George Hodgman's Blog, page 15
December 12, 2014
I am hopping mad and no, it is not about torture, it is about petit fours, snowm...
I am hopping mad and no, it is not about torture, it is about petit fours, snowman petit fours, and I am about to rev up my Infinity, speed north to St. Louis, Missouri and give the ding dongs at Karl Bissinger Candy Company a piece of my mind. For years, at holiday time, we have gotten the snowman petit fours. I hate Christmas. I hate it all. Except the petit fours. They are tiny and covered with frosting and so cute you don't even have the heart to eat them until, like, the Fourth of July when the frosting has completely cracked off and it is basically a kind of mercy-killing situation. My mother's year revolves around the arrival of the snowman petit fours. She begins to talk about them in October; she speaks of the arrival of the snowmen as if they were boys from the local countryside coming home from D-Day, awaiting her kisses and garlands of roses. But there is this: they are very popular and harder to actually acquire than just about anything I know, harder than even truffles. And truffles are dug from the ground by pigs!
I begin calling about the availability of the snowman petit fours on December 1 because they are so popular. The phone ordering department at Karl Bissinger makes Citibank look like a user-friendly situation. I think those phone people are drunk on snowmen or smoking crack by the chocolate vats. I think they eat the snowmen before anyone else has a chance to get them. I think they take them home to their own fat, sneezy little children. I think this thing is rigged worse than a dance marathon or maybe the Florida primary. I have called so often that early last week, the woman on the customer service line said, "I never have seen no man so hot to get his hands on a petit four."
Well, last Friday, still no petit fours yet. Not a snowman to be seen from the Mississippi River to the truck stops of Troy. Now, today, I call again. I wait on the customer service line for at least fifty minutes, just knowing those SOBs are not answering the phone because they are selling my snowmen. My hands sweat. My heart pounds. Finally, the woman answers and before I can even get out my questions, she says, sheepishly, "I know who you are." The tone in her voice suggests fear. "I'll bet you do," I say. "You the petit four man."
I say, "Yes, damn straight. Now give me the snowmen. I am calling from Paris, Missouri. I want them shipped today. I have a ninety-year old woman in her bed hallucinating snowman petit fours. I have a woman who is on the edge, waiting for the vision of a white chocolate snowman to pull her back to life as we know it. " The woman pauses. "We can't ship them snowmen. They have to be refrigerated." I say, we live out of town. She says, "You didn't know you was going to be wanting some of them snowmen the last time you was in St. Louis?" I remind her that the little fellows--oh so sweet and Christmasy and redolent of childhood, tenderly and nostalgically reminding me of all the shit I have endured on this dying, god-forsaken planet since I first ate one--are only now just available. I hope.
"But they're not," she says. "Not what?" I ask. "Available. We're sold out." I almost scream. "Are you telling me some team of fat-ass bitches from Ladue have come in there any wiped out every one of those snowmen? I was in your store right before Thanksgiving and there were thousands of chocolate turkeys. Why this chintzy attitude toward the snowmen?" I really am about to cry. I have called and called and called. In the corner of the couch, my mother, hearing everything has begun to make small moaning sounds. The dog has started to whine. "I want you to get your rear out to that candy kitchen and find me some snowmen," I say, "or I am going to make Ferguson look like the state fair." She laughs. She says, "Maybe you should try the holly leaves." I say, "I hate the holly leaves. I think those little red berries cause diverticulitis. Why can't you make more snowmen? It's two weeks till Christmas. They're obviously big sellers. How long does it take to throw together a snowman?" She says, "Do you want me to put you through to corporate?" I say, "You're darn tooting."
I begin calling about the availability of the snowman petit fours on December 1 because they are so popular. The phone ordering department at Karl Bissinger makes Citibank look like a user-friendly situation. I think those phone people are drunk on snowmen or smoking crack by the chocolate vats. I think they eat the snowmen before anyone else has a chance to get them. I think they take them home to their own fat, sneezy little children. I think this thing is rigged worse than a dance marathon or maybe the Florida primary. I have called so often that early last week, the woman on the customer service line said, "I never have seen no man so hot to get his hands on a petit four."
