If I Still Have Any Readers On This Blog …
Thursday, November 29th, 2007Then I guess I should be writing these posts again. I want to apologize for not writing more these last couple of months but have been quite depressed and down re: the novel-in-progress. I wanted to wait until I had great news to announce. But several publishing houses have turned it down so far and, though it’s still at a few other places awaiting an assortment of judgements, it’s not looking so good. I’m trying to remain hopeful but it hasn’t been easy. Hence the light blogging.
I remain convinced it is good and moving and funny. But we writers are a fragile lot and have to admit my faith in my talent has been shaken a bit. But for those of you who have read Mississippi Sissy you know I’m a survivor and a fighter and God knows I’ve survived worse than a novel not receiving the reception I had so hoped for it. But, as I said, there are still several houses to hear from so we’ll see.
In the meantime, I’ve started the sequel to Sissy. It’s titled “I LEFT IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, A Midlife Search for Meaning, and MYSELF.” The first chapter is called The Climber and is about my successful climb up Mt. Kilimanjaro. Chapter Two is called The Role-Player - it is about my time at Juilliard and my starring as Alan Strang opposite Tony Perkins in “Equus” among other roles I’ve played in life and on TV, including parts in “Tales of the City” and Truman Capote’s “The Grass Harp.” Chapter Three: The Mentored, which is about the two late men who first cut me out of the herd here in New York City - Howard Moss, the poetry editor of The New Yorker and a great poet himself, and Henry Geldzahler, who was curator of Twentieth Century Art for the Metropolitan Museum and also Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City of New York under Mayor Koch. The Mentor is the title of Chapter Four and that is about my relationship with Brandon Gonzalez. For those of you familiar with this site, you’ll know Brandon as the Brooklyn kid I’ve written about so often who is a big part of my life. Chapter Five: The Starfucker, which is about my years interviewing everyone from Madonna to Johnny Depp to Cher to Barbra Steisand to Tom Cruise and on and on and on during my tenures as Executive Editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview and as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. I’m calling Chapter Six The Visitor and it will tell the story of my trip to Louisville to see my first friend who died of AIDS in the late 1980s during his last days in the hospital. The Expatriate is the title of Chapter Seven and it will summarize my time living in Paris which coincided with September 11th. Chapter Eight is about my diagnosis with HIV when I was living in South Beach and it is titled The Diagnosed. The Dogged is the title of Chapter Nine and is about my best friend Archie, who is a 15 pound Chihuahua who has changed my life. And the final chapter is titled The Searcher about the return month-long trip to Africa I plan to take in the near future.
The sequel may be announced in a story the New York Times is doing about Archie and my apartment and me in the Habitats column in its Sunday Real Estate section on December 9th. For those of you who don’t live in New York, I guess you can read it online since I don’t think the Real Estate section is part of its national Sunday edition.
What else? Hmmmm …. I’m still enjoying writing my theatre reviews for Towleroad.com. So check those out. I’ll be writing about William Finn and a few other things this week or next. I went to see a screening of Atonement on Tuesday. Don’t miss it when it opens at your local theatres. It’s a great movie. I loved the Ian McEwan novel, though that word “novel” catches in my throat these days. It was one of my favorites of the last few years as is this movie. I didn’t think the filmmakers could capture the interior quality of the novel’s story - and they haven’t quite - but they have made an astonishingly good film. Joe Wright, the director, and Christopher Hampton, the screenwriter, have accomplished the near-impossible - translating a work of literary art into a cinematic one with a completely different set of tools. Bravo to them and to the cast which includes Keira Knightley and James McAvoy (my new favorite actor) and the always great Vanessa Redgrave. I interviewed Knightley for the cover of ELLE magazine when she was only 17. She could not have been more self-possessed for a teenager. I was smitten with her back then and even more so now. She was staying at The Ritz in Paris with her mother - a left-wing playwright - since at that point Knightley didn’t even have a publicist. She was game from anything. I even suggested I needed a great opening few paragraphs for the story and would she meet me downstairs at The Ritz’s indoor pool to swim a few laps at 8 a.m. so we’d be alone. She arrived the next morning with her bathing cap in place and in her tight little one-piece bathsuit beneath her plush Ritz terrycloth robe. I thought of that groggy Parisian morning with the heated pool’s steam rising Ritzily around us when she, as her character Cecilia Tallis in Atonement, languouously leans back in her own bathing cap and one-piece swim suit on her family’s divingboard in the film. Go see it and you’ll know what I mean when I say Keira has never been more lovely than in that moment on film. Well, perhaps she was in that fleeting memory I had of her when I saw the scene.
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the passing of the great Norman Mailer since I’m back to blogging. His Executioner’s Song was a book that changed my writing life. And I’d often ride my bike by his home way down on the east end of Commercial Street in Ptown hoping to get a glimpse of him or hear him pecking away at his computer of typewriter the way I could hear Eudora Welty working away when I’d walk by her opened bedroom window back in Jackson, Mississippi, where she lived a few blocks from my college dorm in her old family homestead on Pinehurst. I met Mailer a couple of times. The first time was with my aforementioned mentor, Henry Geldzahler. We were in the back of a limo with Mailer and - I catch my breath even writing this - Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. This was when Jackie O was fighting to save Grand Central when Henry was Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. We were on the way to a fundraiser or a party or something pertaining to signifying Grand Central a landmark. Mailer regaled us all about his college days with Henry back at Harvard when he taught him how to box and Henry taught him how to smoke a cigar. “Sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar,” Henry said, paraphrasing Freud. Jackie giggled. I - Zelig-like - giggled along with her, not knowing at that point that Freud was being paraphrased but knowing that a giggle was called for simply at finding myself - a twenty-something from the Missisippi countryside - in such august company.
Years later after interviewing the actress Sally Kirkland for Interview - it was the year she was nominated for Best Actress for her performance in the title role in the film Anna - she invited me to be her date at a Halloween costume party at Norman Mailer’s house in Brooklyn Heights. She went as a flapper and I dressed in a 1920s tux. Mailer was dressed in a toga. I found myself in a corner flirting with Ali McGraw at one point and noticed Mailer observing us. More nervous at the prospect of my flirting with a woman than conversing with the renowned author, I nodded his way. He nodded back. I excused myself and went over and shook his hand and asked if he recalled our ride in the backseat of Henry’s car with Jackie O. “I knew you looked familiar,” he said. We carried on a polite coversation about Henry and, looking at the cast of characters mingling in his Brooklyn brownstone, marveled at how New York City throws such divergent people together. I admitted to him that night how I wanted to be a writer but found myself on the magazine path at the moment. “Come with me,” he said. I did. Yet again Zelig-like, I followed Mailer, busily tucking his toga into place about his square squat body, down the brownstone’s stairwell into his study. “This is where I do my writing,” he said. “I thought you might like to see this.” We talked about Executioner’s Song and how much it had meant to me, had meant to him. “Some day maybe I’ll have one of your books on these shelves,” he told me, so generous with his time and advice. Maybe he just wanted to get away from the drunks at his party but I’ll always be grateful for those few quiet moments alone with that giant of a square squat man. Mississippi Sissy probably wasn’t the kind of book with the kind of title he responded to so I doubt if it found a place on his shelf. But as I’ve doubted my own talent these last couple of months after receiving the rejections for my novel I’ve found solace in the words that night from the toga-wearing Mailer: “Make sure you’re your own audience, kid, and be kind to yourself in this unkind world.” I pray that Mailer has gone now to a kinder world for I’ll always be grateful for those few moments of genuine kindness he showed to - all appearances aside - a very frightened southern sissy on a Halloween night so long ago.
