The last detachment of Ken Kesey

As I sat in the audience that evening, watching Ken Kesey read from his book ‘Demon Box’, I got a strange, low-level vibe. The clues were subtle — inflections of his voice, the way he swayed slightly at the podium, his contextually-wrong smile — that he wasn’t really engaged to the text.

Sure enough, after a few minutes, he suddenly looked at his watch and joked that “right about now” his favorite NFL team was likely losing.

And it was a good story he had been reading — about meeting The Beatles.

Kesey himself was a hard read — an evasive mumble of contradictions. The high school wrestling jock who condemned smoking but loved LSD. The soft-spoken, reflective author who blasted across the country with his pals in an old school bus, fueled by drugs and hard rock, periodically stopping to pull pranks because, hey, they called themselves The Merry Pranksters. (Paul McCartney heard about Ken’s road trips and wrote ‘Magical Mystery Tour’). The writer who rarely wrote, as if adopting an outré lifestyle as a response to charges of indolence.

Detachment — that was the foundation of his loopy, sometimes childish, often self-engrossed, kinda provoking but rarely boring public persona. He knew when to cut out and get back on the bus.

Kesey wrote one great book, ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, and it arrived before the whole 60s trip began. Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’ made Ken a cultural icon. It gave him a stage but took away his writing.

Ken, one of the big time personalities of the west coast counter culture. The wide-grinning shaman with one hand holding ‘On the Road’ while the other spun The Grateful Dead’s ‘Anthem of the Sun’. Part hipster, part hippy.

That detachment let him walk through cultural walls with n’er a scratch… a day-glo clown, a rock culture Robin Hood, taking from the squares and giving to the groovies, turning on, tuning in, but never dropping out, equally at home with Neal Cassady or Timothy Leary.

Leary and Cassady: Party on

Kesey peaked early, and spent the last half of his life interpreting the first. So there he was, white-haired and stout, still hanging in the bus, driving across the U.S.A., now more a portable party than a quixotic quest.

The author as performance artist, the goof as holy fool. It’s hard to follow Kesey because he never had a map. The bus went where it did, no plans, no right or wrong way, rambling along the blue Pacific until a day in November 2001, when it pulled over for the last detachment and Ken waved goodbye to his friends and got off alone, without books or words or drugs or anything, and flew over the cuckoo's nest, arms wide open.

Ursula Andress: What beauty was always supposed to remind us of

London. March 17, 1966

INTERIOR - NIGHT: London. March 17, 1966. The Royal Film Performance of ‘Born Free’. On stage left (in profile) you have Deborah Kerr who, at 45, seems an atavistic Lady Bracknell, a chronological confusion, perhaps a bouffanted levee, holding back Time - at least for a blessed moment - from the startling beauty of Julie Christie, Ursula Andress and Catherine Deneuve, Sirens of the 60s.

Motion is important

Deneuve’s sexuality is empowered by a wistful frailty that demands isolation, to be regarded, not explored.

Christie is engaged but follows a silent muse. There’s heat but it’s random. Restless rather than bored.

So is color

Andress has the impenetrable mask. With her high forehead, deep-set eyes and strong jaw, it is a face culled from a sculptor’s hand, a late night Pygmalion, louche and love sick.

The Face - Full Bore

From her Venus-on-the-half-shell surf-side debut in Dr. No (1962), Andress entered the sixties without a resume. Few (aside from long gone Jimmy Dean) in North America knew her name. And suddenly there was this face, far removed from the rounded softness of Marilyn Monroe, who would die the same year, too famous to ever be hip, too submissive to ever be cool. And it took cool to swing in the sixties, baby.

Poor Pygmalion

Look at What’s New Pussycat (’65) or Casino Royale (’67). Acting not required. Just attitude. And Andress had the requisite attitude. Always game, never serious. A kind of Vegas-style swinger but with a bracing, Teutonic warp. No hippy dippy chick here. No Shirley-Maclaine Rat-packer. If she needed men, it was to turn off the light.

We can well imagine lyricist Hal David in a darkened film theatre watching an early cut of Casino Royale. And then he sees the Face. And then he writes 'The Look of Love'.

Drifting with moon children through paisley parties

Throughout the 60s Andress was always present but never there, drifting with the moon children through paisley parties somewhere between Woodstock and Monte Carlo — so...

...The Face, a kind of totemic, ageless apparition of what Beauty was always supposed to remind us of.

#ursulaandress #jamesbond @ursulandress #petersellers #1960s #popular #pop #culture

Jayne Mansfield...Never let a God fall in love with you

Assuming the titular throne

It takes a little skill and a lot of luck for a career to span pop movements. Most celebrities get creamed trying to jump the cultural chasm, especially if they’re B-level.

