East of the River

Endorsements for Cool Dead People Essays

If I did not know Suzanne Nielsen, my life would have been very dull. Suzanne and I were founding staff writers for Double Dare Press magazine. Her twist on the standard obituary, Cool Dead People became the most popular page on our Web site. It is a blend of memoir and homage sprinkled with humor. Each tale is driven the authentic desire for us to remember people in all of their complexity. These amazing essays examine the lives of artists and thinkers who have fallen to the cultural wayside. Her words become their breath, and they live again. –M. Laurel WalshS h h h . . . . .Here Comes Mabel, The Queen of spontaneity!Naturalness is the most important element in acting. To develop naturalness you must develop understanding of human nature. You must be able to determine just what a certain type of person would do in a certain situation. —Mabel NormandAs I sit down to write this, I have the radio on in the background, no music plays but I am tap tap tapping away regardless. An invisible voice tells me that Caroline Knapp, the author of Drinking: A Love Story, died yesterday at 42 from lung cancer. What is it with so many cool dead people dying so young? And of lung cancer, not what I need to hear as I sit puffing on my Marlboro Light after quitting for five months. Addictions are forever scheming, smarmy devotees, which is why it’s so hard to say goodbye to them. Although I’ve given up the booze and chemicals, I still am leery of the abstemious individual who’s never known what it’s like to soak in oblivion. I would never have been leery of Mabel Normand, except she might have pinched from my stash had we hung together.Normand was swinging even before Chick, her prime lasting over a decade, from 1914-1928. She was born on November 9th, 1892. I would bet her mother didn’t experience the same type of childbirth I did on that same day a century later. But I have a feeling both our babies were pistols, born with fiery laughter in their eyes from the minute they left that dark, suffocating channel.Normand left home at the age of 14 to become a model for ads. She worked with several artists and this enhanced her longing to become an artist herself. Soon after working her way into the media circuit, she hooked up with film personalities like Mack Sennett and Sam Goldwyn and should I say the rest is just trite history? No, because nothing was trite about Normand. Encouraged to move into silent films, she hesitated for several months before moving on to become the greatest slapstick comedienne ever.She really wanted to paint. “The men I worked with helped me, and while of course I’ve never done anything with it, I learned enough about painting to do vignettes in my own books and to do water colors on the programs and guest cards for my friends when they give parties,” she stated during an interview.And party she did, with the best of them: Pickford, Chaplin, Arbuckle, the Gish sisters, Valentino, among many others. It was actually after a party she had one night in her home that she decided to marry one of her leading men, Lew Cody. Cody asked Normand to marry him and she said that they needed to do it right away if they were going to do it at all. So, the queen of spontaneity jumped in the car with Cody and two friends for witnesses, drove several hours to Ventura County, awoke the county judge and had the ceremony in his living room while his family peered through the keyhole. Normand had never thought seriously of marrying anyone up to this point, even though many, including Chaplin, Sennett and Goldwyn wanted her as a life-long partner. Cody won her heart with his constant friendship and spontaneous sense of humor.Normand, known as the female Charlie Chaplin but without a doubt much cooler, made 11 films with Chaplin. It was after Chaplin worked with Normand that he decided he wanted to make a career in films. He felt compelled to work with Normand. Everyone she worked with fell in love with her charm, talent and gusto for life. Passion can bring out the worst and best in people. In Normand’s case, it brought out the best. Once while breaking for lunch, a prop man tried to make a pass at Normand. She picked up a blueberry pie and threw it in his face; henceforth the genesis of the pie-in-the-face humor. Normand used this spontaneous reaction in many films and she was the first of the slapsticks to take it in the face, so to speak. Part of what made Normand so funny was that she was willing to do just about anything, never using a double for any of her stunts.For a while she used the name Muriel Fortesque because she was forced to keep her anonymity as a screen performer. This was short-lived as Normand couldn’t and wouldn’t be forced into anything, especially anonymity.After watching several of Normand’s films, I am left with this feeling: she was too smart, too witty and too