Ted Kennedy Part II: Pale, Slim Hands

A Political Par-tee!

He was called the last and the least, an attitude firmly grounded on the morbid deification of his brothers. Perhaps it’s hard to appraise his value. Few people have had to perform publicly with as many ghosts as Ted Kennedy.

Ted never really escaped

The White House was his, until he abandoned a young girl to drown in his overturned, submerged car.  And then OJ'd his way out of it. After that, the only thing they would trust him with was an incumbent-for-life senatorial position. Massachusetts loved him.  Everyone felt so lousy about his murdered brothers, what else could you do?

Surprisingly, he performed well – which is either a testament to Kennedy’s innate political savoir faire, or evidence of what kind of job it really is.

O them ghosts

Ted had a hard-earned reputation for womanizing and boozing – not exactly a career-killer, but one that keeps you off Pennsylvania Avenue. It was impossible to tell whether he cared, or was just going through the motions ... Something, unprincipled and painful, kept pushing him on.

He had everything and, in a way, very little, choke-collared by historical expectations, and perhaps, when alone, subject to late-night nightmares of slim, pale hands.

‘In our sleep, pain that cannot forget' - Aeschylus

                                                                                                                                                                                  

Get Ourselves Back to the Garden: Marilyn Monroe plays Woodstock

Marilyn Monroe at Woodstock

Among the strangest, most informative on-stage appearance of all time would have been Marilyn Monroe at the Woodstock music festival.

Few imaginations can deep-dive to such dark, intriguing fathoms.

She doesn't belong on that stage. She doesn't belong to the 1960s. But why? Your responses are keys to the Kingdom of appraising popular culture.

But there she is, 1950s America’s undulating, glittering gift to 1960s America’s mud-and drug-soaked denizens of the forests and trees.

Maybe she’d begin her set with ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’, because the song’s playful mockery of materialism would hang well with anti-establishment hippies. Or perhaps she’d just kick it with ‘Heatwave’, as the raw, unbridled sensuality of the lyrics could only lubricate the gears of sexual revolution.

Who knows. A monologue would have been appropriate, in which she discussed her foster homes, sexual abuse and mental illness – issues sure to rile a socially sensitive crowd.

Marilyn would have been okay. Unaccompanied and alone, she’d appear petite on Woodstock’s massive stage, ghost-like in the spotlight, swaying on heels, already beginning to blur at the edges, losing her grip. 

The crowd would grow quiet, straining to hear her whisper, witnessing the moment when the torch-bearer of one generation, exhausted and lost, releases the thin green Gatsby light to the next. And it can only happen with a torch song. So she remembers ‘After You Get What You Want, You Don’t Want It’  to say au revoir.

“And tho' I sit upon your knee

You'll grow tired of me

'Cause after you get what you want

You don't want what you wanted at all”

More a confession than a song, less an epilogue than an epitaph. She would look up, confused to hear an owl in Westwood Village Memorial Park gardens.

Joni Mitchell, watching from the other side of the room, would try to make sense of a different garden:

“Well maybe it is just the time of year

Or maybe it's the time of man

I don't know who l am

But you know life is for learning

We are stardust

We are golden

And we've got to get ourselves

Back to the garden”

"Walk toward the Green Light"

1164 Morning Glory Circle: Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered

I'm wild again

Beguiled again

A simpering, whimpering child again

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I...

-  Lorenz Hart

1164 Morning Glory Circle

Bewitched. 1164 Morning Glory Circle... It was Darrin and Samantha Stevens' pad. Their crib. Love den. The central set and you never saw the ceiling because there were no clouds so they didn't need a sky.

A shelter/suburb against the storm though Darrin, stressed to the point of perforated ulcers, rarely smiled. He was the 'square', neutered, non-threatening, shivering with tension. Samantha, protected from mortality, had an existential marriage at best.

"Hi'ya neighbor"

Set in 1960s Westport, Connecticut but looking a whole lot like Beach Boys southern California. You have a successful – if not harried – ad executive and his blonde, button-nose wife. Lots of space. Variety of high-performance North American cars in the driveway. Beautiful lawn. Everything clean, protected, bright and very White. No

They were Peter Lawford-esque Swingers. Some booze, some magic, some love. Sports jackets and slacks. No drugs or disease. No funerals. Possibly no gravity. No sex. There was never a reference to the outside.

Bewitched. 1964-72. Eight seasons. A childlike world full of grown-ups behaving like neurotic children. Every night TV news told us about Vietnam — so who the hell needed grown-ups?