By the mid 1960s, Jayne Mansfield was an odd anachronism. Her pneumatic proportions had no place beside the incipient sophistication of slim new girls like Jane Fonda, Natalie Wood, Mia Farrow and Faye Dunaway. Her voice was an audible cartoon, a breathless Marilyn Monroe underpinned with rinky-dink Betty Boop, made sad with aimless, self-destructive irony.

With Monroe’s death in 1962, it was assumed Mansfield would assume the Titular Throne, but it never happened. That throne remains forever empty, Titularless.

In 1956, she signed a long-term contract with 20th Century Fox. But they dropped her five years later. Like many entertainers with calcified careers, Jayne headed to Las Vegas, commanding $8,000-$25,000 per week for her nightclub act. Unfortunately, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and once off the Strip she was reduced to playing dinner theatres. In June 1967, following a dinner theatre gig in Biloxi, Mississippi, she died at night on a highway in an automobile crash. She was thirty-four.

She remains. It's a mystery.

Mansfield was a pro and needed little provocation to expose her assets, staging a series of wardrobe malfunctions. Critics often dismissed her as more exhibitionist than actress.

During the length of her career, there were many women hip-rolling around Hollywood who were far prettier, had more alluring bodies, and displayed at least rudimentary acting skills, but none succeeded like Jayne Mansfield. They're all gone. She remains. It's a mystery.

The ancient Greeks believed those whom the gods love die young... with no time to gasp final wisdom on a Mississippi highway at midnight; no chance to suffer the crushing shame of silence where there once roared applause. 

Maybe the mystery staggers lost down that thousand-year-old rainy neon Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

Lesson: Never let a God fall in love with you.

The Avengers: A Land Without Children



Revolving in digital aspic

Trying to analyse The Avengers leads to a conundrum, akin to racing over a sunny morning meadow, straining to net a playful butterfly: it’s delicate and fleeting, never looking back, and you know capturing the creature will destroy its beauty, yet beauty only exists if seen...

...But onward we beat, boats against the current…Let’s do a little analyzing, hopefully without impaling this profoundly original British TV series on the Great Cork-board of Life.

Above all, the Avengers (1961-69) was goofy fun — but goofy in a swinging 60s Matt-Helm kind of way, not a hippy-dippy Rowan-Martin mold. The two lead characters, played by Patrick McNee (John Steed) and either Honor Blackman (Cathy Gale), Diana Rigg (Emma Peel), or Linda Thorson (Tara King), were, by varying degrees, sexy, breezy, detached, bright, chic, educated, athletic and rich without any visible means of support.

Emma kicking butt

The program made London and its surrounding environs a huge playground for grownups, that is, for Steed and his female buddies, blithely laughing over cocktails, meting out judo chops to vaguely threatening villains — always witty, always bemused, stereotypes of a stereotype that they were in the process of inventing. Big kids on expense accounts (though hard currency is never, ever seen. Way too real darling).

Mona Lisa of the 1960s

In fact, it’s hard to think of an Avengers episode in which kids are present, let alone featured. For the appearance of a real child, along side a man-child/woman-child, tends to emphasize the underdevelopment of the latter. (How many kids have you seen in Bond movies?). As for visible minorities...The Avengers managed to salaam its way around most hot issues of the 1960s. Vietnam had no call on Avengerland. 

AvengerLand is a world without seasons and calendars, a timeless London of clean, neat streets (usually – strangely - devoid of humans and traffic), of bucolic Britain with lazy, leafy lanes and Elizabethan-era bridges. Technology, when it does appear, is most often associated with evil — sociopathic robots, mind-control machines – that kind of thing). Even Steed drives a forty-year-old car. And rarely is there a gun about, or an explosion heard. Entering AvengerLand is the upbeat flipside of poor ‘ol Patrick (The Prisoner) McGoohan entering ‘The Village’.

Trapping that butterfly called The Avengers will tell you nothing, aside from the notion that butterflies belong in a meadow, not pinned dying to a board: expressions of 60s pop culture should be appraised within that swirling, psychedelic glass dome of their times. Because outside that dome, the air is pure poison and sure to distort perspective and curtail ‘goofy fun’.

The romance of callligraphy

...So now we depart Steed and leather-cat-suited Emma, comforted in the knowledge that they shall always be there, when we need them, ageless and enticing, revolving in the digital aspic of a DVD, in pre-email Land where a man may contact his ravishing workmate with just a tasteful, embossed calling card, as in ‘Mrs. Peel, We’re Needed!’

Kubrick’s Killer Decade

The Kubrick glare

When you watch a Stanley Kubrick film, it’s often easy to discern an active intelligence at work – a variation on what Hemingway called the iceberg theory: there’s something going on that can felt but not seen or heard. It’s in the lighting, the framing, the timing, the editing – it’s everywhere. But with few exceptions, Kubrick is heavy.   

