Marshall McLuhan: Everybody Went ‘Awww’

 

His pomposity was tolerable given the profundity of his theories. Just the way he’d tuck in his chin with a slow wag of the head.  Your poor souls, it said. Professor Marshall McLuhan seemed most comfortable when he spoke and others listened. And what they heard was a brilliant mind trying to make sense of the world of the 1960s and beyond.

He managed to supra-distill a far-reaching theory about communications into one sentence - the medium is the message. And it was… and is.

Gentle performer, public intellectual, bow-tied provocateur, it became hard to know where the performances ended and the promulgations began. More than once he suggested that people took him too seriously (“I don't necessarily agree with everything that I say”), further inflaming jealousies of his academic brethren.

He became a star, compensated and celebrated, a skit actor in a Woody Allen flick. The journalist Tom Wolfe famously wrote, "Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov—What if he is right?" The question persists… though the Internet unknowingly bolsters his claims.

Inside the Ivory Towers, those who had once offered obeisance, now bemoaned a belief, perhaps rightly, that his theories were not a testable, repeatable, or practical scientific methodology.

In the final years leading to his death, McLuhan witnessed condemnation and belittlement of his work. But it turns out, for the most part, that he really was right.

"We live in a global village, connected by instantaneous electronic networks." How did he know, so confidently, sixty years (plus) before the World Wide Web?

As an intellectual entrepreneur, he was willing to risk where no tome had gone before. Very rare. To borrow from Kerouac, McLuhan was “like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

 

#marshallmcluhan #universityoftoronto #pierretrudeau #1960s #professor #mediumisthemessage #haroldinnis #university #normanmailer #cbc #canada #media

Twiggy: Perfectly You

 

Just a wisp. Short and skinny. A boy’s haircut. Awkward poses. Lesley Hornby. A most unlikely fashion model yet perfect for a time and place that loved to smash the parapets. Who wants to be ‘normal’?

Twiggy by name and by nature. O those Margaret Keane eyes. It was her very anomality that made you notice how much fun she was, how different from steely-eyed glamazons glaring from Vogue covers. Fewer pretensions in a Britain too poor for a class war. The candor of her gaze expelled irony. We could join her at the party.

Carnaby Street. She strolls by without a watch, a purse or purpose. Up for the next laugh, celebrating her good fortune, unencumbered and unfettered, swinging now to a future so deeply in love with itself.

And of herself, she said, “I always describe her, 60s Twiggy, as my little friend who sits on my shoulder.” How wonderful to stroll the leafy lanes of life knowing that you have been, all along, indisputably, irrefutably, perfectly, you.

 

#twiggy #lesleyhornby #carnaby street #fashion #1960s #1967 #davidbailey #theboyfriend #documentart #london #davidbowie

Sharon Tate: How to Enter the Mystic

She appears delicate. Her skin, almost translucent. Feminine and maternal. There is an innocence in the deep-set eyes, watchful but wistful, perhaps a playful turn of the lips. We uncover a realism in her persona that makes her noticed. Uncommon. She is unexpectedly nervous.

Her films are forgettable. She needed more time. But her future, and motherhood, ended in a slash of violence decreed by a mentally ill man, trying to raise awareness for his demons.

Her name endures with the crime of her demise. Or does it? There’s more. Others have met terrible exits. Somehow, she’s the fleeting nymph under a diamond sky, dancing unchained from Time. Somehow the crypt has no purchase. It makes little sense. But immortality has nothing to do with material gain. Unveiling that ruse is the first step to entering the mystic.

Perhaps her soul was more powerful than others, far from madding Manson and the broken Polanski. There is no conclusion to her tale. Her film will never read ‘The End’. She always leaves the frame before forfeiting her freedom.

Perhaps people like Sharon Tate hold furtive, flickering candles, wayward ghosts who light the way out of forgotten caverns.

Past is prologue, and prologue just may be that wind-swept bikini-clad woman on a blue-sky Malibu beach, out of touch but never out of reach, leaving no footprints as the pounding white surf pulls her far down the coastline.