Well, last Friday, still no petit fours yet. Not a snowman to be seen from the Mississippi River to the truck stops of Troy. Now, today, I call again. I wait on the customer service line for at least fifty minutes, just knowing those SOBs are not answering the phone because they are selling my snowmen. My hands sweat. My heart pounds. Finally, the woman answers and before I can even get out my questions, she says, sheepishly, "I know who you are." The tone in her voice suggests fear. "I'll bet you do," I say. "You the petit four man."
I say, "Yes, damn straight. Now give me the snowmen. I am calling from Paris, Missouri. I want them shipped today. I have a ninety-year old woman in her bed hallucinating snowman petit fours. I have a woman who is on the edge, waiting for the vision of a white chocolate snowman to pull her back to life as we know it. " The woman pauses. "We can't ship them snowmen. They have to be refrigerated." I say, we live out of town. She says, "You didn't know you was going to be wanting some of them snowmen the last time you was in St. Louis?" I remind her that the little fellows--oh so sweet and Christmasy and redolent of childhood, tenderly and nostalgically reminding me of all the shit I have endured on this dying, god-forsaken planet since I first ate one--are only now just available. I hope.
"But they're not," she says. "Not what?" I ask. "Available. We're sold out." I almost scream. "Are you telling me some team of fat-ass bitches from Ladue have come in there any wiped out every one of those snowmen? I was in your store right before Thanksgiving and there were thousands of chocolate turkeys. Why this chintzy attitude toward the snowmen?" I really am about to cry. I have called and called and called. In the corner of the couch, my mother, hearing everything has begun to make small moaning sounds. The dog has started to whine. "I want you to get your rear out to that candy kitchen and find me some snowmen," I say, "or I am going to make Ferguson look like the state fair." She laughs. She says, "Maybe you should try the holly leaves." I say, "I hate the holly leaves. I think those little red berries cause diverticulitis. Why can't you make more snowmen? It's two weeks till Christmas. They're obviously big sellers. How long does it take to throw together a snowman?" She says, "Do you want me to put you through to corporate?" I say, "You're darn tooting."
December 6, 2014
I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem when I was sixteen, then moved on to "Play It...
I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem when I was sixteen, then moved on to "Play It As It Lays." She taught me about how beautiful you can make a sentence and still get away with it. She never went an inch into excess. When I was 18, I did a term paper about her for English class. I wrote her, care of her publisher, Simon and Schuster. Six months later, my mother got the mail from the box and i remember her yelling out to me in my room: "Who in the world is writing you from the Pacific Coast Highway?" The letter came on Tiffany stationary and was written in fountain pen. She made a pen slash through her monogrammed name and, for twenty years, I tried to figure out the meaning of that gesture. I had asked her about her style and, in response, she said, "Style is everything you are, aren't, hope to be. Style is character. Old bromide, but I think true." That letter still hangs on my wall, framed, in Manhattan. In college, I read in an interview that she smoked unfiltered Pall Malls. I tried to smoke them, too, but the paper stuck to my lips and the tobacco slipped out and when I looked in the mirror, my teeth appeared to be sprouting hairs.
Later I went to work at Simon and Schuster and met her a couple of times. She did not exude warmth and was so tiny that when glimpsed on the street with her husband, looked like his daughter. At a graduation party for her daughter, Quintana, Didion served fresh guacamole and chicken flautas from Zarella. I spilled a frozen margarita and broke the glass. I was mortified. Didion, summing up the situation, snapped her fingers at the maid and the woman flew into action. I had never seen anyone snap their fingers at a human before. Sometime later, Joan got into a huge row with Michael Korda at Simon--over his description of her book, Miami, in a tip sheet-- and demanded to be released from her contract. When her agent couldn't get her out of her contract, she fired her agent (the late Lois Wallace) and hooked up with Lynn Nesbit. Here was a woman generous enough to answer a fan letter from a small town teenager, but who snapped at maids and was tough enough to fire an agent who had helped make her a star in favor of someone more commensurate with her sense of her own power and importance. For a long time, I weighed all this in my head when I tried to sum up Didion.