From about 1960 to 1970, film director Stanley Kubrick could do no wrong. He fed off the sixties zeitgeist with vampiric cunning—intellectual, cynic, craftsman, always detached, always so mindful of the light.

His best films are about death—or seen through a different lens—about life’s absurdity. He didn’t create heroes or happy endings. His films are scripted thesis.< Does thought drive emotion, or vice-versa?> Stanley’s films are top-heavy with thought—but unlike the grumpy Jean-Luc Godard, who enjoyed his salad days at about the same time, Kubrick never hits you on the head with a book.

"How you doing HAL?"

If you’re looking for the key to Stan’s mind, you might find it at the bottom of a magician’s trunk, or hidden under a chess board. The general sterility of his sets tricks you into believing ‘here’s a serious artist’ , but it is indeed a trick. Above all else, he is a humanist, and like others of his ilk, wasn’t too crazy about humans, at least their bodies.

So—similar to Hitchcock, actors never did that well in his films. Only two or three performances stand out. It’s no coincidence that his most memorable character is a computer.

Here’s killer Kubrick:

- Lolita (1962)
- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
- A Clockwork Orange (1971)

After ‘Clockwork’, one got the feeling that Kubrick wasn’t making the films that he wanted to – he was just keeping the wheels in motion with goofy stuff like ‘Barry Lyndon’ and ‘The Shining’. His final film, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ is disturbing, given that the same talent once gave us ‘2001’.

The Composer & Composition

Today, Kubrick enjoys legions of diehard fans that have sanctified every frame of his opus. He was the kind of guy who could inspire such devotion. Only an artist who tells the Truth, his own Big Truth in his own Time, ever reaches that rarified stratum where angels dispense the mixed blessing of immortality.

And what is Kubrick's Big Truth? It's plays on the other side of the screen.

LSD: Leary’s in the Sky with Diamonds

If you choose to visit YouTube and view Dr. Timothy Leary’s interviews and speeches, one rather unsettling conclusion becomes irrefutable: almost without exception, he radiates clarity, intelligence, humor, and robust health. Beside him, the hosts most often appear slouched and defeated, suffering under a dead-sweat, long having abandoned the corporate gotcha script and praying for a commercial break.

It’s wasn’t supposed to be that way.

Throughout the 1960s, Leary actively promoted—and experimented with—Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD). He was the King Pin, capo di tutti. No LSD, no 60s. At least, not in the way we know/knew/remember that decade. Dr. T was a big deal. When he ran for Governor of California, John Lennon wrote him a campaign song called ‘Come Together’. Not bad.

Richard Nixon’s much celebrated (but never discovered) ‘silent majority’ were scared stupid of Leary. Not only did he have the implicit prominence of a Harvard psychology professor (a job from which he was canned—no surprise there), but the Beatles loved him, as did other prominent, counter-culture types. So—the law went after Leary.

He did jail time for marijuana possession (originally, a 20-year sentence. Whoa…). While in stir they gave have him psychological tests used to assign inmates to appropriate work details. But Dr. Leary had devised the test years earlier; in fact, they were called ‘Leary Interpersonal Behavior Test’. So Tim answered the questions in such a way as to appear a conventional person with interests in forestry and gardening. Result? Leary bagged work as a gardener in a lower security prison. Not bad.

The key to understanding the 1960s is to consider people like Leary—a guy who walked his own path, sometimes flaky, sometimes irresponsible, but never cowardly or morbid. He was outrageous in the best sense—that of having powerful, intriguing ideas.

It’s rare to see his type anymore. Now, even worse than then, the media (a cash-starved conduit for advertising) can’t tolerate originality. It’s too destabilizing: it scatters demographics. Nobody even has the time to Tune In, Turn On, or, god forbid, Drop Out. There’s no money trail to follow.

Leary, who died in ’96, was nothing if not an enlightened optimist — certainly not an attribute I’d ascribe to current social totems. He offered solutions without necessarily exploiting, or even mentioning, problems — and no man ever made big bucks doing that.

So requiescat in pace. Leary’s in the Sky with Diamonds.

Ted Kennedy Part I: He Crosses the Bridge

Ted.... Mary Jo

You’d think a country that is as cranked up as the United States would refuse to give anyone, let alone a politician, a second chance. Europeans despise second chances, flailing the injured with the cool detachment of a still vibrant class system.

Part of the American ethos dictates that a loser doesn’t necessarily have to remain a loser. Down the road to success you’re bound to get in a few accidents. Pull yourself up pal.

