January 14th, 2010
He weeps over Jerusalem.
And yet the city was still standing in its glory, and the temple still held its head high, higher than any structure in the world.
And Christ Himself says, “If thou hadst known in this thy day the things which are for thy good!” But to this he adds, “Now they are hid from thine eyes.” In God’s eternal counsel its destruction is determined, and salvation is hid from the eyes of its inhabitants.
Was the generation then living more wicked than the foregoing generations to which it owed its life?
Was the whole nation corrupt, was there none righteous in Jerusalem, not a single one who could check God’s wrath?
No, its destruction was determined. In vain the besieged city looked in anguish for a way out, the army of the enemy crushed it in its mighty embrace, and no one escaped, and heaven remained shut and sent forth no angel except the angel of death which brandished its sword over the city.
Is this the jealousy of God, that He visits the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, in such a way that He does not punish the fathers but the children?
What answer should we make? Should we say:
“There have elapsed now nearly two thousand years since those days. Such a horror the world never saw before and never again will see. We thank God that we live in peace and security, that the scream of anguish from those days reaches us only very faintly. We will hope and believe that our days and those of our children may pass in quietness, unaffected by the storms of existence. We do not feel strong enough to reflect upon such things, but we are ready to thank God that we are not subject to such trials.”
Can anything be imagined more cowardly and more disconsolate than such talk?
Is then the inexplicable explained by saying that it has occurred only once in the world?
Or is not this the inexplicable, that it did occur?
And has not this fact, the fact that it did occur, the power to make everything inexplicable, even the most explicable events?
If once it occurred in the world that man’s lot was essentially different from what it ordinarily is, what assurance is there that this will not recur?
What assurance that this is not the true thing, and what ordinarily occurs is the untrue?
Or is the true proved to be such by the fact that it most often occurs?
And does not that really often occur which those ages witnessed?
Is it not what we all of us in so many ways have experienced, that what occurs on a great scale is experienced also in a minor degree?
“Think ye,” said Christ, “that those Galileans whose blood Pilate commanded to be shed were sinners above all the Galileans because they suffered these things?” It was a providential dispensation, you will say, not a punishment.
But the destruction of Jerusalem was a punishment, and it fell with equal severity upon the innocent and the guilty …
EITHER/OR – The Ultimatum
November 30th, 2009
Most of Colonel Prouty’s writings are archived by heroic Len Osanic at Prouty.org — but not this one: an article from Gallery magazine and 1975, chatting about the “assassination business.”
Shop talk done, the author then wanders back to the watershed — both his and the Republic’s — of November 1963, when first President Diem of Vietnam and then President Kennedy of the U.S.A. were dispatched.
One bothers to post Prouty’s piece now in support of Roger Craig’s moving last testament — for Prouty’s piece focuses on the technique of suiciding targets in places, like Washington D.C., where moblike drive-by blasts wouldn’t do.
Craig was deemed to have died — months after filming his testament — by a suicidal rifle blast to the chest.
But that was then, surely. Not now …
Well. The Prouty piece emphasizes his conviction that the fix was in at the Secret Service in Dallas.
And one can’t help but note the odd event at the White House last week, when the Secret Service allowed — for no reason yet public — an oddball couple sans invitation to enter the White House grounds, then the building and then the East Room, where a State Dinner was in progress, and shake hands with the President.
Is it merely funny that this happened just days before Obama’s long-awated All Things Considered speech in which his decision as to the future of the National Security Apparat’s venture in Pakghanistan will be revealed?
Might a little slip in security just be a way to remind the young Prez who’s got his back, and why?
Read Prouty here — then place comments below.
November 17th, 2009
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Four half-hour chats — from 1980 with Dick Cavett.
A fine heart and mind. And interesting times.
He talks remarkably of his father, a coal miner. And of alcohol and his saving-grace wife, Susan.
The four clips, linked here, are from the NY Times site, where Cavett has a column:
Part One. Wales. His father the coal miner.
Part Two. Growing up poor & orphaned but happy. Stumbling into acting & catching the bug. Laurence Olivier. John Gielgud.
Part Three. Garbo. His journals. Writers. Bogart & Bacall & John Huston. Spencer Tracy. Hubris. Elizabeth Taylor. His own films. The Bogey stories are fun.
Part Four. Demon Rum. His wife Susan. A taste of Camelot.
And throughout: the slings and arrows of acting and life and other arts, from one who learned most of what he knows out of school.
Bravo, PBS. And Mr Cavett, who fields a number of short-hoppers with thoughtful aplomb. Noticed him about town some months ago, looking spry.