 

#sharontate #charlesmanson #romanpolanski #film #hollywood #tarantino #beachboys #crime

Anna Fallarino: Tales of Pleasure and Pain

 

A crime of the heart?

Zannone. A beautiful Mediterranean island. Italian. Warm waters ebb and flow. Overhead, an azure sky. In the 60s, the Marquis Camillo Casati Stampa di Soncino, or just Casati Stampa, leased the island.

His villa was the scene of endless parties, replete with orgies. There was a 'hidden mirror room' where the marquis and friends would watch sex sessions, many involving his wife, who often swam naked with guests.

His wife. Anna Fallarino, an actress searching for a different stage. Off to Zannone. Lots of lovers. A cache of nude photos. And more and more.

But then, what? Call it love. Massimo Minorenti, student/porn actor, a regular sex partner, captured her heart. And they met off the island—an extremely dangerous adventure.

Rome. August 1970. Enter Casati Stampa with a shotgun. Six shells. Three for Fallarino. Two for Minorenti. And the final one for himself. All gone.

A crime of passion? Hardly. Sexual jealousy is no substitute for a crime of the heart.

Today, Zannone is in ruins. At night, wild sheep sleep under their indigo sheets, unheeding the whispering surf with its tales of painless pleasure.

 

#zannone #casatistampa #annafallarino #sex #1960s #island #italy #marquis #lamarchesa #annaecamillo #MassimoMinorenti #letsplaysomethingelse

Warren Beatty: Never a Dandy in Aspic

 

Strategic sex

You walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht

Your hat strategically dipped below one eye

Your scarf it was apricot

You had one eye in the mirror, as you watched yourself gavotte

And all the girls dreamed that they'd be your partner

They'd be your partner and

You're so vain.

-        -  Carly Simon

Closer to Narcissus than Priapus, or perhaps neither, because Warren Beatty was strategically vain. He had a discipline matched by temerity and talent. Sexual conquests were guided by pragmatism. Like most enduring film stars, he was self-reverential with a charming detachment.

Beatty had little time for the 1960s zeitgeist. He was never counterculture, always closer to the Rat Pack than Haight-Ashbury. But pure Malibu, no Vegas. By the time of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), he had perfected the character of an inchoate man, burdened by cultural confusion and societal norms. He wanted to belong but lacked an invitation. Unsure, mumbling, Beatty in Shampoo (1975) can’t be redeemed by his face alone—so alone he must stay.

Know when to leave

His personal narrative belongs to America for it’s grounded on the terra firma of independence. No other soil breeds those so hungry for freedom that they risk all to remain untethered. Beatty could act, write, direct and produce. His ambition was puzzling. Was he a new kind of movie star? Carey Grant never attended political conventions.

Then the films began to fail, and he just stopped. Didn’t matter—because he was protected by instinct. He was never a dandy in aspic. You see, anybody can show up; only the chosen know when to leave.

 

 #warrenbeatty #shirleymaclaine #shampoo #bonnieandclyde #movie #star #oscar #hollywood #shampoo #reds #swinger #1960s #pop #culture  

 

Donyale Luna: Behind Every Great Face is a Greater Spirit

 

Born Peggy Ann Freeman (1945-79), in Detroit. Later, by her own hand, she becomes Donyale George Tyger Luna. 6’2”. Slim. Her parents married and divorced on four separate occasions. In January 1965, her mother fatally shot her father in self-defense. Luna stayed away.

First Black model to appear on the covers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar—although Harper’s likened her to a Masai warrior. A supermodel before the term was born.

She said: “I wasn’t accepted because I talked funny, I looked funny, and I was a weirdo to everyone. I grew up realizing I was strange.”

Sometimes, she told people she was Polynesian or Mexican. Some thought she was Indian. Whatever they wanted her to be… She could wear colored contacts and once expressed a desire to be white, blonde, and blue-eyed. Did it really matter? Never a shapeshifter because she always controlled the light.

She palled around with Andy Warhol, Otto Preminger, Salvador Dali and Federico Fellini. Restless, pursued by demons from long ago and far away.

