SALUTE TO NOEL COWARD

We are having a bit of a Noel Coward revival. There are readings of some of his plays, a course or seminar at Marymount Manhattan College, a marvelous exhibition at Lincoln Center’s Performing Arts Library, where a lively Coward symposium is due on June 11 at 6 P.M. A lecture demonstration is in the planning. In the two last-named events I am a participant.

Lord Louis Mountbatten, a friend of Coward’s, had it right. There are, he wrote, those who could equal Coward in any of the 14 or 15 disciplines in which he excelled, but no one who could combine all those excellences in his single self. I have always been a Coward fan, but having just reread his two memoirs, Present Indicative and Future Indefinite, as well as the voluminous posthumous Noel Coward Diaries, I am more than ever convinced of his genius.

What must be born in mind is that, along with the manifest heavyweight geniuses, the Prousts and Wagners, there are also lighter weight geniuses who do not produce huge masterpieces, but achieve immortality in less profound, philosophical or epic works. They do not invent new techniques or shed new light on the historic past, but they charm generation after generation with lighthearted entertainment.

It is surely remarkable that Coward wrote serious and comic plays, long and short fiction, both words and music for theatrical and nontheatrical songs, as well as poems and parodies. He was also an outstanding actor and an accomplished stage and film director, notably in that masterly tribute to the British navy, In Which We Serve., which he wrote, directed and starred in. He was also a great traveler, writing admirably about exotic places and people, keenly sensitive to beauty in all its forms.

He was also a dazzling wit, which, while not a profession, constituted a social talent, making him a favorite lunch and dinner companion of royalty, aristocracy, and artists of various kinds. Though almost totally self-educated, he was enormously knowledgeable and a superb conversationalist. He was an unofficial cultural ambassador for Britain in both hot and cold war, and was even a sort of gentleman spy. He seldom if ever wrote a dull page, and was no slouch at epigrams. Although, like most geniuses, self-centered, he carried his self-centeredness lightly, with centripetal as well as centrifugal irony. And he was a terrific letter writer.

He was homosexual, but what with England’s draconian laws against homosexuality, rescinded only by his later years, he never came out of the closet, but spoke up, if only privately, for gay rights, and was, if only platonically, loving toward a good many women. Altogether, he had a gift for friendship with all sorts of people, regardless of rank. But for those deserving of contempt or reprehension, he possessed a stock of both, and was not loath to let it hang out.

I found reading The Noel Coward Diaries pure delight. Over its nearly 700 pages, I felt I was getting ever closer to knowing Coward, and found his company consistently stimulating, expectably humorous but also surprisingly humane.

His favorite epithets for people and things he liked were “sweet” (best) and “dear” (a close second), and often both together. For things and people he disliked, it was a tossup between “idiotic” and “ghastly.” But he could make repetition feel not like redundancy but like a jolly refrain.

He had favorite phrases as well. A person might be “merry as a grig” or “happy as a bee.” Things could be “all over bar the shouting,” to end with “and that is that.” But we do not begrudge such verbal idiosyncrasies any more than we would someone’s characteristic gesture or toss of the head. He had, what Kenneth Tynan called “his hard-core court,” consisting of the actor Graham Payn (co-editor of the diaries and at a time Noel’s lover), the actress Joyce Carey (in many of his works), the designer Gladys Calthrop (who created his early sets), his secretary and as it were manager, Lorn Lorraine, and Cole Lesley, who, beginning as his valet (then named Leonard Cole), became another secretary, manager, and probable lover.

The diaries, doubtless intended for eventual publication, are studded with quotables. Of particular interest are Coward’s twin love affairs with England and America, neither of them free from lovers’ quarrels. The real quarrel was with the (mostly English) press, stunningly unfair to both the playwright and the citizen. Some of it was based on envy of his many successes, and some of it on his setting up residences in Paris, Switzerland, Bermuda and, most steadily, in two homes in Jamaica. If some of it was to escape British taxes, why not, given their exorbitance?

Curiously, Coward had scant use for opera and symphonic music. Likewise for certain literary classics, almost always expressing his dislike with the euphemism “too long.” Thus he would have none of Mozart (like me) or Britten (unlike me). He had grave problems with the likes of War and Peace and Death of a Salesman, which I fully share.

Coward is not only good at snappy witticisms; he can also astonish with his sagacity and good taste in longer passages. Consider the following:

            I have plunged firmly through Our Mutual Friend. What a great

            writer Dickens can be at moments, and how completely he fails

            when he becomes sentimental. Some of the characterization

            In O.M.F. is masterly and some, particularly Lizzie and Jenny

            Wren, abysmally bad. I suspect that he suffered from a funda-

            mental lack of taste. The descriptions of the river and London

            and the general atmosphere of the period areal superb, but

            why, oh why, those treacly, tear-sodden, pious, noble, com-

            pletely unreal scenes which I cannot believe that he believed

            himself.

This is not only sound judgment; it is also compellingly expressed. Closer to the epigrammatic is this: “When I eventually write my book on the theatre there will be a whole chapter devoted to leading ladies’ dresses and hair. They are invariably the main stumbling-blocks. Leading ladies’ husbands may also come in for some acrid comment.” Unfortunately, that book never got written, but passages in the diaries, letters and memoirs more than make up for it.