On July 18, 1969, U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, leaving a woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, to die in the submerged car. Experts believe that she lived up to four hours in the overturned vehicle. While she slowly asphyxiated, Ted dozed in a drunken sleep in a nearby hotel.

Seven days later he pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury and received a suspended sentence. He gave the dead girl’s parents about $90,000. The next year he was reelected with 62% of the vote.

As the 1960s reached conclusion, dark forces, skirting the chronological perimeter for the last nine years, finally stormed the walls. For the most part, the ramparts held, supported, incredibly, by flowers and guitars. But nothing lasts forever, not even Time. In the later half of 1969, the evil that men do hit the headlines, shrieking through drifting waves of saffron and billows of tie-dyed shirts like lost V2 rockets. My Lai came on deck. Charles Manson. Brian Jones. Chappaquiddick. Altamont.

 A watery grave

But Ted Kennedy survived to become the second longest-serving U.S. senator in U.S. history. And he knew how to party hard. In 1989, European paparazzi caught Ted having sex on a boat. Numerous magazine articles profiled his sociopathic womanizing and impressive drug abuse.

In 1980 he ran for president. A few people brought up Chappaquiddick and Ted said aw, forget it, I quit. He made a great speech declaring “the dream never dies”, crawled off to Boston, and then never made that mistake again.

When Ted died in 2009 at age 77, President Obama gave the eulogy. Ted was praised as a great guy.

There’s nothing wrong with second chances. It takes guts to forgive, but it takes a lobotomy to forget.

Or maybe you just have to party, really, really hard.

But Ted never forgot.1969 held him under the waves, his destiny forever entwined in the floating, flowing hair of Mary Jo Kopechne.

Peter Pan Has Really Left the Building: Michael Jackson Thru Sunglasses Darkly

More of a warning than a destination

Michael Jackson turned pro in 1968-69. But he doesn’t have a lot to do with 60’s pop culture. He belongs to the sequined, coked-up 80s, a decade in which he was most powerful as a fashion force.

What he can offer us is bookmarks on the nature of celebrity, especially U.S. celebrity—the most aggressive kind—that has effectively euthanized talent stretching from Chaplin to Brando. In the late 60s, the paparazzi had yet to crank up. There was still enough war-generation sense of collective decency to temper the mass tabloids. In the new millennium, the notion of privacy has been degraded to the point where it’s as vulnerable as an infant.

Jackson called himself ‘The King of Pop’…not ‘pop music’, just ‘pop’ as in ‘popular’. The fact that he even gave himself a lofty moniker is sad— for such a thing is earned, not granted. He was battling with the lightness of his being, banal and appealing as a Warhol soup can.

A more accurate—but ultimately distressing—appellation for Jackson is ‘King of Fame’. Because that’s what he was about: his career deftly parallels the explosion in pop media. The imbalance now between talent and fame is so precarious that even those with gifts, such as Jackson, are smashed apart in a multimedia whirlwind. Few have the perspective and stamina to remain grounded.

Fame doesn’t pay you; you pay it, forgoing privacy, domesticity, family love, and peace of mind. Jackson’s popularity intertwined with his life in that same scorching, self-destroying furnace that immolated Judy Garland and a hundred more honored with sepulchral, concrete hand prints: all those unfortunate enough to bypass childhood, dragged screaming from the playground by fierce, brisk parents, on their way to a Savings Account.

But he was intuitive: Jackson knew he had more to do with popular entertainment than music: he was a package of singing, dancing, fashion, cosmetics and self-mutilation, an Emmett Kelly clown pulled thru sunglasses darkly. Those who baited him with charges of pedophilia were unaware that Jackson was already chained and dying in a silk-lined dungeon of his own decree.

He altered his appearance, with surgery and chemicals, trying to reconcile a healthy body with a sick mind. Or was the other way around? In his final years, Michael Jackson seemed to be in a death struggle with himself.


Gifted boy, confused man

His executors may as well sell Neverland, his sprawling Santa Barbara estate and personal monument to mental illness, named in homage to Peter Pan. It’s hard to see it as ever becoming Gracelandish, but tourism can be morbid and clever.

James M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, once wrote, “Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough. You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.”

Maybe it has to do with dreams and sacrifice, but more likely it’s about a passion for popularity, a pursuit that destroys all grownups, every single one of them, no questions asked.

Phil Spector: An Inescapable Wall of Sound

When the Wall of Sound turned into bricks

We’ll kill the fatted calf tonight

So stick around

You’re gonna hear electric music

Solid Walls of Sound

- Elton John

Nobody better personifies the quintessence—and possibilities—of 60s pop music more than Phil Spector.

On a higher level, he is the single most important producer in rock history—one of the few of whom you can say, if he had never existed, what comes out of the radio today would be different.

But he was, and is, a ‘difficult’ man.