Around the office, there was a certain amount of gossip about Didion's war with Korda. I remember standing at an elevator, filling one of the older editors in on the latest round of the battle. I remember the look of horror on the face of that editor, who was a loyal friend of Korda's and who always made me laugh. "Didion," she sighed, "Didion. I hate little people. Never trust little people. As far as authors go, stick with zaftig. They are always so grateful for a lunch." I wanted to run to Joan Didion and tell her that line and, all through my life, I have seen and heard things and sentences and thought, "Joan would appreciate that." She trained my eye and ear, as she did for so many. I think you can hear her now in these sentences I am writing. I can. Happy birthday.
Timeline Photos
@[140487126025467:274:Joan Didion] turns 80 years old today. Also on this day in 1976, Didion famously called writing "a hostile act" in "Why I Write", an essay published in The New York Times Book Review. In an interview with @[18709970741:274:The Paris Review], Didion said: "It's hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture ... Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream."
Read the full interview here:
http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...
Later I went to work at Simon and Schuster and met her a couple of times. She did not exude warmth and was so tiny that when glimpsed on the street with her husband, looked like his daughter. At a graduation party for her daughter, Quintana, Didion served fresh guacamole and chicken flautas from Zarella. I spilled a frozen margarita and broke the glass. I was mortified. Didion, summing up the situation, snapped her fingers at the maid and the woman flew into action. I had never seen anyone snap their fingers at a human before. Sometime later, Joan got into a huge row with Michael Korda at Simon--over his description of her book, Miami, in a tip sheet-- and demanded to be released from her contract. When her agent couldn't get her out of her contract, she fired her agent (the late Lois Wallace) and hooked up with Lynn Nesbit. Here was a woman generous enough to answer a fan letter from a small town teenager, but who snapped at maids and was tough enough to fire an agent who had helped make her a star in favor of someone more commensurate with her sense of her own power and importance. For a long time, I weighed all this in my head when I tried to sum up Didion.
Around the office, there was a certain amount of gossip about Didion's war with Korda. I remember standing at an elevator, filling one of the older editors in on the latest round of the battle. I remember the look of horror on the face of that editor, who was a loyal friend of Korda's and who always made me laugh. "Didion," she sighed, "Didion. I hate little people. Never trust little people. As far as authors go, stick with zaftig. They are always so grateful for a lunch." I wanted to run to Joan Didion and tell her that line and, all through my life, I have seen and heard things and sentences and thought, "Joan would appreciate that." She trained my eye and ear, as she did for so many. I think you can hear her now in these sentences I am writing. I can. Happy birthday.
Timeline Photos
@[140487126025467:274:Joan Didion] turns 80 years old today. Also on this day in 1976, Didion famously called writing "a hostile act" in "Why I Write", an essay published in The New York Times Book Review. In an interview with @[18709970741:274:The Paris Review], Didion said: "It's hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture ... Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream."
Read the full interview here:
http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...
December 5, 2014
"Love is not blind. It sees everything and just keeps on."
--From Bettyville
"Love is not blind. It sees everything and just keeps on."
--From Bettyville
--From Bettyville
November 29, 2014
Betty. November, 2014.
Betty. November, 2014.
November 27, 2014
Can we come to an agreement? Valentines are nice, but they aren't really very in...
Can we come to an agreement? Valentines are nice, but they aren't really very interesting or very real. And the feelings they bring don't last long and don't really go very deep. They don't say much about real struggles or real life. To try and write about people as they are doesn't mean you don't love them. It means you love them totally, just as they are--as human beings.
November 26, 2014
I don't like to drop names, basically because I don't have very many to drop and...
I don't like to drop names, basically because I don't have very many to drop and I am trying to save them until I am at least seventy and crave attention even more desperately than I do now. But, last night, I drove to St. Louis to interview an old friend, Andy Cohen, whose book has sold like nineteen million copies in 45 minutes. On stage I broke into a sweat, but that's not the point: the point is that in his book, he writes about Madonna. She came to his Christmas party. The idea of Madonna at my Christmas party makes me so nervous I want to immediately become Jewish. It is hard to know what to serve a woman sitting by your tree in a cone bra. If she came to my house for a Christmas party, I think I would have to rehearse by sitting by the tree in a cone bra and imagining if I would be offended by the offer of a frosted sugar cookie.
