Some Came Running

Mom

1.

The first movie I’m reputed to have set eyes upon was Psycho, which my parents saw at a drive-in when I was barely one. The first movie I remember seeing a portion of was North by Northwest—the portion being the one in which Roger Thornhill almost drunkenly drives “Laura’s Mercedes” over a cliff—also at a drive-in with my parents. Part of an early-60s double bill, I guess. The first movie I remember sitting all the way through was The Haunting, which my mom asked me to stay up and watch with her during its network television premiere—was it 1966, 1967? this is one factoid I have found resistant to my Googling chops—on an evening when my dad was working his second job parking cars. We were both plenty scared by it. I don’t remember if my mom held my hand or not. Even then though I found it kind of funny that she was asking a not-even ten-year-old boy to help her not get overly spooked by what she had heard was a pretty effective horror movie (and even with commercials it was pretty potent).

And that was it: I was hooked on images and their synchronization with sound just as hard as the Beatles had hooked me on music. Looking through old pictures this week I came across a shot from Christmas 1970—good grief, did my parents actually buy my brother a drum kit?—and I’m sitting there with my hair holding a record album with the curving letters “OCKER” the only visible clue to its title, and it took me a minute before I figured out it was the Joe Cocker Mad Dogs And Englishman double LP. My dad mostly liked Chet Baker (well, he’d tell me that, years after we hadn’t shared the same roof) and my mom’s favorite was Tony Bennett so, yes, I must have driven them crazy, but they were always indulgent—even got me the picture sleeve single of “The Ballad of John And Yoko” when it came out.

When I was a little kid, poring through a library book or the Arts and Leisure section of the Times, I asked my mother—with no real clue why I should have any expectation that she would have a ready answer to the question—“Why do you think Jean-Luc Godard wears sunglasses all the time?” And my mother answered, “Maybe it’s an affectation.” And I asked her what “an affectation” was, and she told me.

My sister and I recall my parents going once again to the drive-in to see David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter with the expectation that my sister and I would be sleeping in the fold-down back seat of the family’s Ford Country Squire station wagon. But we did not, and my sister recalls my mom telling her to put her head down during the forest love scene between Sarah Miles and Christopher Jones. I remember no such thing; I just remember the scene—Miles’ rather self-consciously artily-depicted nudity amidst all that green, on a gargantuan screen framed by a soft warm New Jersey night, and the silhouettes of my parent’s heads immediately in front of me.

Lest I give the impression that my parents’ drive-in choices were unfailingly discriminating, I should add that If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium, and Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell are also reasonably vivid memories from that time.

After my parents split up, I watched a lot of movies with my mom. Her favorite star was Paul Newman; her second favorite was Robert Wagner. But she didn’t rate The Towering Inferno particularly high despite the fact that “R.J.” and Newman were both in it. We saw Raging Bull together some time late in its release—I think it was something like my ninth viewing—and that’s not really a comfortable movie to sit through with one’s mom but coming out of the theater with her I felt a shared tacit acknowledgement of the film’s painstakingly accurate and painful depiction of the sacred and profane within Italian-American working class milieus—we both looked at each other with what would come to be known as the “well, that happened” expression. For all that, my mom still kept a crucifix not very much unlike the one seen in Jake La Motta’s familial home among her effects. (She was born Amelia Teresa Petrosino, and graduated from St. Joseph’s, a Catholic high school in or around Fort Lee.) One time, for lack of anything better to do, we even went to the local multiplex for pot luck and ended up seeing Gotcha!, which elicited a “what the hell was that” from me; Mom, wanting to be optimistic, shrugged that parts of it were kind of cute.

2.