It’s quite possible that sometime during the late 1960s, he began to crack. Or maybe he got the pills-booze quotient wrong, as has been surmised. Whatever happened, Phil began to lose it. And the hits stopped forever.

Phil has discussed his mental illness. His father committed suicide when Phil was nine.

It appears 69-year-old Spector is in jail for eighteen years, having been convicted of second-degree murder. He shot and killed an actress in the foyer of his home. Phil has an extensive history of domestic abuse.

Spector has pulled many guns on many people, including Leonard Cohen and John Lennon. When he was arrested for murder in 2003, Spector had more than ten handguns in his house. That’s a lot.

Speaking of a lot, I’m reading over a list of Spector’s hits: Be my Baby, Da Do Ron Ron, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, Then He Kissed Me, Walkin’ the Rain, Spanish Harlem, Unchained Melody…It goes on for a while. Pop music offers us few geniuses, but if put to the test, I’d say Spector has his foot in the door.

Technically, we know how he developed his famous ‘Wall of Sound’. But nobody, not even when using Phil’s studio engineers, has been able to reproduce it.

Author Tom Wolfe wrote a famous essay about him called ‘The First Tycoon of Teen’. Phil did indeed make millions, sometimes in questionable ways. He also made a lot of people big stars.

He produced the Beatles’ last album ‘Let it Be’, although Paul McCartney hated the results – and still does — though McCartney is getting a little cranky in his dotage.

Rolling Stone magazine ranked Spector # 63 in the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

Spector is renowned for his ability to scream at people, for up to half an hour, without losing his voice. He’s also known to be generous to friends and strangers in financial trouble.

He stands 5’ 5”, wears elevator shoes, lived as a recluse, and went weeks without leaving the walls of his mansion.

For decades people have wondered why such a small man ever felt compelled to create such a gargantuan sound.

Phil’s life is about walls...some keep people in, some keep people out. Sometimes they're made of music, sometimes brick. It's no difference to Phil. For like any significant artist, he knows the only way to create is to create alone.

It's been said that silence is a sound you can't hear. Be it ironic, merciful, or both, Phil Spector must face an inescapable Wall of Sound until the day he dies.

Françoise Dorléac: A hollow man holds a flame

Considering the extent of Catherine Deneuve's fame, few people know that she had an older sister: her name was Françoise Dorléac - and she was just as beautiful as her famous soeur. Poor Françoise was to have a glamorous, brief life, making just a handful of films before her untimely death in 1967, gone at age 25 in a car crash.

Phillipe's flame from long ago

I didn't know any of this until I worked with a guy named Philippe Reux: we were partnered as 'on location' bodyguards for the film star Jean Claude Van Damme during the production of a movie called 'Maximum Risk', partly filmed in Toronto during a bitter winter.

Attempting to explain how I became Jean Claude Van Damme's lowly bodyguard occasions dark memories and general illegalities. Suffice it to say that for two weeks, it was my well-paid position to make sure that Mr. Van Damme was not harassed by his fans. I had a very quiet time.

Philippe was from Marseille, about sixty years old, white hair in a short pony tail, intensely skinny, once handsome with that peculiar Mediterranean tone of tan - light chocolate/more orange than gold. From certain angles he looked a lot like Keith Richards, especially in the early morning. Philippe chain-smoked, was excitable and chronically irritated. When we were introduced on the first day of our assignment, he just stared at me, wincing like he bit a lemon, as if he couldn't believe he was on a security detail with a man who had never killed anyone.

Sisters

He spoke English in short - often incomplete - sentences. His staccato delivery alternatively conveyed deep-seated anger, boredom or both.

Never once, in twelve days of work, did Philippe ask me about myself: in fact, part of his attraction was a self-engrossment so powerful that he barely needed to eat. I doubt if he ever knew my name.

By the second day, Philippe was more expansive, mainly because I gave him cigarettes and lobbed him banal questions. He told me that Canada was boring, and that he was "a party man. I can party. All the time. I never stop. There is no point." He really did speak like that.

Sisters in harmony

He had spent all of his life on movie sets in low-end jobs: filling a star's coffee cup, walking a producer's dog - it didn't matter to Philippe; he was there for the party. It was a haphazard career that began in 1960 on the set of Jean-Luc Godard's 'A bout de souffle' and had never really stopped. He went from film to film carrying nothing more than his toothbrush and wallet.

If you asked Philippe, 'what was Godard like?' or 'how was Brando on the set of Last Tango?' he would either just walk away or give you an elliptical answer like "A film. Just chemicals. Nothing is important."

"She had this little dog"

In fact, for a man who had spent his life on movie sets, Philippe had no interest in the medium whatsoever.