But, of course, Coward is better-known for outright epigrams. Thus about Mary Baker Eddy: “She had much in common with Hitler, only no moustache.” Or this: “It is hard to imagine, considering the inherent silliness, cruelty and superstition of the human race, that it has contrived to last as long as it has.” Or this, about posterity: “There will be lists of apocryphal jokes I never made and gleeful misquotations of words I never said. What a pity I shan’t be here to enjoy them.”

And again: “It is a natural enough malaise, this idealized remembering, but should not be encouraged too much. There is no future in the past.” Or this, after a day of auditions “Really felt worn out by the end of it and oppressed by the thought of those legions of unattractive men and women thinking they were gifted enough to entitle them to appear on the stage.” And self-criticism, too: “Other people, less clever than I am, can often be dead right when I am wrong.” More typical is this, about the autobiography of Monica Baldwin, an ex-nun, I Leap Over the Wall: “Very interesting, I must say. It has strengthened my decision not to become a nun.”

That, of course, was frivolous, but other epigrams are not. Thus: “Everything I have read lately has confirmed my long-held suspicion that Christianity has caused a great deal more suffering, both mentally and physically, than any other religion in the history of mankind.” (Written, to be sure, in pre-jihad days.) And this, prompted by a later work of Evelyn Waugh: “I do wish highly intelligent writers would not unconditionally surrender themselves to specific religious dogmas; it really does bugger up the output.”

Nevertheless, Coward’s principal achievement is in his best plays, correctly identified by Tynan as Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Blithe Spirit and Present Laughter, though I would add the brilliant one-acters of Tonight at 8:30, especially the musical Shadow Play with its rather daring strategy.

About the avant-garde, Coward could be as wrong as about classical music. Thus concerning Waiting for Godot (which, to be sure, he only read and never saw), “pretentious gibberish, without any claim to importance whatever.” But everyone is entitled to some mistakes; why begrudge them to genius? To Coward’s many talents we must add yet another: a great deal of wisdom.

  

LAUGHING PRIMA DONNA

Yesterday I casually picked up a book that fell off a bookshelf. It turned out to be How I Lost 10 Pounds in 53 Years, and is the wonderful memoir of Kaye Ballard, which I acquired in 2006 when it came out, but foolishly failed to read. Mea culpa! I make up for it now, and what a pleasure it is.

You should know who Kaye Ballard is: one of the great comediennes of the American stage, screen, television, concert halls and nightclubs, who should live in your memory and your heart. Born into an Italian immigrant family as Catherina Gloria Balotta, she is now 86 and still performing in a career that began in 1947, and has included co-starring roles with Eve Arden, Jane Powell, Julie Andrews, Jack Cassidy, Nathan Lane and Maureen McGovern. She was “romantically involved” with Marlon Bando, been friends with Gypsy Rose Lee, Marilyn Monroe, Ethel Merman, Desi Arnaz, Bette Davis, and toured with Helen O’Connell and Margaret Whiting.

But in numerous movies, TV, talk and stage shows (many of then musicals, as an ace singer), she rubbed amicable shoulders with more celebrities than I can begin to enumerate. You should get hold of her memoir, co-written with her friend Jim Hesselman, and published by Watson-Guptill as one of their Back Stage Books. It has earned high praise from, among others, Horton Foote, Doris Day, Phyllis Diller, Walter Cronkite, Rex Reed, and Helen Gurley Brown, to which I now add my own belated but hearty encomium.

A compendium of anecdotes and lively reminiscences of many famous or just plain interesting people that crossed Ballard’s path, it is affectionate and outspoken, often hilarious but never malicious, only slightly mischievous but then mostly about herself. Altogether, it covers delightfully a hefty chunk of show business history from more than six decades.

We have here a feisty but sympathetic woman, smart and versatile, not a conventional beauty but of strikingly characterful aspect, not readily forgettable. Striking enough to have been cast as Helen of Troy in The Golden Apple, a show about which she waxes condignly eloquent.

And why not? This is a marvelous musical, with words by the clever John LaTouche and music by the gifted Jerome Moross, which deserves to be much more than a cult favorite, remembered as a near-success in its Broadway premiere of 1954, shortly after it transferred from an Off Broadway hit. But not even enthusiastic reviews, terrific word of mouth and a Life cover of Kaye Ballard by Richard Avedon managed to propel it into a well-deserved smash. Even today, by when the Encores! series has excavated oodles of forgotten musicals, The Golden Apple remains insufficiently revived other than by a few scattered, less than outstanding productions, including a well-intentioned but mismanaged one at the York Theater in 1962. As Thomas Hischak has written in The Oxford Companion to the American Musical, this “brilliant and charming show [is] one of the American musical theater’s most beloved failures. . . . it was far ahead of its time and its score is still treasured as one of the most unique of the decade.” Most unique? Oh, well.

The original cast recording, an LP of only 45 minutes, does nowhere near full justice; even so, reissued on CD, it’s still worth getting. Ballard writes winningly about the show in general and her experience as Helen, and observes cogently that what was required, “a cast album that was two hours long” would not have been bought by people in 1954, “when so much popular music came from Broadway.”  Not even the splendid opening, scene-setting number about a little Washington state hill town, “Nothing Ever Happens in Angel’s Roost,” made it into those procrustean 45 minutes.