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Camelot on Broadway, with Julie Andrews, 1960-61
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Alan Jay Lerner and director Moss Hart adapted Camelot from T.H. White’s rejuvenation of the King Arthur legend, The Once and Future King. Frederick Loewe came grudgingly aboard to write the music.
Burton and Julie Andrews were the original headliners, the latter as Guineviere, fresh from her smash in My Fair Lady, also by Lerner and Loewe. Robert Goulet got his first break as lovelorn Lancelot. Broadway’s advance-sales records were broken.
The show had been five hours plus in out-of-town trials, with Loewe and Hart seriously ill and Lerner suffering marriage trauma. The latter in later years was keen to credit Burton’s “faith and geniality” for holding the production together.
It opened on Broadway in early December 1960. Senator Kennedy had defeated Vice President Nixon four weeks earlier.
Twenty years later, it’s between performances of a Camelot revival at Lincoln Center that Burton sits with Cavett. Exhausting exercise, at age 55.
Weeks later Burton had radical back surgery. The pain or a certain constriction can be seen in his eyes.
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Night of the Iguana, with Sue Lyon, 1964
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Talking at frank length about alcohol, Burton credits his wife Susan with likely saving his life.
Four years later he was dead. At 59.
I remember my mother grieving a bit, not for having lost a star, but something closer to the bone, bearing on early deaths of her oldest brother and father, the latter whom, like Burton, died in his 50s of a brain hemorrage.
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With Liz Taylor
Life in bloom.
He met Elizabeth Taylor in 1963, while filming Cleopatra, at the time the most expensive film in history.
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They were married twice, from March 1964 to July 1976, taking sixteen months off in June 1974.
Was it Nixon’s resignation …?
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It’s generally thought that they acted out private life, with encouragement from Mike Nicholls, as Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
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Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 1966
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Six years after the last divorce, he speaks of Taylor as a good friend.
And argues she was a great screen actress, underrated because of beauty, but due for rediscovery and immortality.
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Asking about his diaries, Cavett suggests that Burton is in essence a writer.
The actor allows he’s had ten or so extracts from his journals published — but merely in places that pay well. Ladies Home Journal. Cosmopolitan.
Then offers that he admires writers above all other “craftsmen,” and prefers their company, among artistic types, finding painters “inarticulate” and actors wont to tell stories rather than converse.
Throughout, comments about acting and the business focus on scripts and mention authors.
Post mortem, a book was carved out of his journals, and published to rave reviews.
Seems the thinking man’s world found itself shocked to find he was not a gigolo.
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Boom! 1968
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He speaks of his father, Richard Jenkins, as a genius coal miner. The stories are laced with alcohol and affection.
But elsewhere he spoke of the man’s violence. And when the father died in 1957, his namesake son, 32 and famous, did not attend the funeral.
His mother had died when he was two, giving birth to her thirteenth child at age 44. He says he has no memories.
At some point the state made master Richard Jenkins a ward of Philip Burton, one of his schoolteachers and a scholar of the theater. The lad’s passion for rugby was channeled elsewhere.
“I would rather have played for Wales at Cardiff Arms Park than Hamlet at the Old Vic,” the actor later said. (So reports biographer Melvyn Bragg.)
It’s curious that he speaks at such length about his father with Cavett, yet so briefly — but with honor — of Philip Burton, whom he reports alive and well and living in Key West.
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The Longest Day
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The photo at the very top here is also from The Longest Day, where Burton stands out, — amid a huge top-drawer Hollywood ensemble, and among the work-hard-play-hard Yank soldiery — as a quiet, hard-drinking RAF pilot on the verge of losing his nerve.
One imagines he cherished the role, having served in the RAF for three years during the war.
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He came home intending to return to Oxford, but found the town so crowded at that moment with veterans that his chances to make the rugby squad were deemed poor.
So, instead, with Philip Burton’s aid and comfort, he answered an ad for an acting job …
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His last film was magnificent: Michael Radford’s 1984, shot in the spring of Orwell’s year.
John Hurt was an obvious and indeed perfect Winston.
Less than obvious was Burton as O’Brien, the Ministry of Truth officer who watches then arrests Winston, methodically interrogates and breaks him, then washes his brain. A fierce minimalist perfect performance.
He died months later. August 5.
The 1984 now seems a bookend to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, from John le Carre’s breakthrough book. Another great minimalist characterization in an important film about secret police.
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The cold spy, with celestial Claire Bloom. 1965
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HOWEVER …
I hadn’t realized, knowing only his post 50s films, that Burton’s roots were so wide and deep in the English theater
More than once he tells Cavett that he doesn’t watch movies at all, work aside, and suspects only ten or twelve of his 60 or so are worth preserving from fire.
