Warren Adler's Blog, page 59

Where Have All The Topless Women Gone?

Twenty five years ago when I first visited Saint Tropez, almost all the women on the beaches were topless. It didn't matter how old they were, it was standard. By and large, if memory serves and these images, I can assure you, are engraved in my mind, there were many many gorgeous females. Some wore sarongs and strings of pearls between their breasts. The female form in all its glory was a priceless feature of the Côte d'Azur and it was considered bad form to wear a top. Even my beautiful wife, gaining courage, unveiled her full upper form, despite the fact that people she knew from New York suddenly appeared. Remarkably, everyone seemed comfortable with the idea, especially the women.

Alas, those days are over. Topless is, sadly, out. I'm not sure what this signifies, perhaps some changing mores. Perhaps the French have become too uptight. Who knows? In a sad way, the topless exit, does diminish the joy of  the beaches of the Côte d'Azur. There are some women who have bucked the trend, but the days when it was an essential part of the scene seems over. Perhaps this sounds sexist to those to whom being politically correct is essential to the conversation. Frankly, I don't care.  I am unalterably opposed to anything that suggests political correctness. And I am not in the least opposed to the topless females that made the beaches of the Côte d'Azur so wonderful.

iPhone Tragedy

A major tragedy, perhaps worse than death itself. David's friend Anthony jumped into the pool accompanied by his constant attachment, his iPhone. The instrument could not be resuscitated and is lying under a bed of rice hoping that this treatment will revive it.  I don't know what idiot suggested this radical process, but it has not raised the poor iPhone from the dead.

Anthony is now going through a major crisis of withdrawal. This indicates that there is probably a business plan in the works to create a rehab program for iPhone addicts. For those of us who still prefer occasional personal live face to live face communications, we are baffled by those who cannot live a minute without some attachment to an electronic device.

As someone who thrives on face to face dialogue and live inter-communications, it is a lonely life indeed to be surrounded by people who prefer to live in cyberspace clicking away to some far away place, preferring the company of  people outside the human real life range.

Doesn't Get Much Better Than This

The weather here in Beaulieu reminds me of fine wine, delicious on the tongue, warmth for the heart and soul. After enduring a week of rain during our first week here, the weather has turned this into a wonderland. Last night we had dinner on Paloma beach. The tables were placed on the pebbled beach, where the sunset brought out the brilliance of the pink rock walls that surround Cap Ferrat. When the sun disappeared the tables were lighted by candles. Does it get any better than this? Perhaps the joys of a first love, but nothing else.

Our principal activity , aside from dining and drinking wine, are walks around the Cap. There are narrow trails, high up on the cliffs. Unfortunately my agoraphobia keeps me from truly enjoying the view, although in a sturdy outcrop I do take a quick peek.

A Painter's Paradise

I finished the McCullough book on Americans in Paris. Great. Now I'm reading David Mamet's new book about his reasons for abandoning liberalism. He's not as good an essayist as a playwright, but his book is well worth the time.

I've been posting stuff on various writing networks. It amazes me how many people out there are writing fiction. The challenge, of course, is how they will find readers. There will be millions of books out there in cyberspace. I will live with the illusion that quality work will find its audience.

If the world is going to pot, you would never know it on the Côte d'Azur . The Russians are here en masse and the yachts seem to fill the little bays. It's easy to see why this place was a painter's paradise.

Food, Sunshine, Gossip, and the Glorious Lifestyle

Old friends whom I met 11 years ago when Sunny and I made a valiant attempt to learn French have surfaced from my postings that we are in the neighborhood. Mitch and Michelle have found us and we had dinner with them the other night. Over the weekend we had dinner  with my landlord JP and his Suzy and our friends from Denmark. We met E at the school and later his lovely wife. E and I have something in common. We never did learn French and both of us tried like hell.

As you can see from my posts France, especially the Riviera, is all about food, sunshine, gossip and glorious lifestyle. Give the French credit. They know how to live. We've been here two weeks and they've had two Monday holidays, meaning three day weekends.

My son David will be rolling in today. I hope he can find the place which is tucked away out of site on a hillside. I'll have to meet him in town and guide him up here.

Every Knock a Boost

Yet again the mainstream media cabal against Sarah Palin has come a cropper. From my own cursory reading of her e-mails while Governor of Alaska, she comes out as a hard working executive and concerned wife and mother, valiantly and quite successfully juggling her obligations to her family and public office.

As a supportive admirer of women who work and aspire, I can't help concluding that Sarah has realized the feminist dream of having it all. It baffles me why she is not celebrated by women for this singular achievement, which could serve as an inspiration for young women seeking to make a difference through public service, and fulfilling their instinctive desire to have children and a stable family life.

I have heard this college educated working woman referred to as trailer trash. Trailer trash, indeed. Sarah earned her living as a commercial fisherman and Todd worked far from home on the oil rigs. I guess that kind of work is to the intellectual elite the new definition of trailer trash.

Most of the women in my social circles wrinkle their noses when confronted with any mention of Sarah, as if her name itself induces some nauseating effluvia.

Remember Harry Truman, the haberdasher who never went to college? I have vivid memories of this man being pummeled by the Ivy League snobs in our midst.

I'm sure the Sarah haters are disappointed that the anti-Sarah dirt they expected from her e-mails did not bear fruit.

Perhaps they expected some revelation of a fascist conspiracy, a secret agenda of a far right psychopath attempting to undermine America behind the mask of good looks and a perky personality.

I'm sure, too, they were hoping that the e-mails would serve to diminish her intelligence and ignorance of world affairs that the interview with Katie Couric tried to deliberately induce during the campaign.

It was that interview that set the agenda for the opening gun of the campaign to tar and feather Sarah as a lightweight brainless moron who was a walking political disaster.