The show is the story of what would have happened if the Iliad and Odyssey had taken place in the Pacific Northwest, the Spanish American War had been the Trojan War, and the Greek and Trojan heroes and goddesses had been racily idiomatic 1912 Americans, without loss of Homeric pungency, poignancy or romance. Even with the battlefield becoming a boxing rink, and Paris a traveling salesman, this seems somehow to have been too alien to audiences, despite a potent cast comprising Stephen Douglass, Bibi Osterwald, Priscilla Gillette, Jack Whiting, Portia Nelson, Charlotte Rae, Jerry Stiller, and Kaye Ballard, a superb Helen, immortalizing the ballad “Lazy Afternoon” into a golden (apple) oldie. Other songs, like “It’s the Going Home Together,” “Windflowers,” and “By Goona Goona Lagoon,” were no less glittering.

There is something obstinately inexplicable about why certain shows unjustly fail to become hits. To me, The Golden Apple ranks with the likes of Oklahoma! and Kiss Me, Kate, yet it remains an also-ran. Could it be that the still mihty Venus, Juno and Minerva vented their their divine displeasure at being turned intoa mere Lovey Mars, Mrs. Juniper, and Miss Minerva Oliver?

Kaye Ballard’s memoir is not the least sparing in stories about her own gaucherie. So, for instance, about her turning down a dinner invitation from Richard Burton, an act quite probably unique in theatrical history. She was in London in a show called Touch and Go when Burton came backstage with Glynis Johns and Jean Simmons and extended the invitation, but she felt too exhausted to accept, only to regret it to this day: “What if I had gone and fallen asleep in my soup? It was Richard Burton!”

Years later, she is backstage in New York after Burton’s opening night in Hamlet. She bumps into Liz Taylor, who looks at her and asks, “You’re the one who refused to have dinner with my husband, aren’t you?” And she wonders, “Oh my God, how did she know that? Was it really possible that my name passed between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s lips? How exciting!’ That sweet innocence makes up for the mistake in what should be “Richard Burton’s and Elizabeth Taylor’s lips.” Close as the couple may have been, they did not share one pair of lips.

“Good memoirs must always be the cumulation of gossip,” Max Beerbohm has written, and when the memoirist is a celebrity among celebrities, a memoir automatically becomes a rich trove of gossip. But much of what makes this book enjoyable is its inspired slapdashness. As Ballard says in her Introduction: “I have met so many remarkable people throughout my lifetime that it seems almost impossible to relate some of them to a specific date or event.” So, she writes, “I have sandwiched in short passages that I call Interludes, about people whom I might mention at other times in the book but to whom I want to give a little extra time. . . . Think of these passages as little ‘palate cleansers’ between chapters.” Well, sandwiches or palate cleansers, they are tasty morsels, and feature Gypsy Rose Lee, Phil Silvers, Fred Ebb, Carol Burnett, and Doris Day among others, and also “Critics,” which graciously repays those of us who have been (deservedly) kind to Ms. Ballard. There is also a final delightful chapter of brief “Afterthoughts.”

She may earn your plaudits or frowns for the following, as stated in the Introduction: “After talking to various publishers, I found that they believe the general public could not be interested in the story of my life unless I include a lot of sordid, X-rated type materials having to do with things like how I lost my virginity, Okay then, here it is: I lost my virginity riding my brother’s bicycle. The whole experience was quick and painful. (And that’s about all the juicy sex stuff about me you’re going to get.)”

There is only one truly negative paragraph in the book, and this, appropriately, about Barbra Streisand dining in a restaurant at a table close to Ballard’s. A female fan approached Streisand and asked for an autograph. “’Can’t you see I’m eating my dinner?’ Barbra snapped at the woman. . . . I can understand that to someone of Barbra’s stature fans, and especially paparazzi, can get very overwhelming at times. What I can’t understand is how, once you’ve reached the ‘star’ level, you can be rude to the people who put you there.”

We get a marvelous chapter centered on the 1988 revival of the Stephen Sondheim-James Goldman Follies at the worthy Paper Mill Playhouse of Milburn, New Jersey. Here Ballard, who played one of the important supporting parts in a flawless cast that included Ann Miller, Liliane Montevecchi, Phyllis Newman, Eddie Bracken, and Donald Saddler, reminisces about that production and that theater (and does me the honor of quoting a couple of paragraphs from my review), and about why, despite rave reviews and enthusiastic audiences, it did not transfer, as expected, to Broadway. This was partly because Goldman’s widow would not authorize it unless it alternated with the revival of one of her husband’s plays, which the producers did not want to do, and partly also, it seems, because Sondheim wasn’t sufficiently impressed. Her memories, speculations, and even divagations are golden.

The memoir is profusely illustrated, and its happy pictures include Kaye with such greats as Ray Bolger, Jack Paar, Shelley Winters, Jimmy Durante, Sandy Duncan, Ronald Reagan, Phyllis Diller, Carol Channing, Mary Martin, and lots more. My favorite one has her and Maurice Chevalier camping it up for the camera, which proves that a mere black-and-white snapshot of veritable comedians can bring a smile to any viewer.