Long before being a loser who lived in his mother’s basement was a thing, I was a loser who lived in his mother’s basement. As I put it in “Going Through The Motions,” a piece of my writing that appeared in Black Clock last fall: “After my parents were divorced in the early 1980s, my mother got an apartment in West Paterson. The place was a two-story house and the unit my mom rented encompassed both the ground floor and the basement, and it was determined I could have the basement for a fee of $250 a month that I would never pay.” The bit was somewhat funnier when my mom was around to read it. There were all sorts of ways in which I was a hardship to my mom—even up until the last days of her life, I tell myself, and then concerned and kind friends and family members pull me back from that—but I do know that she got some satisfaction from the fact that during the time that I spent dicking around “honing my craft” or “trying to find a vocation” or whatever the hell it was I was doing, she was the only person who never said to me, “get a job.” Because she really did believe that someday I would make good as a writer. So I roosted there, and the little victories started coming my way: a piece I submitted on spec seeing print in Musician magazine, a how-the-hell-did-that-happen monthly music column in a girlie mag, and, finally, after what felt to me like a tortured bout of argumentative correspondence, an invitation from Robert Christgau to write a piece for the Village Voice’s Riffs section. That was it: I knew then that I had it made. I soon heard from another “jerk from Jersey” (her phrase) who’d gotten into the Voice, Rosemary Passantino, and after an initial antipathy (I found her as humorless as I’d expected any English Lit grad student to be, while she thought the bowling shirt I wore on our first in-person meeting to be unforgivably louche) we got to be thick as thieves. Last week RP wrote to me: “I will always remember your mom, happy to have us and not caring a bit that we were way too old to be lying around for hours pretentiously commiserating over comic books and French philosophy in her basement!” In fucking deed.

3. 

I did move out eventually and my mom moved to western Jersey to manage one of several video rental stores my uncle owned. One of her regular customers was Keith Jarrett. I loaned him, by proxy, a laser disc of Roger Vadim’s Dangerous Liaisons ’60, which he was keen to see because Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers actually appeared in the film. I got to take my mom to see Jarrett’s trio for her birthday in December of 2013. It was a great show. I also took her to see Yves Montand at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1982—how the hell I pulled that off I have no idea—and Sinatra at one of his Meadowlands shows, not the really bad one thank God but one where he got sufficiently bored with his material that he sang “Love was just a glance away/a warm pair of panties away” or some such thing. Mom rolled her eyes at that but was otherwise largely delighted with the show. I don’t know that she had ever been a bobby-soxer for real but I could see her in the part.

In 1995 or so my work appeared in book form for I think the first time, or so, in the first and only edition of Leonard Maltin’s Film Encyclopedia, which did not become the franchise that Leonard’s Home Video Guide did. Here is what I wrote in the copy I gave my mom:

“4/16/95

Mom—This will provide you with many amusing hours trying to figure out which entries I wrote. Here’s a hint: I’d like to get my hands on the editorial assistant who introduced a grievous error into the Godard entry (it was Macha Meril who starred in ‘Une Femme Marieé,’ not Anna Karina). Only in the exciting world of book publishing can you get it right the first time, only to have some intern get it wrong. But that’s my sole complaint. Enjoy…

Love, your son, Glenn”

Pretty insufferable, yes. But my mom was gracious enough to be amused. I think my inscription of her copy of my De Niro book had a little more humility, and definitely more gratitude. I’m also very glad I dedicated the book to her and to my dad.

4. 

On March 7, I went to the Museum of Modern Art to see a screening of the five-hour director’s cut of Wim Wenders’ Until The End Of The World, which my friend the screenwriter and essayist Larry Gross had kind of insisted I discover. That Sunday was kind of my first day “off” in quite some time. In early February, my mom had been admitted to the hospital after a fainting spell in the Fort Lee apartment building into which she had moved the prior August. She hadn’t been herself in a while, and we had some appointments scheduled to look into the problem; her faint was just two days before a scheduled date with a doctor. Some scary hours ensued as doctors tried to figure out what was wrong with her. It happened that she had a benign meningioma. You have never seen anyone so excited and happy to be diagnosed with a tumor, ever. Because, for one thing, it meant that she didn’t have dementia. Yes, the operation to get rid of the tumor was a real bear, and various complications were possible/likely. But. This was a hurdle she could see her way to clearing. And yes, Schwarzenegger impersonations were proffered, and “It’s not brain surgery…oh, wait, it IS brain surgery” was uttered more than once.