When I told him that François Truffaut was an important director and well-known in Canada, he reacted with shock, as if I had mentioned that his own brother was on the FBI's Most Wanted list. Then he immediately lost interest in the whole thing. Truly, he seemed incapable of sustaining interest in anything that wasn't attached to his body. I had come to accept him as a condescending extraterrestrial: it didn't matter where he was on planet Earth because it needed him more than he needed it.

During our last day of work we were stationed at a side entrance of Toronto's Old City Hall, down at the bottom steps, right behind the Eaton Centre. Van Damme was inside the Hall, filming a 'prison scene'. We smoked, leaning against Van Damme's 'personal trailer' - that was never more than a few hundred meters from the great man himself.

Time crawled by. Just to raise Philippe's irritability level, I asked what in life was important to him. He squinted at me, suspicious, as if I was laying a trap. I wasn't. I just wanted to know what kept him going. He seemed so perfectly hollow.

But for the first time, Philippe looked pensive.

Beauty is an accident

It had been snowing and Philippe, who wasn't dressed for a Canadian winter, started to smack his hands together, scowling at the sky, taking it all personally.

He told me that he liked to travel and that he liked to look at beautiful women - and the best way to combine both pursuits was to work in the film business. I asked him if he pursued the starlets. He replied that it wasn't necessary; that actresses were insecure and vulnerable to flattery - and sexual conquest under such conditions is dull and void of challenge. (He really did say things like that). But beauty was another thing, he said - now that was worth pursuing.

"Okay," I said, "who is the most beautiful woman you've ever seen?"

"Do you know the name 'Françoise Dorléac'?'

"Vaguely. Wasn't she in that Polanski movie about some old guy who...."

Philippe cut me off with a sharp wave of his hand. Evidently, I had bored him with just over ten words.

Two Sisters

"She was talented," he said. "Very beautiful. Her sister was Catherine Deneuve. She died. 1967. Twenty-five years old. We worked on 'Cul-de-Sac'. We spoke. We were young. She had this little dog. I can remember her profile, her face, you know? You cannot be that close to beauty and be unchanged, undamaged. Died a few months later. Françoise. The most spectacular of them all." Philippe looked drained. "Beauty is a wonderful accident, you get it? Something in me arrived at the end."

Always another party

Philippe's eyes were frozen on an object moving farther away. I was dumbfounded that he had a capacity for sentimentality. For a moment he even looked different.

Some of the crew was beginning to exit the set, which meant that Jean Claude would soon require our tough-guy services to protect him against the surging, nonexistent mob of frenzied fans. Philippe emerged from his reverie. His face tightened and he slowly rubbed his hands together.

We began to walk up the courthouse steps to the movie set. Philippe suddenly turned to me and said, "Never stop. Always another party. You get it?" As we reached the landing, Van Damme himself rushed down, petit and feline, leapt up into his trailer and snapped shut the door.

#CatherineDeneuve #jeanclaudevandamme #lesdemoisellesderochefort #romanpolanski,#jeanlucgodard #maximumrisk,#FrançoiseDorléac #keithrichards #1960spop #film #1967 #toronto #ianmclarke #pop #culture #popular #dorleac #culdesac

Au Revoir

George on Jim: The Doors Play Toronto

After 4 years I'm left with amind like a fuzzy hammer
regret for wasted nights& wasted years
I pissed it all away
American Music
End with fond good-bye; plan for future—Not an actor
Writer-filmmaker
Which of my cellves will be remembered
Good-bye America
I loved you
Money from home
good luck
stay out of trouble

Jim in a suit...people are strange

- Jim Morrison (Wilderness Vol. 1)

Looking back on the day September 13, 1969,  George can recall exactly where he was: "I had a job," he says, "to look after Jim Morrison, the singer for The Doors. And it was fucking horrible."

That's the day of Toronto Rock n' Roll Revival, a 13-hour concert at the University of Toronto's Varsity Stadium. Although John Lennon showed up, The Doors headlined.

George was attending the University of Toronto at the time, and to make some money, signed on as an event organizer. Somehow George became a reluctant member of a small group waiting at the airport for The Doors to show up and escort them to the stadium. He'd been told to stay close to Jim Morrison, as it was rumored he was an alcoholic.

"I think he was already drunk when they landed," George explains, "or just acting weird. Regardless, he was a difficult guy to be around and I knew it was going to be a tough night because The Doors was on last."

Was his time with Morrison as important, given that Morrison has become a cultural icon, one of the great die-young gods, like Jimmy Dean and Marilyn Monroe? "Not at all," says George. "I never liked The Doors. I still don't. That organ they play reminds me of a cheap Bar Mitzvah quartet. I wanted to see Chuck Berry and Little Richard and John Lennon, but had to hang with Morrison, so I kind of missed the whole thing."

