ONCE AGAIN WE REMEMBER

Berry Berenson was a friend to me in my early years in Hollywood. She was married to the movie star Tony Perkins at the time and until his death in 1992. They seemed really loving to each other and I admired their relationship. And I admired her.

Though she was often noted more as Perkin's wife or as model/actress Marisa Berenson's sister, Berry was a wonderful actor in her own right (see REMEMBER MY NAME). But despite her fame-for-whatever-reason, at least around me she was always the least pretentious or self-centered person I ever met anywhere.

She came to a play I was in early on in L.A, Landford Wilson's BALM IN GILEAD, and after the performance stuck around to talk to me. One of the things she said to me that night was that she had only seen one other person in her life who had the kind of glow, I think that was the word she used, that I had, and that was Marilyn Monroe!

She was wonderful on screen and off, either in front of the camera or behind it (she was a great photographer), and I only wish, as I too often do with many friends, that I had made more of an effort to see her more often. Especially after I heard the news that she had been on one of the two planes that crashed into The World Trade Center towers on 9/11.

I knew some others who went down with the towers on that tragic day, like Father Mike Judge, but Berry is the one I think of most often. As I later wrote in a poem ("March 18, 2003"), she was:

"a woman who was kind to me when
she didn't need to be[...]
How many people have died
before you got the chance to tell them what you meant to?"

R.I.P. to all those we lost on that horrific day (and those we continue to lose).

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YET ANOTHER LIST

Once again my post-op brain initiated and sustained a list. This time provoked by my picking up one of the many biographies of William Saroyan I own and starting to reread it. Got me thinking about all the writers whose work I've fallen for since I was a kid, in that obsessive way only some authors inspire, where I bought every book they wrote and every book written about them. I don't remember all of them, but a lot, like:

William Saroyan
Emily Dickinson
William Carlos Williams
Walt Whitman
James Joyce
Jean Rhys
Martha Gelhorn
Jack Kerouac
Frank O'Hara
James Schuyler
John Ashbery
Kenward Elmslie
Muriel Rukeyser
Dylan Thomas
Brendan Behan
Andrea Lee
Diane DiPrima
Barbara Guest
Gertrude Stein
Ranier Maria Rilke
Samuel Beckett
Christopher Isherwood
Fydor Dostoevsky
Henry Miller
Henry Roth
Gary Snyder
Francis Ponge
Charles Reznikoff
Louis Zukofsky
Ezra Pound
William Blake
Joe Brainard
Ted Berrigan
Michael McClure
Hubert Selby Jr.
Blaise Cendrars
Joanne Kyger
Bobbie Louis Hawkins
Dante
Theodore Dreiser
Lady Murasaki
Zora Neale Hurston
Henry James

MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS

Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie, how could anyone not want to watch anything they might be in, let alone together. And as actors they don't disappoint. But the writer and director do. The inconsistency of Ronan's Mary doesn't always make dramatic or narrative sense, nor does Robbie's Elizabeth, played mostly as weaker than any other Elizabeth in film. I prefer Kate Blanchett's version in ELIZABETH. But MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS is still worth watching for Ronan and Robbie, despite the missed opportunity to create something worthy of these two stars.

ONCE IN PORTLAND

My dear friend the late great poet and publisher James Haining and me in Portland, Oregon, when he lived there in the 1990s before his MS became too debilitating and he returned to his native Texas. This was at an event at Artquake, as I remember it.

SPARTACUS

Watched the beautifully restored SPARTACUS on TCM the other night and found it more relevant than ever, though I wonder if younger people would see that underneath all the old Hollywood habits (like casting Brits to play the upper class Romans etc.). There's so much terrific movie making and acting in it (except at times for poor Tony Curtis cast for his looks not his accent).

At the time it was made and producer/star Kirk Douglas decided to give blacklisted Dalton Trumbo the writing credit, it seemed daring the way the story highlights the similarities between McCarthyism and other antidemocratic authoritarian tactics. I remember drawing inspiration from my memory of this 1960 movie later in the 1960s when a Dean at the U. of Iowa warned a student rally that anyone who used the microphone to speak would be expelled. I wasn't a scheduled speaker, but I went to the mic and told the crowd of more than a hundred that he couldn't expel all of us, and suggested that everyone come to the mic and state their name, as I did mine and then stepped away to make room for others. After a moment of hesitation the first student stepped up, followed by another and another until everyone had done it and the Dean's threats were rendered meaningless.

Despite the Hollywood ending in SPARTACUS, the hope at the heart of it is still poignant, maybe more than ever.

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