And Mom came through the operation like a champ, as they say. And suddenly her friends and family saw how much of her spirit and personality had been subsumed by her condition, because her spirit and personality came roaring back. My sister was on the phone with my father one afternoon and gave the phone to my mom to say hello, and mom practically roared “Your first wife is still alive!” with a big grin.

I had not been entirely aware that the condition had been making it impossible for my mom to read anything much beyond a restaurant menu. Now  here I was, bringing her a Maigret mystery by her beloved Simenon, The Late Monsieur Gallet it was, and she was tearing through it. I had gone to visit her in the hospital, and then in her rehab facility, most days of the week, and she was always super-solicitous, worrying about the weather in which my wife Claire and I would be taking the bus, and so on. And when we’d leave her to take the bus back home, I’d roll my eyes when we pulled into the Port Authority and see she was calling, to make sure we’d made it back into the city okay

Anyway, I was particularly moved by the Wenders film, because one of its big plot hooks involved William Hurt’s character gathering images to present, via a new technology, to his blind mother, played by Jeanne Moreau. Moreau’s portrayal of a frail/strong woman for whom a certain veil of consciousness is lifted via technology and love resonated strongly for obvious reasons. I was terribly excited by the gift my mom had received, and looking so forward to the ways she’d use it, and how her family and other loved ones would share it with her.

5.

There are, when you come down to it, two kinds of “you can’t make this up” stories: the kind that are just remarkably absurd and silly, and then the kind you would not want to make up even if you could. The story of my mom’s death falls into the latter category, I think.

It was March 10, the day she was scheduled to come out of rehab. I took the bus out to Jersey, carrying with me a canvas bag where I had her new dish drainer and dish pan. I also had some tennis balls that I was gonna cut apart and put on the back legs of her walker. (It turns out the walker they were giving her was sufficiently snazzed-out that it wouldn’t have needed the upgrade.) On the bus I got a phone call from my aunt. Seemed that my mom had complained of chest pains earlier in the morning, there was some concern among the staff as to what it meant. They were going to take her to the hospital up the block and have her checked out. She’d have to stay another night in the rehab, at least. Well, okay. So I wouldn’t be helping bring her home today; instead I’d be reconciling her to staying one more night, and going with her to the hospital for some tests.

Mom wasn’t into it. “How’s your aunt going to get off work tomorrow?” she asked. Well of course she could get off work tomorrow. Don’t worry about it, Mom. For now you should just relax, because we need to take you up the street and get checked out. I left her room and went to speak to the head of the nursing department. There were some concerns about Mom’s hemoglobin count that needed addressing. Then I needed to make some calls: to my sister, to my aunt. I went back to my mom’s room and the patient with whom she shared a room was out in the hall, in her wheelchair: “You better get in there,” she said. My mom was on the floor, having tripped and fallen, face first, after having gotten up from her bed to go to the bathroom. She was bleeding from the nose. She was lifted up, and sat down into a chair; her blood pressure was taken. It was fine. “How do you feel?” “Awful.” Well, that was to be expected. So now she was going to have to be checked out for a broken nose, too, when we got her to the hospital. But for now we had to lay her down. Once in bed, she complained of not being able to breathe. She was hooked up to a small oxygen supply. I sat at the side of her bed and held her hand. “I can’t breathe,” she said.

“It’s gonna be okay, mom. You ARE breathing. Breathe through your mouth. There.”

I squeezed her hand. Even though she was breathing, she clearly felt that she could not. I said to a nurse, “She says she can’t breathe.”

“That’s why we gave her the oxygen.”

“Something else is happening. Get someone in here.”

And then I kept saying “It’s gonna be okay, Mom,” and after a little while she exhaled deeply, shut her eyes, rolled a little to the side, and she was gone. And I knew she was gone. Efforts to resuscitate, in the rehab facility and then the hospital, went on for an hour after that. I’ve consulted with her neurosurgeons, who did an amazing job with her and are understandably kind of angry now, and it would appear that what took her was a pulmonary embolism.

6.