spontaneous to have been openly admired for all her talent. Because she hated convention and conformity, she was known towards the end of her career as an “outlaw at heart,” by those who loved her and a scandalous vixen by those who she outshone. In spite of the fact she was known in Hollywood as being incredibly kind and generous, the ink tried to defame her by claiming she was a cocaine addict and a heathen. They even wrote about her abortion with Sam Goldwyn. Come on, why wouldn’t any woman in her right mind abort a Goldwyn fetus? Also, she treaded dark waters when her friend, William Taylor, was mysteriously murdered. Normand was the last person to have seen him alive. The tabloids tried to make a case of her involvement with foul play.Any person with the well-earned cinematic chutzpah of Mabel Normand would tread shadowed waters before their time was up, our envious society sees to that. One remark Normand made to Alla Nazimova during a visit was “I have often been alone, felt alone, when surrounded by the thickest crowds.” Even the fearless suffer from social envy.So scandals were created, unkind words were spoken and movies moved in the same direction. The silent screen became chatty. Normand sought out voice lessons from Nazimova, as she felt uncomfortable with her voice. She had been silent for so long, she was convinced that her throaty tones wouldn’t be accepted. This was the beginning of the end for Normand. Nazimova and Normand met on several occasions at Nazimova’s home with the intent on working toward conformity with Normand’s voice, but instead they decided to have bitch sessions and confided in each other, building a lasting friendship until Normand’s death in 1930. Part of Normand’s throaty tone was connected to her chronic pneumonia, which later led to tuberculosis and eventually killed her. Her decaying lungs may have been drug related, maybe nicotine, a vice she could have been in control of but dammit, there’s that addiction stuff again, our spontaneous long-time vernaculars. Our devotees……And there’s that lung stuff again. Mabel’s lungs gave out; Caroline’s lungs did the same. Stevie’s raspy-throated tones began to sound more and more like munchkin sounds after her too many snootfuls of cocaine, although her lungs appear to still be in tact. Nevertheless, these women either found or lost their voice, their backdrop to visibility through verbiage or silence.Don’t you think that some “dead” folks are really just hovering around, dying to get the last word in? Normand died at 37. No way did she say everything that needed to be said before her last curtain call. So people write her biography, Stevie Nicks writes and sings a song about her, I write this little ditty… for what? I guess to get our version of her last words in, our version of a cool dead person who died way before her time.So Caroline Knapp, rest in peace with Mabel, with Chick and Chuck, Taylor, Tommy and Theodora and the queen of filth, Ms. Massey. I read your drunk-alogue and related through every chapter, as I’m sure Mabel would have. You’re another woman who broke the silence in a world of addictive spontaneity.The radio is still yapping and my foot is still tapping; the invisible never silenced, the silenced never invisible.Joe Orton: Joe Orton: Cleansed or Condemned by Maniacal Rage…Cleanse my heart, give me the ability to rage correctly. —Joe OrtonWhen you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking. When you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock-to the hard of hearing you shout and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures. —Flannery O’ConnorI’m an acquired taste. That’s a double entendre if there ever was one. The public will accept me. They’ve already given me a licence, you see. What they’ll do is say, ‘Joe Orton can do these things because he’s a success,’ but I’m a success because I’ve taken a hatchet to them and hacked my way in. —Joe Orton, 1967When my son was three, maybe closer to four, I took him to the library for his first uncensored literary pick. He thought he’d died and gone to book heaven. Of course he only wanted books he couldn’t reach, and he had a terrible time understanding the concept of borrowing versus keeping. Three weeks at home seemed more in the line of keeping to him than borrowing. Needless to say, the concept took years for him to foster and library fines grew like weeds in our gutters. One night when my tap tap tapping wouldn’t bring forth sleep, I rearranged the living room, cleaned out my closet and then went to work on the bathroom closet. There, stashed between two frayed bath towels was a library book we’d checked out much beyond the three-week limit. Murmuring under my breath, I took the book into my son’s room, flipped on the light and said, “okay, Mister, explain this one.” He took the book in his hands, all the while in a blur and said, “Mom, I did this when I