Dated, Demented, Dead: what became of my literary heroes

As usual, I was looking for something else. 

I like to go on Amazon  and order books by the pound (a nice thickie for bedtime reading – unlike so many people who  claim to fall asleep to dull documentaries on YouTube, I still read for the same reason). But it can’t just be any book. I like biographies because they’re generally over 500 pages, and generally not too traumatic. 

There are exceptions. I just trudged through two extremely thick books on my latest "furia", Toulouse-Lautrec: an excruciatingly-detailed bio by Julia Frey, and a novel “based on” his life (but only just) which stretched the Lautrec myth past the snapping point. The novel spent 50 pages dragging out Henri’s horrible death from alcohol and syphilis, and the Frey bio did the opposite and just chopped it all off when he took his last breath. Reeling, I came out the other side of these two (both of them, ultimately, hard to get through), looking for another thickie, and maybe an easier-to-digest one.  

I ended up ordering a new-ish memoir by Barbra Streisand called, of course, My Name is Barbra. It clocks in at nearly a thousand pages, so I just had to have it. But in that labyrinthine way one thing leads to another, I ended up in a totally different place.

For some reason, I got thinking about the authors I used to enjoy eons ago, back in the ‘70s when I wasn’t so interested in bulk. Then I had the thought: what ever happened to Erica Jong? You know, THAT Erica Jong, the one who wrote deliciously dirty books that sold a zillion copies. I did read most of them and found them quite trashy, but “in a good way” (as they say). I liked how she liked men: she loved their bodies in an unabashed, sybaritic way, no holds barred. So I Wikipedia’d her, and discovered she is now 83 years old, suffering from dementia, and living in a nursing home. Her daughter Molly Jong-Fast recently published a Mommie Dearest-style expose called How to Lose your Mother. 

Harsh. 

But oh. 83, dementia, nursing home? The last time I saw an interview with Jong, she was in a state of faded glory, her low-cut gown displaying a very wrinkled cleavage. Still playing the bestselling sexpot author at 65. The fame and glamour and all the rest of it did NOT protect her, not from the indignities of age or the acid vitriol of a memoir written by a bitter, disgruntled daughter.

I won’t read the Jong-Fast memoir, because I won't do that to myself before bed -  but while nosing around on Amazon I discovered something pretty hilarious. There it was, a 50^th Anniversary Edition of Jong’s so-called groundbreaking sex-fest, Fear of Flying. The original novel was published and made a huge splash in 1973. But this 50^th Anniversary Edition was published in. . . 2003. I had to look twice, then three times, but I was right the  first time. 30 years had somehow magically been transformed into 50. 

I thought I MUST have read it wrong, but no, all the reviews were from the same time  period. So somehow poor Erica’s masterpiece turned 50 when it was actually barely 30. Did they want to get all those accolades in before Jong was too old to enjoy it (or even be aware of it)? Or before the public completely forgot about her?

I don’t know how I got onto the next one, maybe a “whatever happened to” thing, but I started thinking about the male equivalent to Jong, Tom Robbins. Like Jong, his books were full of sex and whimsy. I remember reading his first, pre-famous novel,   Another Roadside Attraction (in which a hippie couple somehow attain the body of Christ from the basement of the Vatican, and make it the star attraction of their roadside zoo) and his first big bestseller, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. From what I remember, Cowgirls was pretty excruciating even then – the main character being Sissy Hankshaw, a tall, lovely young girl with the perfectly sterile looks of a fashion model, and (inexplicably) thumbs the size of a standard rural mailbox. It has been a long time since I read it, but I do remember there was a spiritual guru living on the hill, a Chinese guy they called – the Chink. And there’s a hideously stereotyped gay interior decorator called Davy who swishes around for hundreds of pages. And those cowgirls, my goodness – aren’t they hot to trot? They only have one thing on their minds, and it sure ain’t the cows!

The movie version of Cowgirls was even worse: just an excruciating ordeal, with Uma Thurman trying to act with massive prosthetic thumbs strapped to her hands. The creakily dated novel was made into an embarrassingly dated film, fortunately soon forgotten.  By that time Robbins was basically writing the same story over and over again, sexy, whimsical, but kind of dumb. He did attempt a memoir which I could not get through at all. It was whimsical in a forced kind of way, and ultimately, simply dull. 

