This past Saturday Alan and I went to visit Alan's Cousin George, who was a beacon of light for a lonely young Alan during Alan's childhood. George, some seven or eight years older than Alan, had studied at the Actor's Studio, knew Marlon Brando, had spoken with Sandy Dennis and the rest of the young actors of that age, had earned bit parts in some of television's greatest shows like The Naked City, then went on to become a librarian at Berkeley where he met the poets Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg and writers like Kerouac. He translated the Tao and taught it at colleges. A strangely lovely mix of introvert and extrovert and one of the most ravenous readers I have ever met, he ended up being a janitor with ten thousand books in his head. Recently Alan and I had the task and the honor of going through his books (his apartment WAS books with only a narrow path from table to bed amongst the books) which, for me, was wildly exciting. We only spent six hours there; I could have spent six weeks.
Chinese history. Film. Music. Women. Poetry. American history. Communism. Religion, of all kinds. Books of Latin. Turkish. Books on Marilyn Monroe. Books on Krishnamurti. Books on Beethoven. My fantasy place, my pounding heart, my scent of rose.
This time, when we approached George, he looked terrible. He in living in one of those very nice You've Reached The End of the Line places in Seattle; of course that's not the place's name, but it might as well be, and if it really met George's requirements, it'd come with a huge bottle of highly potent sleeping pills. For George, these last months are lived via a" monstrous idiot's demand". He sat hunched and tiny on his bed in a room just large enough to hold a television, an oxygen tank and a sliding hospital table for meals. George's face was ashen and his eyes were nearly shut and they, too, looked grey and nearly lifeless. Our conversation, too, was without life. "And the kids? The food? That's good, that's good. You've been here how long now? And the hospice folks? You still like them? And one in particular, yeah? That's good. Oh, sure. Sounds fine."
And then. And then, somebody brought up Rita Hayworth. Rita Hayworth, that glorious hourglass of a woman with red ribbons of hair and a smile brighter than the Chicago fire. Put the blame on Mame, boys. And the moment Hayworth's name came up, George's hunched position unhunched a bit. "I'll take Rita," Alan said, for Susan Hayward's name had also been brought up. So we began talking stars from the 50's, a subject George happens to love, along with stars from the forties.
"Oh yeah?" George said, "I'll take 'em both!"
"I don't know why women today get so crazy about their bodies," George said. "Me, I always drew the line a little bit over 200. I tell ya, it's the fashion industry, they're killing women. Sophia Loren, now there was a body, and she wasn't any lightweight. Neither was Monroe. Did I ever tell you about her first picture, which was also Ann Bancroft's first picture? I'm telling ya, it was a black and white film and made before Monroe was doing any of her Marilyn mannerisms, it was great. I remember the lighting in that film. Funny how much even writers spend writing about light, you'd think more of them would write about more important things but anyway - - I spend a lot of time now thinking about light - - like in Carol Reed's THIRTY-NINE STEPS, that moment when Harry Lyme, played by Orson Welles, comes out of the darkness into the light and it's just his face, remember that? Yeah? What a great face. "Hmmmm. Where's Harry Lyme."
And now he's rolling. He's teaching us, it's a class, and we don't know it until later, which is the best kind of class of all. His eyes are open and sparkling. I'm listening as closely as I can. "You know that movie Welles's directed and also acted in, for free, I might add, where he's eating a big sausage and talking to Marlene Dietrich and he's huge, just huge, and wearing this revoltingly big old rag of a coat and he takes a bite of sausage and his slobber falls down upon the sausage and he offers a bite to Dietrich and her face, God, I will never forget that look of sheer derision on her face....." This sounds awful, of course, but one must remember what Francis Bacon said of beauty: "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion". A quote which may not fit here perfectly, but does fit EVERYWHERE imperfectly.
Anyway, ah, God, doesn't a bit of imperfection really make everything so much more WONDERFUL!
And he goes on to talk about Peter Lorre in the great film "M" which made me want to run out and buy that film and see it over again, and damned if George hadn't managed to transcend his illness and his his former mindset and me, I had even transcended mine, for listening to him talk about movies gave me the very same feeling I felt when I first read the great writer and film critic Jame Agee's books about movies, they made me feel something like a mix of adoration and mind expansion all at the same time.
Put the blame on Mame, boys. Put the blame on Mame. So when we left George this past Saturday, we all felt great. Genuinely great, like if we were lucky we would see him again and if he was lucky, we wouldn't.
And then, while I'm toying with word or notion or feel of Transcendence, I may as well go into a sort of rave about the movie HUGO which Alan and I took my grandson Aleister to on Sunday. Directed by Martin Scorsese, HUGO is the story of a nineteen-thirties director named Georges Melies, an inventor of fantasy and science fiction in cinema. Talk about transcendence, the movie's full of it. Everybody needs it, nearly everybody gets it. Certainly Ben Kingsley's character, Monsieur Melies gets it. And his wife. And the mean-silly war-injured policeman. And several of the characters in HUGO's smaller stories, for the film is completely about
story; story after story after story. And so does Hugo, the kid, receive it. Transcendence. He earns it. And, indeed, so does the audience.
By the end, when Kingsley, back to the camera and making one of those old and famous vaudevillian moves where a person slowly raises both arms up as if both arms were floating, a move so evocative of old movies that I began, softly, to sob, we were all transcended from our everyday lives into the zany, magical, exuberant, wondrous, glistening, tinted world which Melies had created and which Scorsese had recreated.
Once again, this time a man who is a true film historian, gave us a an entire class on film, in such a way that we had no idea we were being taught. We were simply enjoying, all that time.
And did Aleister like it? "I loved it!" he exclaimed. And when asked which part of the movie he liked best, the lad went silent for a moment, then tilted back his beaming face and said, "I loved the first part best - - and then - - I loved the second part best!"
Oh, well said, Aleister, well said.