Yet Ballard can also be observantly, impressively serious: “There is no wit anymore, no grace. There are a lot of smart young composers and performers out there with their computers and their telephones that do everything but the laundry. But, you know, once we got through the anger and love power and whatever else we were going through in the sixties and early seventies, we never went back to listening. Every product we invented was about being faster or cheaper. And the art world went right along with it. It is not a coincidence that Broadway musicals began to decline around this time. Once they did return, they were concentrating on sinking ships and flying helicopters instead of telling a story. The world started going so fast there was no time for the wit of a Noel Coward or a Lorenz Hart, no time for the grace of Lerner and Loewe.”

True enough. And though How I Lost 10 Pounds in 53 Years is also show-biz encyclopedic while being a fast read, it is by no means a cheap one. Abounding in wit, it is nevertheless free of cheap shots. Benevolence, indeed beatitude, radiates from its pages, even while it relates fiascos, faux pas, failed opportunities and footling faits divers. It tickles your funny bone and enhances your fantasies. I’m happy that it fell off my shelf, and hope it will fall into your hands as well.

THE AUDIENCE

There should be a difference between a good performance and a great one. Sensibly, one applauds at the end of the former and rises to one’s feet for the latter. About which is which, one knows in one’s bones. Or does one?

I don’t recall seeing in the old days audiences bent on rushing into a standing ovation even for a mediocre, sometimes indeed dismal, play, as if they were goosed by their seats. But nowadays standing ovations are as common as dirt, and strike me as a dirty joke. Why, even at a performance much later than the premiere, benighted souls will leap to their feet, clapping and cheering, as if to stand were standard procedure. This raises a number of questions.

Are audiences particularly stupid? Or did they spend so much on their tickets that they must resort to this device to prove to themselves that the money was well worth it? Or are they lusting for some sort of participation in the creative process and deluding themselves that this is it? Or are they just trying to show off with how much smarter they are than their still sedentary neighbors? What they certainly don’t realize is that they are devaluing the standing ovation, and often adding insult to injury by their shrieks or howls, or whatever you call the throat complementing the feet.

Of course, once a fool thinks up a new trick like that shriek or howl or whatever it is, there is never a shortage of copycats or lemmings to follow suit. We have seen it happen even in the refined sport of tennis, where after Monica Seles started the grunt, it took hold of any number of distinguished players, women first but eventually some men as well. Whatever it means in tennis, in the theater and concert hall it indulges the herd’s need to be heard. Forget about I think, therefore I am: Descartes is discarded. The new motto is: I make noise, therefore I am. And the standing ovation, sometimes also accompanied by foot stamping, is the shout made visible.

Alas, that is not the only sound we hear from audiences. Any number of people talk during the show. It is argued, not without plausibility, that because they watch so much on television, they have lost the sense of difference between the theater and the living room. Some people, more commonly but not exclusively at the movies, randomly get up and leave, and sooner or later return. I doubt that it can all be to the toilet. But it can disturb, like two heads in front of you repeatedly coming together, which is talk made visible.

Some such people can be shushed. Others get furious, glower at you, and continue as before. The supposed option of complaining to an usher is useless. Even in the remote possibility of finding one, it means missing too much of the play or concert. And just what can an usher do? The culprits know that they won’t be physically ejected; a reprimand mostly earns the usher and you the wrath of other audience members who, until now, were not disturbed.

For so many hidebound people in the audience, from whom you might hope for support, the misbehaving persons in front of them don’t matter, and neither do the ones behind them. So perhaps new ways of dealing with the talkers must be invented. Perhaps one could have an index card ready to thrust at them, reading “If you’ll kindly stop talking, I’ll give you a monetary award at the end of the show.”

Sometimes if you hear what they are saying, you can score. At a Truffaut film, where the camera raced around sights of Paris, a man behind me kept identifying them for his companion. “The Eiffel Tower,” he would say, or “Notre Dame Cathedral,” and the like. Finally, when he announced the Triumphal Arch, I corrected him: “No, the Brooklyn Navy Yard.” This somehow stumped him into silence.

Then, at the cinema where there are empty seats, a talker will tell you, “If you don’t like it, move!” You might want to question him why it doesn’t occur to him to follow his own advice. But the trouble is that the offender is often a huge, burly, uncouth fellow, who might start a brawl or worse. In that case, by moving yourself, you may miss some important part of the movie, not to mention disturb innocent people in your present row and the one you move to.

Sometimes I think enviously of mad king Ludwig of Bavaria, who had Wagner compose works for him played at the Private Theater with the king the sole audience. That may well be the ideal enjoyment, especially at a comedy, where primitive audiences will laugh louder and longer than the maddest monarch, and often make you lose several lines of dialogue and the next joke. Sad to say, though I might try to approximate Ludwig’s madness, his money is beyond my wildest dreams.

Speaking of concerts, the late great and eccentric music critic B. H. Haggin was so disgusted with audiences, though rather better at classical concerts (I keep forgetting that these days anything is called a concert), that he would hold his program up before him so that it would block out the audience and leave only the stage in view. I never attended anything sitting close to him, so I can’t tell to what extent he made a spectacle of himself for those he couldn’t block out. He was also unusual among music critics by ignoring if possible any music later than that of the late Romantics.