was just a little kid, give me a break.” With that, he tossed the book to the floor, pulled his blanket over his head and he was out. I picked up the book, looked inside and realized what he was referring to. He’d written the word “poop” in brown magic marker on almost every page. Some pages had his artistic rendition of little poops piling on top of one another, making a big shitty mess, clearly identifiable by the standards of most mothers’ of young boys. Why is it boys are so obsessed with poops? Obscenities in general?This leads me into the life of Joe Orton, our monthly cool dead person. One of the things that has interested me most about Orton was that at the age of 29, he spent six months in jail for stealing over 70 library books and fucking them up. “I did things like paste a picture of a female nude over a book of etiquette and over the picture of the author. I did other things, very strange things,” he said in an interview shortly after his release from prison. Oh god, is this what I have to look forward to? If so, I will look forward with scintillating pleasure. If my son were to do something similar with likewise motives, visits to detention centers would be well worth my while.Orton was rejected by the literary world for a long time before one of his masterpieces was finally noticed as such. As a result of the continued rejection, Orton and his partner in crime, Ken Halliwell, watched people react to their little works of art. “I used to stand in corners after I’d smuggled the doctored books back into the library and then watch the people read them. It was very funny and interesting,” Orton revealed in his diaries that were given to John Lahr years later. Lahr wrote a stunning biography titled Prick Up Your Ears and it is through this biography that we truly get to know Joe Orton for who he was.Orton was 17 when he met Ken Halliwell in 1950 at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Halliwell, eight years Orton’s senior, was a frustrated, unpublished and unagented novelist, who connected immediately to Orton’s need of detachment and his desire to also write novels. The two moved in together and set up house so to speak, with Halliwell engaging in the roll of dutiful housewife all the while Orton’s success took hold and won him various awards until a brutal ending which came about in 1967. In ‘67, Halliwell took a hammer to Orton’s head while he was sleeping, pounded his skull to death, and then killed himself with an overdose. The only hint of reason was a note left by Halliwell, which read, “If you read his diary all will be explained. KH P.S. Especially the latter part.”Orton and Halliwell were both determined to get their work into print as well as make a statement. The hilarious library fiasco was one way of doing so until 1963 when Orton’s play, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, made him a well-known playwright, and four years later had earned him international recognition. Halliwell believed that he taught Orton everything that he knew as far as writing, the arts and etiquette. Orton believed that his stint in jail is what brought him his most self-learned advancement with the literary arts. Up until that time, Orton claimed he was very involved in his work but the jail time had gained him enough detachment in his writing that public reaction and outcome no longer mattered. In the end, it was his detachment from Halliwell that hit him in the face.However, many people, including Orton’s agent felt that his ability to detach is what brought about his success and curbed his angst. Orton had gone from being angry at the critics of the world to truly believing his own words when he said that, “Words were more effective than actions; in the right hands verbs and nouns could create panic,” because panic is what he created among the meek, all the while inheriting the Earth.As time went on, Orton’s spontaneity grew with his character surprises and his unrelenting works to shock the world. I have to think that John Waters learned something from his predecessors like Orton. Waters came to the scene almost two decades behind Orton, creating the glorious Pink Flamingos where Divine eats doggy doo. Although some people think Waters made Divine eat shit, we all know that Divine himself chose such a stunt, with no stand-in. As Divine and Orton both knew, we’ve all eaten shit at some point or another without even realizing it. What better than to be spontaneous about it? Some say phooey to spontaneity. Look at Ken Halliwell’s gorey indulgence in being spontaneous. I don’t think for one minute Halliwell’s hammer was spontaneously situated. He carried a grudge for Orton’s success, feeling unnoticed by Orton himself. Halliwell never detached from his own despondency and in the end, he got even for the pain, condemning instead of cleansing Orton in a maniacal blood bath.What comes first for us, the