Sam getting mail at 1164

It’s still there. 1164 Morning Glory Circle. Half façade. Empty. Samantha and Darrin? Long gone baby gone. 

Darrin, always a Mad Mad Man

And even when 1164 Morning Glory Circle itself heaves to the ground, choking under Warner's back-lot sand and pounded to dust by a million lost acolytes, it will still be around, kind of.

Because Samantha knew all about nose candy. The magic was bleached in her eyes, her smiles, and in her hair.

1164—deceptive and alluring with no need of time or place, but like Tinkerbell, shows up when called, sprinkling pixie dust in your eyes.

"Hey, we know the score at 1164"

Hey Hey The Monkees and the Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The Monkees really becoming a band was like the equivalent of Leonard Nimoy really becoming a Vulcan.” – Mickey Dolenz

Mike Nesmith. Mickey Dolenz. Davy Jones. Peter Tork. 

The Monkees took a lot of heat.

Just crazy kids

The hippies’ blissed-out quest for authenticity was itself muddled with conflicting definitions of ‘authenticity’. The Monkees bugged them because the group was assembled by TV producers, not tie-dyed, flower-slinging record producers or concert/nightclub promoters or other really authentic types. 

(Elvis was promoted by a former carnival barker and the Beatles achieved planetary grooviness through the tireless dedication of a troubled furniture store salesman. But man, keep it on the low).

They were entertainers, not rock guys. They mostly  sang songs written by professional songwriters, not by singer-songwriters. But other musicians didn’t seem to mind. Ask Stephen Stills (who auditioned for the Monkees). Or ask Jimi Hendrix (who opened for the Monkees).

The 1960s had a tough time dealing with big bad commercialism. The Establishment was commercial...so it follows that those who worked the land or sold sea-shell trinkets were uncommercial. The intent was well intended though the logic was weak.

They called them ‘The Pre-Fab Four’. Their music was ‘bubblegum’. They were an insubstantial

The Monkees find a litterbox

vapor given form by klieg lights and back-lot set designers. So what? ... the unbearable lightness of being.

So now, 50 years later, with the hippies long buried under Altamont Speedway, the Monkees continue to entertain, to help you forget, and to help you remember.

What? No concert t-shirts? Sell outs!

The charm of entertainment is that it is as unauthentic and manipulative as the Beatles’ matching Pierre Cardin suits... But don’t be too harsh on the hippies. They sometimes died in taking action against what they saw to be corrupt and toxic. We don’t do that much anymore. There’s no money in it. Gotta stay authentic baby.

Laurence Harvey and the Art of Ennui

"Someone once asked me, 'Why is it so many people hate you?' and I said, 'Do they? How super! I'm really quite pleased about it."

-           Laurence Harvey

Laurence gives a neck rub

He was born in Lithuania but everybody thought him British. At birth his name was Laruschka Mischa Skikne. His Hebrew names were Zvi Mosheh. In South Africia, where he moved as a young boy, he was called Harry Skikne. ‘Laurence Harvey’ was just made up. He was married a few times but rumored to have other inclinations.

See the pattern? The swirling brocade he dutifully followed from cradle to grave? And so perfect with the 1960s demimonde passion for detachment and ennui.

Laurence Harvey was posh and pedestrian at exactly the same time. He was equally at home in Room at the Top as in Of Human Bondage. In fact, regardless of the part he played, his hair rarely changed. Always parted and combed, longish in a 60s mod way. And his face rarely changed too. Wooden, flat, ideal for the hypnotized zombie of The Manchurian Candidate, his most famous role.

And a lot of people did hate Harvey. Some actors and directors refused to work with him, even though he was popular and had box office appeal.

The Sound of Silencer

Laurence Harvey didn’t seem to like anyone or anything, even himself. His deep-rooted misanthropy empowered his performances with mystery and violence, an existential angst that was never supposed to be there but somehow worked. You got the feeling that Harvey couldn't be trusted by anyone, not even himself…and he was okay with that.

Playing the character Miles Brand in Darling (1965), Harvey has this exchange:

Diana Scott: I asked you to go. Why haven't you?

Miles Brand: Because I've stayed.

People don't like me?

More Beckett than Pinter? Few could speak a Waiting-for-Godot haiku with such conviction as Laurence Harvey.

He once said, “To bare your soul to the world, I find unutterably boring.”

So goodbye Zvi Mosheh and all others who know the fleeting power of not belonging.