My own taste is the exact opposite. I have no interest in music from before roughly 1840, and can only wonder at the adulation of, say, Bach and Mozart, when there is Fauré and Debussy and Bartók and Berg and Prokofiev and Janáček, to name only a few. I recall the time when the great lieder singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau gave three recitals in Carnegie Hall, all of which I attended. The first two, Schubert ones, I enjoyed well enough, but really looked forward to the third, which was to be all Hugo Wolf. But Sol Hurok, the concert manager, managed to talk the baritone into sticking with Schubert, who apparently was bigger at the box office. As we were leaving, I bumped into Haggin, who asked me, “Wasn’t it wonderful?” I replied that I would have much preferred Wolf. Haggin burst out laughing; for him, I must have been the only one with such a preference.

I realize now that I have strayed a bit from the subject of the audience. But I too, like all critics, am also audience. And perhaps the only subject on which I wholly agree with my colleagues is about not talking during a show. I mean the professional critics, and not those unfortunate bloggers who, in the Age of the Internet , when everyone is a critic, fancy themselves that. Those, with some honorable exceptions, would do well to shut the hell up.

MISSING LINKY

I read the other day, evoking many memories, that the great publisher Barney Rosset had died aged 89, and reflected on what adventures and enterprises those years had yielded. With his admirable Grove Press, he brought out, among other daring coups, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Waiting for Godot, Story of O, and, on film, I Am Curious (Yellow), which entailed many law suits and other battles with puritanical censors and craven exhibitors, all of which and more Rosset triumphantly won. He achieved free speech for literature and cinema in America for all time to come.

I am happy to note that the Times obituary of February 23 was, as is not always the case, laudably unstinting as written by Douglas Martin, and provided a commendable overview of an exemplary career. I knew Rosset only slightly, encountering him last at a dinner party chez Larry Rivers, which I remember chiefly for having said strongly negative things about my ex-student Harold Brodky to a woman who turned out to be his wife.

I do recall Barney as charming and lots of fun, and only wish I had known him better. I enjoyed several of his controversial books, and was a witness for the defense at several I Am Curious trials. I also read with interest his Evergreen Review, and was very sorry when he had to sell Grove Press. I was even sorrier that the purchasers were Ann Getty and Lord Weidenfeld, both of whom were my friends, but treated Barney badly when, despite contrary promises, they fired him within a year.

The story I have to tell here would have been of scant interest to Barney, but was not unimportant to me. It involves my relationship with a young woman, still alive today, whom I will refer to only by her nickname, Linky, sometimes abbreviated as Link.

Linky was quite simply the most beautiful Radcliffe undergrad at the time, the one most envied by her fellow Cliffies and most lusted after by Harvard students, graduate ones like me included. I recall first spotting her in a booth with some girlfriends at the St. Clair’s eatery, and resolving to become her boyfriend come hell or high water.

I managed to wrangle a date via a phone call whose tactics I forget, and in due time this involved steady dating. This, alas, was not tantamount to sleeping together, which, smitten and devoted as I was, I considered a rightful development. Much about my courtship I can no longer recall.

What I do remember, however, is taking Linky to the Charles river’s further bank for a photo session. In those days, I owned a fancy camera and was a bit of a photography buff. That day I took numerous pictures of Linky, who quite willingly cooperated with a number of charming poses. These were nowise erotic, but such were Linky’s loveliness and her graceful postures that you could not look at them without amorous longing. Today all these snapshots are lost, except for one tiny 35millimeter print that I pasted into a volume of
Mallarmé’s poems.

There she stands on the Charles’s further and wilder bank, on a piece of wood jutting into the river, in a casual yet graceful attitude, a nymph if ever there was one. Her left hand supports her against a tall picturesque shrub that somehow winds its way along a tree trunk, her right arm dangles casually, both arms impeccably beautiful. She is wearing a dark dress with white edging, the fairly long skirt revealing only some elegant shins, perfect ankles, and tastefully ballet-slippered feet. She is gazing into the distance, her face slightly inclined, her lovely blond hair hanging loose onto her left shoulder. In the distance, a solitary oarsman is looking in another direction, unaware of what he is missing.

Amusingly, Linky’s picture is pasted above the famous sonnet beginning rather appropriately “A la nue accablante tu,” and as difficult to interpret as what might have been going through my model’s highly independent mind.

Our platonic relationship continued for a while until a Fulbright Fellowship propelled me to Paris and the Sorbonne. Linky had promised to write me faithfully, but all I got was a couple of letters in large, touchingly schoolgirlish handwriting and with rather noncommittal content. And then complete cessation. I surmised that she had found another swain, and I, in Paris of all places, found other young ladies much more forthcoming.

In the spring, surprisingly, I got a new letter from Linky. A talented sculptress—whose work I may have biasedly found superb—she was headed for Italy for further study with the famed sculptor Arturo Martini. On the way, she intended to stop in Paris for some time with me, and I was to meet her at the appointed time at the city’s airplane bus terminal.

Well, there she was, lovely as ever, and adding to my amazement by having accidentally rented a room, in all that mighty metropolis, only a block away from where I had my rented room. Two things, though, marred my pleasure. One was my not then being fully aware that young American ladies, strictly chaste at home, became, upon landing on European shores, something like maenads, no longer bound by real or imagined surveillance. The other was my being by then madly in love with June, an American ballet dancer who had been my lover, but was lately on tour with her ballet company and hopelessly enamored of its male star, who, however, was homosexual.