Anyway, this is a long way of saying that last night I had a dream about Madonna. During a certain period when I lived in New York, around the time I was thirty, all of our dreams were about Madonna. We were never not talking about her. We loved her music, her attitude. She made our lives fun. It was an odd thing. We felt so close to her. Yes, she was a superstar but she was also around New York, going places we went--the Sound Factory, Il Cantinori, certain Yoga venues. One Sunday, around the time "Erotica" came out I saw her at a Mexican cafe where I was seated at a big table of friends. She looked tiny and tired, but gamine. Like Charlie Chaplin's sprightly little daughter with dark circles around her eyes. She was seated with her back to the room. Someone I was with told me that celebrities were always seated with their back to the room so they wouldn't be seen, but Madonna kept turning around to face everyone like she couldn't resist looking at the effect she was having. She was like a kid who knew she was doing something she shouldn't but who was delighted to be breaking the rules. She kept looking around and smiling at everyone. Once she looked at me--at least I thought so-- and I dropped a large piece of chicken enchilada into my lap.
I worked for a fancy magazine then. It was so slick its pages were perfumed. I couldn't read the actual copies because they made me sneeze. For six years, all the time I worked at that magazine, my nose ran. I told my boss, I was allergic to Prada. One day, that same boss called me in. He seemed about to disclose something major: Either I was being executed or some society woman had been strangled. Actually the news was, well, earth-shaking. Madonna, who had just finished "Evita" and announced that she was pregnant by Carlos, her personal trainer and lover, had kept a journal on the set of the movie and we were maybe going to publish it. I began to sweat. When he said that I was to edit it, I began to sweat more. When I took my hand off his desk, there was a puddle and he looked at me and I tried to wipe it up with me sleeve and he said, "That is disgusting." I told him I had a glandular disorder. He did not seem satisfied.
Cut to the chase: On an incredibly beautiful day in June, I am getting out of a taxi cab, getting ready to go to Madonna's apartment which was located just a few steps from the Center for Ethical Culture, a geographical situation I thought interesting. I was wearing the hippest clothes I will ever own--a pair of lime green Helmut Lange pants that were made of an extremely odd material I have never been able to place. It was not from nature. Already, I was soaking wet with sweat, though not malodorous as I had used a huge amount of cologne. I smelled like a hooker from Caracas who had just been through a hurricane. By the time I got to Madonna's apartment, I was completely wet. She came to the door herself. For some reason, you entered the apartment through the kitchen, the same one you see in "Truth or Dare." There were dozens of glass jars filled with many different kinds of candy. Not fancy candy--like Jolly Ranchers. The first thing she said as she looked me up and down was: "Is it raining in your country?"
And then she smiled for just a second, breaking this facade that I could tell she maintained at least during professional moments. It was kind of like she was a little girl who was pretending to be the president of General Motors or maybe a bossy mommy in charge of the other children when the parents were out of the house. But you could see that behind it there was this kid who was thinking, "Gee, I'm Madonna. What do you know? Let's have some fun. Woo hooooo!" She had on this black dress with lots of layers. Her head was huge. It was like she had borrowed it from a person with a larger body. It sort of hovered over the rest of her. When I remember that day, I have always recalled the scene in the Wizard of Oz where they go to see the wizard except in my head the wizard is Madonna.
She had on an extremely large amount of make-up. As she passed a mirror, she said, "Jesus, I am beginning to look like Melanie Griffin." I said, "I was thinking more Catherine Deneuve" and smiled. She said, "Keep blowing smoke like hat up my ass and you will probably leave this apartment alive."
Her apartment was actually two apartments, one on top of the other, combined to make a an extremely large space. There were a great many pictures of boxers, a painting by Leger, and the sense that I have had in the few celebrity homes I have visited, the sense of a hotel lobby where nothing was really quite personal. Things were very clean. I had the feeling she kept those maids hopping like grasshoppers. She took me upstairs and sat me on a couch by a balcony the most beautiful view of Central Park that I could imagine. I was just waiting for Maria Von Trapp to come running out from behind a rock with her striped apron and her arms in the air singing "Climb Every Mountain." You get the picture. It was gorgeous. I wanted to stay forever and I thought we were certainly going to be best friends from now on and that I would wind up a frequent guest here in the Land of the Cone Bra where the boxers stood guard in stunning black and white.