She joked that her home was in the cosmos, hence ‘Luna’. Possible, for her beauty was untethered and somehow intellectually seductive. Very rare. Great photographers know that beauty itself is banal and strictly limited—just a matter of proportions: behind every great face there must be a greater spirit.

Marriage failed, a nervous breakdown, so off to swinging London as 1966 got underway. Then her most famous photo, a cover for British Vogue. Her pose was a riff on Picasso’s ocular-centric portraiture. One of Luna’s eyes playfully peers from between her fingers.

Eccentric, even for a model, she spoke of her love for LSD and had a habit of not wearing shoes while walking on city streets.

The end came from drugs. Too many, too soon. Luna is gone.

When asked in 1966 about what her success might mean for other people of color, she said, “If it brings about more jobs for Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, Negroes, groovy. It could be good, it could be bad.” She thought for a moment. “I couldn't care less.”  Cosmic for sure—because the farther up you go in the sky, all of the Earth looks blue.

 

#donyaleluna #model #vogue  #harpers #beatles #rollingstones #1960s #fashion #andywarhol #film

Dennis Hopper: An Artist Knows Who to Trust

 

"The cocaine problem in the United States is really because of me. There was no cocaine before Easy Rider on the street. After Easy Rider, it was everywhere". – Dennis Hopper

“No other persona better signifies the lost idealism of the 1960s than that of Dennis Hopper". - Matthew Hays. film critic

 

Dennis Hopper was such a good actor that you always assumed he wasn’t acting. That’s an extremely rare accomplishment.

In his greatest role, Frank, in Blue Velvet, he presents mental illness as empowering components of his personality, traits that render him forceful and attractive and violent. It’s a seamless performance. Sure, we say, that’s Hopper. But it’s not. He became a go-to-actor for offbeat roles which, to work, can only be played by so-called ordinary people. Yes, the best comedians are sad and serious. Life works in opposites. It always has.

In his most famous role, Billy, in Easy Rider, he detaches himself from Earth, Camus’ stranger on a motorcycle, tripping the light fantastic, burdened with worry but unencumbered by fear. With hair blowin’ in the wind, we motor with Hopper down dark halls of hippie existentialism. No flowers. No peace. No music. Fade to black.

He long mourned his buddy James Dean. He got sick on drugs and booze. He had five wives—with one marriage lasting eight days. Unemployable. Erratic. Dennis the Menace. Somehow his anger was transmuted to art—without artifice. He stumbled from the fifth dimension, torn and frayed but unbowed. He was what he was. 

He held a tremulous flame. Dennis Hopper enslaved his demons, kept them in chains, to be visited now and then, as they hunkered in their dungeons, waiting for a reprieve that never came. Because artists always know who to trust.

#dennishopper #easyrider #peterfonda #jacknicholson #michellephillips #motorcycle #1960s #james dean #rebelwithoutacause #bluevelvet #davidlynch

Diana Rigg: True to Her Own Spirit

In the 1960s, she looked like smart fun. Not so much sensual as kinetic... C’mon, catch up, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever... The promise of fresh excitement. Always on her way to somewhere else. Bright but unburdened. Diana Rigg came to prominence with a playful smirk that spread to a smile; with an independence free from rancor; with delicate femininity that could smash glass. 

Her role as Emma Peel in the TV series The Avengers gave her firm footing. Somehow her Shakespearean training was perfect for a program that embraced theatre of the absurd, and sexual flirtation, often in equal measure. 

 It was said she squandered her fame on the theatre. No Bond girl ever tramped by limelight. But her spirit demanded independence. She would not subject herself to Hollywood strictures. Cosmetic surgery not required—for the theatre holds a mirror to the audience, not the performers. So, for the screen, it was bit parts to pay the bills. 

 Euripides, author of Medea, in which she played her greatest role, wrote, “I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees.” Diana Rigg was true to her own spirit. Her beauty is what that looks like.

