HERE WE ARE IN MONTECITO

HERE WE ARE IN MONTECITO, an upscale suburb of Santa Barbara California, waiting it out big time with Sam S.P. Eagle , a formidable tennis spare time doubles partner, Sam coming back to his red carpet roller coaster, after  collectivelyassimilating  Oscars for “the African Queen” with Bogy and Katherine Hepburn, “On the waterfront” with Marlon Brando”“Lawrence of Arabia” with a Maurice Jarre  musical tour de force and “Doctor Zhivago” with Omar Sharif (“again, Sam?” )and Julie Christie…,Alec Guinness as the uniformed khaki cladofficer. (“Bridge on the River Kwai”).

                                                                                      II

During Sam’s   bagging of trophies and Oscars , he strolled past the  digs of James Agee, the former Times magazine moviecritic, who was awarded a Pulitzer for his autobiographical novel “Death in the family”.

And what about “Let us now praise famous men”.

“S.P. Eagle! Another guise! Sam. We won’t  tell  a  soul…  a ticketed admission at that! “You run around your back hand.”

                                                                                     III

Passing Robert Hutchins Grecian estate for  debate on the nation’s moral stance. “Relatively speaking Sam, you think Dr. Hutchins, born in Brooklyn, treasurer at Yale, President of the University of Chicago,

Outlawing football. Co founder of the Great Books…”

“Your namesake Mortimer. Any relation, kiddo?”

                                                                                   IV

“Sam, tell me your partner in crime. How did you do it? The climb from’ B’ flicks….seeing your “Tales of Manhattan” at theRugby on  Utica off Church, in East Flatbush. Around the corner from Silver Rods  drug store, across from the bank and the“parler Italiano”, barber where he placed the “lift” as a stoop foran eight year old’s cut…  from P.S. 233 and a typhoid fever coma of thirty days. No penicilium to wipe out the 106 fever inthose yesterdays.… Bethel Hospital nee Brookdale, on LindenBoulevard.

“Free dishes,” replied the multi lingual tennis player turned “A” producer. A moneyed Daryl Zanuck with all the scratch andlivery that goes with the status.

A walking stick or cane. A crutch to lean on in the passing of time. “Appearances,  my boy,” unlike the yesterdays ,running around his back hand.

“Once we got Bog, “Kiss me Kate” Hepburn signed in, agreeingto the  “the African Queen..on location, the Amazon River.. John Huston signed in….and we were off.,” said S.P. Eagle, giving a nod toward James Agree hotel where the scribe was  into histrance…nicotine, not un like the “Last Tycoon” “ The Great Gatsby”  F. Scott Fitzgerald dying at the Garden of Allah on the Sunset Strip, Sheila Graham, the Louella Parsons Hedda Hopper gossip columnist at his bedside….the New York Post columnist down the Strip at the drugstore…. Producing  Larry Parks in the “Jolson Story”.

                                                                   .            V

Nothing posthumous about crafting a column about the storied crush of fan mail for the fantasies and wishful thinking of the Big Apple denizens and gulls, who identify with the likes of Shelly winters, Evelyn Keyes , Sam Goldwyn’s ‘quips,’believing in the pretensions, the reality scene.  What makes(Sidney Skolsky’) Sammy Run?  ”

                                                                               VI

Rounding the jogging track on the edge of the U/C Santa Barbara campus(where Michael Douglas got his break…..”Volley ball volley ball, that’s the best game of all”….Eugene O’Neil’s Connecticut estate), S P Eagle touchedhis  partner’s am. “ Some sensitive soul told me in 1939, the early days of my career……baking mickies, roasting marshmallows, the depression, the War, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, kiddo…. “Tales of Manhattan” was my first fastbreak. “

                                                                                 VII

“You put it together Mist6er Eagle. 1938-’39 Your ”gestalt”…dish night at the Rugby. My mother had to go……win thosedishes. a scholarship student at Hunter High in rhetoric. Screwed out by her older sister Grandma listening where her oldest was coming from. Sending my mother out to” voick” you slave. Age 13, her sister going on to College A moral outrage, Mister S.P . A moral outrage!”

                                                                                VIIOI

“Some  seven decades plus….. Seventy six years. A lifetime toput it together. The gestalt!  

Angels Bogy and Kate. Pioneers behind a” nickel and dimeproducer into his” déjà vu“ When we did “Suddenly last Summer” I knew in my gut. Retire to my yacht like Aristotle Onassis.. No more name dropping , running around my backhand...

                                                                                    IX

“Tell me s did Maurice Jarre whistling Clara Schuman’s Robertmelody for your” Lawrence of Arabia”?, were you aw aware the  harmonies reminiscent of his first movement.?”

“ I’m at a loss for words. Being the producer , Maurice was scoring “Doctor Zhivago” David Lean, directing. What more can we say? Some 77 years of running around my backhand.Kiddo. We’re not at “The Three Stooges slapstick. We’re not sting in the mail room, sorting the fan mail But not their worthwhile humanity..

Sidney Buchman, his brother Harold, Sam Briskin, RobertRiskin  ,(“Mr. Smith goes to Washington”), Max Arno, Frank Capra have all vanished from the Gower and Sunset lot.. ”

“ But It sure beats Larry Moe and Shemp’s (Curl) shtick out of Bath Beach and” Philly”, Padre,  You become a quality human being .A nickel and dime bandit, finding your rhythm…yoursShang-la. The High Llama has been waiting a long time. .Youvision found its own audience. You found yourself, Padre..”