My mom was my first love, and she taught me what it meant to be loved. I may have not treated that gift so carefully as I ought to have, through many too-long stretches of my life, but I never lost it, and I cling to it now ever more fiercely...or at least I try to, or tell myself that I try to, I don’t know. My mom had a hard life—more than one of her friends has told me that in the past week, and frankly in some cases I haven’t been sure how to take the information, not that it’s news to me or anything—but she also had a life full of event and eventually adventure. And she knew that she was loved, and she took a lot of delight in the people around her who gave her that love. You can see, in the picture above, the genuine joy she’s experiencing as she holds up that mewling jowly infant who was I at six months (as opposed—I might as well beat anybody else to it—to the mewling jowly infant I am today).

I feel kind of lucky that I’m not more of a Loudon Wainwright III adept than I already am, because if his song “Homeless” had been wired into me back when he first sang it, I’d be more of a wreck now than I already am. “When you were alive, I was never alone,” it opens; “somewhere in the world, there was always a home.” It goes on: “And I feel like I faked all that I ever did,” oh dear. “They say in the end, your good friends pull you through/but everyone knows, my best friend was you.” I am more fortunate than Loudon here, because I found another best friend, Claire, who will have been my wife for nine years this coming June. God knows I’ve put her through it, but I do think I’ve been able to make her happy sometimes, though not as happy as she’s made me. And while it’s never going to be possible for me to truly accept a world that my mom isn’t in, I guess I will someday be able to recognize what so many people have been telling me these past few days, which is that I somehow did make her proud, not just in the end, but always. 

Anita Ekberg and something that's probably not the Kuleshov Effect

Against Jerry Lewis in Hollywood Or Bust, Frank Tashlin, 1956.

 

Ekberg, who died yesterday at age 83, is the first of Bob Dylan's "Country'll Grow" trinity to shuffle off this mortal coil. To call her the poster girl for the Male Gaze is both somewhat apt and entirely reductive. Nevertheless, here is a rendering of her mouth as it appears on a giant advertisement for Call Me Bwana in From Russia With Love.

Rod Taylor, 1934-2015

In Zabriskie Point, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970. With G.D. Spradlin and an unknown actress. 

Actors as a rule don't get to choose their directors but Taylor had the appeal, talent, and luck to get him chosen by a bunch of the greatest: George Stevens (Taylor's in Giant, briefly); John Ford/Jack Cardiff, then Cardiff solo; Hitchcock, Tashlin, M.A., and...Generally Quite Good director Quentin Tarantino eventually. Richard Quine, Burt Kennedy, and Edward Dmytryk were no slouches either, and Taylor worked for them as well. I sought him out for an interview in my Premiere days and was told he didn't see or talk to anybody, so was both gratified and slightly professionally miffed to see him turn up in Inglourious Basterds years later. His entirely honorable and memorable career in cinema had one of its oddest highlights when he played John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee in Darker Than Amber, the same year as Zabriskie Point. Directed by future Enter The Dragon man Robert Clouse, it features one of the most insane fight scenes ever committed to celluloid, a ship's cabin battle with a bizarrely coiffed and VERY amped up William Smith. If you can find it you need to see it.  

Three direct experiences of Jack Bruce

1: First time I saw Jack Bruce play was at the performing arts center at William Paterson College, in 1980, most likely the fall, leading an outfit called Jack Bruce and Friends. I hadn't heard a whole lot of his post-Cream output at the time, and a good deal of what I knew of seemed kind of intimidating to me. But I was also wary of holding him in the reflexive contempt that I still sometimes thought my post-punk aesthetic demanded. Having developed a taste for the astringent progressivism of Henry Cow and Art Bears and such a couple of years earlier, I was definitely an art-rocker in training, and Bruce's presentation hit a relaxed sweet spot with me. He and his band were relaxed, coming off like journeymen virtuosos—Robert Christgau described Bruce's music as "dense and dissonant and throbbing," and it was/is, but the players—Clem Clemson on guitar, David Sancious on keyboards, Bruce of course on bass, and man-mountain Billy Cobham (whose constant grin was the only indication that he wasn't just on the verge of casually destroying his kit) on drums—ere sufficiently relaxed and assured that this might have been the regular Thursday night gig for a bar band that was very attached to its bar. I was impressed, and then when they came back for the encore to repave the campus parking lot with a very heavy rolling rendition of "Politician," kind of awestruck. 