#dianarigg #theavengers #patrickmacnee #bbc #1960s #emmapeel #johnsteed #popart #popculture #gameofthronwa

Ian Fleming: Master of the Sex/Death Ratio

 

Author Ian Fleming (1908-64) lived with the insouciance and bad behaviour reserved for those who have resigned themselves to an early death. Menefreghismo is an Italian noun which connotes one’s approach to life; it translates– roughly – as ‘don’t give a shit’. It’s hard to discern what held Fleming’s interest, but he certainly lived with a free form, unbridled, if not erotic, passion that seems awkward to a modern sensibility.

And that’s where James Bond comes in. Menefreghismo.

Ursula Andress & the ratio

Although about one half of the Bond novels were published in the 1960s, their genealogical roots are embedded in 50’s, and even earlier. That’s why a female character can be named ‘Pussy Galore’. Not a big deal at the time.

And that’s why James Bond, in books and films, was successful. Fleming knew how to balance the critical sex/death ratio like few authors before—or since. He was so good at it—and it is the ratio that gives the early films their life. When, later, the ratio became unstable, so began the era of Bad Bonds.

The ratio is based on the notion that the proximity of death heightens sexual tension—and, importantly, vice-versa. That’s one reason why you will never see a child in a Bond film—for a child is the strongest representation of Life we have. It just messes with the balance.

The ratio is based on post-WW II notions of masculinity and femininity. Small wonder Fleming was among John F. Kennedy's favorite authors. Times change. JB (James Bond) got the JB (Jason Bourne) reboot in Casino Royale (2006). Now it was mostly about hand-to-hand fighting, lightning cuts, and constant close-ups. However, the ratio did appear, however warily, when needed.

Ian Fleming died as he lived, fully aware that the ratio was unlivable. But longevity was never the point for Fleming, or Bond. It was to greet Death at his own door, look in his eyes, and say, ‘Your move’.

 

#ianfleming #jamesbond #ursulaandress #drno #diamondsareforever #danielcraig #seanconnery #1960s #popculture #popularculture #film #casinoroyale

Elizabeth Taylor: The Sublime Performance of Her Face

 

Perhaps it is the sublime performance of her face. Her perfect nose… violet/blue eyes that turn whatever color you want. Beauty is an accident that never waits to happen.

She remains a movie star, a celluloid daemon that only asks for light to live. We see her as a child, already fluent with assumed attitudes and false fronts. Then, a young woman, soon to mount the golden throne, unassailable, Cleopatra-like, the greatest of them all.

Then the illness, the awards, the husbands, the lovers—all that is demanded by a wayward congregation, always on tiptoes, eyes above the crowd, praying for just a glimpse of the Queen as she enters a long, dark limousine.

A better actor than accredited by critics, her supernova publicity was too blinding to clearly see a performance. Her fame exceeded skill, always a dangerous condition, but one that she embraced, selling toiletries one day, AIDS awareness the next.

For few ever had such a clinical understanding of Hollywood as Elizabeth Taylor. It used her, she used it. Simple, honest, and as coarse as the Hollywood sign itself.

Gratefully, movie stars cannot be manufactured. There are too many unknowns that must intertwine.  The magic remains with the magician. Those most committed to celestial heights embrace an entrepreneurial spiritualism. They just seem to know what to sell, when, and to whom.

Somehow, against all odds, Elizabeth Taylor discovered how to fall deeply and passionately in love with herself.

 

#elizabethtaylor #richardburton #cleopatra #miketodd #1960s #popculture #moviestar #michaeljackson 

 

Jane Fonda: Redeemed by Resilience

 

“Well, there's this man... and I don't know exactly what he wants out of me, or anything like that. But he took care of me… When you're used to being lonely and somebody comes in...and moves that around, it's sort of scary I guess…I want to...manipulate him. In all the ways that I can manipulate people. I mean, it's easy to manipulate men. Right?”

-          Dialogue from ‘Klute’ (1971)

She was never robust, but had a hardness about her, as if Life, early on, had delivered low blows…. a mother’s suicide, an industry that celebrated beauty above brains… You could hear it in her sharp delivery, see it in her curt smiles. Perhaps Jane Fonda’s sublimated pain compelled her – professionally and personally – to haphazard choices.

