All the way with LBJ
They said I could write when I was a cub reporter in L.A. That was sixty-five years ago, though I was a lousy journalist. I turned over one big local story to Phil Sperrier because it was – yuk! And get this: I covered the 1960 Democratic National Convention at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown L.A. and here’s what my readers learned from me. Press release handouts about logistics. How many sets of flatware delegates . . . never mind.
The big story was Lyndon Johnson crowding Jack Kennedy for the nomination. Bet you didn’t know that. Well, I did. And Ed Lombard invited me up to Johnson’s suite. Let that sink in. Where his boss was in the shower and when he spiffed up afterwards and huddled with his Louis Howe types, you know, everyone puffing on cigars, I would be there! Poised to get the scoop of the century and earn myself a ticket to the big time.
So you’re on the edge of your seat, right? Holding your breath wanting to know how this dimwit became an A-list celebrity worth your attention. Karen who?
I got my big scoop and the rest is history,. Senator Cornpone got the nomination and went on to civil rights glory and Vietnam ignominy in Rome-on-the-Potomac. JFK took up crocheting on Cape Cod, and I beat out Walter Jenkins for LBJ’s closest confidante. All written up for the Smithsonian by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. when I got him 30 minutes with Walter Winchell at the NY Daily Mirror.
All the way with Lee Remick
You guessed it. I’d spotted Lee Remick on the floor of the convention and couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had just starred in Wild River, a movie I reviewed, and I knew she was the one for me. (Full disclosure: I’m nuts about women. And a sucker for cliches, wordplay, and mixed metaphors.) Not the first or last time that a scheming woman would ruin my life, but better to die happy than gasping for air in a smoke-filled room.
I didn’t go upstairs and my readers had to go on thinking the convention was all about flatware. I bailed on journalism a month later, an event little noted nor long remembered by a profession glad to be rid of me. And went on to the life you’d expect of a fool. An Emerald Mile of rapids in a wooden dory. That miraculously stayed afloat even though I did everything possible to scuttle it. Serendipity living a charmed life until money illiteracy and child support bankrupted me and I had to bail on another career. So broke that my wife-to-be paid for the U-Haul.
The ultimate in cool
Wife #2, but one of a succession of relationships that left me wonderin’ what in the world did I do? Like Patsy Cline. Feeling sorry for myself. Or just Crazy. It wasn’t supposed to be this way! The refrain of how many of us wonderin’, like Peggy Lee, Is That All There Is? When, if I had my way, I would have been a jazz pianist and lyricist. Femininity being no better at penetrating heart and soul than the poetry of music. Good old American jazz standards and love songs. Like It Never Entered My Mind (Rodgers & Hart 1940), only it did. Because that’s all I ever wanted.
Gifting me with Dee Brown, a D.C. jazz singer, and a moment in the sun. The ultimate in cool, when she performed for an audience and I was her pianist. Playing When I Fall in Love, in E-flat no less, and didn’t screw up. One of only three such times-out-of-times I can savor without wonderin’ what I did wrong. Stroking an eight-oared heavyweight crew to victory on the Charles for Harvard and pulling volunteer-of-the-year from the Boulder County Democratic Party the other two. Incontrovertible proof that I exist.
Still in all, tiddlywinks compared to my real passion: Stompin’ at the Savoy (1933). Earning and learning character by jitterbugging. While Chick Webb’s big band let loose and Ella Fitzgerald belted it out. If only I could. Because truly, it can’t get any better than this.
Everything satisfactual
Putting the lie to the insouciance that follows toward all things worldly when, obviously, what I care most about is being a man of the world. Shane, the male equivalent of the whore Lorene (From Here to Eternity 1953), a gunslinger with nerves of steel and a heart of gold, who out drew Jack Wilson with two shots in George Stevens’ Shane (1953). A girl magnet with so many Oscars to my name that I can afford to give them away to little kids like Clark Gable. The pool shark who out-hustled Fast Eddie Felson with character: Minnesota Fats. in Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1960).
I’m “Granddad.” A onetime tough-guy on the playground who turns into a puddle of emotion when Carly Simon sings Where or When (1937) or All the Things You Are (1939) while he’s thinking of his granddaughters. Two prototypes for the idealized ‘you’ of every heart-opening lyric, poem, or epiphany, who awaken my soul with the music and poetry of life. Archetypes of Femininity untrammeled by the boundaries of time and space, present in everything everywhere caressed by Love. Two characters and authors within, setting off to write their own stories.
