Phillip Seymour Hoffman: beyond good

From a news report on the death of actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman by heroin overdose:

At present it is not understood why the actor fell back into the habit, if there were any events in his personal life that were besieging the actor or if it was just a case of hedonistic pleasure uncontrolled? Interestingly many of the roles he portrayed were often that of conflicted characters caught in deep moral and existential crises, something one suspects were themes very close to the actor’s heart.

I don't know about that. Don't know about that at all. Hoffman was always a supporting player, a damn skilful one, but in that capacity couldn't draw too much attention to himself.

Then came Capote.

The bizarre thing was, there were two pictures about Truman Capote out that year (2006), both covering the same time and territory: his long investigation of the butchering of a rural family that led to his masterpiece, In Cold Blood. Very quickly, "that other Capote movie" (Infamous with Toby Jones) was largely forgotten, perhaps due to Jones' performance as an out-and-out caricature, a sadistic little munchkin more interested in posturing at parties than ferreting out the truth.

Hoffman, a tall man with scruffy blond hair, a broad unhandsome Anglo-Saxon face and an ungainly body, won. He won the Oscar. I remember it, I remember him ascending to the podium, and I remember exclaiming, "Yes!" He had nailed Capote, a man both brilliant and repulsive, his life an exercise in squandered talent and agonizingly prolonged, brutal self-destruction.

It's not that I found Hoffman particularly attractive as a person, because he was always pretty scraggly and looked like an unmade bed. But I knew that as an actor, he was beyond good. Now he's dead. I'm trying to take it in. No doubt what I'm writing right now, raw and unprocessed, isn't very good, but it has to be light-years better than the shit at the start of this post: At present it is not understood why the actor fell back into the habit, if there were any events in his personal life that were besieging the actor or if it was just a case of hedonistic pleasure uncontrolled?

Pleasure! Yes, they actually used the word "pleasure" to describe sticking a needle into your arm. The asshole who wrote this report either had never experienced the agony of withdrawal, the gut-sucking sensation that you will literally die if you don't get a hit, and soon, or had experienced it and was too much of a prick to admit it and would rather write off the howling desperation of addiction as "hedonistic pleasure".

NOBODY takes heroin at that level for "pleasure", "recreation", or anything else except survival. The amount needed just to feel "normal" keeps on escalating until it becomes impossible to feel anything but horrifying hollowness and despair. Since drug abuse is so drenched in shame in our culture, abuse leads to abuse, to try to drown that shame and keep it from consuming your soul.

No, I've never taken heroin - my poison was something much more prosaic (though also easier to obtain). But an addiction is an addiction is an addiction. I know this stuff better than I ever wanted to.

The most howlingly awful part of this story is the fact that Hoffman had been clean for 23 years, half his life. Those of us (I mean us, I mean me) who have struggled with addiction in any form know that we are NEVER completely safe, and that anything at all, even a celebratory event that causes us to take a tiny sip of champagne "because it can't hurt this once", can tip us over into the quicksand.

And it doesn't matter how long we've been sober or clean. Hoffman reportedly spent ten days in rehab (ten days, because everyone around him was telling him that that was long enough to detox so he could get back to the movie set in time). Barely time to 
cleanse the body, and no time at all to heal the soul.

The ironic thing is, I didn't even like Hoffman all that much, except for his acting, as he seemed somehow offputting, but now I "get it". And hardly anyone else seems to. Oh, he decided to indulge in a hedonistic pleasure! That needle pointed inward as surely as the barrel of a suicide-aimed gun.

Will we ever learn? No. The human condition makes me sick half the time, but I guess I am part of it. Think of Pete Seeger, people say to me. Think of Mandela, Pope Francis. Yes, and the billions of idiots and assholes who are raping and destroying the earth, pulling its green majesty right out from under us.

When one addict dies, especially an addict like this one, we all die a little. But when, when, when, when, when do we LEARN?

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Here we are in Crimbo Limbo, and it would not be so bad if I didn't have certain medical issues that have been "postponed" until after the holidays. I have been asked to wait "two or three days" to refill certain vital prescriptions because "we ran out" (and no one told me they couldn't refill it, so now I can't even take it somewhere else and avoid all this bullshit). I have been put on hold, but my pain and discomfort hasn't, and I won't be able to reach my doctor for a full week. So I am basically screwed, and no one is listening to my complaint because they just don't think it's very important. More than that, they have that hazed, vacant look of too much plum pudding and booze. Their mouths are hanging open and they are drooling slightly. It's Crimbo Limbo, that deadly week at the end of the year when everything just stops functioning.

