Neal Cassady: Drive He Said

 

King of the Road

“Twenty years of fast living - there's not much left, and my kids are all screwed up. Don't do what I have done." - Neal Cassady

If he was just a clown, a hyperactive dunce, a celebrity buddy, he would have been abandoned by  American literature. But Neal Cassady always makes into the footnotes. He’s always there, On the Road with Kerouac or On the Road with Kesey or wherever – he always seems to be moving, vibrating, jabbering and anxious to devour Life just before it devours him.

Cassady & Kerouac: Hit the road Jack

He drives the beatniks. He drives the hippies. He drives a neon-noir zeitgeist into the perfumed arms of flower power. He belongs to mid-century America (I like Ike but I dig Kennedy), a post-war Huckleberry where the Mississippi meets macadam. And like all travelers who know the real purpose of moving, he never takes baggage because the game is about escaping, not finding.

- 1968. His last breaths of life fog cold metal of a railway track at night. There he is, under a Mexican moon, hanging on, alone, the Holy Goof slowly slips behind the wheel for a velvet drive to the stars.

Always keep moving

Donald Crowhurst: Just Like You

 

Looking beyond the vanishing point

An error in judgment or a weakness in character such as pride or arrogance helps bring about the hero's downfall. – Characteristics of Greek Tragedy, Quizlet

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport - Shakespeare

Wealth. Fame. Status.

Under similar circumstances, perhaps you would have done the same. That’s what makes Donald Crowhurst a family member. He wasn’t outrageous or evil. Nor was he cruel or violent. He was just like you, a tightrope walker mercifully unaware of the ever-present chasm. Just a slight breeze, just enough to puff out a jib, is all that’s needed to slip.

In 1969, he slipped into the living hell of a dark mind; at first, intellectualizing his behavior, and then, when the center would no longer hold, diving into the womb of salvation and peace, a hundred miles deep in the North Atlantic.

End of the Voyage

He needed the money for his family, for his dreams, and The Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a singled-handed, round-the-world race, offered everything. Wealth. Fame. Status. Yet, he had to win. It would take near genius-level cheating, but we all have different talents.

Wait, here’s an idea to draw less attention: what about a hail-fellow-well-met second place? The gods must have been bemused to let such a forlorn, sad man drift and bob across the whirling waves. What a character this Crowhurst was. Let’s blow his bark into first place. And that was it - the tipping point.

Gone was a father, a husband, a kind heart and a good sailor. How fragile and weak and courageous and strong. Exactly like you.

Mike Nichols and the Rarity of Entertainment IQ

 

                          Mike Nichols directs Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. 

If we don’t accept the possibility of genius, it’s difficult to explain how consistently – if not contiguously - successful Mike Nichols was on screen and stage.  One person can’t direct that many hits; one can’t win that many awards.

Part of the mystery is no mystery at all: Mike Nichols had an odd talent which cannot be learned, copied or modified. He could sense material that had hit potential and was able to dust his work with a patina of artistic refinement. It had quality, not just fame. Very rare.

Nichols, Taylor, Burton on the couch in Virgin Woolf

Beginning with the films Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) and The Graduate (1967), he rarely took a false step. Same thing with theatre. Barefoot in the Park (1963) kicked it off and he just didn’t quit.

Born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky, in Berlin, in 1931, Nichols developed supreme survival instincts. He seemed to know what people wanted, what they liked, what they wished to see – and especially, in the beginning, what made them laugh. Similar to many funny people, he suffered depression, but he endured, and perhaps made the illness an unwelcome attribute.

Mike Nichols: Thinking it out

Regardless, when someone is so good at a difficult job, we must take note of the high-water marks, as if to say, we were lucky that such an artist touched down. Our prayers illume the illusion of life as we watch people - like Mike Nichols - paint in the dark, fifty feet high.

Janis Joplin: Freedom's Just Another Word

“On stage, I make love to 25,000 different people, then I go home alone.”

― Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin became famous because of her incredible singing voice. That’s the essence of her appeal. She had no stylists or wardrobe assistants, no dry ice machines or back-up dancers, no lip syncing. That stuff doesn’t keep you around 50 years after you left...No, just a few guitars, drums, maybe a keyboard...and Janis. That’s it.

Don’t let her early death distract you from the raw talent – and her talent was as raw as it gets. She knew how to sell a song, the same way Sinatra did or Judy Garland or Aretha Franklin or any of the greats. Listen to her sing Me and Bobby McGee and you’ll hear it. ( It’s the phrasing, it’s the pitch control, it’s that cosmic alchemy of spirit, personality, experience, physicality, hope, defeat, love and loathing.

She was strong but could seem weak, a leader that followed others, laughed with a cackle but sad beyond belief. She needed heavy drugs to do what? Calm a restless soul? Obliterate despair? Help her to remember to forget? No answers, only convenient asides. Perhaps she wished for escape from her self-made cell. Maybe freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, maybe not, but Janis never played with a strong hand.

She molded her appearance to coincide with her persona – all feathered boas and junk jewelry and owl sunglasses and psychedelic cars. But a persona is, well, just a persona.

There she is jamming with sex machine Tom Jones or rapping with the impossibly beautiful Rachel Welch. Few other celeb hippies had the guts – and brains - to shake off the tie-dye and patchouli and just follow their hearts.

Like Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin did not commit suicide and wasn’t fated to die young. That’s morbid and sloppy. It was a series of dark, unresolved private issues and plain bad luck that led her away. That said, those who knew her well would tell tales, years after her demise, of her darkness and isolation.

They still find it hard to say farewell to Janis – because she always seems to be around, just one head-thrown-back-shattering-cry-for-love that swells it all back to life one more time.

“The first time I heard Janis Joplin’s version [of Me and Bobby McGee] was right after she died. Paul Rothchild, her producer, asked me to stop by his office and listen to this thing she had cut. Afterwards, I walked all over L.A., just in tears. I couldn’t listen to the song without really breaking up. So when I came back to Nashville, I went into the Combine [Publishing] building late at night, and I played it over and over again, so I could get used to it without breaking up.” - Kris Kristofferson

Ann-Margret: The Allure of Energy

Ah, her chin. Just the way she held it – defiant, confident, with Attitude before everyone had Attitude. 

Anne & Elvis: Doppelganging

If energy alone could convey sexual allure, then it would look like Ann-Margret.

She had it... The body – hard but curvaceous, the hair long and electric. The voice, either soft sensual or direct and laughing with an invitation to roll.

You could cover her in paint (The Swinger) or beans (Tommy) and it only enhanced what was obscured.

Ann-Margret met her match with Elvis Presley, two of them so ridiculously alike that there was a doppelganger effect tripping along the XX/XY chromosome axis.

Always on the move

And when it wasn’t hip to entertain U.S. troops in Vietnam, she went anyway, shaking for boys – just farm boys dazed by fear and heat.

Always ambitious, so eager to confront challenge with an inviting grin - more hip than hippy chicks - empowered by her untethered spirit.

That day she left Elvis’ funeral, head up, keening overcome by forward thrust, to be alone in the desert on a Harley thundering toward Viva Las Vegas. For years ago she discovered that only movement itself could calm such a restless soul.