When I lived in NYC in the mid-1970s, & I was studying at HB Studios, I was living with my sorta boyfriend- WCK3 ( who was studying at Julliard) & I working at ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers). This was a fabulous job as a “music monitor”. I had a small cubicle in the ASCAP building, with a huge window that looked out at Lincoln Center & a smack on view of the Chagall tapestries at the Metropolitan Opera House. It remains one of my favorite jobs of all time, & one of the perks was frequent house seats for Broadway musicals.
The big musical of the moment was a little thing called- A Chorus Line, but my own favorite was the somewhat less popular- Chicago. I loved this show, directed & choreographed by Bob Fosse & I saw it when ever I got a chance. It starred Chita Rivera, Jerry Orbach & Gwen Verdon. At some point,Gwen Verdon fell ill, the victim of swallowing a feather from her costume & she was replaced for 1 month by someone named Liza Minnelli. I was so excited to see Liza up close & personal. ASCAP secured, for me, 2 tickets for her 1st night in the role. WCK3 could not attend, but he suggested that I bring his friend & classmate at Julliard- Bebe.
I felt bad that I had been taunting Bebe, because she shared a name with the Seattle Zoo’s famous gorilla. Beebee & BoBo were a very famous gorilla couple at the Seattle Zoo, & WCK3’s friend had to suffer through my gorilla jokes. I was glad to have a date for Liza’s Chicago debut, & Bebe seemed to have forgiven my ribbing. We had a great date at the theatre, with drinks at Joe Allen’s after the show. I wish that I had been portentous at the time, about my date was Bebe Neuwirth. I would loved to have told her that she would someday go on to win a Tony Award as Velma Kelly, in the most successful revival in Broadway history- Chicago (She would also be the 2nd Sheila in that other show- A Chorus Line): “Hey Bebe…someday, you will wina Tony award for this show & you will go on to be a big Broadway & TV star (winning 2 Emmy awards for her take on Dr. Lilith Sternin on Cheers), how about a kiss? She was a swell date. I regret not trying to make out with her at the end of our evening.
Things turned out pretty well for Bebe. For the last year she has been starring with Nathan Lane in The Aadams Family on Broadway. Bebe never thanks me in her award speeches, although I was the perfect date, footing the cost of the tickets & the drinks, & every bit the gentleman. Today is Bebe Neuwirth’s birthday. I will never forget our date.
He wasn’t gay, but he sure gave gay people something to sing about. Many of his tunes are connected to gay sensibities & gay culture in the 20th century. As a young Musical Theatre Queen, Jule Styne played a significant role in my early love of theatre music. Styne the versatile, prolific songwriter whose tunes became standards for 3 generations & the composer of such classic Broadway musicals as Gypsy, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes & Funny Girl, was born on this day- December 31st, in 1905.
Among Styne's enduring songs are: the Oscar-winning 3 Coins in the Fountain, I Don't Want to Walk Without You, Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend, Everything's Coming Up Roses, & Don’t Rain On My Parade.
His name was always less familiar than his music. This was probably because of his very flexibility. Styne: "You write as well as who you write with," & he usually let the lyricist & the star set the tone for the score.
Styne: "If you can't be a collaborator, you don't belong in the theater, & I am the greatest collaborator there is."
Styne estimated that he had written 2,000 songs, had published 1,500 and had 200 hits. Styne: "I'm talking about hit hits. The others were popular, but there were 200 hit hits: It's Been a Long, Long Time, It's Magic, Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!, Time After Time, People, Five Minutes More.
In Hollywood, he teamed up with Sammy Cahn for the romantic: I've Heard That Song Before,I'll WalkAlone & 3Coins in the Fountain. On Broadway, he shifted from satire: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with Leo Robin, to drama- Gypsy with Stephen Sondheim, to glitter- Funny Girl with Bob Merrill, & also working with Comden & Green on shows including 2 On The Aisle & Bells Are Ringing.
His songs often bore the stamp of the singers who introduced them: Carol Channing, Judy Holliday, Doris Day, Mary Martin, Barbra Streisand & Ethel Merman. How gay is that?