detachment or the success? I would have to think that both are equally important to the others existence. In Orton’s case, detachment made room for Orton’s success. I’ve been detached for years; I’m still waiting for success. Then again, I get to do this column going on its second year for Double Dare Press, interacting with all of you…now that’s success. We’re read worldwide, we’re understood in ways that we’ve never been understood or even heard before. I’ve eaten my fare share of shit during this lifetime, how about you?Let’s continue to explore such wonders of life together, let’s dig up the graveyard of tabooed areas and public opinion regarding all these unleashed dead, and the future cool dead people of the world. Let’s continue to uncover succes d’estime and rally in succes fou. This has been an incredible year for Double Dare Press, we’ve set aside taboos by bringing our dead back to life, something conformists might like to ignore.Per Bob Hope, thanks for the memories, thanks for reading Double Dare and I extend a worshipful gesture to M. Laurel Walsh. Keep up the great work, Lovey. By the way, what do you think of the detachment theory? I’m flying off now on my big turd, hovering over the twin cities and rousting some live spirits to come out and make me laugh. I guess I’d have to agree with Orton; “I suppose I’m a believer in Original Sin. People are profoundly bad, but irresistibly funny.” Until next month, keep seeing dead people.Bruce Chatwin: He’s A Real Nomad ManYou must remember that I shall be a nomad, more or less, until my days are done.–Robert Louis StevensonAll our activities are linked to the idea of journeys. Nomads survive because they have an irreverent and timeless vitality.–Bruce Chatwin”Symbolism is our friend, an extension of our fictional and non-fictional literary imagination,” said the great Ms. Kaiser, my ninth grade English/Social Studies teacher. Nell Kaiser was a first year teacher, an East St. Paul girl who went on to college and decided to dedicate her life to teaching others from her neck of the woods. She was also my homeroom teacher. Our classroom was in a portable, a building on school grounds but not connected to the school, built of plywood and indoor/outdoor carpeting to house the overcrowded junior high students. Nell had a stereo in the portable, freedom posters, and lots of ironic symbolism. Mind you, this was 1971. The Beatles were symbolizing all there was to symbolize with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and OD’s were rampant as a symbol of the need of a hallucinatory world.Our portable had no windows, but it had one door that could be locked from both the inside and outside. One morning in February, I still remember it as being a Wednesday, the students meandered into homeroom only to find Ms. Kaiser standing in the front of the room, her back to us, and the room ransacked. Empty cans were tossed about freely and the room smelled of sour 3.2 beer and pot. The stereo was missing, as well as all the posters and symbolic items that we’d become ‘one’ with over the course of the year. “This violation is a symbol of feeling closed off and not welcome to our class,” Ms. Kaiser said when she’d finally composed herself to face us. “If only we’d have had windows,” she said, “then the people who did this would have seen we had nothing to hide.”I wonder if she was that much like Mother Teresa, or if she really wanted to clobber the jerks that stole from her. Maybe she believed that people who lived in glass houses wouldn’t get stones thrown their way. In retrospect, I would have to say that Nell Kaiser was gifted with a keen eye for the world of symbolism, and as a result maybe she did have windows into others’ hidden and pained interiors.I go back in time to this scenario when I think of the Englishman, Bruce Chatwin, the great-grandson of an architect who designed churches, banks, bridges and a palace for a maharajah, all made of glass. Chatwin himself studied architecture early in his life and befriended the architect, Eileen Gray, who happened to have been friends with Natalie Barney (Small world, isn’t it?). After studying architecture, Chatwin went to work at Sotheby’s for seven years, moving from the position of archivist to director. This was Chatwin’s longest held position; he was a compulsive mover.Chatwin, born May 13,1940, in Sheffield, England, published six books during his life. Most of his writing was categorically labeled “travel writing,” but he hated to be characterized as such. “It always irritated me to be called a travel writer,” he said in an interview with Susannah Clapp, author of the inspiring book, With Chatwin. Chatwin’s travels brought him to the most fantastical realms. He had no interest in journeying to ordinary places or writing sightseeing guides. He traveled to places like Patagonia, vast open horizons where windows weren’t needed. His travels