Now it damnably so happened that the Ballet de Monte Carlo, and with it June, was guest appearing briefly in Paris, and I harbored crazy notions of somehow recapturing her favors. She was lovely, but not a stunner like Linky; however she was my new love whom I had frantically and unsuccessfully pursued all over tarnation via unaccepted long-distance phone calls.

And now, simultaneously, there was Linky, whom I neglected all next day while feverishly searching for June, who had deliberately withheld her exact whereabouts from me. I finally located her, but that is another story. For the evening’s star-studded performance at the Opera of Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust I had two tickets, and to this I invited Linky.

She came, but was silently crying in the seat next to me. In the intermission, she perched on an outside fountain and rivaled it with torrential sobbing. I felt for her, but was unable to console her or accede to what I now assume were her frustrated expectations.

I did not see or hear from Linky for quite a while, at least not until the British National Theatre was appearing in New York with several performances headed by Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, and Vivien Leigh. To one of those I invited Linky and she came. But oh my, what a reversal of roles! How I craved her affection, even as she remained as cold as one of her marbles. When I saw her home, she stopped me at her front door, and hurtfully proceeded to echo all my pleas verbatim in harshly sarcastic tones, accompanied by cruelly mocking facial expressions.

That was the end. The only time I glimpsed her again was on a street in Cambridge, where, catching sight of me, she promptly crossed to the other side. Sad, very sad. Years passed, and the one thing I heard about her was that she was living with Barney Rosset, but that, because of troubles in the relationship, they both had therapy sessions with the same analyst—whether separately or together I don’t know—and that he was paying for them. This struck my friends as mighty peculiar and therapeutically unsound.

Fast forward now to that Larry Rivers dinner party, where I got to talk to Barney and naturally inquired about Linky. They had broken up long before, but remained friends. He spoke of her warmly, saying that she was living happily and, apparently, solitarily, sculpting away to her heart’s content. I am surprised to this day that she hasn’t become a famous sculptor.

HOWARD KISSEL

The premature death at 69—though it would have been premature at any age—of Howard Kissel is a severe loss to everyone involved in the theater, interested in theater, and relative or friend of his. Whenever Howard was at a play, before the beginning or during intermission, a small crowd of chatty admirers assembled around him as they did around few other critics. Lovable as a human being, he managed to be so even as a critic, which, without being a milksop, is no small achievement.

An old joke has it that a pessimist sees only the holes in Swiss cheese, whereas an optimist sees only the cheese.  Perhaps there are also critics who manage to see the cheese above all, and the holes, if holes there are, only in second place. Howard was surely one of those.

He was a drama critic for some forty years, first at Women’s Wear Daily, then, for twenty years at the Daily News, and finally as a columnist at the Huffington Post. He also at various times reviewed film, opera, ballet, food, and books, the last of which he was particularly good at, and I wish he had done more often.

He also wrote books, about David Merrick, Stella Adler’s teachings, and Noel Coward, and was a frequent speaker or panelist on arts subjects. He also briefly taught Musical Theatre History at Marymount Manhattan College. Even more briefly, but delightfully, he played the protagonist’s manager in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories. Wherever he went, his shock of wavy silver hair was a cynosure, if not indeed a rallying point.

Politically, he became more and more conservative with the years, but did not allow this to cloud his aesthetic judgments, to the extent that it is humanly possible. He also kept up his interest in the arts, and kept exercising yet another of his talents—for friendship.

Howard Kissel was a true friend to everyone he knew: sympathetic, compassionate, and understanding. This last is important: one can be compassionate without full understanding, but full understanding helps immeasurably. And as if all that weren’t enough, he could also be very witty.

We saw quite a bit of each other. Often at restaurant meals, which was also one we shared at our penultimate get together. The cuisine was quite undistinguished, but Howard, who was also quite a good cook in his own right, enjoyed it a lot more than I did. Eating was always a serious thing for him, and here too he uttered his famous rapt: “This is delicious.” As for our last shared experience, it was a performance of the ballet Romeo & Juliet, which thoroughly pleased Howard, but I found quite deficient in Peter Martins’s choreography, its inability to tell a story in dance, and in the dreadful set by a supposedly leading Danish artist.

But one of the best things I know was chatting with Howard on the telephone. Some people, perfectly pleasant in person, are not so good on the phone. They go on too long or hang up too soon, are too discursive but do not properly listen, or simply don’t think of certain interesting things they would have brought up in a tete-a-tete.

Howard, however, was perfect on the phone, and always good for a stimulating conversation. It is a good thing that these talks, which in our earlier days could go deep into the night, were not long distance. They could have bankrupted both of us. Perhaps kindred to it was his admirably cozy way of chairing both the drama critics’ and film critics’ circles, which no one else has ever straddled.

The especially nice thing was discussing theater with him. Even though we belonged to very different schools of criticism, his tolerance made my strictness as opposed to his indulgence acceptable to him, and his unassuming way made that indulgence somehow acceptable to me. It was wonderful when we did agree, and never annoying when we didn’t. And we had terrific laughs together, many about the reviews by some of our well-paid colleagues, whereas he and I were both eventually treated shabbily by the media we had dedicated so much to.