2: In the largely first rate biography of Bruce by Harry Shapiro, Jack Bruce: Composing Himself, the musician recollects his brief tenure with the then-carnivalesque Golden Palominos, beginning in 1986. "That was a completely mad band," Bruce says. "[Founder and drummer] Anton Fier was completely drunk all the time. I remember Anton sitting in the first class lounge in Paris Airport with a bottle of brandy and drinking it in the twenty minutes between flights." 

I do not doubt this. The profile I wrote of Fier and the Palominos, which ran in the February 1987 issue of Spin, is for the most part an account of the writer getting nearly blind drunk on a variety of Chinese wines with Fier and Peter Blegvad. At the time, which seems in my mind to have been by an eternity from the feckless collegiate fall of 1980, feckless freelance rock critic and consumer electronics magazine Associate Editor me had become a potential Boswell to the GoPals, as they were referred to on the scene. I did not really ride to any unprecedented career heights in this endeavor but I heard a lot of great music and got royally fucked up with a bunch of wonderful artists. Singer Syd Straw used to marvel at touring with a bunch of guys who actually played chess in the van, and yeah, eavesdrop on a conversation between Blegvad and Jody Harris and you were likely to hear them comparing notes on Thom Gunn, but good God those guys liked their drink, and when he was touring with them between '86 and '87, so too did Bruce. I remember a show at Webster Hall at which Harris, with both his standard deadpan detachment and a dollop of genuine irritation, told me of a Bostn show the night before at which Jack had gotten so blitzed that he futzed the words to most of the songs he had to sing. "I'm really sorry, I'll never do it again," Jody reported as Jack's apology, and we both smirked. "I'm sure no one who's ever worked with him has ever heard that before, ever," I observed. 

Whatever his damage had been the night prior, he bounced back strongly that evening, and the set was a remarkable pageant of raucous, unself-conscious eclecticism. Slapp Happy and Funkadelic are not two bands one generally thinks of in the space of a single 24-hour or even two-week period, and yet here's a stage featuring founding members of both (Bernie Worrell and, later, Mike Hampton played that night) as well as Jack Bruce, and it all meshes, and rocks, and pushes. I got to go to what is commonly referred to these days as "the after party" (I think back then it was called "a party") and everyone was so wired that it was once more off to the races, and that's when I had my most significant personal interaction with Jack Bruce. I was waiting in a short line to use the facilities, and Bruce scurried over to me, hunched over a bit, and manically requested permission to cut in. "I have to go really bad," he said. Well, who was I to deny Jack Bruce. I said go ahead, and when the bathroom door opened, Bruce scurried in, and held the door open to let in another guy. Feeling slightly burnt, I said, "What he gonna do, hold your dick for you?" Jack Bruce thought this was hilarious. He was still laughing as he closed the door.

The thing was, whatever Bruce was doing at any given time, there was never a trace of genuine-rock-superstar-condescension in the way he carried himself,and there was never a minute of doubt relative to the music to which he chose to commit himself. Coming out of Cream and into Tony Williams' Lifetime, Bruce came off as if it was Williams who was doing him a favor. Listen to him with Carla Bley, with Mike Mantler, with Kip Hanrahan; his discipline, his passion (anyone with doubts of that ought to listen to Cream's "Spoonful" quick fast and in a hurry), his almost offhand sense of adventure all come through  like a-ringing a bell. And in the Golden Palominos, Bruce gave the most convincing reading, pace the wongwriter himself, of Peter Blegvad's dread-laden "Something Else (Is Working Harder)." "People work hard to keep a lid on their anger./To see that justice will prevail,/to no avail, their efforts fail—/something else is working harder." 