to the ends of the earth were ways for him to escape censure and status quo, among other things; these were demons that tried throughout his forty-some years to take control of existence. He fought the battle of submission by immersing in self-made paths to “explore not a place but an idea: nomadism.”Chatwin believed that nomadism had been in our DNA from the beginning of time. “We are instinctively restless,” he said. This is where he resembles Robert Louis Stevenson. Both men were nomads. Both wrote about their travels with a sense of romance. Neither was overtaken by possessions. Both men died in their forties with shades pulled shut on the windows into their souls.Writer Salmon Rushdie, a friend of Chatwin’s, said that although he highly admired Chatwin’s work, Chatwin withheld much of himself in his writing; “The whole person he was when you met him.” He attributed this to a life of secrets. Other friends were confused by Chatwin, ‘the person.’ Some said he was too elusive, others said he was too much. As a writer, he was mostly thought of as walking a fine line between fiction and truth.As I read Chatwin’s work, I am once again reminded of how there is nothing more truthful than fiction. Chatwin himself said, “The word ’story’ is intended to alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work.” An eye for narrative and an eye for drama are what make for great story telling. Because Chatwin had his eyes constantly open to the extraordinary, he could take us to places in his writing that we’ve never been, seeing through language and symbolism.The more I read about Bruce Chatwin, the more I am flashing back to Peter Carey’s story of Oscar and Lucinda. Lucinda is fascinated with glass. Oscar hated limitless expanses. They took a gamble and built a structure framed in iron, boxed in glass. The entire expanse was one huge window to the worlds around them. It was a fascinatingly symbolic structure that represented solitude, enclosure and exposure; this is a unifying theme in all of Chatwin’s writing and in his life.Chatwin befriended the artist, Joseph Cornell, who made hundreds of glass-fronted boxes where micro-worlds existed, little windows into his various worlds of obsessions. Before Cornell’s death in 1970, Chatwin had him make a box, representative of the author’s life. The box, fronted in glass, was left empty.As we know about Bruce Chatwin, we know very little about what truly touched his soul. Chatwin was a detailed writer, he could impress crowds of people with his effervescent personality when talking about his delicious travels, and he loved beautiful people, art, literature, and his wife. He loved the idea of nomadism and the freedom to call himself a nomad man. He died a sad and secretive death of AIDS in 1989. His wife was with him.Maybe Chatwin lifted his shades for his wife. There was something that he showed her to make her believe that “all his geese were swans.” There was more to the man than a lost horizon. I hope to someday meet up with Elizabeth Chanler, the wife of Bruce Chatwin. Her own artistic abilities and impressions of this artist’s life might vary; then again, she might think all that could be captured was captured. I reckon she would say that although his horizons were limitless on his solitude ventures, his shades were drawn to the windows of his personal life.As for Oscar and Lucinda, their structure collapsed, their load needed lightening. As for Nell Kaiser’s realm of “trust everyone,” she might have stuck with Morse code as a dedication to symbolism. As for Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail around the world alone, his whereabouts remains a mystery. I loved the little ditty of information Clapp gave her reader: the “first grown-up book [Chatwin] read from cover to cover was Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Around The World Alone.”Solitude was an important part of Chatwin’s existence. Solitude and remembrance. As I come to the end of this essay, I am tap-tap-tapping to the song by the Beatles playing in my head, changing some of the words ever so slightly;He’s a real nomad man, sitting in his nomad land, thinking up his nomad plans for nobody.Doesn’t have a point of view, knows not where he’s going to, Isn’t he a bit like you and me?Thanks, Bruce, for mixing fact with fiction and having the nerve to print it as faction (otherwise known as travel writing). Thanks for your reverence for art and the unknown. Thanks for your secrets behind the shades, as well as what you depth hidden behind glass. In the end, it all must have seemed like a hallucinatory blur, I’m sure, as well as it did with Stevenson. He died of tuberculosis, the disease of his day. I am sorry that AIDS was to remain unknown, yet on one level you must have known it was nothing to hide. Your square on the quilt is securely fastened, hidden behind glass and your shades remain at half-mast.