She handed me her journal to read and asked if I wanted anything to drink. I didn't really, but wanted to drink something that belonged to Madonna and said a Coke. A few minutes later, there she was in the hall with a glass she had filled too high and was trying not to spill. It was sweet. Her journal was in that kind of old notebook with the rings that we had in school back when. It was subdivided by drawings of costumes from "Evita." When she left, I began to read it. It was interesting for a couple of reasons. One was that she captured this feeling of being absolutely and completely alone in a hotel room in Argentina and missing everyone you knew while downstairs thousands of teenagers were chanting your name. One was that it was really funny, bitchy high school-girl funny. But there was something odd. She spoke of finding out she was getting pregnant and being all excited and blah, blah, blah, but she never ever mentioned the baby's father. I thought this would seem kind of odd to a reader, but hell, she was Madonna and I thought maybe the papers were wrong and it was an immaculate conception situation. The real problem was that the thing was, like, 100,000 words long. My boss wanted the piece to run at 10,000 words. I knew there was going to be a battle over this. I knew who was going to have to tell her it was going to have to be cut. I knew that this was going to take on the proportions of an international incident and I was fairly certain that I was going to wind up dead in the trunk of a car in a shipyard in New Jersey.
When I finished, I wasn't sure if I was allowed to move out of the room so I sat there for a little while. It seemed to me the room of a Latin woman who would date a bullfighter. A few months later, she made a video where she portrayed a bullfighters lover. I think this shows an uncanny presience (I cannot get spell check to work. F--k it.) on my part. When I had finally decided that it would be okay to leave the room unescorted, I stuck my head out and, at the very same time, she stuck her head out of a nearby room. It seemed she had been listening, waiting for me to finish. "I said, 'This is extremely entertaining. I think you really capture the reality of what it's like to be someone like you."
"Is that good or bad?" she said. I said, "Good." I thought we were going to stand in that hallway forever. "There is one thing we need to discuss, though," I said, continuing. "Can we sit down? I'm dry now." In the living room, I told her that we were going to have to cut it a great deal. She looked at me. I began to sweat again. "Did they not tell you about the allotted length?" I asked. She said nothing. Her publicist arrived from somewhere. "He wants to cut it," Madonna said in an unhappy voice. "Not HE," I yelled. "Not me. Other people….Awful horrible people who I barely know."
Madonna and the publicist went into the other room. I sat for maybe two hours waiting for them to come back. Muhammed Ali, glaring at me from his autographed photo, seemed to say, "You done it now, boy. You get those pants in Cleveland?" They never did. I thought maybe she was having the damn baby. Surely, I thought, she was going to return, but I just waited and waited and, finally, I let myself out. I knew that I was going to have to go back to the magazine and say that I had blown it, that there was going to be no journal, no cover photo, no nothing. Madonna sold like half a million copies then on the newsstand. I was….ill. I didn't sleep that night and by the morning something in my back or chest had locked or tightened in a way that made breathing difficult and, by the time my doctor arrived in his office, I was there, waiting. And--you guessed it--sweating. "I think I picked up something from Madonna," I told Doctor Case who for years had treated me like someone destined for a mental institution.
At work, I could not get in to see the editor to break the news. But he had heard and various people, including the features editor, went in and out of his office. There was an extreme silence. Like the day Versace was murdered. When I finally got in to see Graydon, he said, "Make it happen. Talk to the publicist. YOU cannot lose this." I said, "We have to give her more space. She's Madonna. She's pregnant." He said maybe. He was not happy. Suddenly a piece that he had previously seemed lukewarm about was essential not only to the magazine, but to the survival of civilization as we we knew it. By the end of the day, Madonna's publicist had agreed that I would do a cut of the piece so that Madonna could see how it would work at a shorter length. But I had to work at Madonna's house because they could not risk the journal falling into enemy hands. I think they were expecting it to be stolen by, like, Henry Kissinger. I do not know. Dead Sea Scrolls are guarded less carefully than this journal was.