He once told an interviewer that he preferred to write the music before the lyrics, as he had done on Gypsy, his collaboration with Sondheim. Styne: "When the music is written first, the lyricist will do his best job because he is not writing to his own preconceived rhythmic notions."
Don't Rain on My Parade
Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend
Everything's Coming Up Roses
Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry
I Fall In Love Too Easily
I Still Get Jealous
Just In Time
Let Me Entertain You
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!
Long Before I Knew You
Make Someone Happy
The Party's Over
People
Saturday Night (Is the Loneliest Night of the Week)
He currently manages a hotel in the heart of Hollywood, where he lives with his cat Booky. Joe Dellesandro: "I've lived such a full life. I've had such great things. There were some hardships, but overall everything has been great."
Joe Dallesandro, a.k.a. “Little Joe,” was the greatest of the Warhol Superstars, the only one to really break out of the film underground & have a career in cinema. I would have credited his success to his looks, but what I really went for was his cool attitude. Dallesandro could also, he just acted like he couldn’t. He identifies himself as bisexual.
Dellesandro did his first bit in Warhol’s The Loves of Ondine (1968), after accidentally walking onto the set & getting cast on the spot. He appeared in other Warhol films, including Lonesome Cowboys (1968). When Paul Morrissey began to direct Warhol’s films, Joe starred in almost every one: Flesh (1968), Trash (1970), Heat (1972), Flesh for Frankenstein (1973), & Andy Warhol’s Dracula (1974).
Dellesandro later moved to Italy, where he starred in European art films, working with directors like Louis Malle, & Serge Gainsbourg. He also led a rather wild life there. Then, after the death of his brother Bobby, who had worked for Andy Warhol as a chauffeur, Joe moved back to the U.S. in the 1980s & worked on a variety of Hollywood films &TV series: Steven Soderbergh's The Limey, Sunset with Bruce Willis & James Garner, Critical Condition with Richard Pryor, Gun Crazy with Drew Barrymore, Wiseguy, Miami Vice & Matlock.
He was definitely mysterious, & he had obviously been around. In Flesh, he played a male hustler. Lou Reed was talking about Joe in his lyrics for Walk On The Wild Side: “Little Joe never once gave it away/Everybody had to pay & pay.” He hustled well enough to make it as a movie star. John Waters: "JoeDellesandro forever changed male sexuality in cinema.”
I always felt a connection to Joe. I wanted to work with Andy at the Factory & star in his underground films. A photograph of his crotch bulge encased in a tight fitting pair of jeans is featured on the cover of the Rolling Stones 1971 album, Sticky Fingers. It was taken by Andy Warhol. He filled the jeans very nicely & a 17 year old Stephen got a lot of use from that album cover.
In my last post, on Robert Cottingham, I showed a detail from one of Edward Hopper’s paintings, and think that it would be appropriate to end the year taking a look at some more of his work. Hopper has always been one of my favourite artists, and was an early influence on my own work, since I fell in love with his painting Early Sunday Morning when I stumbled across it (not literally – it was hanging on the wall) in the Whitney Museum, New York, way back in 1969. Hopper (born Nyack, New York 1882) is the best-known American realist of the inter-war period, once said: 'The man's the work. Something doesn't come out of nothing.' This offers a clue to interpreting the work of an artist who was not only intensely private, but who made solitude and introspection important themes in his painting. By 1899 he had already decided to become an artist, but his parents persuaded him to begin by studying commercial illustration because this seemed to offer a more secure future. Later, at the New York School of Art, he studied under Robert Henri, one of the fathers of American Realism - a man whom he later described as 'the most influential teacher I had'. In 1906 he followed the fashion to study in Paris but was later to claim that it had little effect on him - he hadn’t even heard of Picasso while there for instance. He visited Europe on two more occasions – in 1909 and 1910 – then never went to Europe again. Hopper had settled in Greenwich Village, which was to be his base for the rest of his life, and in 1923 he renewed his friendship with a neighbour, Jo Nivison, whom he had known when they were fellow students under Henri. She was now forty and Hopper fortytwo. In the following year they married. Their long and complex relationship was to be the most important of the artist's life. From the time of his marriage, Hopper's professional fortunes changed. His second solo show, at the Rehn Gallery in New York in 1924, was a sell-out. The following year, he painted what is now generally acknowledged to be his first fully mature picture, The House by the Railroad. With its deliberate, disciplined spareness, this is typical of what he was to create thereafter.