April 14, 2015. The City that never sleeps.

                                                                              “

WHETHER IT WAS

WHETHER IT WAS  “WATER LOO BRIDGE” (1940) or “Hiroshima Mon Amour” thirty years later, it was the scenario’sgeometry playing out.… Ocean Parkway benches & Avenue ‘H’in Brooklyn, Champs Elysees “on Paree’s right bank , ma Cherie.”

The Sorbonne is within the  Grand Hotel de France on the left bank , across from Gertrude Stein’s book store. ’Shakespeare and I’, the Opera de Paris, across the Louis XIV Square.

”If they want bread, give them cake.”  Marie Antoinette’s empathy, King Louis’s mistress                                                                          

                                                                               II

Coming off her “Gone with the wind” Scarlet O’Hara destiny, Myron Selznick, her agent, Vivian Leigh pressed Tarzan’sgrowling lion’s higher uppity ups….

“There’s a jungle out there, Scarlet.”

                                                                               III

Producer Sidney Franklin and director Mervyn LeRoy.(“My so,n my son” Tavern on the Green’s proprietor) “Larry (her husband Lawrence Olivier of the  Old Vic) is ideal foridentifying with the  Colonel’s falling in love with me. Our rendezvous at Waterloo is predestined, isn’t it gentlemen?Larry’s mutual attraction with Sir Aubrey Smith and **MariaOuspenskaya is casting out of Heaven. Believe me, gentlemen. I should know. ” (her first ‘H’)

But the MGM state of mind, saw fit to caste Robert Taylor  asthe Colonel, going off to war, but meeting his twin soulballerina, portrayed by Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlet O’Hara,metamorphosed as the Radio City Music Hall ballerina in her past life, across the pond.

                                                                          IV          .

“Love at first sight?” who knows. But a higher power spelled out their chemistry for a box office smasheroo. But not on the same level as ”Gone with the wind”. Still and all Robert Taylor living a lie with Louis B. Mayer’s  “Fantasy” marriages. Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck (Brooklyn’s Ruby Stevens) living a lie, in a trumped up  alliance. Notwithstanding Norma Shearer and her ski instructor ‘H’. .

Greta Garbo’s “I vant to be alone,” ripping off her Camille s disguise, retiring to East 56th Street on the Big Apple ‘s East Side.

Taylor saying in “Waterloo Bridge” he realized high standards for the first time. Coming off theWW2 in real time, he married a German beauty, buying a spread off Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills… ”to live happily ever after”

                                                                       V

But its  neither  here nor there as this corner captures a spread sheet of unholy alliances at Waterloo Bridge, the 1940 version that manifested itself at Coney Island Avenue’s trolley trackKent  theater in 1940. A 12 year old knot hole urchin, living o n Avenue H and 14th Street, in an elevator apartment house…

Art Carney, Jackie Gleason’s alter ego, living on the oppositeside, above Bohack’s, on the corner, our classmate Leonard Schnitzer. , opposite 5A’s twin,… playing out his own role as an usher at the Kent.

Leonard and his brother, Elmer, their pap a dentist, his mother and ours, into the shopping spree…Ira Waldbaum’s mother ‘spot cheese s grocery store between J and k  on Coney Island Avenue.                                                                                                                                                            

                                                                          VI

The Avenue ‘H’ mothers navigating the Avenue J grocery storescene and Dubin and Elfenbein’s bakeries on Avenue. Or the   Aand P’s    competing with Kubrick’s market under the Avenue J subway station. The Dym’s  yellow cab dynasty… post WW2 waiting in the  subway’s exit, at curb side.  

Stanley Kubrick a chess player on his own ego grip into the lion’s “Space Odyssey”(Boremwood Studio, outside London), “Mister Novak” carrying out our short lived notoriety…3seasons on ABC tee vee., searching for originality in the “Blackboard Jungle” of Los Angeles’s secondary schools.

The studio leasing a Jaguar, driving us to George Bernard Shaw’s digs in Ayot Sate Lawrence, a village where he composed his original plays., Stalin’s image on his pianokeyboard..

His “Androcles and the Lion” filming at RKO Studio, Alan Young (“Mr. Ed” Midwood High School’s Argus) in the lead, Charles Laughton directing , Shaw’s’ alter ego Gabriel Pascal,producing.…pre Desi Lu.                                                                                  

                                                                               VII

In the meantime, fast forward from those adolescent yearningsof the Kent  theater…P.S. 217 schoolyard  Midwood High School at Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn College’s Campus Road, a half mile down Avenue ‘H’

On a Spring day, the young pros, strutting the opposite way to the Avenue H subway and the Big Apple’s “monyah honyah”     their own ”Waterloo Bridge (Brooklyn’s own) playing out.

Vivien Leigh last seen at New Haven’s Schubert theater, on the old phone off her dressing room, near Yale University’s Chapel Street, the Bard’s facsimile, Stratford on the Avon, across the pond..

Robert Taylor ,his own English Colonel to her ballerina, “Waterloo Bridge” long since gone. From the Metro Goldwyn archives. But the Kent theater still survives on Brooklyn’sConey Island Avenue ”too be continued” on our minor planet’s cyber space screen…

**Maria Ouspenskaya of the Stanislavsky Moscow acting school  “The way you walk is thorny, though no fault of your own, but as the rain enters the soil, the river enters  the sea, so  tears run to a predestined end. Now you will have peace foreternity.”

April 7, 2015 The City that never sleeps.