3) In June of 2012, I went to B.B. King's Blues Club And Grill to see Spectrum Road, a band—what they used to call a supergroup, maybe—dedicated to the music of the aforementioned Tony Williams. I couldn't swing the Cream reunion, but this I could, and I had been pretty impressed by the attendant album by the group, which seemed a genuine band effort. The other members were guitarist Vernon Reid, who'd flirted with rock superstardom in Living Colour and of late has been, among other things, conducting a productive collaboration with James "Blood" Ulmer; keyboardist John Medeski, whose combo Medeski, Martin, and Wood has made significant inroads with jam-band fans while remaining steadfast to its John-Zorn-affiliated roots; and drummer Cindy Blackman Santana, whose dynamism as a percussionist had not, I think, been so fully represented on any record prior to this one. In any event, throughout the selections, the music flows and pummels beautifully with no sense of it being led in any traditional sense; not to sound trite or anything, but it's one of those tribute records on which is seems that the spirit of the honored musician really is in charge of the whole thing. 

Live, it was like that, and a little more. Almost, or perhaps more than, a century of assured musicianship had come to play, and as Bruce had the main microphone, he was the de facto frontman (although Blackman did vocalize on one tune, and quite well). He had turned 69 in May. In 2003 he had undergone a liver transplant. On stage, he had a not-terribly large bottle of Poland Spring water nearby, and at the stage read there was a standing-stool sort of contraption on which he could rest while playing if need be. 

He didn't use it that often, if at all. First among equals with his bandmates, he commanded the stage for the entirety of a nearly two-hour set, stepping out only during Blackman's drum solo feature. His bass playing was, as ever, astonishing. Jaco Pastorious and Jamaladeen Tacuma get a lot of credit for reinventing electric bass playing from within a certain generic framework, and they were/are great players, to be sure. But there is/was something sui generis about the simultaneous muscularity and delicacy of Bruce's touch. Something working hard, and succeeding. 

At the encore, I thought, "I wonder if they're going to trot out 'Politician.'" They did, either before or after "Sunshine Of Your Love." Why not. They crushed both. 

Lauren Bacall, 1924-2014

Bacall with a few mugs, Humphrey Bogart among them, in the exemplary anti-fascist film To Have And Have Not, Howard Hawks, 1944.

Here's the thing with Lauren Bacall: she turned up on screen and there she was. Like Venus on that half-shell, she was fully formed and all that from frame one. It didn't matter if she could act or not. There she was. I mean, look at her. In her very first movie. There's a Warner Bros. cartoon from a couple years after this, Bacall To Arms, that depicts a big goofy zoot-suited wolf reacting to Lauren on screen; my favorite part is when he silently flops over a seat in the row on front of him, emitting a soft, hapless "woof." 

And of course she could act. Though plucked from modeldom, she took it seriously and did it well, and seemingly effortlessly.

Great movies in which she is great include the above, and The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, Key Largo, The Cobweb (THE COBWEB!), Written on the Wind, The Shootist, Birth. She wasn't actually IN Howl's Moving Castle, but hell, why not, that counts. Good movies in which she is great include Young Man With A Horn, How To Marry A Millionaire (c'mon, it isn't that bad), Blood Alley, Designing Woman, Sex and the Single Girl, Harper, Murder on the Orient Express, Health, Misery, The Walker. It's your call on Manderlay, Dogville, Pret a Porter, The Fan, and sundry. What can one say about her? She had a life full of rough patches that she bore with grace, and in her later years she impressed and sometimes terrified as an interview subject who brooked no bullshit and told it like she saw it, even to the extent of tattling a bit on her discoverer Mr. Hawks. And she was also Lauren Bacall, for heaven's sake. She made being Lauren Bacall look pretty...heavy, actually. But also fun. How could it not have been, even if only a little bit?

Robin WIlliams, 1951-2014

In Awakenings, directed by Penny Marshall, 1990. 

UPDATE: I wrote about Williams and his work for Vanity Fair Online, here. 

James Garner, 1928-2014

With Lawrence Montaigne, Gordon Jackson, and David MacCallum in The Great Escape, John Sturges, 1963.

