother. There was a rumor that Showtime wanted to bring Arrested Development back but with a smaller cast. As much as I miss one of the greatest shows ever, why would you want to play Sophie’s Choice with that cast? I guess some things are just better left in the realm of the unknown.

Long Ago And Far Away

When I was about eleven or so, I flew to the East Coast to visit my mother's family. I stayed a few days in New York City with my Great Aunt Caroline, who had a lovely two bedroom apartment on West End Avenue. To her the nondescript tower in a utilitarian park setting she inhabited was "penitentiary living" with "Salvation Army furniture" compared to her previous apartment on Central Park South. And even though there was only space in the living room for an upright piano, she accepted her reduced lot late in life with equanimity and her familiar blend of cheerfulness and unflagging optimism, great dignity with never a hint of pretense. After all, there was still a piano where party guests could gather around, belting out off-key standards filled with laughter and joy.

Caroline was more Tallulah Bankhead than Auntie Mame, her refined MGM-inspired cadence straight out of a lavish 1930s Manhattan comedy, always in a smart suit from Lord & Taylor and never out of doors without a hat. To her, everyone was "Darling" and sexual matters were always discussed with the casual candor of one poring over a shopping list. It is impossible for me to sum her up in a paragraph or two because to me she was so singular, so much greater than a pile of words. It reminds me of the line late in "Touch Of Evil" when Marlene Dietrich says of Orson Welles, "He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?" She was some kind of a woman. There isn't anything more you can say.

We hopped on a Greyhound Bus and took the long trip out to West Hartford, Connecticut to visit her younger brother (and my grandfather) Justin and his wife Laura. Where Caroline was the eternal ingenue, Justin was the sly character actor, an inveterate storyteller filled with Will Rogers hominess and smiling charm. He was so beguiling and had he had even a whit of wickedness in him, Justin would have made one hell of a con man. As always Laura was the villain of the piece, a severe dyke haircut with attitude to match, Mercedes McCambridge inside and out. My mother always said that Laura never believed in anything she couldn't put her fist through and I don't doubt it.

Laura and Justin (she always came first) lived in a comfortable white house on a cul-de-sac, buried so deeply in the suburbs that their house was virtually impossible to find without a guide and I think that is just the way they liked it. As a kid I was in awe of this bucolic life with the small stream that ran through the backyard and the ducks that would wander in from the wooded water looking for bugs to eat. "Don't feed the ducks. They shit on the lawn." Laura yelled after me as I ran off to the backyard to see them, while inside the house Caroline played Carole Lombard, Justin politely watched from a wingback chair and in the kitchen Laura disassembled all of the groceries into a phalanx of unmarked Tupperware containers to which only she had the secret combination.

I think I have always been torn deeply between these two fantasy worlds. Caroline's life made me want to live in Manhattan and Justin's made me yearn for a quiet suburban existence. When I first moved to NYC, I had to have a two bedroom apartment, so that I could have a guest room. Caroline's wise father always insisted that an extra room in Manhattan was a necessity because it is the kind of place people want to come to and you need to always be ready to accommodate a guest. But last year, the other side of me won out and I bought a house as close as I could get to the life Laura and Justin had. And that all came to the fore for me today on this very rainy day as my dream of a stream came true in the backyard.

It is just pouring here and the gentle slope in my yard has formed an impromptu river that is now casually pooling in my neighbor Junior's yard. I woke up around noon and equal to the weather built a huge roaring fire in the fireplace, cooked up some pancakes and bacon and settled into a chair in the living room with the real estate section of the New York Times. It is my favorite section of the paper because it always has a "hero" story in it about someone who found a charming, undiscovered corner of the city and with far less money than effort turned it into their dream. How fitting then that I should follow that up with a viewing of the new TV movie version of "A Raisin In The Sun."

I am just amazed at how well that fifty year old play has held up and how deeply moved I was by the power that comes with personal ownership, not just of a home but also of your own life. Of course, everyone in it is going to win an Emmy, but more importantly it was a great story of standing up for what you believe in even as everything around you falls apart, even when the road to what is right is the hardest. It is so easy to just give up and fall in line with the decay of life, to accept a smaller piece of the pie than you deserve, and ultimately a smaller version of yourself. Life has stages, as Caroline knew, and there are times of monetary excess, but real richness comes from inside you and the people in your life, not from having a room with a view or a grand piano.

Near the end of Gore Vidal's tremendous essay "Remembering Orson Welles," he writes of his friend: "I have a recurring fantasy that if one were to dial the telephone number of someone in the past, one would hear again a familiar voice, and time would instantly rewind from now to then. I still have Orson's telephone number in my book (213-851-8458). Do I dare ring him and talk to him back in 1982?" Caroline's number (212-877-8916) is the only one I still have memorized even though she and her telephone are both long gone. It is rare when a day passes that I don't want to pick up the phone and see if she will answer. I miss her loud inimitable greeting, booming "Well hello darling, so good to hear your voice!"

I miss Justin and his mad scientist logic. I even miss Laura and her brusque dismissal of everyone's bullshit but her own. But it is impossible to go back in time for one last visit. And now Caroline's voice echoes only inside my own head. I work in Manhattan and live in the suburbs, and like the rivulet in my yard, I know how fleeting it all is. Life is too important to miss out on all the small joys, to separate ourselves out one from another over pettiness, to accept defeat just because the things we once cherished are no longer there, or are hard to attain. "How did we get to a place where we're scared to talk softness to each other? What gets into people who ought to be close?" Walter intones to his wife in "A Raisin In The Sun." Nothing truly permanent can get between people except the quickness of time. The water in the yard recedes, the memories fade, but the emotions remain as sharp as ever. Standing up for what you want and know is right often means no simple solution, perhaps not even a happy ending, but that struggle is better than the soft easy existence of accepting less than you deserve.

