Tune & Minnelli Share A Birthday

2 talented directors share a birthday. I can't help reflect on what a difference it must have made in one man's life to have been in the closet & the other to have been able to be openly & unmistakenly GAY.

The life of Vincente Minnelli, the director of classic MGM musicals like Meet Me in St. Louis, Gigi & An American in Paris, was as peculiar as the dream ballets that became his trademark. Born Lester Anthony Minnelli in 1903, he grew up the only child in a family of traveling performers in the Midwest. His mother, Mina Mary LaLouche LeBeau, played the ingénue in stock melodramas, while his father, Vincent, conducted the Minnelli Brothers Tent Theater orchestra.


In young adulthood, shy, stammering Lester Minnelli, who had had a penchant for trying on his mother’s clothes, read a biography of the flamboyant painter James McNeill Whistler & decided to reinvent himself as a worldly aesthete, working as a window dresser in Chicago before making his name as a designer of lavish theatrical sets in New York. It was there that he became “Vincente.”

Once he moved to Hollywood as a director in MGM’s stable, Minnelli quickly built a reputation as a fearsome perfectionist, despite his passive, retiring personality. A closeted gay man, Minnelli had been known to sport “light makeup” & yet, he married 4 times , most famously, to Judy Garland & he fathered 2 daughters, including the perpetually re-self-inventing Liza Minnelli.

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There is 6’6’’ & Texan, with the improbable name-Tommy Tune who is an actor/dancer/singer/choreographer/director, & the winner of 9 Tony Awards, the only person in theatrical history to win in 4 different categories & to win the same Tony Award 2 years in a row.

Tune danced onto the Broadway scene in the chorus of Baker Street in 1965 & hasn't stopped since. I saw him in Michael Bennetts’s Seesaw in 1973, for which he received raves & his first Tony (Best Featured Actor in a Musical). He directed his first show, the off-Broadway production of The Club in 1976. he directed & choreographed The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, A Day in the Hollywood/ A Night in the Ukraine (his 2nd Tony- Best Choreography), Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9, Nine (his 3rd Tony-Best Direction of a Musical), My One & Only (his 4th & 5th Tony-Best Choreography, Best Actor in a Musical). Stepping Out, Grand Hotel (Best Choreography, Best Direction of a Musical), & Will Roger's Follies (Best Choreography, Best Musical).


Tune has an art gallery in Tribeca . In his 1997 memoir Footnotes, he writes about what drives him as a performer, choreographer & director, offers stories about being openly gay in the world of theatre, his partners David Wolfe & Michael Stuart, about his days with Twiggy in My One & Only & meeting & working with his many idols.

I find him likable & remarkably talented... & tall. He turns 72 today.

Broadway Baby

Happy Birthday, Bernadette Lazzara! Of all the Broadway Divas: Betty, Barbara, Patti, Chita, Kristin, Audra, Chita, Carol…or even Angela, the one with the most special place in my heart & on my stereo is Bernadette Peters. I first saw her in George M! in 1968 & I absolutely fell in love with the voice, the va va voom curves, the cinnamon curls, the dramatic chops, & the crack comic timing. But, it is really about the voice. She has been working on stage for 59 years: Curley McDimple, Dames At Sea, George M!, On The Town, Mack & Mabel, Sunday In The Park With George, Song & Dance, Into The Woods, The Goodbye Girl, Annie Get Your Gun, & Gypsy!.

Bernadette does amazing work for animal rights with her organization with Mary Tyler Moore- Broadway Barks & is the author of a popular children’s book of the same name.


I have seen her many times in musicals & in concert. My personal favorite was Annie Get Your Gun on Broadway in 1999. Peters sings with her whole body. Not just a few arm gestures for punctuation, as many excellent singers offer, but the music seems to travel from her toes to the tip of her nose as she bends, reaches & throws her head back to let out the final notes.


She turns 63 today & she looks terrific. A perfect example of the advantage of staying out of the sun. But again, for me it is all about the voice:

Keith Haring - part 2

 Here is some more work from 'graffiti' artist Keith Haring. For biographical information on Haring see part 1 below. These works date from 1984 - 1989:

 1984 Untitled

 1985 Moses and the Burning Bush

 1986 Untitled

 1986 Untitled

 1986 Untitled

 1986 Untitled

 1986 Untitled

 1987 Knokke

 1987 Untitled

 1988 Apocalypse #3

 1988 Apocalypse #6

 1988 Apocalypse #10

 1988 Growing 3

 1988 Untitled

 1988 Untitled

 1989 Brazil

 1989 Piglet goes Shopping

 1989 Untitled

1989 Untitled

What Is Your Personal Favorite Tear Jerker?

"Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories."

Deborah Kerr in An Affair To Remember



Could It Be That It Was All So Simple Then?

Tim was an acquaintance-friend, not quite in my circle, but dating one of my best friends. He was cute, bright, & talented. I knew him for a while before we had a long-ish conversation where I discovered that his father was the esteemed & popular big band leader & arranger- Paul Weston & his mother was the beautiful Jo Stafford, one of the great jazz singers of the 1940s & 50s, with a pure & understated voice.

I was, & remain, a huge fan of Jo Stafford’s & I think Tim was taken aback a bit when I gushed. I actually dragged him back to my apartment to show him my collection of LPs of his parents’ music.


He was kind enough to invite me over to the house in Beverly Hills. He owed me nothing & we were not really close. It was a lovely gesture. I brought one album for Jo Stafford to sign. She was very lovely & quite funny. She & her husband had a great act throughout the 1950s, as Jonathan & Darlene Edwards, a bad lounge act. Stafford, as Darlene, would sing off-key in a high pitched voice; Weston, as Jonathan, played an untuned piano off key & with bizarre rhythms. They won a Grammy in 1961 for Best Comedy Album for Jo Stafford & Paul Weston Present: The Song Stylings of Jonathan & Darlene Edwards, on which the pair intentionally butchered some of the best popular music. The couple continued to release Jonathan & Darlene albums for several years, and in 1977 released a final single, a cover of The Bee Gees' Stayin' Alive with I Am Woman on the flip side. A very funny couple.

During my short visit with the Westons, their neighbors from behind their Beverly Hills house dropped by to talk about what to wear to the Academy Awards the following week. This handsome couple were nominated for an Oscar for Best Song, for a little number that they called- The Way We Were, sung by their good friend Barbra Streisand who was also nominated for Best Actress. I was just a little starstruck, but I was able to tell Marilyn & Alan Bergman that I would be seeing them at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion the following Monday (the awards were held on Mondays then, the day that theatres were traditionally dark, I guess so actors in Broadway or touring shows could attend).


My good school chum & fellow actor in the theatre program- Gina had offered me a ticket. Her father- Arthur Piantadosi was Secretary of the Academy that year & a 7 time nominee (he became an Oscar winner, for Best Sound for All The Presidents Men). They were not attending the awards & had a single ticket up for grabs. I wore my tux from Private Lives, which was still in production at the time. I was frantic about getting some makeup stains off the white dinner jacket. I got myself to the Chandler Pavilion, parking a mile away, & I was seated a row away from Paul & Linda McCartney & Paul Newman & Joanne Woodward (who was nominated). The nominees that year:




Best Picture:
THE STING, American Graffiti, Cries & Whispers, The Exorcist, A Touch of Class


Actor:
JACK LEMMON in Save the Tiger, Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail, Al Pacino in Serpico, Robert Redford in The Sting


Actress:
GLENDA JACKSON in A Touch of Class, Ellen Burstyn in The Exorcist, Marsha Mason in Cinderella Liberty, Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were, Joanne Woodward in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams


Supporting Actor:
JOHN HOUSEMAN in The Paper Chase, Vincent Gardenia in Bang the Drum Slowly, Jack Gilford in Save the Tiger, Jason Miller in The Exorcist, Randy Quaid in The Last Detail


Supporting Actress:
TATUM O'NEAL in Paper Moon, Linda Blair in The Exorcist, Candy Clark in American Graffiti, Madeline Kahn in Paper Moon, Sylvia Sidney in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams


Director:
GEORGE ROY HILL for The Sting, Ingmar Bergman for Cries & Whispers, Bernardo Bertolucci for Last Tango in Paris, William Friedkin for The Exorcist, George Lucas for American Graffiti

My new good close personal friends- The Bergmans did win that night.  I deeply wanted Streisand to win. I still love The Way Were  & the moment where Barbra moves a lock of Robert Redford's blond hair with her gloved hand still destroys me. Babs lost to Glenda Jackson in a stunning upset. I still have my ticket/pass to the ceremony.

