Stuart Sutcliffe: Those We Leave Behind

 

"[He is my] alter ego ... a spirit in his world ... a guiding force.” – John Lennon

 

It would be cosmically ironic if Stuart Sutcliffe (1940-1962), an original member of The  Beatles, ever wanted to be a famous musician. But he quit the group early on to begin a life behind an easel, not a guitar. Anyway, he had the eyes of a painter, not a musician.

The universe-wide divide between the anonymous solitude of his death and the raucous, global fame of the Beatles leads us to question the role of those we leave behind. Does their essence – like static, temporal monuments - demark the progress of our lives, or are they as unchained as the wind, always with us, changing but unchanged?

 So Stuart Sutcliffe, a leather-clad, pale face angel, ghostly and delicate, decides to emerge on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – called the greatest rock album of all time. There he is, a silent sentinel, defiant but reassuring, imparting that wisdom shared only by the departed – nothing dies if remembered, nothing leaves if loved.

Just listen to the way he sings Love Me Tender with an ethereal, driving determination - like a playful prayer - sure to leave footprints in the sand. 

 

 

 

Truman Capote: The Most Perfect Writer

Norman Mailer called Truman Capote “the most perfect writer of my generation.” Perhaps he was. The simplicity of his prose is deceiving. Like Hemingway, there often seems to be another tale - one of greater importance – hidden behind the one you’re reading.  Such a skill cannot be learned. It flows from the deepest realms of the soul and often, it seems, bespeaks trouble.

Truman Capote at his peak 

Capote termed his great work, In Cold Blood, a non-fiction novel.  In my many ways, his life followed the precepts of this genre: fact was hidden as fiction, and fiction was presented as fact. In the end, no amount of drugs and alcohol could meld the fact/fiction parallax, and grief became too severe.

Party (and host) of the Century

He said: “No one will ever know what In Cold Blood took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.”

Perhaps his greatest creation really was the Party of the Century. For the event, such as it was, came forth from Capote’s imagination, passion, and ambition.  Never before had there been anything like it. It’s as if The Party was a living, danse macabre of his psyche.

And after it ended and the last guests left, he was forever spent.

He was spent forever

Capote filled the ensuing years with sad, public displays of debauchery and rare, incomplete offerings of former brilliance, his talent eroded by pills, sophomoric disputes, mendacity, and disappointments.

The strange story of Truman Capote certainly wasn’t written by him. There’s an unimaginative coarseness to his declining years; a too-obvious narrative not found in his words; a hopeless, drunken weave toward darkness that engenders cliché. No, whoever wrote it has no talent at all.

Of Peripheral Celebrity and Collateral Damage: The ballad of Suki Potier

Suki Potier: Collateral
Damage

You’ve read the news, oh boy: December 18, 1966, Tara Browne, the Guinness heir, plows his Lotus into a van on Redcliffe Gardens, South Kensington. Dead. He is 21. John Lennon hears about it and writes A Day in the Life…something about a lucky man who made the grade but blew his mind out in a car.

Browne’s passenger that day? Model and all-around It Girl Suki Potier.

If ever someone walked under a rain cloud through the rarefied world of 1960s popism, it was poor Suki.

What to make of peripheral celebrities who suffer collateral damage? They appear as secondary characters, necessary to turn the pages of history.

Brian Jones. Suki. Tara Browne.
Bad karma

It wasn’t long after Browne’s death that Potier surfaced in the arms of Rolling Stone Brian Jones. Given what we know now about Brian Jones and women, this wasn’t going to turn out well.

July 3, 1969: Potier leaves Jones’ country house just thirty minutes before he drowns. Not quite in the passenger seat this time, but close.

Jones/Potier: Blonde on Blonde

Then, after Jones’ death, she marries wealthy Hong Kong business man Robert Ho.

And it’s now that the rain cloud bursts. June 23, 1981: Suki and husband die in a car crash while on holiday in Portugal.

Fate can be cruel but rarely is it so aggressively personal.

Raquel Welch: The Beauty of Defiance

Somewhere between Las Vegas and
Haight-Asbury, she found a fur bikini

This kitten had no whip, though each film seemed an act of defiance. It was her attitude to her face and body that set her apart, not the corporeal charms themselves. But we were all looking in the wrong/right places and didn’t see.

The most successful American 1960s sex symbol couldn’t act much and just sang and danced a little. 

Determination hardened her eyes but softened her curves. She wasn’t blonde. She wasn’t dumb. She wasn’t available.

Surrealism vs. Reality

Somewhere between Las Vegas and Haight-Asbury, she found a fur bikini and rocked the world.

Life itself is sexy

The former cocktail waitress never looked back and never once took it all off. She didn’t need to – not with such a ferocious spirit and the realization, known to only a chosen few: it's Life itself that's sexy.

