A bon vivant from the word “go”, Ton to, Geronimo’s kimosabi, in his retirement from his Lone Ranger yesterdays…star of radio, television, and the silver screen.
Wasn’t it all a stage? These Apaches finding their true selves in the metamorphic reality: survival of the fittest.
Geronimo in his retired incarnation, hustling blankets at theFlagstaff ,Arizona train station. Rattling the dice, as theEasterners…Claire Trevor,(originally from Brooklyn) got off theEl Capitan from Chicago, took a spring chicken stroll from her sleeping car to limber up her fated destiny, stretching hercoefficient of expansion for the “Petrified Forest”, Bogy and Bette Davis: a saga of a desperado taking hostages in the train station’s diner.
‘Don’t any of you think you can outwit this gun ho hood. I may not be Jesse James nor Clyde of “Bonnie and Clyde” boys and girls Any of you think you can out snitch Bogy, you got another guess coming.
“Cliché or not, when J. Edgar Hoover’s G men come a knocking, you all play dumb. If Duke Mantee going to theflawed electric chair, we’re all going down together. Nothing like the Ukraine Kiev Crimea onslaught nor the Gaza PalestineIsrael nightmare.. Our planet has hostility wherever.
“ Youngsters with dreams, searching for a better way. Fleeingevil ,beyond the pleasure principle. That’s my sermon, boys and girls.
“The name of the game. My mother always told me” shed the snitchers, son”. She hated snitchers. It’s in my DNA, no matter how you read the stars in cyber space.... Remember dead snitchers tell no tales, boys and girls.”
III
Meanwhile Bensonhurst’s Claire Trevor off her spring chicken jaunt toward Duke Mantee’s diner of an Alamo, for a cup a java, a respite of her Oscar I.D. impersonation of a gassedup moll, to Edward G. Robinson’s “Key Largo” in the FloridaEverglades, not that far from where Tennessee Williams was dialing up his history of clogged frontal lobes: schizophrenia blocking growth and development, mental illness diminishinghis morphing once proud hoops and hopes.
Gulping down her coffee, served up by the Littleton, New Hampshire born Bette Davis of a waitress, Claire Trevor took a Hemingway “For whom the bells toll” grasp of the scene, feeling her thespian way into the” Petrified Forest” diner.
IV
Cybernetics not yet on the plate, Duke Wayne’s “Stagecoach” passengers , along with Porter Hall and Thomas Mitchell, JohnCarradine , Duke riding shot gun. The Brooklyn born Trevor,having portrayed a gun moll, felt her way into the Alamo scene. Leslie Howard, Bette Davis….the poet drifter mounting the diner’s kitchen.
‘”Knowing how gifted our waitress is., may I (taking a document from his tattered jacket) may I devise my property and assets to Gabrielle, our waitress ,so she may further her dream and vision of becoming an artist”, unfurling a landscape of PabloPicasso surrealism, the her brush transcending still life, thestrokes beyond the one dimensional Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post covers of a bygone 20th Century life.
V
Duke Mantee infuriated by the seedy poet’s dissertation, burstsout his Billy the Kid forty five and blasts Leslie Howard. His very mortality….dying on the diner’s floor, gives life to his last wishes, a testament to his fixation on the waitress’s dream ofbecoming a European artist.
The gun fire is a call for arms as the G men and Feds rush the diner, side arms blazing
The Duke going down in a blaze of glory, his body falling, next to Howard’s corpse. Clair Trevor and Bette Dais, hiding in thekitchen, playing out their catechism of “survival of the fittest”
V
Claire Trevor in her abbreviated asides for Starbucks cup of coffee, boarded her El Capitan sleeper, passing Geronimo smoking his peace pipe, his blankets next to his tent.
The rest is History as the pundits say….Claire Trevor settling inNewport Beach ,California. University of California at SantaAna, Claire Trevor School of Performing Arts… tribute for 9 decades of her immortal soul…6o in acting roles..
July 26 ,2014, the City that Never sleeps…
