II
Izzy out of Park Slope’s “the Bryna apartments”...That’s right! Our partner in doubles. Kirk Douglas, he of Vincent Van Gogh’s embodiment.....Diana Douglas’s ex.
Stanley Kramer’s “Champion” chasing “Paths of Glory” with Adolph Menjou to “Spartacus”( penned by Dalton Trumbo) and Irene Wrightsman, the oil tycoon ‘s scion who wanted to be a ”Mildred Pierce”
“On my mother’s honor so help me God. I wouldn’t con you, would I?”
III
Burt Lancaster’s partner “Gun fight at the OK Corral” espoused in his Beverly Hills second floor El Camino Drive think tank.....his Bryna dynasty hanging by a thread.
His son, Michael playing volleyball in front of Gene O’Neil’s New London “ doorstep”
“Volley ball volley ball is the best game of ’em all.””
Thinking out “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest”, starring the air crew chief at Van Nuys Air National Guard, .”Sergeant Nicholson, sir....
“Paachutes packed Rip cords ready Count to ten ..... Jump you buggers.”
IV
Recycling “Ace in the hole” heaven forbid Billy Wilder. We’re selling content, not hardware. Embracing fantasies for a surreal “Our town” of Thorton Wilder when innocence was the modus de operandi and over extending souls had not corrupted the scene ...but give human beings time....some time to crib their notes..
Right? Right..
“Business is business and Tom Mix Rin Tin Tin Buck Jones Ken Maynard Lash LaRue gave good and evil a twirl ... not in the passion of Van Gogh’s pallette in the Dutch Flemish and “Aries” French lifelines..
V
Not being privy to the construction of “Lust for life”, it seems the collective consciousness of the MGM crew: Vincent Minelli directing, Corwin scripting Irving Stone’s novel, Kirk Douglas and Tony Quinn as Gaughin (“Moon and Sixpence” Somerset Maughan )
“Gaughin” heralding from the East L:os Angeles Whittier Boulevard reality....his still in the Belvedere Junior High lobby (along with “Shangri-la’s” Margo)
VI
“Where you headed partner?” asked the spiffy attired driver of the convertible as he stopped for the thumb hitching March AF Base legal assistance officer on a two week bivouac chasing down Lerner shop deadbeats from nearby Riverside malls..
“San Jacinto art colony overlooking Rancho Mirage, sir,” responded the boyish legal eagle.,feeling his peach fuzzed whiskers were out of character.
“That’s my haunting ground, General “ said Irving Stone, his fingers lowering Vince Scully’s vocals of the Chavez Ravine Dodgers out of Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field. ....
His convertible cutting to the chase as Steve McQueen used to say,.... ascending. up up to the mountain’s rim where Jean Stone, Irving’s frau and manager waited .
VII
Meanwhile Norman Corwin in his Sherman Oaks pad South of Ventura, toiled over his grasp of the post impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh...those radio scripts left behind in deserted apartment and subway treadmills
“We almost forgot God,” he said to his Jean, knowing his own pallette not unlike Van Gogh’s,was dependent on the chemistry Douglas and Tony Quinn could persuade and convince the audience of fate...a divine providence transcending the lives of the two painters. (Quinn passing away in his sculptor’s studio, Providence, Rhode Island (within recent memory)
VIII
Stifling two centuries of bourgeoisie inhibitions (Hawthorne’s “ Scarlet Letter”), Germaine Greer’s liberation.... “The Second Sex” tome of Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s “O sole mio”)”
Tony Martin recycling the Caruso theme on the Hillcrest Country Club’s back nine....
“It’s not my first rodeo”, he said to his caddy . “I’m a gamer from the word “go”I taught Vincent Van Gogh all he knows.... it’s in the eyes of the beholder, my boy..”
“Don’t believe a word of Balzac or Proust.... what do they know about the demons that drove Vincent to cut off his ear and pistol whip himself ........ biting the dust in a brothel...
“Double double toil and trouble. Fire, burn, aud cauldron bubble” sang the Bard’s 3 witches.
“Fore”
“Lust for Life”s” deja vu..., the Big Apple, April 25, 2010....