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His Hamlet here in 1964 was much remarked upon.
There’s a filmed rehearsal run-through available on CD, which became the basis, two summers ago, of a revival extravaganza on a big screen in Central Park (if memory serves) and then the Public Theater.
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I missed it. But do have the CD, which is always a bit disappointing, because the actor is indeed running through the text.
Watching the erstwhile rising rugby star run, however, one can imagine the fearsome athletic power he brought to the role. An Achilles of a Hamlet.
Able to snap Claudius’s neck with a hand.
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Burton speaks highly of Gielgud, who directed him in Hamlet but also later remarked that Burton was, indeed, too rough for the role. Meaning, perhaps, nothing more, or less, than that he was a Welshman.
Toward the end of their chat, Cavett notes that his wife had performed with Burton years before in Munich.
The actor responds with a taste of Hamlet’s second soliloquoy in German.
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The passing of Paul Newman a year ago left me feeling similarly bereaved.
Is it only in context — contrasted with the luminaries and prospects of our day — that Burton seems so remarkable here, chatting with an urbane fellow traveler of the cosmopolis, as Reagan’s presidency, which just a few months before had seemed as always a ludicrous long-shot, so lugubriously dawned?
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February 8, 1966
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Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot
The Camelot company did an original cast album in 1961. Burton refers to the lovely royalties with a smile, and replies to Cavett’s request for a piece of his quality by noting that viewers may yet buy the record.
The music had caught on inside the Kennedy White House. Mr Richard Burton had been invited to dinner.
And after the state murder, Camelot inspired Jackie to compare her husband’s administration to the court of young Arthur, who after innocently pulling a sword from a stone had found himself king, and gone on, legend goes, to do noble things.
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February 6, 1968: Bobby, Liz, Richard and Ethel.
Four months later a dream fully died.
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JFK, incoming, was not much like Arthur: His progress to the White House was long planned and well contrived, and he’d been working in town, in Congress, for twelve years already, and had been raised in a family that traded at the highest levels.
Nevertheless, his odyssey once arrived at the big house was indeed that of an Arthurian ingenue, quick on his feet, able to sniff rats, and change course, intent on nobler things.
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Burton was banned from the BBC for speaking of Churchill as a mass-murderer and quasi-fascistic racist in his conduct of the war.
He spoke of himself as a socialist, life long, and his pride in honest labor is the steady note in the tales he tells Cavett of his father, and the sisters who raised him, and his six brothers all of whom went to the mines.
Yet to avoid the King’s tax man, the escape artist resided in Switzerland, from the 50s onward.
And is buried there, in Celigny, on the shores of icy majestic Lake Geneva.
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October 16th, 2009
I began this darn script on August 18, 2006. Day 22 !!!
Tonight, after many developments, drafts, distractions, derailments and deaths, including baby steps toward a low-budget production and Wall Street blowing its brains out …
Tonight it seems perfected: properly abandoned.
On Day 1,184. Good dog almighty …
The prior six scripts received no more than four months of attention. But this, the trouble and time of a novel.
A toast is in order. Let’s see …
Well, modest — but tasty: the superbly bitter Rye Pale Ale that Michelob has put out to compete with all the artsy crafty beers.
Tomorrow back to business.
And, in the evening, perhaps, a bit of wild Decompression.
April 4th, 2009
The cruelest month: Coney Island starts up for summer despite the death of Astroland, the prime kiddie amusement park.
QUOTE:
“The thing is, we ain’t closed,” said Jimmy Carchiolo, an old salt with a pigskin voice who has run a dart game behind the Wonder Wheel for 43 years.
“Astroland went under, but everybody figures it’s the same. Astroland’s three acres. People don’t know how Coney Island works.”
Ever since the first carousel was installed on Surf Avenue in 1876, Coney Island has been a jumble of competing institutions, an amusement park cooperative of sorts. Today, there is the Cyclone, Nathan’s, the Wonder Wheel, KeySpan Park (where the Brooklyn Cyclones play), the New York Aquarium, the Coney Island Circus Sideshow and the Coney Island Museum.
The separate parts exist together, squabbling and sharing like a family, and giving off a tribal fractured energy, a mirror of New York’s.
“People think amusement parks are Disney World, where you pay one price and enter at the gate,” said Aaron Beebe, the director of the museum. “But Coney Island isn’t like that. It isn’t homogenized. It has lots of moving parts.” …
“It always feels like New York is on the edge of losing its soul,” he said, “and Coney Island represents that. Coney dying — it’s kind of like a stand-in for everything else.”
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