But I found this, and I think it's good. I am so preoccupied with other things that this blog is running a bit thin lately. Maybe it will go on that way, who knows. I need to get feeling better and moving forward instead of sideways.

Russell Brand: my life without drugs

Russell Brand has not used drugs for 10 years. He has a job, a house, a cat, good friends. But temptation is never far away. He wants to help other addicts, but first he wants us to feel compassion for those affected

The Guardian, Saturday 9 March 2013

'I cannot accurately convey to you the efficiency of heroin in neutralising pain.' Photograph: Mark Nolan/WireImage

The last time I thought about taking heroin was yesterday. I had received "an inconvenient truth" from a beautiful woman. It wasn't about climate change – I'm not that ecologically switched on – she told me she was pregnant and it wasn't mine.

I had to take immediate action. I put Morrissey on in my car as an external conduit for the surging melancholy, and as I wound my way through the neurotic Hollywood hills, the narrow lanes and tight bends were a material echo of the synaptic tangle where my thoughts stalled and jammed.

Morrissey, as ever, conducted a symphony, within and without and the tidal misery burgeoned. I am becoming possessed. The part of me that experienced the negative data, the self, is becoming overwhelmed, I can no longer see where I end and the pain begins. So now I have a choice.

I cannot accurately convey to you the efficiency of heroin in neutralising pain. It transforms a tight, white fist into a gentle, brown wave. From my first inhalation 15 years ago, it fumigated my private hell and lay me down in its hazy pastures and a bathroom floor in Hackney embraced me like a womb.

This shadow is darkly cast on the retina of my soul and whenever I am dislodged from comfort my focus falls there. It is 10 years since I used drugs or drank alcohol and my life has improved immeasurably. I have a job, a house, a cat, good friendships and generally a bright outlook. The price of this is constant vigilance because the disease of addiction is not rational.

Recently for the purposes of a documentary on this subject I reviewed some footage of myself smoking heroin that my friend had shot as part of a typically exhibitionist attempt of mine to get clean. I sit wasted and slumped with an unacceptable haircut against a wall in another Hackney flat (Hackney is starting to seem like part of the problem) inhaling fizzy, black snakes of smack off a scrap of crumpled foil. When I saw the tape a month or so ago, what is surprising is that my reaction is not one of gratitude for the positive changes I've experienced but envy at witnessing an earlier version of myself unencumbered by the burden of abstinence. I sat in a suite at the Savoy hotel, in privilege, resenting the woeful ratbag I once was, who, for all his problems, had drugs. That is obviously irrational.

The mentality and behaviour of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help they have no hope.
This is the reason I have started a fund within Comic Relief, Give It Up. I want to raise awareness of, and money for, abstinence-based recovery. It was Kevin Cahill's idea, he is the bloke who runs Comic Relief. He called me when he read an article I wrote after Amy Winehouse died. Her death had a powerful impact on me I suppose because it was such an obvious shock, like watching someone for hours through a telescope, seeing them advance towards you, fist extended with the intention of punching you in the face. Even though I saw it coming, it still hurt when it eventually hit me.

What was so painful about Amy's death is that I know that there is something I could have done. I could have passed on to her the solution that was freely given to me. Don't pick up a drink or drug, one day at a time. It sounds so simple. It actually is simple but it isn't easy: it requires incredible support and fastidious structuring. Not to mention that the whole infrastructure of abstinence based recovery is shrouded in necessary secrecy. There are support fellowships that are easy to find and open to anyone who needs them but they eschew promotion of any kind in order to preserve the purity of their purpose, which is for people with alcoholism and addiction to help one another stay clean and sober.

Without these fellowships I would take drugs. Because, even now, the condition persists. Drugs and alcohol are not my problem, reality is my problem, drugs and alcohol are my solution.

