HARNESS UNBRIDLED AMBITION”..Old man Ness into his burro’s ear, as he drove his pony’s wagon of kids to Bethlehem, New Hampshire’s village, between the Howard House hotel, and the White Mountains “Old Man of the Mountain”. …its ski slopes and hay fever free fresh breezes..
II
It was in this reality scene, that a lean handsome sauerkraut andfrankfurter huckster on stilts, hawked his wares to Coney Island’s depression laden immigrants and their children strollingon the boardwalk some eight decades ago.
Achie Leach, the huckster on stilts, to be cast as Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly’ and then to the City of Angels, his marquee listing “Cary Grant” …Mae West, Randolph Scott, “Prince Romanoff” and Howard Hawks “Only Angels have Wings” freaking out in the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, Mulholland Drive and Beverly Glen Laurel Canyon Hollywood Hills thoroughfares to the San Fernando Valley.
III
And off Coldwater Canyon, to the MGM studio in Culver City,and its interior dining room where the likes of Elvis Presley (Colonel Parker’s “numero uno”) and “I spy’s” Bill Cosby broke bread and made a blessing, praying for health and “unbridled ambition”.
A half a century later, these once quality human beings are older if not wiser as the Isla torn planet reeling from the Paris and SanBernardino suicide plus pipe bombs, massacring 14 humans who were created in the image of themselves, were blown away and blown off the once desert sands of the Mojave Desert in San Berdu and the Riverside Palm Springs , Rancho de Mirage, the 29 Palms Pinto Mountain trail to Mojave and the Continent’s City of Brotherly Love and Bill Cosby’s comeuppance.
With his half of a century of pretensions and Empire building of sanctimonious interior musings..from the Warner Brothers television studios on Avenue M in Flatbush, Brooklyn..
His prosecution yesterday, avoiding the Statute of Limitations defense by today 2015 New Years Eve, heralding 2016.
IV
But how could this b e? West Hollywood’s Melrose Aveue’sballet studio of Martha Graham, Agnes De Mille, (Isadora Duncan), was needling the thread of Aaron Copeland’s “Appalacian Springs”, his Boys High School, Brooklyn College score that merited a PULITZER.
Wasn’t that the same MGM studio that he scored the John Steinbeck novel “Of Mice and Men”.
But the “cheap and tawdry” continued to play out, notwithstanding Aaron Copeland’s tour de force BurgessMeridith and Lon Chaney, Jr., not unlike Mozart scoring a Requiem for J.F.K….Aaron Copeland’s soul into Steinbeck’s screenplay, transcending the “cheap and tawdry” the underbrush of “Mice and Men”
V
What hath these creative artists metamorphosing as con artists?Composer’s block as in Rachmaninoff’s being freed up by a witch doctor? After years of not putting a note to musical notation and spelling out musical rhythms and chords . ...
In the annals of sex prosecution in Jerry Geisler’s Beverly Hills office, the fodder was Errol Flynn and Charlie Chaplin……how times and mores have changed 60 years later.
The City of Brotherly Love ratcheting up the criminal prosecution for Bill Cosby’s two qualludes and a glass of wine.
VI
Ah to harness all that pathology…. ……Cary Grant’s (Archie Leach) “Only Angels have Wings.”.
December 31, 2015 The City that never sleeps.