Never mind that she busted the hold of the greedy big boys who ran Alaska for years, or that she was instrumental in pushing a gas line through Canada to warm up the frigid Midwest.

The sheer ugliness of the campaign to discredit her, not merely as a politician which is fair game, but a mother and a wife, and paint her as a clueless right wing fanatic, is, in my opinion, unprecedented and undeserving.

What I admire most about Sarah is the way she has absorbed every punch and continues to come out swinging. How can one fail to admire that kind of moxie? Take advantage Sarah. What's wrong with making a buck? Rub their snobby noses in it.

The campaign against her for whatever reason has been relentless, hateful, sanctimonious and vicious. Miraculously, she has survived, and won respect from a large swath of the so-called working class. Indeed, try naming a Vice Presidential candidate of recent vintage. Most have faded into oblivion.

My friends characterize her as a dumb broad who has no business on the public stage. Unfortunately, they can't offer much more than "I just can't stand her" as their reasons for hating her. I guess I am an anomaly in the social world I inhabit.

So be it.  To them my irritant is an entertainment.

As for me, I like Sarah's take no prisoners brass balls attitude. Maybe it's time we Americans took some hard political lessons from someone who had to perform actual productive work for a living. Could she do worse than what we have had running the show in the last decade?

That said I would love to have a peek into the e-mails of Sarah's political and media enemies. Might keep an army of psychiatrists busy for decades.

Oh yes, what ever happened to Katie Couric?

Sunsets from the Terrace

Two nights ago we had dinner at the Voile D'or a lovely hotel in St. Jean Cap Ferrat where we watched the glorious sunset from the terrace. Apparently the actor David Niven lived close by and would come each evening to do the same.  Somerset Maugham lived close by as well. Wonder how many young people remember Niven or read the books of Maugham, which were and still are quite wonderful.

As usual we go lost in the maze of Cap Ferrat. Our objective was to find the trail around the Cap that we had walked numerous times during our "schooldays" at the Ecole Francais where we spent a month attempting to master that language.

We stopped the car next to a likely fellow and asked the usual question parlez-vous anglais?

Fluently came the answer. It turned out he was a Brit enjoying a holiday with his wife at the Grand Hotel. We bonded quickly and he invited us to poolside where we met his lovely wife, pregnant and pretty from South Africa. It turns out he has a sister who is a novelist in New York and we dined together. Once again we learn the miracle of serendipity.

Ava and Chris our houseguests for a week left to visit Ava's half sister in Krakow. Ava is a whirlwind of energy and her departure will give us a chance to catch our breath while we await the arrival of two of our sons next week.

The Greater Journey

I'm still reading David McCullough's The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. It is one of the best books I've read in years, beautifully written and exactly the right book for this trip. I've fired up Sunny's Kindle for her to read the same book at the same time. She will love it as well.

The two television sets in the house were not working and had to be replaced. Not that I care since I get all my news via the Internet and it's all bad anyway. In this part of the world one can live very happily in a non-media dream world.

Hi-Tech Living

I'm still having trouble with the hi tech house we rented. But slowly learning to survive. Can't work the GPS in our new car either, but since we're staying close to home no problem has arisen. To reach this house requires some gymnastic driving since there are numerous hard round turns. French drivers speed around these corners like mad. But this is the price one pays for being high up with a magnificent view of the little  harbor.

We're beginning to make sense out of the supermarket. One must weight ones fruits and vegetables and get a price sticker ourselves. There is a lot of do-it-yourself stuff living in France, but the produce is remarkably fresh compared to supermarkets in the states.

Do Novels Ever End?

A writer's mind is like a house with a thousand doors, all operated by some pre-tech system that opens and closes as if controlled by something akin to an infrared target line. Apparently, I crossed one of those lines and opened a door somewhere on a top floor of the house.

I now realize that I came back to Beaulieu, which is just a walking distance from Cap Ferrat which was one of the European settings for the The David Embrace, a novel just published exclusively by Amazon.

There it was unfolding before my eyes, The Grand Hotel beach club where the two fish out of water lovers first meet. People from different worlds, with far different agendas, suddenly bonding mysteriously. There was the spot, the actual spot where I chose the hired killer to view the yacht owned by his target.

Call it a thriller, a love story, a tale of deception and betrayal or however one wishes to categorize it. I pay no attention to genre. Essentially, it is an exploration of the mystery and power of human attraction which seems to be the central theme of all novels.

Looking back over most of my thirty or so published novels,  I seem to be obsessed with transformation, characters becoming, always becoming, following an arc of change over which they have little or no control.  The plot line of The David Embrace leaves southern France and goes on to Florence, the place to where our mismatched lovers escape from their previous lives.

Florence is central to the story because it is here that one of the great wonders of the world lives in resplendent glory, Michelangelo's David, that masterpiece of sculpture that cannot fail to move anyone who comes under its spell. It has made a profound impact on the main characters of this novel.

The point of this little essay, aside from the obvious flacking of the novel, is that I believe I was drawn back to this place so that I can walk through that open door and perhaps write a sequel. To me, many of the characters in my stories continue to be alive even after I have completed the story cycle confined to the specific novel. The fact is that a writer can never write finis to the life of his or her characters because they continue to live on. What happens next is always on the mind of both the reader and the writer.

Oddly, the only novel that I have ever written a sequel to was The War of the Roses, and the two main characters actually died at the end of the novel. What had obsessed me long after the novel was written, long after the movie was made, was what happened to the children of these poor deluded souls who allowed greed and hate to destroy their lives. Thus came The Children of the Roses.

So here I am back to the scenes of The David Embrace, rerunning the story and noodling the possibilities of what happened to these star-crossed lovers who went through so much pain and angst to keep the fires of their mysterious attraction continuing at white heat.