We have a sex queen in Barbarella (1968) evolving into a political activist who poses in a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun unit in Hanoi (1972). Just four years apart... Aside from an extremely private pursuit of integrity, she’s to be admired more for diligence than condemned for dreadful photo ops.

It comes as little surprise that her greatest role is of an emotionally damaged prostitute, striving to escape ‘the life’. The film Klute (1971) seems tailormade for someone detaching from the corporeal and sliding into a more cosmic vibe, the world of the mind where people can’t find you.  Jane Fonda always hummed with a West Coast 60s ethos…but never a hippy like brother Peter. There was a drive to escape herself, to transition the entertainer, the dancing bear, to Citizen Jane, to be taken seriously, damn it.

And she was. Jane Fonda was redeemed by her resilience. She never let up. Even her exercise videos attest to a discipline unknown by many. Relaxation is not in her lexicon.  She always had more angular lines than curves. And it was this emotional awkwardness that empowered her performances. Her difficulty in expressing compassion and understanding did indeed look real.

Again, from Klute.“You make a man think that he's accepted. It's all just a great big game to you. You're all obviously too lazy and too warped to do anything meaningful with your life, so you prey upon the sexual fantasies of others. I'm sure it comes as no great surprise to you when I say that...there are little corners in everyone which were better off left alone. Little sicknesses, weaknesses, which should never be exposed. That's your stock in trade, isn't it, a man's weakness? I was never really fully aware of mine...until you brought them out.”

In her best roles, perhaps in her life, Jane Fonda reveals the difficulty of emotional honesty. And the camera just loves emotional honesty. It’s so easy to fake.

#janefonda #klute #donaldsutherland #peterfonda #1960s #cult #film #rogervadim #barbarella #vietnam #film #review #pop #culture

Jim Morrison: Rage from the Stage but Think on the Page

 

Whether he lacked the talent or time to develop into a great poet remains unclear. Much of Jim Morrison’s brief life is obscured—perhaps strategically—with vague pronouncements, clumsy metaphors, spacey diatribes and art house pretension. But when he was great, he drifted far beyond expectations, completely original, yet always too smart for the job.

Importantly, Jim Morrison looked like a rock star. The image matched the music—perfectly. In 1967, he invented how a rock star must appear—the hair, the leather pants, the boots, even the attitude. So powerful is the image of Morrison that his influence remains undiminished.

With The Doors, he found a band to match his dark visions. Ray Manzarek’s brooding organ seemed wired to Morrison’s dread. When Morrison died, so did The Doors, though they struggled for a while, pushed on by the momentum of their silent singer.  

He grew uncomfortable with show business, more artist than magician, more preacher than singer, hungering for fame until aware too late his soul had stopped. You can rage from the stage but only think on the page.

Restless demons empowered his words. He battled bravely until no drug or drink could forestall The Big Sleep—which was his end game anyway. Or maybe not.  With months to live, he was trying to get better in Paris, get his lungs back, repair a heart damaged by rheumatic fever, but never made it. His girlfriend didn’t help. Or maybe it was all predestined, just as he had predicted.  Like his contemporary, George Harrison, much of Morrison’s life seems passed in preparation for death. And Death always obliges the eager.

At Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Jim Morrison appears nightly, courtesy of The 27 Club, alone in a dimly lit corner, forever searching for that single, indelible, timeless line that always tells the truth.

#jimmorrison #thedoors #lizardking #lawoman #lightmyfire #classicrock #perelachaise #georgeharrison #1960s #rock #music #27club #losangeles #whiskeyagogo

 

Eve Babitz: It’s All About Eve

 

Though labelled a 1960s ‘It Girl’ (but never ‘a West Coast Edie Sedgwick’), Eve Babitz, through force of personality, creativity, and a hard buzz of underlying craziness, made herself, and those around her, an enduring work of art. That’s a rare achievement that can’t be strategized or funded—thank God. (Corporations remained puzzled, restricted by an invisible blockade, unable to monetize whatever ‘It’ is.)

Consider ‘It’ as yet another definition of organic. Eve belongs more to a ‘sense’ of time & place than actual Los Angeles in the 1960s-70s... Faulkner is always the Deep South. Fitzgerald remains preserved in the sparking lapis lazuli of the Jazz Age. A time & place. That’s Eve.