Garner's screen work gently rebuffs hard analysis. It isn't that what he did lacked complexity or sophistication. But he had a way of relaxing into whatever character he was playing that only made you want to be by the character's side, rather than "understand" the character. Strain, either visible or subtextual, was not part of his performing vocabulary. This could have the almost paradoxical effect of bringing an unusual depth to less-than-fully-conceived persons. While Charlie Madison in 1964's  The Americanization of Emily has righteousness on his side, scripter Paddy Chayefsky's writing, eloquent as it is, has an unrelenting stridency that, coming out of pretty much any other actor's mouth, would have made him a scolding drag. Garner's voice, the set of his jaw and brow, his gait, make you warm to the character even at his most uptight. Similarly, part of what makes The Great Escape such a great sit is the fact that you'd follow Garner's Hendley anywhere, any time. 

He clearly had an innate sense of his limitations. No, he was not Stanley Kowalski, nor was meant to be, and he did not waste his or his audience's time pursuing such feats. Which didn't mean he couldn't swing a little; to watch him run a near-full gamut of sexual confusion in Blake Edwards' 1982 Victor/Victoria is to witness as acute (but compassionate) a critique of machismo as Hollywood could muster at the time. By the same token, his work in later pictures such as Murphy's Romance provided little object lessons that "masculine" and "gentle" need not be mutually exclusive terms. 

He worked an awful lot, and whatever he was in, good or bad, you were always glad to see him in it. If that doesn't constitute a laudable performing career, I don't know what does. 

The happily brief film career of Charlie Haden

I was saddened, like so many music lovers, to hear last week of the death of the very great bassist and composer Charlie Haden. He was one of my favorite musicians and a person I considered not just an artistic giant but a moral hero. (I met him once and had a brief chat with him, at the Village Vanguard after a Liberation Music Orchestra gig in the '90s; he was quiet, and gentle, and kind, and he was the only person I've ever met who could refer to another person as a "cat" with complete unselfconsciousness.) In the latter part of his career his work was often cited for its plain, gorgeous, unfussy lyricism; that quality was always there—but since his passing I've also been listening to the revolutionary work that he did, as one among equals, in Ornette Coleman's quartet. Particularly the 1961 masterpiece This Is Our Music, a statement album if there ever was one, a raucous, deeply joyful, deeply serious vision. Now Ornette himself is the sole surviving member of that quartet: Ed Blackwell, Don Cherry, and Haden are now gone. While Coleman is arguably the originator of the "harmolodic" idea of group improvisation, the whole point of it is to create a band of equals, and this informs the music, making each of the players as monumental a figure as the ostensible leader. The music hasn't dated a second.

A lot of artists, particularly musicians, who have their origins in the avant-garde and/or experimental, will refer to those origins with some disdain or distaste after finding some kind of mainstream respect or commercial success with more conventional fare. It's worth remembering that Charlie Haden never did this. His love for Ornette, reverence even, is tied to the story he recounts in Rambling Boy, the excellent 2009 documentary about Haden directed by Reto Caduff, about hearing Ornette play for the first time, his immediate love for the keening sound of his plastic alto, and how a week after that, he followed Ornette home from a bandstand and the two played through the dawn and into the day, speaking entirely through music. You can hear perhaps a reprise of that interaction on the splendid album of Coleman/Haden duets, Soapsuds, Soapsuds.

There's no reference in Rambling Boy to the crippling heroin addiction that plagued Haden in the early 1960s, and that's fine; Haden deserved to be commemorated for his music and his conscience, and the doc could have been three times its 90 minute length and not needed to mention his struggle. Haden did, however, speak to the great writer Rafi Zabor about it for a detailed, painstaking, and terribly moving two-part profile for Musician magazine in the '80s. The piece has been anthologized in a now out-of-print but accessible collection of pieces from that magazine. I don't have the article at hand myself, but I remember one passage from it in which Haden looks at the cover photo of This Is Our Music, a photo that finds the lean, angular Haden in a dark place. Haden speaks to Zabor about his recollection of junk-sickness at that photo session, and the now-healthy musician seems to regard his younger self with a combination of horror and compassion that many recovering addicts become familar with over the years. 