If this seems odd to you it is because you are not an alcoholic or a drug addict. You are likely one of the 90% of people who can drink and use drugs safely. I have friends who can smoke weed, swill gin, even do crack and then merrily get on with their lives. For me, this is not an option. I will relinquish all else to ride that buzz to oblivion. Even if it began as a timid glass of chardonnay on a ponce's yacht, it would end with me necking the bottle, swimming to shore and sprinting to Bethnal Green in search of a crack house. I look to drugs and booze to fill up a hole in me; unchecked, the call of the wild is too strong. I still survey streets for signs of the subterranean escapes that used to provide my sanctuary. I still eye the shuffling subclass of junkies and dealers, invisibly gliding between doorways through the gutters. I see that dereliction can survive in opulence; the abundantly wealthy with destitution in their stare.

Spurred by Amy's death, I've tried to salvage unwilling victims from the mayhem of the internal storm and I am always, always, just pulled inside myself. I have a friend so beautiful, so haunted by talent that you can barely look away from her, whose smile is such a treasure that I have often squandered my sanity for a moment in its glow. Her story is so galling that no one would condemn her for her dependency on illegal anesthesia, but now, even though her life is trying to turn around despite her, even though she has genuine opportunities for a new start, the gutter will not release its prey. The gutter is within. It is frustrating to watch. It is frustrating to love someone with this disease.

A friend of mine's brother cannot stop drinking. He gets a few months of sobriety and his inner beauty, with the obstacles of his horrible drunken behaviour pushed aside by the presence of a programme, begins to radiate. His family bask relieved, in the joy of their returned loved one, his life gathers momentum but then he somehow forgets the price of this freedom, returns to his old way of thinking, picks up a drink and Mr Hyde is back in the saddle. Once more his brother's face is gaunt and hopeless. His family blame themselves and wonder what they could have done differently, racking their minds for a perfect sentiment; wrapped up in the perfect sentence, a magic bullet to sear right through the toxic fortress that has incarcerated the person they love and restore them to sanity. The fact is, though, that they can't, the sufferer must, of course, be a willing participant in their own recovery. They must not pick up a drink or drug, one day at a time. Just don't pick up, that's all.

It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing? Would Great Ormond Street be so attractive a cause if its beds were riddled with obnoxious little criminals that had "brought it on themselves"?

Peter Hitchens is a vocal adversary of mine on this matter. He sees this condition as a matter of choice and the culprits as criminals who should go to prison. I know how he feels. I bet I have to deal with a lot more drug addicts than he does, let's face it. I share my brain with one, and I can tell you firsthand, they are total fucking wankers. Where I differ from Peter is in my belief that if you regard alcoholics and drug addicts not as bad people but as sick people then we can help them to get better. By we, I mean other people who have the same problem but have found a way to live drug-and-alcohol-free lives. Guided by principles and traditions a programme has been founded that has worked miracles in millions of lives. Not just the alcoholics and addicts themselves but their families, their friends and of course society as a whole.

What we want to do with Give It Up is popularise a compassionate perception of drunks and addicts, and provide funding for places at treatment centres where they can get clean using these principles. Then, once they are drug-and-alcohol-free, to make sure they retain contact with the support that is available to keep them clean. I know that as you read this you either identify with it yourself or are reminded of someone who you love who cannot exercise control over substances. I want you to know that the help that was available to me, the help upon which my recovery still depends is available.

I wound down the hill in an alien land, Morrissey chanted lonely mantras, the pain quickly accumulated incalculably, and I began to weave the familiar tapestry that tells an old, old story. I think of places I could score. Off Santa Monica there's a homeless man who I know uses gear. I could find him, buy him a bag if he takes me to score.

I leave him on the corner, a couple of rocks, a couple of $20 bags pressed into my sweaty palm. I get home, I pull out the foil, neatly torn. I break the bottom off a Martell miniature. I have cigarettes, using makes me need fags. I make a pipe for the rocks with the bottle. I lay a strip of foil on the counter to chase the brown. I pause to reflect and regret that I don't know how to fix, only smoke, feeling inferior even in the manner of my using. I see the foil scorch. I hear the crackle from which crack gets it's name. I feel the plastic fog hit the back of my yawning throat. Eyes up. Back relaxing, the bottle drops and the greedy bliss eats my pain. There is no girl, there is no tomorrow, there is nothing but the bilious kiss of the greedy bliss.

Even as I spin this beautifully dreaded web, I am reaching for my phone. I call someone: not a doctor or a sage, not a mystic or a physician, just a bloke like me, another alcoholic, who I know knows how I feel. The phone rings and I half hope he'll just let it ring out. It's 4am in London. He's asleep, he can't hear the phone, he won't pick up. I indicate left, heading to Santa Monica. The ringing stops, then the dry mouthed nocturnal mumble: "Hello. You all right mate?"