During the time I worked in her apartment, I rarely saw her, but she did notice that I was putting in a lot of hours. I think she thought that I was just going to come in and like tear it in half. Now and again, when she passed by the door of the room where I was working, she smiled. "Are you comfortable?" she asked at one point. "Oh yes," I said, breaking down into something approaching realness. "I am just sitting her basking in the idea of losing this story for the magazine and having to go to work as an assistant for Jennifer Lopez." This cracked her up. Suddenly, all was well in my world. Suddenly it seemed that we were going to be friends forever and that I was going to be the baby's godfather, and spend vacations in South Beach with Madonna and Donatella and many Latin American men in tiny, tiny bikinis. This did not happen. No. None of it. She went on. I well, kept sweating and gained a lot of weight and could no longer fit into those pants I wore to her house. But I have never been able to throw out or give to the Salvation Army because I am convinced they still smell a little bit like Madonna and that incredible apartment on that beautiful day in June when I was young.
I am telling you all this not to name drop, but because I want you to know that me and the Big M, well, we ended up on really good terms and, if you do not pre-order my book, Bettyville, in a red-hot second, you are going to have a tiny Italian-ish woman sitting by your tree in a cone bra and it isn't going to be pretty.
Anyway, this is a long way of saying that last night I had a dream about Madonna. During a certain period when I lived in New York, around the time I was thirty, all of our dreams were about Madonna. We were never not talking about her. We loved her music, her attitude. She made our lives fun. It was an odd thing. We felt so close to her. Yes, she was a superstar but she was also around New York, going places we went--the Sound Factory, Il Cantinori, certain Yoga venues. One Sunday, around the time "Erotica" came out I saw her at a Mexican cafe where I was seated at a big table of friends. She looked tiny and tired, but gamine. Like Charlie Chaplin's sprightly little daughter with dark circles around her eyes. She was seated with her back to the room. Someone I was with told me that celebrities were always seated with their back to the room so they wouldn't be seen, but Madonna kept turning around to face everyone like she couldn't resist looking at the effect she was having. She was like a kid who knew she was doing something she shouldn't but who was delighted to be breaking the rules. She kept looking around and smiling at everyone. Once she looked at me--at least I thought so-- and I dropped a large piece of chicken enchilada into my lap.
I worked for a fancy magazine then. It was so slick its pages were perfumed. I couldn't read the actual copies because they made me sneeze. For six years, all the time I worked at that magazine, my nose ran. I told my boss, I was allergic to Prada. One day, that same boss called me in. He seemed about to disclose something major: Either I was being executed or some society woman had been strangled. Actually the news was, well, earth-shaking. Madonna, who had just finished "Evita" and announced that she was pregnant by Carlos, her personal trainer and lover, had kept a journal on the set of the movie and we were maybe going to publish it. I began to sweat. When he said that I was to edit it, I began to sweat more. When I took my hand off his desk, there was a puddle and he looked at me and I tried to wipe it up with me sleeve and he said, "That is disgusting." I told him I had a glandular disorder. He did not seem satisfied.
Cut to the chase: On an incredibly beautiful day in June, I am getting out of a taxi cab, getting ready to go to Madonna's apartment which was located just a few steps from the Center for Ethical Culture, a geographical situation I thought interesting. I was wearing the hippest clothes I will ever own--a pair of lime green Helmut Lange pants that were made of an extremely odd material I have never been able to place. It was not from nature. Already, I was soaking wet with sweat, though not malodorous as I had used a huge amount of cologne. I smelled like a hooker from Caracas who had just been through a hurricane. By the time I got to Madonna's apartment, I was completely wet. She came to the door herself. For some reason, you entered the apartment through the kitchen, the same one you see in "Truth or Dare." There were dozens of glass jars filled with many different kinds of candy. Not fancy candy--like Jolly Ranchers. The first thing she said as she looked me up and down was: "Is it raining in your country?"
And then she smiled for just a second, breaking this facade that I could tell she maintained at least during professional moments. It was kind of like she was a little girl who was pretending to be the president of General Motors or maybe a bossy mommy in charge of the other children when the parents were out of the house. But you could see that behind it there was this kid who was thinking, "Gee, I'm Madonna. What do you know? Let's have some fun. Woo hooooo!" She had on this black dress with lots of layers. Her head was huge. It was like she had borrowed it from a person with a larger body. It sort of hovered over the rest of her. When I remember that day, I have always recalled the scene in the Wizard of Oz where they go to see the wizard except in my head the wizard is Madonna.