So there she is seated, naked with pendulous breasts, playing chess with Marcel Duchamp (1963), in a moment definitely closer to Dadaism than Cubism. Or she’s dancing somewhere on the Sunset Strip, in a hot club with Warren Beatty or Steve Martin or Ahmet Ertegun or Stephen Stills or Jim Morrison or Edward Ruscha or Warren Zevon or Harrison Ford… or whomever. More explorer than groupie. 

Her appetite for Life was enormous, enabling true participatory journalism, involuntarily leap-frogging Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer and Hunter Thompson and other practitioners of ‘new journalism’. Eve wrote about Eve, even though it’s never clear she totally understood her subject. Thankfully, it’s all about Eve.

Her books and articles have a wayward honesty that pull readers into tentative friendships: you want to travel with her, but remain firmly in the back seat.

Eve’s often outrageous behavior is somehow subsumed in the inevitability of her actions—as if ‘it had to happen this way. Can you describe a more interesting alternative?’

Anyway, it’s those restless, Peter Pan-eccentric spirits, garnishing dull days with pixie dust, then to dance beneath diamond skies, to bequeath us the prayer ‘There’s wild magic everywhere. You only have to move.’

#evebabitz #losangeles #warrenbeatty #jimmorrison #harrisonford #normanmailer #huntersthompson #marcelduchamp #fscottfitzgerald #williamfaulkner #edie sedgwick #andywarhol #1960s #1970s

Anna Karina: The Importance of the Moment

She didn’t belong with the hippies. She wasn’t rebelling. She wasn’t stoned. With Anna Karina, you could see the love of life was on her face, even when bathed in a vale of tears.

There seemed to be a Zen-like acceptance of the here-and-now, no yesterday and maybe no tomorrow.  Her pursuit of the present was irresistible.

She might dance now. She might cry or adjust her beret. It was the ‘moment’ and you couldn’t look away. There was no need for a narrative or three-act structure or character deficits. There was just Anna.

It was a charmed life (often the gods are kind to those with no agenda)...as if the French New Wave just happened to her. With her pale face and dark eyes, there’s a lightness to her that is ghostly. We see her forever in a school-girl outfit, pleated skirt and sweater: it wasn’t innocence; it was detachment.

In her face and body and attitude was an expression of the unshakable confidence that comes with the serenity of freedom:  she was what the 1960s always wanted to be.

 

Sophia Loren: Of Strangeness in the Proportion

 

“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.” - Edgar Allan Poe

We have millions of Monroe and Bardot lookalikes, but there are few, if any, women who remotely resemble Sophia Loren. What is it about her beauty that it should be restricted to one face only, ever?

The eyes, the nose and the lips – the proportions are odd, yet together proffer an allurement more supplication than seduction. If sound took form we would see harmony.

Her face remains more in memory than on a screen – for that’s where she belongs amid timeless shadows and sighs, the candle-lit embrace under a windswept moon with everything drifting out to dawn.

She could only come from an old land of sun and sea where the past is bemused by the present, knowing the love of life leaves you untouched by time. You can see it in her smile and the way she swirls her skirt. When she’s around, you don’t need a clock.

Glenn Gould and the sacred gift of silence

A musician so outrageously gifted that he worshiped silence, listening to the notes as if small, restless friends. 

He shied from human contact yet always embraced Bach.

 Head-flung-back ecstasy

Genius does not go unpunished. There were the obvious eccentricities, the quirky cadences, the sotto voce, preternatural humming that came as a prayer to gods others could never know.

Weighted with awareness

Always alone, even with people, communing with that music of dark space wherein you risk deafness by the awful beauty of solitude. So Canadian: it is the distance between us that pulls the soul upwards.

You can see it in the hunched back, weighed with awareness, in the hands that were always beautiful white wings, and the head-flung-back ecstasy as music holds him as a lost lover.

Glenn Gould, when in the deep trance of talent, gave us whatever music always meant to reminded us of.

The awful beauty of solitude

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.