He picks up.

And for another day, thank God, I don't have to.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm 

Erotic collision: when Garland met Levant

 

 

If anyone doubts for an instant, for even a flea’s sneeze, that I am an obsessive, then hear ye and hark. Here comes another entry about Oscar Levant! Something about the man just hooks me, and it’s not altogether a comfortable feeling.

 

I have a horrible habit of sampling through books before I actually read them. It’s far worse than reading the ending of a murder mystery, for this involves sucking the marrow out of a book, vacuuming up the essence and thus insulting the author by claiming to know what’s in it, and whether or not it’s worth reading.

 

I have never, I mean NEVER done this with a review copy: I have always read every word, keeping in mind the golden rule. If a reviewer ever covered my work after a mere skim or a skipping dip, I’d be devastated. But when it’s my favourite form, the three-inch-thick, slightly skanky literary and/or Hollywood biography, I allow myself to abandon the sequential. I am a speedboat bumping along on the crests of exhilarating waves.

 

 

And in such a way am I bumping through this book. When I came across the passage in A Talent for Genius about Oscar Levant and Judy Garland, my heart beat a little faster. I can’t really reproduce these 2 1/2 delicious pages because it would violate every copyright ever invented. But I can describe it in my own words, and somehow I must!  Oscar was in his early 30s and already a major celebrity as a concert pianist and radio personality. In various places in the book, women refer to him as “sexy”, “tender” and even “a wonderful lover”, so the big sloppy mug with the Walter Matthau looks must have had a thing or two up his pianist’s sleeve (or in the tips of his Gershwin-playing fingers).

 

It was even more surprising to learn just how readily he partook. Women, glamorous or otherwise, were there for the sampling, but he didn’t just sample. He devoured. Prostitutes were his first choice as a young man, with his rowdy older brothers actually dragging him off to a brothel to celebrate his bar mitzvah.


"Oscar was sexy," one of his conquests claimed, "and women instinctively knew he'd be good in bed. . . particularly if they were a little thwarted in that department with their husbands."

 

 

Along with other people's wives, he was drawn to  actresses, gorgeous and glittery, many of them beautiful sexual predators. These were mere hors d’oevres to Levant, who no doubt enjoyed himself with them (and they with him!), but felt no real emotional attachment.

 

He was a Victorian sort of male in that he kept sex and love so widely separated that they barely inhabited the same planet. Eventually he married one of these glittery women and made it last 33 years, so let’s hope he got over the dichotomy enough to thrill her with those swift and talented fingertips.

 

Anyway, one day came a momentous encounter at the Capital Theatre in New York – don’t ask me where that is (New York, maybe?).  Judy Garland was still in her protracted girlhood, her chest strapped down to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. But at 17, florid passions were beginning to bloom, and the first object of her romantic obsession was . . .  Oscar Levant.

 

Yes. Oscar Levant, rumpled and gangsterish (and who wouldn’t love a man who strode down Fifth Avenue “hatless as usual, wearing Nick the Greek’s castoff overcoat”?), with his tragic eyes and lips that suggested all sorts of dirty orgasmic things: somehow this unlikely poet of Tin Pan Alley had attracted the attention of a dynamo, a girl already hurtling towards phenomenal stardom. When she sidled up to him and asked him, “What do you think of me?”, he quickly replied, “You’re enchanting.” “Don’t give me that! What do you really think of me?”

 

The two of them had instantly recognized something essential in each other: both of them were terminally insecure, with an incurable inner void that may have held the key to their magnetism. Still in her teens, Garland was a mere bud, and Levant must have known it, for he handled her passionate love letters and gale-force eyelash-batting with extreme care. ANY attention from him was welcome, obviously, but when she wrote to him confessing her undying passion and existential angst, he recommended certain books for her to read and music to listen to. Not exactly what she had in mind.

 

 

He must have believed that mentor was a safer role than lover for such a vulnerable creature, and of course he was right. In fact, they never did become lovers, but something better happened. I think this was a case of mutual fascination, something that went on for years and years. Their paths would cross again and again because they ran in the same circles. Which is to say, they did a lot of running around in circles and falling down.  They’d salute each other on the way down, maybe trading a pill or two.