She had on an extremely large amount of make-up. As she passed a mirror, she said, "Jesus, I am beginning to look like Melanie Griffin." I said, "I was thinking more Catherine Deneuve" and smiled. She said, "Keep blowing smoke like hat up my ass and you will probably leave this apartment alive."
Her apartment was actually two apartments, one on top of the other, combined to make a an extremely large space. There were a great many pictures of boxers, a painting by Leger, and the sense that I have had in the few celebrity homes I have visited, the sense of a hotel lobby where nothing was really quite personal. Things were very clean. I had the feeling she kept those maids hopping like grasshoppers. She took me upstairs and sat me on a couch by a balcony the most beautiful view of Central Park that I could imagine. I was just waiting for Maria Von Trapp to come running out from behind a rock with her striped apron and her arms in the air singing "Climb Every Mountain." You get the picture. It was gorgeous. I wanted to stay forever and I thought we were certainly going to be best friends from now on and that I would wind up a frequent guest here in the Land of the Cone Bra where the boxers stood guard in stunning black and white.
She handed me her journal to read and asked if I wanted anything to drink. I didn't really, but wanted to drink something that belonged to Madonna and said a Coke. A few minutes later, there she was in the hall with a glass she had filled too high and was trying not to spill. It was sweet. Her journal was in that kind of old notebook with the rings that we had in school back when. It was subdivided by drawings of costumes from "Evita." When she left, I began to read it. It was interesting for a couple of reasons. One was that she captured this feeling of being absolutely and completely alone in a hotel room in Argentina and missing everyone you knew while downstairs thousands of teenagers were chanting your name. One was that it was really funny, bitchy high school-girl funny. But there was something odd. She spoke of finding out she was getting pregnant and being all excited and blah, blah, blah, but she never ever mentioned the baby's father. I thought this would seem kind of odd to a reader, but hell, she was Madonna and I thought maybe the papers were wrong and it was an immaculate conception situation. The real problem was that the thing was, like, 100,000 words long. My boss wanted the piece to run at 10,000 words. I knew there was going to be a battle over this. I knew who was going to have to tell her it was going to have to be cut. I knew that this was going to take on the proportions of an international incident and I was fairly certain that I was going to wind up dead in the trunk of a car in a shipyard in New Jersey.
When I finished, I wasn't sure if I was allowed to move out of the room so I sat there for a little while. It seemed to me the room of a Latin woman who would date a bullfighter. A few months later, she made a video where she portrayed a bullfighters lover. I think this shows an uncanny presience (I cannot get spell check to work. F--k it.) on my part. When I had finally decided that it would be okay to leave the room unescorted, I stuck my head out and, at the very same time, she stuck her head out of a nearby room. It seemed she had been listening, waiting for me to finish. "I said, 'This is extremely entertaining. I think you really capture the reality of what it's like to be someone like you."
"Is that good or bad?" she said. I said, "Good." I thought we were going to stand in that hallway forever. "There is one thing we need to discuss, though," I said, continuing. "Can we sit down? I'm dry now." In the living room, I told her that we were going to have to cut it a great deal. She looked at me. I began to sweat again. "Did they not tell you about the allotted length?" I asked. She said nothing. Her publicist arrived from somewhere. "He wants to cut it," Madonna said in an unhappy voice. "Not HE," I yelled. "Not me. Other people….Awful horrible people who I barely know."
Madonna and the publicist went into the other room. I sat for maybe two hours waiting for them to come back. Muhammed Ali, glaring at me from his autographed photo, seemed to say, "You done it now, boy. You get those pants in Cleveland?" They never did. I thought maybe she was having the damn baby. Surely, I thought, she was going to return, but I just waited and waited and, finally, I let myself out. I knew that I was going to have to go back to the magazine and say that I had blown it, that there was going to be no journal, no cover photo, no nothing. Madonna sold like half a million copies then on the newsstand. I was….ill. I didn't sleep that night and by the morning something in my back or chest had locked or tightened in a way that made breathing difficult and, by the time my doctor arrived in his office, I was there, waiting. And--you guessed it--sweating. "I think I picked up something from Madonna," I told Doctor Case who for years had treated me like someone destined for a mental institution.