Jo Stafford left us in 2008. The Bergmans continue to work. I have watched the Oscar Ceremony on TV since I was 5 years old. I used to hold up a big brass candlestick & practice my acceptance speech in the bathroom mirror: " I thank no one for this award. I did it all myself with talent & gumption..."

Born On This Day- February 27th... Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky

She came into my focus as my mother sat me down at 5 years of age & explained the entire Elizabeth Taylor + Eddie Fisher – Debbie Reynolds = scandal equation. I got it. She remains my mother’s favorite star; they are the same age & were born in the same month. She is a favorite of mine & I think she is the last of the truly great Hollywood Royalty, & very possibly the most beautiful woman of all time. I love her deeply.

Taylor has been a trusted friend to the gay community, & we have loved her right back. She was very close friends & a confidant of gay men: Roddy McDowell, Rock Hudson, George Cukor, Noel Coward, James Dean & most famously to Montgomery Clift. Were there ever any 2 actors at the apex of their beauty, more stunning than Taylor & Clift kissing in A Place In The Sun?



Elizabeth Taylor is a conundrum: truly classy, but perfectly campy, deeply kind, but shamelessly embarrassing, perennially lonely, & serially monogamous. Pills, coke, booze, men, the commercials, the mascara, Studio 54, the guest appearances on soap operas… Elizabeth Taylor & I got through the 1970s together. She gave audacious performances in film adaptations of “gay” plays as Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer & Cat On A Hot Tim Roof, & Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I met her once, at the 50th Anniversary of MGM Ball. I was thrillingly treated to a 7 minute conversation. She amazingly asked about me. I explained that I was a Theatre major at Loyola Marymount University & Taylor quizzed me on my curriculum & my stage roles. I told her was a huge fan of her work. She touched my arm & looked at me with the famous violet eyes & murmured: "I always thought that I was a fine actress, but I spent a lifetime feeling that I was held back because I have such a terrible speaking voice. The coaches at MGM attempted to help me & I did improve, but I will never shake the fact the dreadful small voice was what stopped me from being truly great..." She was only in her early 40s, wearing a beautiful canary yellow mini-dress with yellow flowers in her hair. She was smoking a cigarette with a holder. She was faultlessly beautiful. I nearly fainted.

I appreciate that, like me, she has had a taste for expensive pharmaceuticals, rich fabrics & rich men. I tremble at the thought of her 8 tumultuous marriages & the public denunciation by the Vatican as a home wrecker. I love her for her dramatic tracheotomy scar, of which she was never ashamed. I appreciate her love affair with jewelry that inspired a book simply titled My Love Affair with Jewelry… it looks handsome on the shelf with my own volume- My Love Affair with Whiskey. I admire her unswerving devotion to her friends, to gay people, & for gay activism & attention to fund raising for HIV/AIDS. My feelings are simpatico with Elizabeth Taylor. My mother loves us both, we have both lived with incidents replete with slurred speech, jokes about weight gain, inelegant gestures of elegance & displays of dignity in the face of devastation.


On Oscar day today, the Oscar winning actress turns 78  & she is hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for for treatment of congestive heart failure. I send her love & healing white light. A world without Elizabeth Taylor will not be a good place.