Thank God they never married. When he met the girlish bundle of insecurity that was Judy Garland, Oscar was already deeply involved with June Gale, his future wife, but was not above using Judy to create the aphrodisiac of jealousy. This helped June leap over the chasm of uncertainty about marrying such a walking dilemma.

 

Oh God, Garland and Levant! Am I the only one who has such trouble with them? They both lapsed into an awful sort of tawdry deterioration at the end of their lives. It was painful to watch. Garland kept dragging herself onto the stage, singing in a raucous parody of her early brilliance, while Levant mercifully withdrew, but with body and soul mangled, mental health completely ravaged. According to this book, there were times when he really was insane, howling his anguish in mental hospitals, hallucinating, and. . . I really can’t go on.

 

Life stinks. You know it does. If YOUR life doesn’t stink, then you are damn lucky. Would you want the sort of life these two had? Would you choose the life of ANY great artist, since so many of them are ripped apart by sharks, either internal (Levant) or external (Garland)? Why must it be that way? If I had a gun in my hand. . . but I don’t, and my life is boring and ordinary and I am spectacularly untalented. Perhaps it’s just as well.

Oscar Levant: Rhapsody in Black

Since my enthusiasm so often runs ahead of my knowledge, I'm writing this in advance of knowing anything about my subject. Or not much. I have ordered a biography from Amazon called Oscar Levant: A Talent for Genius, one of those 500-page doorstops I love so much, but for this post I'm pretty much winging it.

He was a strange one, and I have strange feelings for him, attraction and repulsion at the same time. Who wouldn't love a man who could play the piano like that? NOBODY could play the piano like that, poetic sensitivity melded with a gangster's rat-a-tat-tat aggressiveness.

Nobody looked like him either, with that sensual, almost Polynesian mouth, the flop of hair that whipped around as he played, the constant manic bobbing and weaving (particularly later in life when he was in the throes of God-knows-what sort of addiction/affliction) reminding me of Michael J. Fox. The grief-stricken, fathoms-deep eyes, the forlorn eyes of an abandoned child, that could quickly flip over into fierceness, to a sense of "yeah, make me", or even blanked-out indifference. 

Oscar Levant was an updated Oscar Wilde without the effeminacy. You knew he wasn't gay by the way he eyed women. Only his personal charm saved it from being a leer. Some glamorous dame would kiss him on the cheek (he played the harmless, charming, eccentric sidekick in all his movies) and he'd lunge at her neck. He got away with lines that would have been censored without that lightning-stroke, oddly monotone delivery: "It's a good thing Marilyn Monroe has gone kosher, because now Arthur Miller can eat her."

 

 

 

Seductive, but somehow - offputting -  as he evolved into a sort of comic hired gun, an outrageous joke-machine that spewed them out on demand. The narrow-eyed, double-breasted gangster demeanour, cigarette constantly dangling from those Filipino lips, deteriorated most awfully over the years as mental illness slowly consumed him. He ended up, no kidding, a real bona fide mental patient, institutionalized, getting shock treatments right during movie shoots so that he had to have himself signed in and out for his scenes (at one point actually playing a mental patient, a part he described as "Pirandelloish").

That's sad. That's sadder, even, than the elderly Dorothy Parker and her poodle called Cliche holed up in her fusty ash-and-bottle-strewn apartment, watching soap operas all day as her friends edged away from her one by one.

 

 

 

 

 

Oscar Levant had friends aplenty, but did they keep him around just because he was so entertaining? Did he sit down and think about all those viper-strike lines, actually write them down, or did they just pop out of him like Athena from the head of Zeus?  He had an extremely loyal wife who became a caretaker in later life, and three pretty, vivacious daughters. He had a lively, varied career that most people would envy, considerable fame and adoration, and at the same time the most awful, soul-destroying depression that finally claimed him and sucked him under. It's hard for me to even think about it.

People sometimes called him a sellout; he did coattail on his close association with George Gershwin, who did Levant a big favour by croaking at age 38. Levant was automatically assumed to be his successor, but who can follow George Gershwin? Not even George Gershwin. Oscar Levant composed, but it doesn't hold together somehow. He's a  sort of Schoenberg on ice, a "look-at-me-I'm-a-composer" performing triple axels at the keyboard. The music is technically good, but it doesn't say anything.