House by the Railroad 1925
His paintings combine apparently incompatible qualities. Modern in their bleakness and simplicity, they are also full of nostalgia for the puritan virtues of the American past - the kind of quirky nineteenth-century architecture Hopper liked to paint, for instance, could not have been more out of fashion than it was in the mid 1920s, when he first began to look at it seriously. Once it took off, his career was little affected by the Depression, had become extremely well known. In 1929, he was included in the Museum of Modern Art's second exhibition, Paintings by Nineteen Living Americans, and in 1930 The House by the Railroad entered the museum's permanent collection. In the same year, the Whitney Museum bought Hopper's Early Sunday Morning it's most expensive purchase up to that time. In 1933 Hopper was given a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. This was followed, in 1950, by a fuller retrospective show at the Whitney.
Early Sunday Morning 1930
Some paintings, such as his celebrated image of a gas-station, Gas painted in 1940, even have elements which anticipate Pop Art.
Gas 1940
When the link between the outer world he observed and the inner world of feeling and fantasy broke, Hopper found he was unable to create. In particular, the rise of Abstract Expressionism left him marooned artistically, for he disapproved of many aspects of the new art. He died in 1967, isolated if not forgotten, and Jo Hopper died ten months later. His true importance has only been fully realized in the years since his death. His painting Nighthawks is now one of the most iconic paintings of the C20th.
Early 1980s, Seattle: I couldn’t help but notice him, mid-30s, lithe, sad expression, with a head of dark curly hair & almond eyes. We would ride the same bus, sometimes coming & going. I was never able to muster the courage to speak to him; his beauty was out of my league, intimidating & off-putting. So, I was more than a little surprised when he broke the ice by smiling across the aisle from me & holding up a well worn paperback copy of The Sheltering Sky. I was reading the same book in the same edition at the same time. He moved over to talk to me. We slowly became bus buddies because of our interest in Paul Bowles.
His name was invented: Jaxith. He was a costume designer & we knew a lot of the same theatre people. When he was kicked out of his home & disowned by family at age 16, he not only took a new name, but invented a past. He purchased snapshots at thrift shops & put them in a scrapbook with annotations containing names, dates & fictional events. We had a cocktail date once & he brought the scrapbook. It was truly a work of art. In his made up life, he was a direct relation of Marilyn Monroe. He was a survivor, but he couldn’t survive HIV in 1984. I thought of him this morning as I contemplated Paul Bowles for a birthday post.
Paul Bowles was one of the last surviving members of a generation of artists whose work shaped 20th century literature and music.In the Introduction to Bowles's Collected Stories (1979) Gore Vidal states: "his short stories are among the best ever written by an American: the floor to this ramshackle civilization that we have built cannot bear much longer our weight. It was Bowles's genius to suggest the horrors which lie beneath that floor, as fragile, in its way, as the sky that shelters us from a devouring vastness".
His music, in contrast, is as full of light as the fiction is of dark. During the early 1930s he studied composition with Aaron Copland; his music from this period is reminiscent of Eric Satie. In NYC in the 1930s, he became one of the most important composers of American theater music, producing works for Tennessee Williams & others. Bowles: "climaxless music, hypnotic music in one of the exact senses of the word, in that it makes its effect withoutthe spectatorbeing made aware of it.” At the same time he continued to write concert music, using some of the melodies & rhythm of African, Mexican, & Central American music.
Bowles was born in NYC in 1910. His father was a cold, inflexible man, full of secrecy, characteristics that would mark Bowels's life & writing. As a boy, Bowles had few friends & found solace in writing. He attended college, but academic life did not interest him, & he left for Paris abruptly in 1929. From 193, he would spend most of his life outside the USA.
Bowles's literary reputation focuses on his fiction, but until he was 35, he showed more interest in musical composition & poetry. Bowles was gifted in a number of fields: music for plays & films, short stories, autobiography, travel writing, & translations.