At work, I could not get in to see the editor to break the news. But he had heard and various people, including the features editor, went in and out of his office. There was an extreme silence. Like the day Versace was murdered. When I finally got in to see Graydon, he said, "Make it happen. Talk to the publicist. YOU cannot lose this." I said, "We have to give her more space. She's Madonna. She's pregnant." He said maybe. He was not happy. Suddenly a piece that he had previously seemed lukewarm about was essential not only to the magazine, but to the survival of civilization as we we knew it. By the end of the day, Madonna's publicist had agreed that I would do a cut of the piece so that Madonna could see how it would work at a shorter length. But I had to work at Madonna's house because they could not risk the journal falling into enemy hands. I think they were expecting it to be stolen by, like, Henry Kissinger. I do not know. Dead Sea Scrolls are guarded less carefully than this journal was.
During the time I worked in her apartment, I rarely saw her, but she did notice that I was putting in a lot of hours. I think she thought that I was just going to come in and like tear it in half. Now and again, when she passed by the door of the room where I was working, she smiled. "Are you comfortable?" she asked at one point. "Oh yes," I said, breaking down into something approaching realness. "I am just sitting her basking in the idea of losing this story for the magazine and having to go to work as an assistant for Jennifer Lopez." This cracked her up. Suddenly, all was well in my world. Suddenly it seemed that we were going to be friends forever and that I was going to be the baby's godfather, and spend vacations in South Beach with Madonna and Donatella and many Latin American men in tiny, tiny bikinis. This did not happen. No. None of it. She went on. I well, kept sweating and gained a lot of weight and could no longer fit into those pants I wore to her house. But I have never been able to throw out or give to the Salvation Army because I am convinced they still smell a little bit like Madonna and that incredible apartment on that beautiful day in June when I was young.
I am telling you all this not to name drop, but because I want you to know that me and the Big M, well, we ended up on really good terms and, if you do not pre-order my book, Bettyville, in a red-hot second, you are going to have a tiny Italian-ish woman sitting by your tree in a cone bra and it isn't going to be pretty.
November 24, 2014
Another day in Bettyville:
My mother is sitting at in front of the mirror at th...
Another day in Bettyville:
My mother is sitting at in front of the mirror at the hairdresser’s in St. Louis, peering at her reflection as if she just cannot fathom what on Earth became of the woman she used to see there. She is ninety-two years old. She has that look she gets sometimes now, a look she never had in the old days, when things were more normal. Her eyes are glassy and I don’t want to look at them because they make me feel I don’t know her anymore.
Helen, who does my mother’s color, senses Betty’s mood, says. “Don’t worry, babe. We do you up. It’s like the elevator man said when someone poop in the corner. ‘We gonna take this shit to a new level.’”
Betty does not look relieved. She does not even chuckle.
“Come back home,” I want to whisper into my mother’s ears because she seems so far away all of a sudden.
My mother is sitting at in front of the mirror at the hairdresser’s in St. Louis, peering at her reflection as if she just cannot fathom what on Earth became of the woman she used to see there. She is ninety-two years old. She has that look she gets sometimes now, a look she never had in the old days, when things were more normal. Her eyes are glassy and I don’t want to look at them because they make me feel I don’t know her anymore.
Helen, who does my mother’s color, senses Betty’s mood, says. “Don’t worry, babe. We do you up. It’s like the elevator man said when someone poop in the corner. ‘We gonna take this shit to a new level.’”
Betty does not look relieved. She does not even chuckle.
“Come back home,” I want to whisper into my mother’s ears because she seems so far away all of a sudden.
November 23, 2014
Missouri River, Cooper's Landing
Missouri River, Cooper's Landing
November 22, 2014
A book that inspired me when I was busy not writing at one point was Alysia Abbo...
A book that inspired me when I was busy not writing at one point was Alysia Abbott's Fairyland and I hope anyone who has not read it will remedy that sad situation soon.
I don't know all of you who are liking this page, but I am thankful. I'm gratefu...
I don't know all of you who are liking this page, but I am thankful. I'm grateful for your interest and really appreciate it.
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