So what ever happened to - ? I looked it up, and discovered that he died on my last birthday at the age of 92. 

That means he was too old to be a hippie, or even a post-war baby. He was a Depression-era baby, like William Shatner, and immensely old. Then – dead.

That’s what happens next. 

But these two wildly-popular authors, no matter how celebrated in their day, just got old along with the rest of us, went crazy, lost their clever literary brains (or their relevance), then expired, or at least left the known world. Kind of sad, but what does it say about me? I don’t want to live to be 92, and at this point I don’t even want to make it to 83, not if I’m holed up in a sanatorium with the rest of the dementia patients. Given the state of my health right now, I am haunted by the feeling I won’t even make it to my next birthday. And that day (February 9) would be the first anniversary of the death of Tom Robbins.  Appropriate? Or, like all these novels that made such a splash and were seen as so daring - just irrelevant and kind of dumb? 

POSTSCRIPT. But there’s this! I am slavishly devoted to anything to do with the Beatles, and every time I see clips on YouTube of their early performances, they show them in their first-ever appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. My tenth birthday! Like a brilliant flashbulb, the performance left an indelible and radiant impression on my ten-year-old  brain, and it's still glowing even as we speak. 

A good day to be born! But, I suppose, just as good a day to die.  

Marganas Gape, yb Teragram!

Good anagrams almost make sense, and are more than just Scrabble-esque word jumbles. To the purist, they're scramblings of famous people's names which appropriately describe that personage, without any letters left over.

Try it. Quick. Tom Jones!

Uh. . .

Moon Jest! Hm. Does that work? Howbout. . . No jetsom (except it's spelled wrong). Or. . . What's New, Pussycat?

I can't do these very well, so I'm going to cheat and lift some from a web site, never mind which one. I steal all the time.

George Bush: He bugs Gore.
Osama bin Laden: A bad man (no lies).
The terrorist Osama bin Laden: Arab monster is no idle threat.
Elvis Aaron Presley: Seen alive? Sorry, pal!
Clint Eastwood: Old West action.
Madame Curie: Me, radium ace.

The best anagram I ever heard of, apparently thought up on the spot by Dick Cavett when looking at a theatre marquis (sp.? Who knows how to spell such a lame word, anyway?) is for Alec Guiness: Genuine Class.

Well, mine are almost like that. I mean. I have good intentions.

For the past couple of years I've been totally obsessed with Harold Lloyd, the silent screen comedian. You know, the one in the straw boater and hornrims who dangled off the hands of the huge clock above the. . . yeah, him, and by the way, he wasn't gay. (This is the first thing people ask me when I tell them about my book. I have no idea why, maybe all that white makeup, but did people call Chaplin a poof?)

I wrote a novel about Harold called The Glass Character, fell violently in love with him in the process (and I truly believe it's the best thing I've ever done), and now no one in the publishing industry wants to give me the time of day. Jesus, guys! Somebody, read this and cut me a deal before someone else gets it and you'll have to live with the regret for the rest of your life.

So I worked on Harold Lloyd anagrams. With all those backwards-looking Welsh double-ls, it was a problem.

So I came up with:

Rah, old dolly!
Hardy ol' doll
Ah, lord dolly!

Enough dollies. What got me started on this shit? I'm reading a book about the violent decades-long passion between Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, Furious Love (Sam Kashner & NancySchoenberger),which I first heard about on Dick Cavett's NY Times blog. I wondered if I could squeeze out some anagrams here. (Why? Ran out of those little Keurig coffee thingamies and needed something else addictive.)

Richard Burton came out: Brain chord rut. Well, he did waste his genius, didn't he?

But I'm most proud of this one, for Elizabeth:

The royal zeal bit.

I think I'll retire now, while I'm on a llor.

Eat Pray Love God Food: And Oprah Created Women

Is it my imagination, or does Oprah regularly decide to Change her Life by slavishly following a new guru, then replacing him/her once she gets tired of them and the bloom is off?

I just remember people like Sarah Ban Breathnach (who?), a lifestyle coach who used to come on regularly (but, unlike the male gurus, didn't get her own show). I wonder if she's still around, coasting on all that former glory, or languishing in remainder bins next to John Bradshaw.