In Berlin, he met Stephen Spender & Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood later gave the name Sally Bowles to the main character of Goodbye to Berlin (the source for the musical- Cabaret). Bowles visited North Africa & travelled around Morocco, the Sahara, Algeria & Tunisia. He was entranced by what he perceived to be the transcendental nature of North African life as well as by a society tolerant of homosexuality. Over the next decade, Bowles composed a good body of music including sonatas, song cycles, & music for stage productions including Doctor Faustus directed by Orson Welles, the orchestration for George Balanchine's Yankee Clipper (at Lincoln Kirstein's request), & made early recordings of North African music.
In childhood, Bowles was fond of a homosexual uncle. While on a visit, he entered a room where men were dancing intimately together. The uncle's anger at his nephew, who had not been alarmed at this sight, gives light to Bowles's attitude to homosexual behavior: He liked to examine sexuality from a dispassionate perspective for its psychological suggestiveness. In his most explicit homosexual story, Pages From Cold Point (1947), a boy tries to seduce his father.
In 1938, he had married Jane Auer, & in 1947, they went to live in Tangier. Jane Bowles had published 2 Serious Ladies, & explored gay relationships in both her life & in her fiction. He was mostly gay & she was almost exclusively lesbian. They were devoted to each other.
With the arrival of the Bowles, the Tangier cult developed rapidly. American writers & artists William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg,Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, & others - visited & socialized with the couple; the ambience of Tangier, & the tolerant of experimental drug use & sexual expression proved liberating & stimulating.
Jane Bowles, always on the edge of a sexual scandal, died in 1973. Paul Bowles continued to attract interesting personalities &, in his discreet way, gained a cult following. He was very stable, & continued to produce a steady stream of work until his death in 1999.
His translation work started with the Sartre classic No Exit (1958) but became more significant with his translations of previously unknown works by Moroccan writers.
Paul Bowles lived for 53 of his 88 years in Tangier. He became identified with the city: during his life visitors would seek him out, & he became a symbolic American expatriate, & the city became the symbol of his expatriate status.
Bowles died of heart failure at the Italian Hospital in Tangier in 1999 at the age of 88. He had been ill for some time with respiratory problems. The following day a full page obituary was featured in The NY Times. Although he had lived in Morocco for 53 years, he was buried in Lakemont, New York, next to his parents & grandparents.
One of my favorite books in 2010 was the charming & touching, I, Shudder, by Paul Rudnick. This very funny memoir is rendered in Rudnick's gorgeous, zinger filled language & reminds me of the need to keep my wit sharp when facing life's many obstacles & absurdities. I, Shudder is one of a series of humorous collections that I went for in 2010, a not very funny year. It is from a writer who ranks with David Sedaris & Augusten Burroughs as one of the most gifted & hilarious social observers.
Proudly open about his homosexuality, Paul Rudnick is one of the most interesting comic writers at work today. He uses sharp wit & gentle satire to comment on contemporary mores. Unlike many satirists, his work is generally more positive than negative. Rudnick knew he was gay by the time he went to Yale University, where he received a B. A. in theater.
To me, Paul Rudnick has a wicked way with a set up & a joke, & he is great with the one-liners, but a sustained & complex plot seems to elude him. But, I still find him to be a world class comic writer & I always relish his pieces in the New Yorker. I first came to know him from his terrifically funny play- I Hate Hamlet, a play about a struggling actor & his haunted apartment. The New York production was noted mostly for the tantrums thrown by actor Nicol Williamson as the ghost of John Barrymore. Although the original production closed after fewer than 100 performances, but it has had several successful revivals in regional theaters.
I loved his column in Premier magazine, which he wrote under the name Libby Gellman-Waxner. Rudnick came into his own with Jeffrey, an ultimately life-affirming comedy about a gay man in New York City negotiating his need for love & commitment in the age of AIDS. A nearly universally appreciated play, Jeffrey has been produced throughout the United States & around the world. The original off-Broadway production won an Obie Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, & the John Gassner Award for Outstanding New American Play.
Rudnick has also written & script-doctored screenplays.In I, Shudder he writes of the original version of the film Sister Act, which he intended as a raucous Bette Midler vehicle. When the movie studio recast it as a Whoopi Goldberg showcase & revised his script, he insisted on using a pseudonym in the credits. Rudnick also wrote the screenplays for The Addams Family & Addams Family Values.
