“Mush” on Bernie Madoff serving 125 years…no not an Antarctica ice block as was Jack London (“Call of the Wild”)….the Sheik of Araby had mesmerized his fifth grade contemporaries back there in Brooklyn’s Public Schools, his voodoo brain washing those eleven year olds into believing what they were witnessing. A song and dance man’s eyes and tongueinto his classmates enchantment , playing on their own yearning calculus.
A replication of Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye”, a Holden Caulfield “phoney”, waiting to be discovered in more ways than one..
II
What no one knows that Bernie into his Rudolf Valentino- Charlie Chaplin- Marlon Brando persona …that he became the Sheik of Araby, since he was eleven…that his “man in the iron mask” metamorphosis had led him to Joyce Selznick’s UniversalStudio School of dramatic acting.
Surrounded by the likes of Tony Curtis (Bernie Schwartz from the Bronx, his pops owning a kosher butcher shop), Gia Scala , a blue eyed brunette of a starlet from Anna Magnani, Sophia Loren’s Southern Italy school before cocaine, Cary Grant (Archie Leach, a cool coach), Dorothy Dandridge on loan fromMGM, ( coke? peyote?) A journalist turned starlet , Piper Laurie ( “my dream was to become a journalist”) quoted the Piper on her opportunity to see through the Sheik of Araby’s self servingpretense.
“Believe me,” she said, not knowing Archie Leach’s stint on stilts at the Coney Island boardwalk, never “nunca” , had globalbankers admitted to be taken in, by the Sheik of Araby, their cash register blowing a2 and a half billion to Bernie’s 5th grade yearnings.
III
Even the best of our celebrities were burned by their own needs.Steven Spielberg, a studio director,was led astray by his ownFreudian wishfulness and gullibility , his need to believe in the Sheik of Araby’s connections at the Bel Air Hotel at Stone Canyon Road, the Beverly Hills banks, Palm Springs Rancho Mirage upscale Santa Ana winds.
A fiction like the Sheik of Araby… his Ponzi schememesmerizing the “phonies” and the “in” crowd.
IV
So the Sheik of Araby enthralled to get away from the Ponzifiction, for the gig at Universal Studios. Why not if ChrltonHeston can do it at Duxfordi RAF base, in front of the Queen and Prince Philip, why cann’t he give a rear reel reading as Joyce Selznick’s alter ego
What did Rudolf Valentino have that the sheik didn’t. Douglas Fairbanks? Ramon Navarro? Fatty Arbuckle? Hal Roach?“Citizen Kane?”.
The only skeptics would be Tony Curtis, Gia Scala, DorothyDandridge already under the scepter of believing where no credibility existed. Piper Laurie, a down to Earth human being would be difficult But. no match for the sheik of Araby.
V
In the meantime Jack London and his troika of German shepherds, hanging out on those ice flotillas of the Antarctica,waiting for the Coast Guard ice breaker to rescue the two ships trapped….Charley Chan and his number one son into their watchful waiting …..
The Dragon Lady from Milton Caniff’s” Terry and the Pirates”watching from the Chinese Empress’s railing..
The penguins into their Radio City Music Hall Rockettesauditions, clapping their wings, holding their collective breaths,waiting out the Coast Guard ice breaker, once anchored in the Big Apple’s Government Island harbor reality scene.
Where our “Major Fenton’s” own dream saw the light of the Coast Guard rd’s mission, waiting in the ferry booth, Admiral Loy (any relation to “The Thin Man’s” Myrna Loy?)Commanding Officer.
VI
For what seemed like “From here to Eternity” the Russian ship was pressured and rocked, the heavy ice cracking that the ship was able to maneuver in what was once inches, becoming yards, measured by the penguin dancing up a storm.
The troika of “mush” German Shepherds barking , the icecracking, Jack London leading his troika with his Eskimo likemantra, apropos the penguins instinct , the humans dominatingMother Nature, freeing the ships from their containment inAntarctica ice, at the tip of our Contiunent..
January 8,2014 The City that never sleeps