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"

Capucine: Snow Angel

‘Capucine’. One word, an icy brand distilled from the warmer ‘Germaine Hélène Irène Lefebvre’. But then her elegance didn’t permit intimacy. And that was her appeal. A snow angel with dazzling detachment.

Who would believe such a thing?

Born 1928. A Parisian model at 17, then into films. She was surprisingly adept at comedy, a genre strangely receptive to manic depressives. Without darkness we can’t know light?

She was saved from suicide more than once, but who would believe such a thing? The cheekbones, the plush lips, swept-back mane, the porcelain skin, who would believe it?

It’s 1952 and she lands a 2-week modeling gig aboard a French cruise ship and shares a cabin with Brigitte Bardot, 17, a chorus dancer. O pillow talk. Who would believe it?

With Peter Sellers

“Men look at me,” she opined, “like I'm a suspicious-looking trunk, and they're customs agents.” There’s a difference between beautiful and pretty — and in the face of beauty men grow wary, weakened by exposure to the spiritual, anxious to resume a cosmetic, manufactured appreciation.

She also said, “"Every time I get in front of a camera, I think of it as an attractive man I am meeting for the first time...” All the best faces know — instinctively it seems — the camera is a mirror in which you

Poor Snow Angel

slowly, with great art and artifice, seduce yourself, make love to the flesh and fear and forget-me-nots that are you. But therein lays disease and finally, after injecting one too many color chemical emulsions at 1/60th of a second — a kind of walking madness. Narcissus didn’t drown. He couldn’t tolerate the terrible pain of perfection — even his own.

So in 1990, she ended herself. A bi-polar decision lending a polar patina of white frost spangled like sapphires trailing the gorgeous curve of her neck.

The word 'Capucine' is French and refers to flowers. But poor snow angels, they never live to see spring.

Sonny Liston: A Phantom Punch from an Unseen Fist

There’s was always something about Sonny Liston. Always rumours. Maybe the mob connections. Maybe the way he threw the second Ali fight, or his weird death in Las Vegas.

Nobody punched harder

It was as if he saw something out of the corner of his eye, a phantom, something fleeting and cruel.

Maybe he was waiting for something, a meeting that he could delay if he just belonged somewhere for once, if he just punched hard enough, if he only endured enough pain because pain — both delivered and received — lets you know you're alive. So he tried: nobody punched harder and with more debilitating force than Sonny Liston.

He had to. He had to smash his way out of poverty and jail and racial discrimination and… you know this tune — it’s 12-bar blues but in a minor key.

People spoke of his silent stare — eyes of a corpse, face drained of blood having taken such savage beatings at so young an age. But Sonny never complained, never explained. He didn't have to — because it was always between Sonny and the Big Man, not people. Shit, people were trouble. Best to avoid their bank accounts, their push-ups bras, their handguns. Best to fight then flee into the night.

Just as he expected - a Big nothing

That something he saw, that shadow boxer, that bemused trickster who led him pawing through the black & white crowds of yesterday’s newsreels, heaving cigar smoke and screams, the women all hollow-eyed girlfriends, coiled off men’s arms, the men themselves straining veins and broken fedoras.

And so in May/65 Sonny once again met the newly minted Muhammad Ali. (Of all the men I must battle, why O Lord do you face me with the best of them — ever?)

Iconic photo. Ali/Clay over Liston

Previously beaten by Ali even though he had managed to lace nitric acid on his gloves and grind them into Ali’s stinging eyes, this time Sonny said screw it and took the fall just half-way into the first round.

First round? Sure. If you’re going to drop, why take a beating? Makes sense. They called him a stooge — and a lot worse. Some people called it a phantom punch. They had no idea how right they were. Sonny had seen the Phantom all his life... leaning in the corner of a jail cell, by his bed as he lay back, cut and gutted, having survived one more predator. Anyway, some say the mob had threatened his wife and children - which makes sense because Sonny Liston was no quitter.

After that loss he boxed in Europe, did well, but never got back to The Garden. Meanwhile, Ali danced around him and out into the whirling kaleidoscopic stratosphere of 1960s pop culture heroism. Sonny couldn’t shake the grey smell of backstreet whore houses, always the shadows, the pay phone whispers, the film-noir headlights sweeping his motel window and god knows who’s going to get out of the car with something heavy in their hands.

"Lord, you made the night too long"

It's appropriate Sonny died alone in Las Vegas, a city that always been uneasy around strength. The Phantom raised His fist for a final, merciful blow. And Sonny lowered his arms, unguarded now, exposing his ragged soul, and closed his eyes to Nothing, just as he had expected. A Big Nothing.

And then down he fell for the infinite count to a white sea of foam canvas, he a silent cipher, just damaged goods drifting over the planet, more a ghost than a demon, less a man than a wordless tale of a brave spirit fighting forever under endless blows from unseen fists.