JB: James Bourne/Jason Bond

James Bond always was a parody, we just didn’t see it.

A parody you say?

That’s why the ‘In Like Flint’ films and ‘Casino Royale (1967)’ are weak. You can’t parody a parody. It’s too diluted.

Although a creation of the Cold War 50s, it was Bond’s rapacious and indiscriminate sexual proclivities that embedded him in 1960s culture — and made him appear somewhat unwholesome and predatory throughout the 80s and 90s.

Giving women names like ‘Pussy Galore’ and ‘Plenty O’Toole’ was hardly clever, let alone alluring. Nobody has ever figured out author Ian Fleming’s penchant for misogyny (doubtful), lack of humour (probable), parody (likely). Whatever the roots, women in the 1960s Bond films actually do further the plots. Most are aggressive and rarely stupid.  

Ian Fleming: Details are in the smoke

There is a strong undertow of existentialism across all the novels: Bond’s death wish is likely Fleming’s own, who would be granted his desire at age 56, leaving his creation to toil on, experiencing Dr. Who-like regeneration across more than six actors…and counting.

Today, it is difficult to appreciate the impact James Bond had on 1960s pop culture. He became a swingin’ totem for the Rat Pack-like guys who laughed at hippies. Bond legitimized lone-wolf, anti-establishment behaviour and promiscuity, performing both in the defence of Queen and country.

Deadly Siren anyone?

Much later the Bond franchise was reinvented, adopting/adapting the persona of another famous ‘JB’, Jason Bourne –with a twist of British, shaken and stirred. Here comes Bond, wounded and panting, the hunter is now the hunted.

Very New Millennium. 

Still he lives on. An action hero whose place in pop culture we
follow down long winding stairs, descending to the 1960s, down past neon lava lamps to that timeless lounge of dry martinis and beautiful women in tight dresses who sway against the bar like undersea flora.

It has to do with The Look of Love

Richard Nixon: King Lear on the Helipad

"Remember, always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you. But those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself." - Richard Nixon

###

If ever a man — if not a politician — was in the wrong job/wrong place/wrong time, it was Richard Milhous Nixon, the 37th President of the United States.

Sweat it out baby

Today, he could be Bill-O’Reillied as a brilliant right-wing strategist, destroying reputations, dispersing dirty cash, ignoring some basic statutes of a democratically-elected government. Not to say that liberals might be a little more wholesome — but none of them would be in Nixon’s league. He was a burnished pro with dark ambition hardened by self-pity, towering intelligence strangely devoid of conscience, and a deep cynicism for the system he was elected to serve.

Nixon needed draft-dodging hippies as much as they needed him. Bereft of an enemy, both sides would lose direction and purpose.

To think  Richard Nixon was president at the time of Woodstock helps put the inevitability of his demise into an understandable perspective. He became increasingly irrelevant, an opinion strengthened by the surprise election of Jimmy Carter, a man diametrically different than his predecessor (yes, let's overlook G. Ford, a passive Nixon appointee).

Oddly, it was never clear why Nixon wanted the job, who he was striving to impress, or the validity of his vision. For the smartest guy in the room, he made some terrible errors in judgment. Some of his friends were terrifying.

His core contribution to popular culture comes to us through Greek-drama fueled fatalism. His career is a dire, cloaked warning.

King Lear on the Helipad/Heath

Nixon was born to be disgraced and ridiculed; his prodigious gifts splintered under character deficits so aggressive and persistent that any chance of redemption has been ceded to deities. How else could he have left the White House — except hunched and wounded and on the run? Fate.

Nixon had  qualities that prevented him from being a decent man. He knew that, so carefully constructed his image. At one

Nixon on the Beach

point, early on, he believed a wife and a daughter and a dog would help do the trick, but by the end he was half drunk and sick, King Lear confused on the helipad, blaming all on others. Watch his forced smile, his distracted demeanor…the restlessness of a fugitive, the cold sweat of a liar. Certainly, those he trusted betrayed him, but the co-dependence was unwholesome and deranged.

His favorite writer was Leo Tolstoy, who believed, "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."

Heraclitus, a Greek who also knew something about people, believed "character is destiny."

Few fools have ever been as brilliant as Richard Nixon.

Gloria Stavers: Princess of Pop

U.N.C.L.E. - David McCallum?

16 magazine. 1957-2001. A ‘fan’ publication. Written —primarily—for teenage, American girls. The editorial focus was on television and teen male music celebrities.