Mr. Rudnic grew up well aware that his was one of the few Jewish families in Piscataway, N.J., but he assumed that everybody must be gay like him. Rudnick: ''When it finally dawned on me that there were straight people on the block, I felt sympathy for them.''
Rudnick successfully adapted Jeffrey for the 1995 screen version directed by Christopher Ashley, starring Steven Weber, Sigourney Weaver, Patrick Stewart, & Nathan Lane. The gay romantic comedy became a great hit with gay audiences.
Rudnik's most famous film is In & Out, about the accidental "outing" of a small town schoolteacher by a former student on national television. Loosely inspired by Tom Hanks' acceptance speech at the 1994 Academy Awards in which he thanked a gay former teacher, the film is well liked by critics & audiences. Directed by Frank Oz, produced by openly gay- Scott Rudin, & starring Kevin Kline & Tom Selleck, In & Out is particularly interesting for its approach to homosexuality,a serious "problem" in most films. The film uses the conventions of classic screwball comedies. Although the homophobes are properly skewered, the film is full of good humor. In & Out seems to me to be less a satire, & more a comic vision of a more relaxed & accepting middle America in which gay people are free to be themselves & are still loved by family & community.
Any temptation Mr. Rudnick felt to relocate to L.A. & concentrate on films ended with his inability to get a driver's license. Rudnick: ''The last time I took the test, they had those plastic cones for parallel parking, I nudged one, & the guy said, 'You just killed a child.' & I said: 'I did not. I just killed a rubber cone.' ''
Today is his birthday. He turns 43. Give his recent memoir a read. He has a new novel coming out in early 2011, & I can’t wait!
Attend the tale of Billy Tipton. I first became aware of her when she passed away in Spokane, the city that I grew up in, & the the truth was discovered. She lived as a man from 21years old until she died at age 74. Her 3 adopted sons never suspected a thing. Here is the fun part: Tipton lived with 5 women over 5 decades, all of them attractive, even vava vavoom. She had intercourse with all 5, none stumbled onto the truth that her husband was a woman… well, #4 figured it out eventually. Like 1000s of fans, they were taken in by one of the great performances of all time.
Dorothy Lucille Tipton decided to become Billy Tipton in 1935, ostensibly because it was the only way an aspiring jazz musician could get work in an almost exclusively male business. The ruse wasn’t all that difficult. Billy's face was boyish, and her figure full, but not curvy. She had sizable breasts but no waist. A sheet wrapped around her chest, men's clothing, & a bit of padding in the crotch, & she passed. Billy was actually boyishly handsome; women found him adorable.. A talented pianist, horn player, & tenor, he quickly found a gig with a band.
At the start Billy was strictly a cross-dresser, making no great effort to hide her gender during her off hours. She lived with a woman with the unusual name of Non Earl Harrell, in what was assumed was a lesbian relationship. Initially they were based in Oklahoma City, but by 1940 they had moved to Joplin, Missouri, then an entertainment center. There Billy began to pretend to be a male full-time, a pose he would adopt for the rest of his life.
Billy & Non Earl broke up in 1942. After a relationship of a few years with a singer named June, Billy took up with Betty Cox, a pretty 19 year old with a striking figure. The couple were together for 7 years. Betty claimed that they had a passionate heterosexual relationship, including intercourse. She even thought she'd had a miscarriage. I sometimes think I don’t really know my Husban. But after the first 7 years, I think I knew which sex he was. JustlLike the Husband & I, Billy & Betty made love only in the dark. Doesn’t everybody? Billy never removed his underwear & wore a jockstrap that was fitted with a "prosthesis." He wore massive chest bindings at all times, supposedly for an old injury. He would not let himself be touched below the waist. He never shared a bathroom. Betty may also have been distracted. Acquaintances said she went out with other men while she was with Billy, & while she appears to have been genuinely fond of him, in some ways this may have been a marriage of convenience for both.