Mr Mojo Risin'

George is careful to add that as The Doors' performance time grew closer, Morrison began to settle down, and in fact was quite sober, if not catatonic, as the band hit the boards. "There was something about his eyes that wasn't quite right," George adds as an afterthought, stepping into his sedan this bright Sunday morning, on the way to a golf course. "I don't think it was a question of no one being home, so to speak," he says, tapping his forehead. "I think the wrong kind of people were at home. Anyway, that was about forty years ago. It's important to remember how young all those people acted. Morrison was around twenty-five years old but he seemed younger than me, and I was nineteen. Just think about that." Then he's off to the Emerald Isle Country Club.

Let's go back: it's July 3, 1983. Père Lachaise cemetery, just outside of Paris. It's the twenty-second anniversary of Morrison's death. 



This is The End

A clump of hippies are nested by the grave, wrapped in blankets and sweaters, swaying to an execrable, grating interpretation of People Are Strange provided by a thin, blonde young man who, judging by his accent is of Swedish descent.

It begins to rain, which is expected, even encouraged in Paris, because it makes the whole place even more beautiful. Nobody seems to notice; in fact, the Swedish kid has segued into an up-tempo, cheery version of The End. He sings phonetically, free from the encumbering meaning of words.

 

He knew how to party

Forward we go. Twenty-five years, George says, "You know what Morrison said to me that day at Varsity Stadium? He said something like 'This is the last time we play Toronto." George smiles and looks to the sky. "It could rain," he says. "That's okay. We need it."

He begins to walk to his car, stops and turns. "And please write this down," he says, "remember because it's everything—back in the 60s everyone, everywhere, was just so goddam young."

#jimihendrix,#1960spop,#27club,#perelachaise,#raymanzerek,#thedoors,#LivePeaceinToronto  #JimMorrison,#robbiekrieger,#johndensmore,

"Stay out of trouble"

Lyndon B. Johnson: The Most Interesting & Crazy of Them All



The Johnson Treatment in action

When you talk about 1960s pop culture, at some point, often against better judgement, you must talk about Lyndon Baines Johnson.

LBJ (1908 – 1973) is among the most interesting of U.S. presidents. No other holder of that office ever encompassed such a divergent set of personality characteristics (with the possible exception of Richard Nixon during the darkest days of Watergate — when he took pills on top of the booze). And character is contrast.

Brilliant / anti-intellectual, shy / extroverted, crude / charming, violent / peace-loving, honorable / corrupt… Johnson, a towering Texan at 6’ 3.5”, 240 lbs, was an ever-evolving, ever-explosive force of life. There has never been a feature film made of Johnson’s life because American film generally has trouble with shading.

Johnson got the top job when his boss, John F. Kennedy, was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. And he gave up the position because he was simply burnt out.

He had a lousy heart. He expected to die young and smoked and drank heavily. He grew up poor and would take almost every advantage offered to him, underhanded or not.

He claimed, more than once, to close aides and friends, that he had an abnormally large penis.

He inherited the Vietnam War from Kennedy, and did his best to win it—not realizing, until the end of his job, that it was un-winnable. His inability to accept defeat resulted in the deaths of thousands of men, women and children, both American and Vietnamese. When American forces did withdraw from Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge would keep up the killing.


Johnson and JFK: A study in contrast

When in public, LBJ often insulted his wife and friends. Once, while receiving an enema, he gave dictation to a female assistant. While sitting on the toilet, he would sometimes call his aides to the washroom door and discuss affairs of state. If he felt a guest or dignitary was being condescending, he could display his disapproval by farting and belching.

He shook the hands of lepers after his advisors told him the disease was communicable. In order to get a fellow politician to change his mind, the lumbering LBJ might stand two inches from the man, bend slightly, and begin yelling: it became known as ‘the Johnson Treatment’.

He could sniff out nests of political power better than any American politician, before or since, and in this case, he was a genius - no question.

He had numerous love affairs that were, strangely, chaperoned by his wife. Johnson insisted on being called L.B.J., attempting to align his profile with F.D.R. He gave his wife (Claudia Johnson) a new name, ‘Lady Bird Johnson’, because he wanted her to have the same initials as himself. Their children were named Lynda Bird Johnson and Luci Baines Johnson. He even named his dog LBJ, for ‘Little Beagle Johnson’.


LBJ: Warts and all

Bill Moyers, Johnson's press secretary, thought his boss was clinically paranoid. However, his paranoia was somewhat justified: LBJ had thousands of enemies.

He started out as a school teacher and said he was ‘temperamentally unsuited’ to be president.

The Treatment continues

A hardcore Southerner, Johnson did the most of any president in advancing civil rights. He envisioned the creation of a ‘Great Society’, but the Vietnam War gave him no respite.