 

His classic, often-misquoted line was, "There is a fine line betwen genius and insanity. I have erased that line." He constantly joked about suicide and his own craziness, causing an uneasiness and even fear that, for some uknown reason, was viewed as hilariously funny. He was, I think, the first shock comedian.

So, that's what I know, and it ain't much because it's less than what's in the Wikipedia entry. I think his doorstop of a biography (which I will consume in installments propped up in bed before sleeping) will be a wild ride, or else it will be boring, as some biographies inexplicably are.

About these pictures. It was a big disappointment to discover there were very few good photos of him, except for the sardonic, Edward G. Robinson-esque pose at the piano which was a publicity shot for his most famous film, An American in Paris. Others were grainy and dusty-looking, almost mildewed, as if no one had bothered to take care of them.  Contrast this with the hundreds of razor-sharp black-and-white shots I easily found of Harold Lloyd, even going back to pre-1920.

 

So I took the ones I could find, many of them extracted from old album covers, and because they are in the public domain, and because Oscar said I could, I tinkered with them. Something leaped out at me, a kind of predatory energy. There were so many dimensions to him. He looked different in every shot (and I've excluded some of the later, really painful ones). In a few of them he looked like a young Alan Arkin. 

Out of those ancient grey lithographs emerged  Shakespearian spectres, that is, if Shakespeare had dealt in slighty off-colour wisecracks. And many of the black-and-whites, particularly very dark concert shots, exploded into colour, which as far as I know is impossible (i.e. it's relatively easy to go from color to black and white, but how is it possible to go the other way?). But in every case, no matter how much I altered the original, he was still Oscar. His essence came through every one of the masks.

 

People were known to say things like, "Oh! That's Oscar Levant. You know, he could have been. . . " But if he had "been", as they say, we'd know nothing about him now. He would've had a stellar career as a concert pianist, then sunk out of sight, with only a few musty-smelling LP covers to remind us of who he was.

Instead we have quite a few "sidekick" movies where he's somehow irresistable in his craziness, and a few YouTube videos that are a little disturbing to watch, as he becomes a sort of tame circus tiger on pointless panel shows. He even does a turn on his own show, and the one surviving kinescope is excruciating: he slurs and bobs around like Ray Charles at the piano while his wife sits close beside him like a watchdog, making sure he doesn't fall over the edge.

And he did fall over the edge. What's on the other side of it? Nothing, or a reunion with his pal Gershwin, or celestial piano keys waiting to be played? Considering the chaos of his life, I think oblivion would have been more than enough.

 

 

CODA: I'm not sure I'll be writing about Levant again. In fact I kind of hope he won't be another Harold: making an Oscar doll would just be too challenging. But I did find out something about his death, so I'd better get to it now. Too bad he wasn't around to enjoy it, for he was morbid enough that I think he would have found the bizarre circumstances amusing.

 

 

 

 

Though everyone seems to think he was a complete wreck at the end, like everyone else with serious mental illness he also had his good days. Days when he could noodle around on the piano, talk to his wife June, take a nap. This is what happened: he went upstairs to lie down for a while (for, at age 65, he was already frail from years of drug abuse), to rest up for an interview he'd be having later in the day with a certain fresh-faced young photojournalist.

 

Her name was Candice Bergen.

 

Late in the afternoon when the doorbell rang, his wife welcomed Candy in, all bubbly and excited about meeting this living legend. June called upstairs:

 

"Oscar! She's here!"

 

No response.

"Going deaf, obviously. Oscar! Come on down now."

 

"Oh, it's OK, Mrs. Levant, if he wants to. . . "

 

"OSCAR." She looked at Candy in puzzlement. "What's he up to? I'll be right back."

 

Mrs. Levant went upstairs and into the bedroom. He was curled on his side in a fetal position, the way he always napped, the corner of a blanket childishly wrapped around his head.

 

"Oscar."

 

The silence was profound.

 

"Oscar." She touched his shoulder, then drew back with a gasp.

 

 

 

 

It must have been hard for Candice Bergen, being assigned a plum interview like that, an interview with pictures,  to have to report back to her editor, "Uh, sorry, but I couldn't do it."

 

"Couldn't do it? Why not?"

 

"He's dead."

 

"Dead?"

 

"Dead."

 

"Oh. Are you - "

 

"Sure? Yes, I'm sure."