The turning point in Billy's life came in 1958. He had his own jazz trio & a growing reputation, & a new hotel in Reno wanted to hire them as the house band. He seemed on the verge of a fairly successful career. But instead, he took a job as a booking agent in Spokane, Washington, & playing with the house band at The Tin Pan Alley. He played mainly swing standards rather than the jazz he preferred. His performances included skits imitating celebrities like Liberace & Elvis Presley. In some of these sketches, he played a little girl, but he never impersonated a woman, & he would make jokes about homosexuality Perhaps he feared fame would lead to the discovery & decided he'd gone as far as he dared.
In Spokane, Billy was living with a call girl, but in the early 1960s he left her for a beautiful but troubled stripper named Kitty Kelly. She claimed she & Billy never had sex, but in other respects they lived a stereotypical suburban life. They adopted 3 boys, but neither could handle the kids during adolescence, and after a bitter quarrel in 1980 Billy moved into a trailer with his sons. From there it was all downhill. The boys split, his income dried up, he refused to see a doctor. He remained in Spokane, living in poverty, until he collapsed & died in 1989. The paramedics who were trying to revive him uncovered the truth. Death must have come as a relief; he had been pretending for 54 years.
Robert Cottingham is one of the key figures in American Photorealism and is my favourite artist amongst the genre, though I think of his work as less ‘photographic’ and more ‘graphic’. They remind me of the urban works of Edward Hopper with their strong light and shade; both indeed depict street scenes in New York City (see the comparison I’ve made below with the Barber Shop work). In Cottenham’s work he shows fragments of neon signs, storefront marquees, railroad boxcars, letter forms, and more recently, cameras and typewriters. The first piece of work shown below, the tongue in cheek “Art”, is probably the best known and will be familiar to many from the ubiquitous reproductions. Cottingham was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1935 and received his B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He held his first solo show in New York City at the famous O.K. Harris Gallery in 1971. He has also exhibited in many seminal group shows throughout the United States, France and Germany. Robert Cottingham's work can be found in the following museums and collections: National Gallery of Art, Washington, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, National Academy of Design, New York, Orlando Museum of Art, Florida, Seavest Collection of Contemporary American Realism, University of Virginia Art Museum.
Above: "Barber Pole" by Robert Cottingham -
Below: Detail from Edward Hopper's "Early Sunday Morning".
"Roses are red, violets are blue, I am schizophrenic, & so am I."
Alexander Woollcott, a member of the Algonquin Round Table, once said of him: "There's absolutely nothing wrong with Oscar Levant that a miracle can't fix."
Open about his neuroses & hypochondria, Oscar Levant, was addicted to prescription drugs & was frequently committed to mental hospitals. Despite his afflictions, Levant was considered a genius in many disciplines. Levant: "There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."
Levant was sad, ironic & self-deprecating & wildly talented. I have every reason to think that he was gay. Levant's life proves to be more interesting than that of his good friend, the legendary George Gershwin, who he possibly was involved romantically. Perhaps this is because he lived for so much longer, & because of Levant's numerous talents other than music.
Levant was a notorious wit; he was so funny that he could afford to be obnoxious & insulting & still count on being a welcome guest in the homes of his many celebrity friends..
A perceptive musical theorist, Levant about the art of composing for films; it was he who coined the phrase "Mickey Mousing," in reference to movie scores that slavishly commented upon the action. The longer he stayed in Hollywood, the more he became famous as a "character" rather than a musician.
The public first became aware of Levant's acidic wit when he was a frequent guest on the Information Please radio program. From 1940 onward, he spentmore time as an actor: Humoresque (1945), Rhapsody in Blue (1945), The Barkeleys of Broadway (1949) & O.Henry's Full House (1952), in which he co-starred with Fred Allen in the Ransom of Red Chief segment. He was at his best in 2 classic MGM musicals: An American in Paris (1951), where he appears in a dream sequence, playing every member of the orchestra in a performance of Gershwin's Concerto in F; & The Band Wagon (1953), in which he & Nanette Fabray play characters based on Adolph Green & Betty Comden.
Oscar Levant's personality can be summed up by 2 of his most oft-repeated witticisms: "In some moments I was difficult, in odd moments impossible, in rare moments loathsome, but at my best unapproachably great;" & the self-deprecating "I am the world's oldest child prodigy."