How did an editor who extolled the talents of David Cassidy and Paul Revere & the Raiders ever gain such influence? Well, for a start, she gave us answers: What does the Dave Clark Five eat for breakfast? How tall, really, is the Monkees’ Davy Jones? What about Paul McCartney’s favorite color? Are Sonny and Cher dating or married?

Just considering the career of Gloria Stavers (1926-1983) causes one to hold, and balance, sets of opposed virtues, tastes and interpretations. She is evasive, on one page jabbering about Gary Lewis and the Playboys, the next, discussing the career of Lenny Bruce or getting physical with Jim Morrison.

Gloria glammed

How this former magazine subscription clerk and model helmed bubblegum pop promotion with such élan has as much to do with ambition and self-confidence than discernible talent.  It’s as if she willed herself into existence.

As editor-in-chief, she never accepted advertising. Readership peaked at more than five million in 1964. Her talent was quite discernible.

The magazine offered clean, sober intimacy, underpinned with grade-school photo collages and non-threatening confessions, trivializing real-world, contemporary concerns. There was little chest hair. Gloria knew who paid the bills.

Gloria editing

She focused on boys but occasionally let girls through the door—Connie Francis, Hayley Mills, Patty Duke, Susan Dey, Marie Osmond, Farrah Fawcett. But young male readers generally went elsewhere to look at pictures of pretty women.

When she died, Dave Marsh in Rolling Stone opined… “[we have] lost America’s original pop-music writer, the force behind what was at one time the most influential and widely circulated rock publication in America.”

Dave Marsh wrote that?

Gloria Stavers knew, intuitively, that pop culture is interchangeable with

Jim and G-L-O-R-I-A

commercial culture: therein lies its genius, its banality, its endurance, and its fragility.

16 magazine offered an ambiance unsullied by pregnancy, napalm, drugs and rebellion... It was a state of mind,  a place to go when you were a young girl, a gentle reprieve before the long slow you-can-never-turn-back stroll from the magic garden and across the field to Grownup Land.

The existential paean of Julie Andrews

Long-haired Julie

The key to her character is...a hairstyle?

She is rare — a woman who is more feminine with short, boyish hair. Both an enigma and a clue. With substantial tresses she appears ordinary, domestic and inconspicuous. It’s as if her rejection of an average coif adds an air independence, honesty and good health. She is strong in a focused, private Zen way. Small wonder that her two most successful roles (Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music) are really one — that of a kindly, virginal English governess.

The skin is not blemished by sin or wrinkled with profundities. Whether her breeding is innate or acquired cannot be answered.  Her multi-octave voice is pitch-perfect and lilting, no Billie Holiday-style slurring and sadness. Her only mystery is motivation: what does she need? Who, really, is she?

Julie gets ready to shred it

Julie Andrews, with her Rogers & Hammerstein and her Lerner & Loewe is anti-Vegas and anti-Woodstock. Her space is occupied by others like Petulia Clark and Anthony Newley (kind of), those with a sing-along music hall sensibility. How she ended up in two monster money-making films of the 1960s is indicative of the era’s sly playfulness and hybrid nature of its entertainments. (Remember, Janis Joplin sang with Tom Jones, and it worked.)

Come fly with me...baby

Long after rainbow psychedelia is bleached away by the idle tears of nostalgic boomers, we shall still see Julie swirling atop that Austrian mountain, her arms wide open to a celestial lover, or floating to earth on an umbrella, detached from us, from sex, from the war and disease, Saint Andrews, joyous and unsullied in a self-contained, uncontaminated existence in which you sing your way out of any darkness, even the darkness of death. Untouched and untouchable.

Julie, must you leave so soon?

John F. Kennedy: The Song, Never the Singer

"Hey you, doll face - road trip!"

He remains the Don Draper of U.S. presidents. His promiscuity was of gargantuan proportions. His inclination for risk-taking was pathological. He lied and cheated with energetic abandon and shared a family trait for vengeance and a dark appreciation of noblesse oblige.

Arguably —is there any other way? — his approx. 1,000-day reign was potholed with self-induced crises. His decisions surrounding the Bay of Pigs exposed the decomposition of his character. His heedless drive to murder Fidel Castro propelled the world into a U.S./Russian nuclear showdown. His womanizing exposed him to blackmail.

'Hiya girls': Frank, JFK, and, well...