Before she died, I visited Caroline one last time. She was bedridden and in her 90s by then but still cheerful, filled as always with wonderful stories and memories. Even though she stopped believing in God when she was six years old, her fascination with the Bible never ceased and at the end, the trials of Job were much on her mind. Like him, I think she also wondered why an all powerful God would give you everything and then take it all away, piece by piece, reducing life to nothing more than a simple test of faith and emotional strength.

It made me sad at first to see inside her hall closet as I grabbed my coat to leave. There they were. All of her soft felt hats with the long dangerous hat pins jammed into the sides, never to be worn again, suitcases that had been around the world a dozen times, never again to see foreign shores. But as I walked down the hallway, I realized that it was so Caroline. There was no reason to believe she would ever travel out of that apartment in style again, but that was no reason not to be ready for it at all times.In the moment, there is nothing to do but enjoy this stage to the fullest until the next one comes along. Enjoy the friends and family you have while you still have them. Accept the realities at hand and not worry about the dreams. But always be ready for what's next.

Out With The New

I think watching old movies might be dangerous for me.

The Hollywood writer's strike has been going on for weeks now and it has finally caught up with us on the small screen. We are fresh out of fresh episodes of our favorite shows. And while some shows will be starting or returning in January (Lost, New Adventures Of Old Christine, American Idol and a thousand other reality/game shows), the momentum built up so far this fall is at an end. As an avid TV viewer, this has put me in a terrible quandary. What am I supposed to do with all this free time and my incredibly honed staring skills?

It is with this in mind that I have recently returned to watching old movies. What can I say? I am a homo, and I love an old movie. Last month was Guest Programmer month on TCM and even though I owned "The Letter" on DVD, I have never actually watched it. But I did TIVO guest programmer Gore Vidal and that film last month and finally this weekend, at a loss for new TV, settled in to watch it. I enjoyed it far more than I thought I would.

I have seen the enormously famous opening and closing scenes a million times, but the whole movie in between was a swift and engaging good time. Somerset Maugham (who I have decided might be my new favorite dead playwright, knowing now that he also wrote the source material for the hilarious Being Julia with Annette Bening) wrote the original play and it starts off rather delightfully with a quiet night on a rubber plantation interrupted by Bette Davis plugging six bullets into a man trying desperately to get away from her. It is all shot very dramatically and powerfully and I thought William Wyler might have used his best tricks in the first two minutes, but the overall film remained sensational right up to Bette's famous final declaration, "With all my heart, I still love the man I killed." Gore said the film still gives him chills, which at his age could honestly be caused by almost anything. But as much as I liked the film, I fear it might stay with me the way other recent old movies have.

I am well known as a soft touch when it comes to the movies. I might have gone to see the most-awful Deep End of the Ocean with Michelle Pfeiffer because I cried TWICE during the trailer ("Children don't get lost. People lose them!"). As much as I love a good comedy, I think I love to cry at a movie even more. I like it best when I cry at a movie you would least expect tears from, like the unexpectedly poignant ending of the Albert Brooks comedy "Defending Your Life." After all, there is no challenge in crying at something like "Dumbo," easily the most gut-wrenching 64 minutes ever committed to celluloid, although it is satisfying just the same.

This week on my train ride, I settled back in to watch "National Velvet" with a young and powerfully earnest Elizabeth Taylor. You can see instantly in the movie why she became a star and her clarity of character is staggering, especially in her scenes with Anne Revere who plays her mother. Taylor breaks your heart in every scene, her pure faith in that wild horse never wavers, and I can usually wring at least five or six cries out of every showing. Even jammed in the drunk train home on Friday night, I freely let the tears flow for all to see. And this is part of the problem.

I let myself become overly involved in this movies, even to points where I don't realize they are influencing me. I am just too susceptible Years ago in Los Angeles, my roommate Eric and I were shopping for wine at Trader Joe's and I picked out a bottle. "I've heard good things about this one," I said, not being a wine drinker myself. "No you haven't." Erik replied flatly, "There is a billboard for it outside our apartment." The moving images on the screen are even more of a draw to me than a flat advertisement under the warm California sun. Eight weeks after a chance purchase of "Christmas In Connecticut" with Barbara Stanwick and dozens of viewings in a row, I abandoned my perfectly comfortable Manhattan apartment for a house in the country with a bay window, a fireplace and a piano. I guess after buying a whole house, running around all the time saying "I know men. Some of my best friends are men" in a throaty rendition of Tallulah Bankhead in "Lifeboat" isn't so bad, but the end result is the same.

Maybe the problem is that I feel out of control in the whole process. The movies are long since finished and in the can, but my life is still malleable and open to broad interpretation. Not that I think that watching a movie will lead me to stand trial for murder, join the circus, or sit out on the open sea for as long as 43 days with a Nazi; it's just that after buying a house and nearly purchasing bad wine, I am filled with some caution. Then again, these movies can also provide important life lessons, like my favorite from "National Velvet":

"Win or lose. It's all the same. And how you take it that counts. And knowing when to let go. Knowing when it's over and time to go on to the next thing. Things come suitable to the time. Enjoy each thing and then forget it and go on to the next. There is a time for everything."

So I guess now is the time for me to watch old movies, and sit in the window box of my room and blog while the deer and squirrels roam through the yard like extras in a Douglas Sirk movie. And then at some point, it will be time for me to do something else. In the meantime, I suppose I can learn some lessons on my own. Like, just because there isn't anything on TV, that doesn't mean I don't have plenty of other things to watch and do. Another Gore Vidal pick "That Hamilton Woman" is sitting in the TIVO now and since it is unlikely that the Queen of Naples will rise from the dead to oversee my affair with Lord Nelson, I think I am safe for the time being.