The son of a Pittsburgh repairman, Oscar Levant went to New York at 16 to study music under such masters as Stojowski, Schoenberg & Schillinger (I just can’t stop with the alliteration). Before reaching his 20th birthday, he had gained renown as a concert pianist, teacher, band leader & composer. In the early 1930s, he played a minor role in the stage play Burlesque withCher. During his time in Hollywood, Levant became BFFs with George Gershwin & by the mid-1930s Levant was perhaps the greatest interpreter of Gershwin's works in the world.
While he continued with his popularity & circle of friends into the 1960s, Levant's mood swings & increasingly erratic behavior began having professional repercussions. He was nearly banned from television when he quipped about Marilyn Monroe's conversion to Judaism: "Now thatMarilyn Monroe iskosher, Arthur Miller can eat her". As time went on, only late-night host Jack Paar would risk having Levant as a guest, & when Paar left TV in 1965, so, for all intents and purposes, did Levant.Paar in later years would sign off by saying, "Good night, Oscar Levant, wherever you are."
In & out of mental institutions during his last 2 decades; his final film, Cobweb (1955), was set in a sanitarium, he became dependent upon pain-killers & other prescription drugs. Despite his deteriorating physical & mental condition, he was able to turn out 3 terrific memoirs:, A Smattering of Ignorance, The Unimportance of Being Oscar and The Memoirs of anAmnesiac. Oscar Levant died of a heart attack in 1972 at the age of 66.
He composed one of my favorite songs of all time, a song in my own repitoire:
Here are just some of his quips:
“Spinoza said rituals are all based on fear. My faith destroyed, I put down the book.”
"What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left."
"I only make jokes when I am feeling insecure."
"So little time & so little to do..."
"I'm a concert pianist, that's a pretentious way of saying I'm unemployed at the moment."
"I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin."
"I have one thing to say about psychoanalysis: fuck Dr. Freud."
"The only difference between the Democrats & the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too."
"Everyone in Hollywood is gay, except Gabby Hayes... & that's because he is a transvestite."
"It's not a pretty face, I grant you but underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character."
When asked by Jack Paar what he does for exercise, he replied, "I stumble, then fall into a coma."
"Leonard Bernstein is revealing musical secrets that have been common knowledge for centuries."
Asked by Jack Paar to describe his reaction to Milton Berle converting to become a Christian Scientist- "Our loss is their loss."
Overheard at a dinner party: "The best kind of guests are the ones that know when to leave!"
“Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.”
“I don't drink. I don't like it. It makes me feel good.”
“I envy people who drink - at least they know what to blame everything on.”
“I have given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself.”
"Strip away the false tinsel from Hollywood, and you find the real tinsel inside."
"It's not what you are, it's what you don't become that hurts."
“Every time I look at you I get a fierce desire to be lonesome.”
Ralph Goings (born 1928 Corning, California) is another American painter loosely associated with the Photorealism movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He studied art at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California. He’s best known for his highly detailed paintings of diners, pick-up trucks, and California banks, portrayed in a deliberately objective manner and bathed in SoCal sunshine. I rather like his still-lifes best – he seems to have made the humble ketchup bottle an iconic image and so I’m featuring quite a few of those here. He’s been painting them for four decades now, though his more recent works are less photorealist, looser and more textural – the last painting shown here (below) of a cake, is more reminiscent of Wayne Thiebaud’s work (see earlier post) than Goings’ own oeuvre. Ralph Goings: "In 1963 I wanted to start painting again but I decided I wasn't going to do abstract pictures. It occurred to me that I should go as far to the opposite as I could. ... It occurred to me that projecting and tracing the photograph instead of copying it freehand would be even more shocking. To copy a photograph literally was considered a bad thing to do. It went against all of my art school training... some people were upset by what I was doing and said 'it's not art it can't possibly be art'. That gave me encouragement in a perverse way, because I was delighted to be doing something that was really upsetting people... I was having a hell of a lot of fun..." "My paintings are about light, about the way things look in their environment and especially about how things look painted. Form, colour and space are at the whim of reality, their discovery and organization is the assignment of the realist painter."