Nothing more important in my own life but to be at their sides. Reminder and role-model of Masculinity that Femininity can trust: reciprocity in Loving Friendship. A bluebird on their shoulders, helping to fill hearts with song and lives with laughter. And an irresistible Ideal: the wonderful day in the here and Now, when everything is satisfactual.
Triumphant astride a runaway train
The competition fled when I showed up to audition for the grownups Holden Caulfield encountered on his tour of ambiguity. On the sidewalks of New York, in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Prototype for a “phony” and living embodiment of two-faced corruption. The double-crossing “low-down Yankee liar” who upended Rufus Ryker’s cattle barony with gunplay in Shane. Never mind the details. All any confession needs for proof in this here-and-now is ‘human.’
Subject to herd mentality no less than any other specimen of predatory instinct. As entangled with “others” as the particles of particle physics and the aspens of an aspen forest. Aware that all the bête noirs of my efforts to move forward are the same one reverse mirror-image of evolution pulling back. Yet forced by the evidence of body-brain senses to treat one as many. Aware that Mind-Relationship is the Mind with which I think, yet forced by animal-brain unrelatability to act as though it weren’t. When it would take a miracle to answer a call for Love from a beast with Love. Manny the escaped convict, triumphant astride his dark steed. The lifeless, mindless, senseless brute force of a Runaway Train (1985)
What was she thinking?
Where Karen comes in. The living, thoughtful, sensitive force of gentle loving kindness. Of body-healer, a sorceress who turned Mind-healer. A miracle-worker in her after life, burrowing deep into mind, heart, and soul – hers and mine – to gift me with an answer to a call for Love. An act straight out of the lesson of A Course in Miracles. In the moment, that didn’t need another Groundhog Day (1993) after all.
While the Easter Bunny was placing delicious Vermont Country Store chocolate eggs in his family’s Easter Sunday basket. Four in all, without giving it a second thought. Two for his girls and two for mommy and daddy. The fourth slipping through surreptitiously when not even the third had made it until last summer. For daddy’s birthday. A seismic shift in mommy’s case that occurred imperceptibly while Intuition was still wondering Why.
Why had the healing force of Love between Karen and me been interrupted? What was she thinking? What was she feeling the day it finished with us in this life? She the “dear” in the nativity scene of her after-life when her goat-Child’s questions received a response. Whether true or not, marked by Spontaneity and characterized by compassion. Uncharacteristically for Granddad, when it’s not gently and with loving kindness that warriors for justice usually remove the spikes of injustice from mutilated hands and feet. Hard enough to refrain from making real what’s unreal without silence being misinterpreted as punishment.
Manuals aren’t enough
With Jesus at my side, our minds together focused on Karen’s, what I felt was Femininity’s wish to let go of female. To trust that when she did, Masculinity would let go of male. So that what both of us wanted could detach itself from the mountain streambed of a hallucination and swim upstream together. Back to a Reality of relatability, where demons of willfulness have returned to inactivity, with only an implied role in the work and play of Creation. Where answering the call of nature put out by bodies procreating can no longer substitute for the character of spontaneous Relationships integrating.
The call of nature here is for reciprocity of pain – retaliation. How to tune it out so that the call for Love can be heard instead has its manuals of instruction. Written in every language known to Sapiens. But while RTFM is always good advice, when it comes to relatability at the level of functions behind ideas behind representations behind words, manuals aren’t enough.
Getting down to basics
What I’ve experienced through relationship with Karen is the rarity of the thing itself, without any level of representation, making the connection. Without my getting in the way since I’m a representation, the act performing itself as if it didn’t need me. Love inseparable from Logic, not knowing of any other way to interconnect or interrelate than to do what they are. As one Self, through Mind’s Energy in the Now: to Love and grow together with shared learning, purpose, and character toward the Ideal of Loving Friendship.
Heavy-duty idealistic stuff that appeals to my personality type. It’s virtually all my Mind has been thinking about for the past five-plus years. That won’t appeal to other types. That is, unless they have a taste for Vermont Country Store chocolate crème-filled Easter eggs.
Can it get any better? Yes! With my Andover class of ’55 heartthrob singing True Love (Cole Porter 1956). Grace Kelly. In a movie lot duet with Bing Crosby, while ostensibly sailing on Seneca Lake aboard the schooner True Love. Ethereal loveliness but still no match for my granddaughters.
1. PS. I Love You (Johnny Mercer lyrics 1934)