Yet he was brave, handsome, articulate, wealthy and witty. He loved his children and had great taste in clothes. His image alone attracted a generation of bright, educated young people to pursue careers in the civil service, including a cigar-smoking William Jefferson Clinton — a career path that just a few years later Richard Nixon, building on Kennedy’s boneheaded involvement in Vietnam, would napalm into destruction.

Actually, it looks pretty good

Though he kick-started the 1960s, JFK was nothing if not a swingin’ rat-packer, a rich kid slumming with Sinatra and bed-fulls of prostitutes. In fact, his autopsy report indicated the presence of sexually transmitted diseases which, the doctors surmised, must have given him years of grief, let alone the pain imparted to his paramours.

The question arrives: do we wish to know salacious details as means of explaining motivations and judgments, or are we mired, sick with frustration and boredom, in belittling men and women of accomplishment? Is it a combination of the two?

In our sleep comes the song

Anyway, his importance can not be found in what he was, but what he seemed to be, what he could have been, and most importantly, what we wanted him to be. JFK knew his history, and he knew that in our dreams comes the song, not the singer, rounding our little life with a sleep.

Steve McQueen: You Gotta Move

You may be high

You may be low

You may be rich, child

You may be poor

But when the Lord gets ready

You've gotta move- Fred McDowell & Rev. Gary Davis

McQueen at home

Seems there’s an inherent romance to moving…just being in motion…You might be On the Road...or getting Kicks on Route 66. And there goes The Wanderer and exactly one million songs and books about that ribbon o’ highway.

Because... to move is to quest, and to quest is to discover... yourself… eventually, or the Big Man, or whoever is going to drag you legs jangling over the final finish line.

Cool is about failed romance, about the impossibility but yearning for an unbreakable trust, for love, for eternity, for that lasting embrace that lasts for as long as forever is, and you don’t get cooler than Steve McQueen — for he was the ultimate moving machine, a man

Go Baby Go

head back and handsome, passing the galloping Knights of Old, switching a horse for motorcycle, a holy grail for a moto-cross trophy. McQueen was a loner in the most hallowed sense of the word, sensing at a young age the inverse relationship between distance and love.

 Maybe he was racing from a rough childhood of alcoholic/absent parents and reformatory school. (It was said he had been raped while in school and later worked as a prostitute). There was drive, but there was baggage... Could be he never hold the mirror to his dyslexia? What about the wife beating? The drugs? The serial adultery? Nobody ever asked him because you know he wouldn't have an answer — for anything. Answers weren't his thing. Nor explanations. 

Just being cool

When asked about film acting, he replied the ‘bread’ was pretty good. That’s cool. Don't go too deep because the deeper you go the darker it is — and desperate ghosts wait in the shadows, so anxious to drag down the blue-eyed boy.

Better to hunker in a ’68 Shelby Mustang careening through the zigzag streets of San Francisco. Or to snatch up a beautiful Faye Dunaway from a pointless chess match and tell her ‘let's play something else’. Because in the end, it’s all a game. He would repeat that more than once. It's all a game.

Not even sweating in the sauna

The faster you go, the less you belong to earth, to all this, because speed always lifts you up and doesn’t have to explain anything to anyone ever again. You don’t need the job and the wife and the house because they have no role in the pounding sex thud of torque and raining chain sparks as you skid off Coastal Highway # 1 by Big Sur, up and over the haphazard cliff and moving now thru sweet wet clouds with a high-pitch velocity unknown by anyone to that day.

In November 1980, the King of Cool was gunning a Husqvarna 400 Cross full bore when he jumped The Gates... and a thousand angels, taken by surprise, twirled like feathers in his winding wake.

Federico Fellini: Life is a party. Let’s live it together.

A black & white study of color

Someone once said of Charles Dickens that with all his plot contrivances, his silly character names, his terrible coincidences and reliance on low-end melodrama, he should be bad. Really bad. But he’s great. And he’s great because through it all his over abounding love for life shines through like a summer sun.

Love for life. Love of life. When you consider Federico Fellini, consider love and life. It will get you through the often meandering story structures, the over-reliance on the grotesque, and the unsatisfying conclusions.

You see the colors, the emotions swirling up like kite tails, unpredictable and playful. You see the people, who often seem to belong to a kind of theatrical troupe, argumentative but rarely mean, cheerful but foolish, wounded but dancing into tomorrow.