OK, so this time Oprah tells us she has Found the Secret to weight loss and "food issues". And this time, boy, she really means it! I mean, really really really. It's all in this book by Geneen Roth, a formerly fat self-help/bestseller writer who has revealed an astounding fact: overeating, and food/weight problems in general, are often connected to larger emotional and spiritual issues.

Never having heard it before, Oprah was all over this idea like a mess of mashed potatoes with sausage gravy. In fact, during her "interview" with Geneen Roth yesterday, she monologued for 15 or 20 minutes about her own food problems, while Roth sat there nodding and saying "yes. . . yes. . . yes. . . ", her face arranged in what she hoped was a compassionate expression.

Food is tied to emotional issues? Ack! Oprah isn't the only one drooling over this thing, which is selling wildly, much as Women who Run with the Wolves did about a decade ago. (Take another look at that one and see if if it doesn't embarrass you.) Someone has been paying well-known self-help authors to salivate all over this book, or they wouldn't be praising a rival like this:

"Geneen Roth does it again! Women Food and God is absolutely mesmerizing. And loaded with insights which can change your life." - Dr. Christiane Northrup, author of The Wisdom of Menopause

"This is a hugely important work, a life-changer, one that will free untold women from the tyranny of fear and hopelessness around their bodies." - Anne Lamott, professional confessor/so-called counsellor/recovering sitdown comedienne.

OK, so obviously I don't feel very good about this book. Actually, it's not the book, and it's not even Oprah telling us the book has led her to "epiphany after epiphany" about making the connection between eating and emotional stress.

It's the fact that we've heard it all before, ad nauseam. All the elements get scrambled around, and the face of the author (usually compassionate and spiritual - and by the way, none of them are fat) changes with the seasons. Oprah leads the parade, beating her vast drum and insisting that this book, this author is the one who represents the one true religion about fat.

I feel sorry for Oprah, I really do. I think she is a sad woman who lost touch with herself long ago, and is now trapped in a kind of bizarre media godhood (goddess-hood?). What she says, goes. My prediction is that she will soon enter politics, and if a B-movie actor or a peanut farmer can make it to the Presidency, so can she.

I've been rather guiltily reading another best-seller, the Kitty Kelley tell-all bio, Oprah. It's not particularly charitable, but at the same time it's believable: the Big O has become a media behemoth, her ambition fuelled by a desperate attempt to outrun her traumatized past.

Much has been made of the fact that O has never had therapy, insisting that public confession is enough to heal her wounds. Her Kirstie-Alley-esque weight-bounces are beside the fact. But then again. . . Why this thundering response to a book that seems so self-evident? The Oprah who used to preach sermons when she was three (oh, maybe five) has stepped up to the pulpit again, insisting that THIS TIME we have found the answer. Not by dieting, not by agonizing or weighing, not even by joining Jenny Craig (like a lot of her "successful" guests). But by becoming spiritually aware. By realizing that we need to embrace the things we hate and fear the most.

OK: I have a few things that are hard to embrace.

Environmental meltdown. Oil spills. Random, vicious violence. All those little school children hacked to death in China. Drugs. Waste. The capricious, often horrendous turns of fate that can derail a human being for life. Cancer. Suffering. Pain of all kinds.

Global warming? You get the idea.

Even the things that lurk in my own psyche (jealousy, lust, anger, violent mood swings, loneliness, despair) are pretty gol-dern hard to embrace. I can't really see how embracing them will help. But then, I don't have a book on the bestseller list.

I predict that within one year, or maybe two, Oprah's miraculous weight loss under the Roth banner will have bounced again. And she will once again be fishing for people who insist they have discovered The Secret.

Speaking of, wasn't there a book by exactly that name that Oprah touted not so long ago? Its main premise was that you can get anything you want - anything - just by wanting it badly enough. A woman wrote in to Oprah claming that she had cured her breast cancer this way (prompting the producers to send her a frantic note).

Then came the news headline: this particular guru, James Ray (no relation to James Earl Ray) had been performing endurance tests on his disciples, including an extremely hot sweat-lodge that caught fire, killing several people.

The answer? I'm not even sure I know the question yet.