Keith Haring

Following on from my recent post on graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, I thought I'd take a look at a couple of his contemporaries on the New York 'graffiti' art scene. This is the first of two posts looking at the work of Keith Haring.
Haring (1958 – 1990) was born in Reading, Pennsylvania. He developed a love for drawing at a very early age, learning basic cartooning skills from his father and from the popular culture around him, such as Dr. Seuss and Walt Disney.
On graduation from high school in 1976, Haring enrolled in the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh. He soon realized that he had little interest in becoming a commercial graphic artist and dropped out in the first year. While in Pittsburgh, Haring continued to study and work on his own and in 1978 had a solo exhibition of his work at the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center.
In 1979 Haring moved to New York and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts. He found a thriving alternative art community that was developing outside the gallery and museum system, in the downtown streets, the subways and spaces in clubs and former dance halls. He became friends with fellow artists Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as the musicians, performance artists and graffiti writers that comprised the burgeoning art community.
Haring was also inspired by the work of Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Alechinsky, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Robert Henri’s manifesto The Art Spirit, which asserted the fundamental independence of the artist. With these influences Haring was able to push his own youthful impulses toward a singular kind of graphic expression based on the primacy of the line. Also drawn to the public and participatory nature of Christo’s work, in particular Running Fence, and by Andy Warhol’s unique fusion of art and life, Haring was determined to devote his career to creating a truly public art.
As a student at SVA, Haring experimented with performance, video, installation and collage, while always maintaining a strong commitment to drawing. In 1980, Haring found a highly effective medium that allowed him to communicate with the wider audience he desired, when he noticed the unused advertising panels covered with matte black paper in a subway station. He began to create drawings in white chalk on these blank paper panels throughout the subway system. Between 1980 and 1985, Haring produced hundreds of these public drawings in rapid rhythmic lines, sometimes creating as many as forty “subway drawings” in one day. This seamless flow of images became familiar to New York commuters, who often would stop to engage the artist when they encountered him at work. The subway became, as Haring said, a “laboratory” for working out his ideas and experimenting with his simple lines.
Between 1980 and 1989 Haring achieved international recognition and participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions. During this period, he also participated in renowned international survey exhibitions such as Documenta 7 in Kassel; the São Paulo Biennial; and the Whitney Biennial. Haring completed numerous public projects in the first half of the 80’s as well, ranging from an animation for the Spectacolor billboard in Times Square, designing sets and backdrops for theaters and clubs, developing watch designs for Swatch and an advertising campaign for Absolut vodka; and creating murals worldwide.
Throughout his career, Haring devoted much of his time to public works, which often carried social messages. He produced more than 50 public artworks between 1982 and 1989, in dozens of cities around the world, many of which were created for charities, hospitals, children’s day care centers and orphanages.
Keith Haring died of AIDS related complications at the age of 31 in 1990.
Since his death, Haring has been the subject of several international retrospectives. The work of Keith Haring can be seen today in the exhibitions and collections of major museums around the world.
Something that has struck me is the similarity between some of Haring's work and some of the primitive works of Aboriginal Australians, as in the examples below:

 An Australian Aboriginal painting

Keith Haring: 1982 Untitled

 1979 Untitled

 1980 Untitled

 1981 Untitled

 1981 Untitled 

 1982 Untitled

 1982 Untitled

 1983 Fertility 3

 1983 Fertility 5

 1983 Fertility (no ?)

 1983 Untitled

 1983 Untitled

 1984 Untitled

 1984 Untitled

 1984 Untitled

 Haring photographed by Annie Liebowitz

More works by Keith Haring in the next blog post.

Gratuitious

My dearest readers & fellow blogging buddies,
I am sorry to have not posted much in the past 72 hours. Sometimes it is difficult to come up with something to hold your interest between my job, whiskey shots & nervous breakdowns.
It is not because you don't matter; you mean the world to me. Because I feel that I might have let you down, I offer up something gratuitous:

Forgive me?

With love from frozen Portland, Oregon USA,

The Post Apocalyptic Bohemian

Born On This Day- February 26th... That Big Old 'Mo- Christopher Marlowe

400 years after his mysterious, violent death cut short his brilliant career, Christopher Marlowe: playwright, poet, spy, radical atheist & homosexual, still fascinates with his poetic & tragic life. He was depicted as a suave genius with the looks of Rupert Everett in the film Shakespeare In Love.


Scandal clings similarly to Marlowe’s legend. He was arrested for fighting in the streets & for counterfeiting. Historical records suggest that he spied on Roman Catholics as a secret agent for the Queen's fanatically Protestant court. He was also an atheist with a penchant for blasphemy, a serious charge in 16th century England. Just before his death in 1593, he was denounced for mocking religion & for atheism. He was arrested & ordered to report daily to the Queen's Council.

Marlowe died under very dubious circumstances. He was stabbed through the eye in a brawl that could be interpreted as a quarrel over a bill at a tavern. His killer & several witnesses had criminal & espionage connections, some scholars believe he had been marked for political assassination.


Adding a further twist to the mystery are theories that Marlowe may have written portions the Shakespearean canon, even after 1593, with the possibility that his death was staged & Marlowe escaped to live & write under another identity.


Marlowe wrote Edward II, which I believe to be the 1st major play with a gay hero. Check out Ian McKellen's (then in the closet) breakthrough performance as Edward II from the1969 Edinburgh Festival available on DVD, & openly gay Derek Jarman’s accessible, interesting, relevant, contemporary film adaptation from 1991.