In the early '60s, Haden went for treatment to Synanon, the not-yet-controversial rehab facility founded in the late '50s by Chuck Dederich. Around the same time, the director Richard Quine, who himself struggled with alcoholism for much of his life (which he eventually took in 1989), coming off a run of relatively frothy comedies (Paris When It Sizzles, Sex And The Single Girl, the monumental How To Murder Your Wife), cashed in some of his commercial clout to try something different: a fictionalized story of Synanon, with actors playing some real-life characters (Edmond O'Brien, at his most evangelical, plays Dederich), and shooting the film at actual Synanon facilities in Santa Monica and San Francisco, and using actual residents as extras and in bit parts. 

This is a story I've only heard third-hand, so if anyone has a more accurate version, holler in the comments or send me an e-mail ([email protected] is my main address). Anyway, the story is that Quine's shoot coincided with Haden's stay at Synanon. The recovery model there had a lot of emphasis on what some would call "tough love," not to mention forcing the humility issue; I believe the idea of making celebrities scrub toilets with toothbrushes and all that other stuff you hear about from Betty Ford Center alums originated at Synanon. So my recollection is that Haden, while hardly superstar-level world famous at the time, had some janitorial duties and may or may not have been part of whatever house band the facility ran. In any event, Quine liked his manner, and wanted him to participate in the shoot, and apparently this was something residents were encouraged to do. So, Haden would be in the house band that played in certain scenes in the film.

One problem: the ordinarly astute Quine didn't like the way Haden looked playing his actual instrument, the bass. So he put him behind a drum kit. There he is, below, between Edmond O'Brien and Earth Kitt. Barzini, I mean Richard Conte, is to O'Brien's right. 

 Like many jazz musicians, Haden had a working knowledge of the instruments other than his own, and as you can see from the below shot, he could hold a pair of sticks in a convincing fashion.  

Haden's participation in the movie is sufficiently obscure as to not be cited in the Internet Movie Database entry on the musician, nor anywhere else as far as I can tell. Upon leaving Synanon, Haden married for the first time and sired four of his children, including Tanya, Petra, and Rachel, The Haden Triplets. Their recent Ry Cooder-produced album is superb, a Songs Our Daddy Taught Us for our time.  Haden's son Josh is also a first-rate musician. As far as I know Haden stayed clean, and it's 100% verifiable that he stayed away from film acting, even though his love of movies informed his late music with his Quartet West (by all means seek out their Haunted Heart, a film noir for the ears). 

UPDATE: Commenter Rebekah states below that the man behind the drums is not Haden but Bill Crawford, who actually DID drum with Synanon's house band. Related photographic evidence (e.g. shots of Crawford one may Google—there aren't many, but they're clear) proves persuasive. While I'm ordinarily a fan of the "print the legend" adage, I'm also disinclined to dishonor Crawford. I scoured my copy of Synanon this morning looking for Haden elsewhere and didn't come up with much. Anybody got any clues? Is this a piece of lore in which truth got muddled in the retelling? Chime in in comments, or drop me an e-mail. 

The gleam in Eli Wallach's eye

In Baby Doll, directed by Elia Kazan, 1958 

In The Lineup, directed by Don Siegel, 1958

A couple more Gordon Willis screen caps

From End of the Road, Aram Avakian, 1970.

The actors are Stacy Keach and James Earl Jones. 

What the hell, here's the third one, which also featured in the Vanity Fair Hollywood memorial of Willis that I penned. 

End of the Road is a fascinating motion picture, not just because it was cinematographer Willis' debut feature.  John Barth, the author of the 1958 novel on which it is based, dislikes the movie expansively. Being a fan of the book I anticipated I might come to a similar assessment, if I ever saw it. Which was difficult for some time. It became available for viewing under the aegis of Steven Soderbergh, who also made a documentary about its making; the movie and the doc are available via Warner Home Video. As it happens, Road, while not a very good adaptation of Barth's book, is an engaging, sometimes mesmerizing, and ultimately affecting movie. In transposing the book's action from the early '50s to the then-present day, Avakian and his co-screenwriters Dennis McGuire and Terry Southern concoct an alienated counter-culture anti-parable. If Eustache's The Mother and the Whore depicted personal and romantic dysfunction in Paris as an emblem of the failure of May '68, Avakian's picture implies a sour elegy for the Woodstock Nation. And its imagery is unfailingly striking and beautiful. There are worse things you could do this weekend than to seek it out.