 

"Oh."

 

"He's sure, too."

 

Then they both disgraced themselves - and each other - by collapsing into helpless laughter.

 

 

 

 

I'm glad, though. Not glad he's dead - I'm not that mean - but glad that such a turbulent, often agonizing life ended in such sweet surrender. It was like the tide going out: his heart stopped; it was time to go home.

Whitney Houston: broken butterfly

This was a jolting shock, even though I had never been a particularly big fan. It was one of those, "no, no" moments.


It was sickening news, though there had been plenty of - what? Warning? How can we call it "warning" when someone's life has been spinning out of control for years?

The first time I ever heard of Whitney Houston, even before the movie The Bodyguard catapulted her to fame, my sister, never one to be positive about anything, said, "Oh, she's just a second-string Tina Turner."

Whenever my sister said things like "oh, she's just" ("just" being her favorite diminishing term, purposely busting down anything I loved), I had to sit up and pay attention. It meant something extraordinary was about to happen. And then that incredible song began to appear on the radio, all the time, everywhere.

It had the simplest lyric of all: I will always love you. It was not the words,
but the way she sang them, releasing those pure arcs of sound and sustaining them beyond our capacity to believe what we were hearing.
Back then she was slim and deerlike, wide-eyed, and though I don't know if she was really innocent or not, she looked like she must have been.


She was charismatic, her voice soared almost supernaturally, and she seemed to have everything. a person could possibly want. Then reality caught up with her: the awful, devouring reality of "making it" that seems to eat so many stars alive.

I just can't take it this time, I'm angry and I feel like crying. It's just too much. On the eve of the Grammys, when she was likely to take part as a presenter dressed in a gorgeous designer gown, she lay dead in a hotel room. Efforts to resuscitate her were in vain: this time it really was too late.

One wonders if it was a  Michael Jackson scenario, or maybe Heath Ledger, where people did not call 9-1-1 right away because they were afraid of scandal. I am convinced this is what happened to those other two: shame, denial and a sense of "let's keep this hushed up" may have cost them their lives.


And what about all the people who partied hard with her, knowing she was vulnerable and unable to take even one drink or snort or shot without falling into the abyss? Her many trips to rehab left her in a fragile state, and though she often claimed, sometimes with a touch of belligerance, that of course she was sober and anyone who thought she wasn't was a liar, soon we'd hear that she was in rehab again.

Reports from earlier this week revealed that Houston was particularly out of control, flying on God-knows-what before her spectacular final crash. I don't know why someone (anyone!) didn't take her in hand and put her in the hospital to detoxify. It sickens me, because when I looked up her Wikipedia entry I was dizzy and overwhelmed at her accomplishments on every level. I won't even attempt to list them here, but they were formidable.

In yesterday's post I tried to make some sense of the phenomenon of huge stars plummeting in flames: just what goes on here? Addiction can happen anywhere, but it's often the product of early damage. This can lead the survivor into damaging situations later in life (Bobby Brown!), fuelling the need for oblivion. Having unlimited money is a factor, but the most destitute addicts always find a way to feed the dragon which consumes them.


Does lofty fame convince some stars that they are immune to the horrendous long-term damage of drugs and alcohol? Why did her "friends" party with her, which made about as much sense as helping her play Russian roulette? Are these really friends, or just parasites, sucking at a star's vital force and even trying to steal it for themselves?

I know I'm not saying anything very original, but this one just sickens me and I can't keep silent. We watched Houston's self-destruction in slow motion over many years, and the media feasted on it. We wanted her to win, and yet we didn't. We wanted proof that fame, which so many people lust after, isn't really worth a damn because it swallows people whole. Which it so often does.


But does this stop people from lusting after it and climbing on other people's backs to get it?


The Grammys tonight will be shadowed by this horrendous event, and if it were up to me I'd cancel the whole thing. But the industry juggernaut must move forward, like the great pyramid stone that nearly crushes the old woman to death in that Cecil B. deMille epic. "She's just an old woman. Not important enough to stop a moving stone."

I sometimes hate the dynamics of the human condition, the games we're forced into if we are to survive. The smiling through our anguish, pretending we're all right when inside is nothing but a howling wilderness and a brokenness which is beyond repair. At the Grammys, people will say comforting things like "we know she's with us tonight," because they don't know what else to say. People are afraid to give in to grief, afraid it will demolish them. And sometimes it does.