While his initially pleasant marriage to the late Christine, violinist and ceramist, was still functional—she having later become a rather nutty recluse in the upstate country house, while he soldiered on in the city apartment so cluttered with decades-old newspapers she had amassed that even the dog had to fight his way through to the door—the Kissels and the Simons had many joyous dinners together. But out of respect for Christine, who never even set foot any more in the city, Howard kept those mounds of newspapers till the day she died, though when some utility like the fridge broke down, he felt too ashamed to let a repairman in to see the mess. And that is another good thing about him: he provided one with a veritable trove of bizarrely funny anecdotes. For example, about the leaky roof in the kitchen of their country house, which they couldn’t afford to have repaired, and merely had some sort of tarpaulin to keep the rain off their meals.

Or there was the time when he could finally afford to buy a rickety jalopy ready for the junkyard, and he proudly told us how they could now take extensive snail-speed trips to some neighboring town along sparsely traveled back roads.

But memories, alas, are not quite as good as living company. And so, sadly, I must cite yet another talent of Howard’s: the ability to be missed most intensely—perhaps more than one could miss any other friend. May he rest in the peace he brought to everyone he knew: sharing it with us, and himself enjoying it to the utmost.                

                                                                                                                                                                     It is of some comfort to recall that the final chapters of his life comprised a loving visit with his sisters in Florida, and a greatly savored class reunion in California that also involved other delightful experiences in several Western locations, and can be read about in his last Huffington Post column.

One can truly think of him as having spread and enjoyed good cheer from coast to coast. And how to sum him up, now that he is gone? Noel Coward has a little-known play called This Was a Man. Of Howard it can be said: This was a mensch.

THE NOSTRUM OF NOSTALGIA

Americans are too prone to nostalgia, a phenomenon comparable to gushing about babies, movie stars, and pets. That it was considered unhealthy is evident from its name, based on two Greek words: nostos, a return home, and algos, sickness. Dictionaries define it as either a yearning for something past or homesickness. There is a difference.

It is one thing to long for the past in whatever form (retro fashions, vintage cars, one’s real or imagined childhood, and the like), and another to yearn for home from abroad (as in armed service, business travel, special studies, and such). In other words, nostalgia is the wish to negate either time or distance, humanly understandable but scarcely salubrious.

Of course, in a mild form, a great many of us are susceptible to it; it is only when it becomes intense and persistent that it turns seriously unhealthy—like the difference between a cold and pneumonia, between sniffles and high fever. Granted, nobody dies of nostalgia, but why look at the world distractingly through the rear- view mirror rather than as required through the windshield?

Agreed, a major reversal of fortune can elicit , if not entirely justify, nostalgia, but how many people can claim that as an excuse? These thoughts are induced by a couple of recent movies, the Franco-Belgian The Artist, with ten Oscar nominations, and the Anglo-American Hugo, with eleven. Both are competing for Best Picture, but omens are more favorable to The Artist, including its awards and popularity in Great Britain.

I myself find The Artist disgraceful. It is a perfectly silly, sentimental story, told almost entirely without sound and in black-and-white, to resemble old-time flics. This is like trading in your car for a horse and buggy, or like reverting to babytalk. especially considering the paltry quality of those by-gone movies meant to be replicated. Monochrome may be suitable for dark doings, as in Agnieszka Holland's current In Darkness, about a group of Polish Jews in World War Two hiding from the Nazis in the Lwow sewers. But using it merely for nostalgia I consider lack of both good taste and sound judgment.

To be sure there are distinct allusions even to such superior movies as Citizen Kane and A Star Is Born, yet imitation of this kind is hardly a virtue. And what about bringing in Malcolm MacDowell, a major but now neglected actor, merely to share a bench with the heroine for a couple of minutes?

Absurd, too, is the leading man’s losing his fortune and star standing on the flop of  an epic, self-financed picture, excerpts from which prove absolutely no worse than the rest of The Artist. Downright ludicrous is the soundtrack’s acquiring audibility just for the depositing of a tumbler on a table, presumably symbolic of the coming of sound to the movies, though this one promptly reverts to mutism.

For further incredibility, consider the hero’s confinement in a burning house long enough to turn to a crisp, but being saved by his faithful dog’s tugging at a nearby policeman’s trousers, which in some unexplained way leads to the putting out of the flames in ample time. Or take the heroine, now a star, getting, as the intertitles inform us, a brilliant idea for saving the situation, which turns out to be nothing more than the surly and despotic studio head’s being enchanted  by her and her hero lover’s performing a second-rate dance sequence inordinately dwelled on.

There is an abundance of clichés, such as a torn-off poster for the hero’s ruinous movie blown to a sidewalk, with indifferent feet cruelly treading on it. Be it said, however, for the hitherto undistinguished writer-director of the film, Michel Hazanavicius, that his star and real-life wife, Berenice Bejo, is pretty and charming, and that his protagonist, Jean Dujardin, resembles some of the leading men of yore. But even the unrelenting score by Ludovic Bource will stoop to such a trick as switching into Bernard Herrmann's celebrated score for Vertigo, the sort of dirty doing the great film composers of olden times would not have condoned, let alone perpetrated.