He was prone to rhetorical grandiosity, once declaring "These are the most hopeful times in all the years since Christ was born in Bethlehem."

He hated Bobby Kennedy so much that he initially refused to let the assassinated senator and veteran be buried in Arlington Cemetary, close to JFK. And Bobby Kennedy hated LBJ just as much.

During a speech, Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson declared that he supported a negotiated settlement to Vietnam. Later, when he visited LBJ at Camp David, the president grabbed him by the lapels and shook him and yelled, “You pissed on my rug!”

Long hair. Near the end. The real thing

After suffering a massive heart attack at age 46, he hated to be alone.

He became renowned for phoning people late into the night.

He died from a heart attack, alone in his bedroom, reaching for a phone.

Nobody knows quite what to make of Lyndon Johnson — because he was the real thing.

A Tale of Two Jays: Sebring, Gatsby & the American Nightmare



F. Scott



Tom Krummer A.K.A. Jay Sebring

"The truth was that Jay Gatsby… sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

If we can hang out in English Lit 101 for a second—and why not—Jay Sebring (1933 – 1969) could only have happened in America. He was a stock character, right from the Smith-Corona of F. Scott Fitzgerald (his good friends just called him ‘F’), the man whose mind has left us with The Jazz Age, and its greatest poster boy, Jay Gatsby.

The U.S.A. No other country celebrates self-propagation, creativity and perseverance with such splendiferous rewards. And no other country is so agile at commercializing extreme violence. It’s a strange brew causing Messrs. Jekyll and Hyde to seamlessly mind-meld.

Like fictional Gatsby (born ‘James Gatz’ on a farm in North Dakota) with whom he shares an unsettling number of traits, Jay Sebring surely invented himself under the Beach Boy sun of optimism and good vibrations.

First he was Thomas J. Krummer, an Alabama-born Korean War vet. During his service in the Navy, he was found to possess tonsorial acumen.

After four years of buzz cuts, he split for L.A., epicenter of reinvention. It was there that the middle initial ‘J’ of his name became the hip ‘Jay’ and the bummer ‘Krummer’ was replaced by the name of a swingin’ Florida raceway (www.sebringraceway.com).

In Los Angeles, he was a big hit as a ‘hairstylist for men’, cropping the mops of such celebs as Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Kirk Douglas, and Jim Morrison. In fact, Sebring virtually invented ‘the casual look’, a much-touted fashion of the mid-to-late 60s swingers.

Jay Gatsby was a successful bootlegger and became know for his fabulous, debauched parties. In fact, his parties we so dancing-naked-in-the-fountain-debauched that even today one feels a heavy heart that such gigs have followed the Dodo.

Sebring met the actress Sharon Tate at the Whisky a Go Go in October 1964. He was nothing if not a man of action, and within a year had dumped his wife, got a divorce, and became engaged to the beautiful Tate.

Tate and Sebring: Just before the end

Tate & Sebring: Just before the end

Then Tate went to London to shoot Roman Polanski’s film ‘The Fearless Vampire Killers’. It didn’t take long for her to take up with Polanski. Sebring was wonderfully cordial about the whole thing—jealousy is for losers—and made a fast new friend in Polanski.

An aggressive entrepreneur, business boomed for Sebring, establishing salons in West Hollywood, Palm Springs, and Las Vegas. He also nabbed acting roles, including a cameo in a ‘Batman’ where he played the part of Mr. Oceanbring, a character based on himself. The hair care business is still going to this day: checkout Sebring International and watch a video of Jay explaining his theory of the Big Snip.

On August 8, 1969, Sebring was slaughtered in Polanski’s home, along with Tate and two others, by friends of Charles Manson. Jay was thirty-five.

“[Sebring] was short, about five feet six, and was lying on his right side, his hands bunched up near his head as if still warding off blows. His clothing--blue shirt, white pants with black vertical stripes, wide modish belt, black boots--was blood-drenched.”

- Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi

Gatsby was shot in his pool, a willing victim of mistaken identity. Ostensibly, he took a bullet for the woman he loved—but wise guys know that the Gatz saw his jig was up, and with exploding hubris, made the best of it.

So take from the Tale of the Two Jays what you will. Much has been written about the American Dream/Nightmare—a troubled vision that alternately has to do with freedom, wealth, sex, death, or combinations thereof. Certainly Sebring’s story shows us the fragility of success—the terrible randomness of wealth and life. Gatsby’s demise (like today’s sub-prime maestros) warns us that what we term ‘the moneyed class’ is in a constant death struggle with Darwin: you can’t always buy your way out of extinction.

Conclusion? The 1920s was a lot like the 1960s, but without acid, guitars, and possibly Peter Fonda.