I don't know why Heath Ledger had to die that way, or Amy Winehouse, or even Michael Jackson with his bizarre addiction to hospital anasthesia. I won't mention all the others because I can't get started or I won't be able to stop. They all missed decades of life that might have been rich and fulfilling, or maybe even painful and desperate, but, at least - life.

A line from the 16th-century poet Alexander Pope springs to mind: "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?" It's a question, not a statement, and it hangs there, implying crushed beauty and arrested flight. But who? Is it you over there, press agent - or you, entertainment reporter (just doing his job, after all, perhaps a job he loves), or you, the much-demonized paparazzo? Or you, the fans, clamouring for her as she mounts the stage to that exhilarating roar?

But the same fans are eager to eat her alive, and it will happen now, with rotten jokes about her dying the night before the Grammys. I don't leave myself out of this equation because I  too often see huge stars as commodities, and am quick to hurl criticisms, knowing they can't hear me.



There are no second or third or twentieth chances for Whitney Houston now because she has been broken for good. This is disturbing, but there will inevitably be a certain amount of "what can you expect" sentiment along with the praise tonight. I don't know why she didn't make it. I don't know why Billie Holliday didn't make it. Winehouse. Garland. Let's not add more to the list.

We're left with that incredible song from The Bodyguard, the one that made people say, "Hey, who's that?" They had never heard anything quite like that before, and I hope they paid attention, because they never will again.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

OK, Ted. . .

So I guess I was right about Ted Williams. After the homeless hero insisted he wanted rehab, needed rehab, was all ready to go to rehab, Dr. Phil laid out the plan: get on the plane right now, and fly to Pleasant Valley or wherever, where he could recover in privacy (recover in privacy, after just giving away where he'd be for the next 30 days???)

Then it started. The gaunt, glassy-eyed Williams, the most famous panhandling junkie in the world, the man who was loved and adored because he was homeless but still had a special gift (impossible!), began to shift around in his chair. He started wiggling around like a kindergarten kid with ADD.

His eyes shifted. He began to make excuses. I can't exactly transcribe his bafflegab, except to say that he wasn't going to get on that plane because he had to go to Columbus "to see his grandchildren and girl friend" first.

Columbus, where he skulked the streets, breaking laws and scamming citizens.
This was beginning to sound like an episode of Intervention, in which many of the addicts have "yeah, but" syndrome: Yeah, I want to go to rehab, BUT I have to take care of some things first (i.e., score some dope).

The headlines are saying he's either on his way to recovery, or has checked in. I hope so. Dr. Phil reluctantly let him go to Columbus, and my heart sank. Though he was escorted by the friendly man from Heavenly Hills or whatever that addiction spa is called, I have no doubt that Williams will give everyone the slip.

See, he'd rather drink and use and panhandle than have all that pressure on him to succeed. He doesn't know anything else. He has never been taught anything else. Dr. Phil revealed that he had missed, not one, not two, but three important appointments, just didn't show up. Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding: he's not reliable! A man who's been living on the street for years isn't reliable. Didn't anyone think of that when they handed him all those absurdly inflated opportunities?

I hate to have to say it, but I am very doubtful that Ted Williams will find long-term sobriety and/or recovery (and the two are not the same!). What happened to him was flukey and not really planned, in spite of that infamous piece of damp cardboard. He wants to run. He looked ready to bolt yesterday on Dr. Phil, his eyes full of primal fear. He just wanted to get the hell out of there. Rehab? Can this guy get through even one day sober?

If you watch Intervention, and I stopped doing so some time ago because they all seemed like one big fat dysfunctional family (most of them bankrolling the addicts' drug or alcohol habit "so we'll know where he is"), you often see an end caption saying the person was thrown out of rehab after a few days for using. Then at the very end, the producers desperately put together a happy ending, saying the addict has two weeks clean or something like that, and has moved back in with the family, now completely recovered and with all their generational conflicts resolved.

I think Ted Williams misses the street, where he at least had some sense of control. The wraith with the feverish eyes I saw yesterday was probably quite drunk on Grey Goose or whatever that rotgut is called, but also terrified. Terrified of capture. Terrified of giving it all up.

Though this is a compelling story, it's also a revealing one. And, as usual, we aren't learning a thing from it.