Yes, Hugo, too, has its share of nostalgia, and even rewrites history. Moreover, the notion that a young boy, upon his father’s demise, would inherit the job of regulating the clocks of a major Paris railway station is fairy-tale stuff. But the screenplay is by John Logan, an established writer, and the direction by the distinguished Martin Scorsese. The film unabashedly but nonexclusively appeals to a young audience,
its two young principal actors could not be more delightful, and even its use of 3D is not showily overassertive. I only wish Howard Shore, the composer, had resisted annexing Satie's well-known and superior Gymnopedies to his otherwise acceptable score, for which aberration see above under Ludovic Bource.

Perhaps there is a symbolic significance in the contrast between the dogs that figure importantly in both these Oscar contenders. In The Artist, the dog is preternaturally clever; in Hugo, he may perhaps be (dare I say it?) too doggedly ferocious, but still rather more believable.  So, too, Hugo takes place in an ingeniously evoked Paris, whereas The Artist merely smells of the studio.

MEMORY'S TRICKS

Memory plays strange tricks on us. There are not only (A) the losses of things we want to remember, but also (B) the things it annoyingly won’t let us forget. And further (C), things we puzzlingly don’t know why we remember. They neither bother nor delight us, only make us wonder why these rather than something else.

For reasons that elude me, I recently thought of the Swedish film and stage director, the late Johan Bergenstrahle, whose one superb film not even many Swedes have seen, but whose stage work at Stockholm’s City Theater is remembered and well thought of. One evening in a Stockholm café, he voiced his gnawing concern to me. How to deal with the fact that his still young and beautiful girlfriend’s ass, hitherto firm and smooth, was starting to develop a kind of moiré effect of unsightly ripples?

I don’t recall what sort of solace I could offer him, nor how he responded. But sometime later, I received an unexpected letter from him in his large, imposing handwriting, thanking me for what I had said, and telling me it had helped him. Now, however, I cannot for the life of me recall what it was; all I am sure of is that it wasn’t naming some miraculous ointment or other, but some psychological adjustment. Still, an A case.

But now for a B. The protagonist of a play by Jean Anouilh is tormented by memories of cruelties he inflicted as a youth on various animals. Alas, I too in my boyhood was given an air gun with which I shot poor innocent sparrows without even the excuse of food for myself or fodder for some pets. I still evince intermittent pangs of conscience, and, of course, there is no possible expiation.

Even unarmed, I must have offended some human beings, to whom a belated apology might be possible. Here, however, memory fails me. But I can recall and offer specimens of type C.

My father was fond of philosophy and when the respected philosopher Arthur Liebert, fleeing the Nazis, landed impecuniously in Belgrade, my parents would frequently have him over for dinner. I remember his philosophical head (bald on top and lots of snow-white fringe), but only one inconsequential thing he said. We took him to see “Broadway Melody of 1940,” whose much-touted star, Eleanor Powell, does not appear till the second or third reel. “Wann kommt die Povel?” inquired, stentorously mispronouncing, the impatient philosopher.

There are stranger Cs, however. My father was a wise as well as witty man, yet I remember clearly only one thing he said. My parents and I were in Paris, returning to our hotel after a show, when we saw a sign reading “Repas” (meals) over a closed restaurant door. Said my father in Hungarian, “Even this root vegetable man has shut shop by now.” Repas, with an acute accent on both vowels, would, if such a word existed, mean root vegetable dealer or man. Somehow, the preposterousness of that reading and pronunciation had all three of us burst out laughing. Why remember this of all things?

Of my mother, I recall only, as she was washing me in my childhood behind my ears, referring to “the little bench behind your ears.” Calling it a little bench is rather strange, but surely not memorable. One other remark of hers, to my wife, and relayed to me by her, was, “Who is that old woman looking at me from the mirror?” Seems very apt to me these late days.

The one utterance of my own I recall from my infancy is, walking in the park with my grandmother and seeing a nest of ants, “What a multitude of beetles!” To be sure, “Menge” in German was less resonant than the English “multitude.” Though entomologically incorrect, it made an impression on grandmotherly ears, and was duly reported as proof of my linguistic prowess.

Actions are more memorable than words, and I do remember a few from my boyhood. For instance, on a holiday at an Italian seaside watering place, there was a girl of maybe twelve, like me, who tried fishing in the bay with a butterfly net. It got away from her and was starting to float away to sea. My parents were away, and I, not yet a secure swimmer, chivalrously waded right in fully clothed, unconcerned with how deep and dangerous the water might be just there. Luckily, I retrieved the net. A friendly lady, horrified, carried me off to her room and gave me a rubdown and something dry to wear. I wonder now, is this memory a B or a C?

Oddly enough, an insignificant event from my ripe years often haunts me in B fashion. At a public spelling bee, Phoebe, a co-worker at New York magazine, wanted to join in, but only if I would too.  An early word was “cartilage.” I spelled it “cartilege.” This faux pas was actually written up in some British newspaper to my eternal shame.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could teach our memory to remember only pleasant things, and skip the indifferent or bad ones?  Of course, the latter may function as useful warnings against recidivism. But when would I ever again have to spell “cartilage” in public?