Fellini takes off the makeup

As Guido says — his greatest character in his greatest film — “What is this flash of joy that's giving me new life? … I feel I've been set free. Everything looks good to me, it has a sense, it's true. How I wish I could explain, but I can't... I'm not afraid to tell the truth now…what I'm seeking... Life is a party, let's live it together. I can't say anything else, to you or others. Take me as I am, if you can... it's the only way we can try to find each other.”

‘Felliniesque’. Few people have had their surname metamorphosed into an adjective, but how else to define this indefinable parade of glistening souls.

“Life is a party. Let’s live it together.” Federico, we try, but unlike you, few of us dream in color.

Andy Warhol: Imprisoned in Eternity for 15 Minutes

Mr. Detachment

No one did banality like Andy Warhol. He never had a business card, so who knew if he was artist or graphic artist. For Andy, there was no difference. And anyway, who cared as long as you got paid.

Indeed, he never escaped the charge of poseur, and to his credit, he never tried.

Somehow he tapped the mother-load of a nation’s early-60s spiritual fatigue. And he knew it had a lot do with cash, consumers, and celebrities.

Andy's Selfie

His droning speech patterns. His childlike, gentle observations. His fright wig. His voyeuristic films. He was a way of life, one billion miles from Woodstock and campus rebellions. To complain is to commit, and that wasn't Andy’s bag. He never explained a thing.

He was all for detachment and from the beginning knew it's the observer who adds depth to the painting, never the other way around.

To this day, no one does Andy better than Andy, a monochrome magician, silk-screened with pixie dust, juggling soup cans, still frugging with it-girls, imprisoned in eternity for 15 minutes.

Jimi Hendrix: Some of us are looking at the stars

"Your guitar, it sounds so sweet and clear/but you're not really here/ it's just the radio."

- Superstar

The electric guitar of Jimi Hendrix spoke an odd language to everyone that heard it, world over, time and again. People were baffled. It was so foreign. Wasn't feedback to be avoided? Not long after Woodstock, I overheard my primary school teacher say of Hendrix, "What  planet did he come from?" Yeah, there was much day-glo coloratura.

Notice his lyrics have a lot to do with outer space and distant planets, which makes sense considering the cosmic lexicon of his fingers.

Mom & Son: Hendrix begins 

Getting the groove

And similar to an alien that carries no immunity to systematic greed and racism, he became sadly indentured, tethered to lawsuits and fair-weather friends and lecherous relatives and well-wishers’ drugs. A friend of mine met him in Toronto, and said, "He looked very thin and very frail."

If ever there was tragic hero crushed between the tectonic plates of art and commerce, it was Jimi Hendrix.

Visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and stand before his stage outfits. He was slim-shouldered but held out for five years under punishing pressure. Oscar Wilde: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

New York Times: September 18 2025

Neptune probe reveals strange discovery

Performing on Neptune. Where else...

AP - New York - NASA’s small but determined Columbus 5 probe that has been scouring Neptune for the past two weeks made an unusual discovery today. What can be described as balls of used electric guitar strings rolled down the blue plains like dancing tumbleweeds. Scientists are puzzled by the strings and the odd sound made by the warm winds which, they say, is reminiscent of singing and amplified feedback.

###

So wish Jimi well on his beloved Valleys of Neptune where every night forever he plays under the stars and the face of God...sweet and clear.

Peter Sellers - When the Fake Exceeds the Original

Ursula causes high blood pressure

Spike Milligan said Peter Sellers was not a actor, but a freak — and meant it as high praise. Sellers’ aptitude for mimicry was so far beyond the norm, there had to be something else going on. Possibly he was sad heir to a Frankensteinian alchemy endowing the chosen to speak with genuine voices — yet unable to fake souls.

A freak? An article about Sellers in a 1960's edition of Vogue suggests that it’s genius when we accept the veracity of the fake over the fiction of the original. Director Stanley Kubrick was astonished at Sellers' seemingly limitless talent - and astonishment was rarely a Kubrickian reaction.

A Frankensteinian alchemy

That Sellers was mentally ill - yet functional - is tribute to his will power and the more morbid aspects of the entertainment industry.

There was about him sadness, a technical detachment that veered away from ensemble performances and aligned him with gadgetry — anything that wasn't alive. His best work is seen in films with thin plot lines — because  Sellers never belonged to anything, let alone himself. He was no good at life.

Not Being Anywhere

Every girlfriend, every wife, every movie, seemed to further eviscerate his damaged heart. And when the end arrived, a slumming deity gazed from a cloud and pronounced, “Let him speak to us all in the voice of God — because God is hard to imitate. Plus, He never makes us laugh."