Theatre Dionysius, Athens, 4^th Century B.C.E.

2,400 years before U.C.L.A. Theatre Arts Department

Oh! for a Muse of Fire

(3^rd installment)

  Why was it so important for me to gain approval—to be with these people, especially Curtis? Shouldn’t I get into the mainstream mix, curry favor with those certain to become the bright lights in the “Industry”? Hollywood movie making called an “Industry” was perhaps enough to turn me away from them, the future casting directors, agents, producers. In those euphoric times after the war, William Donald Curtis rapidly transformed my life, a savant throwing open gates, enticing me across the threshold, keeper of the flame—a Muse of Fire.

  Other accomplices conspired to bind me in their spell—sitting in dark movie houses with Curtis, Anne, and Dean, miraculous films seducing us, warming to Gerard Philippe and Micheline Presle in “Devil in the Flesh,” Jean Cocteau’s “Orpheus” and “Blood of the Poet,” stunning Edwige Feuilliere, Olivier’s “Henry the Fifth,” “The Red Shoes,” Noel Coward’s “Brief Encounter” and his war-time epic, “In Which We Serve.” Curtis and I created our own magic that spring season after “The White Steed” closed its two week run, performing in two Tennessee Williams one acts, unveiled in Royce Hall 170, with, unfortunately only one performance to succeed or fail. Ada Friedman, efficient, energetic woman, directs me in Tennessee Williams’ “The Long Goodbye,” a play forms a template for Tennessee’s first Broadway success, “The Glass Menagerie.” Curtis in Williams’ “Auto-da-Fé.”

  At that moment in time, the part of Joe is made to order for me—a young would-be writer closing up an apartment where he’s lived all his life with his mother, now dead, and sister, a runaway. Flashbacks reveal his agonizing past as movers (one played by Al Supowitz/Sargent) carry out the furniture. (All “fucks” in the movers’ dialogue are deleted—although we had no resident censor in the department; perhaps it was Ada Friedman’s aversion to the word.)

  Future film and television producer, George Eckstein plays Joe’s sometimes friend, Silva, who keeps urging Joe to stop brooding over the past and join the “project.” Who could predict that Eckstein, an intense, bespectacled little guy, was to enjoy a career as prolific writer for television and film, as well as producer—sixteen episodes for the series, “Banacek,” and series executive producer; co-producing “The Fugitive” series, writing fifteen of its episodes, and three episodes for “Perry Mason” and nine episodes for “The Untouchables.”

  “The Long Goodbye” ends with dour Eckstein-as-Silva telling Joe to stop taking a morbid pleasure in watchin’ this junk hauled off like some dopes get in mooning around a bone-orchard . . . This place is done for, Joe. You can’t help it. Write about it someday. . . JOE – but not so fast that you can’t even say goodbye.” SILVA – Hello’s the word nowadays. JOE – You’re saying goodbye all the time, every minute you live. Because that’s what life is, just a long, long goodbye! Get out of here now, get out and leave me alone! SILVA – Okay, but I think you’re weeping like Jesus and it makes me sick. . . Remember, kid, what Socrates said,  “Hemlock’s a damn bad substitute for a twenty-six-ounce glass a beer!”

  Joe is left alone. He looks out the window. Children call out in the streets. Joe grabs his small suitcase and goes to the door, looks around the empty flat; slips a hand to his forehead in a mocking salute to the empty room, then thrusts the hand in his pocket and goes slowly out. Children’s laughter and scattered shouting float up to the room—to which director Ada Friedman is inspired to add children’s voices intoning from a vanished world, “Olly-olly-oxen-free!  Olly-olly-oxen-free!”

  That got ‘em, and perhaps that final mocking salute to  the past. A final farewell in “Billy Elliott,” perhaps writer, director, or even Jamie Bell himself—is familiar with Tennessee’s “The Long Goodbye.” Or perhaps, simply, these moments of “long goodbyes” are imbedded in our psyche, Billy leaving his home, probably forever, on his way to London to study at the Royal Ballet Academy, his granny “I’ve could’ve been a great dancer,” hugging him, then pushing him away. Billy pausing at the door, looking around at the home he’ll never see again, taking me back to that parting in “The Long Goodbye.”

  Curtis bursts into the men’s dressing room beneath Royce Hall, standing over me as I remove make-up, announcing in his growling low-pitched voice, “With the exception of Stanley Glenn’s Richard the Second last season, this was the best performance I’ve seen at U.C.L.A.” Cynical sneers from everyone (so I imagine.) but all I care about is Curtis’s approval.

  His own triumph in 170 followed soon after in Tennessee Williams’ one act, “Auto-Da-Fé,” playing Eloi, a frail man in his late thirties, a gaunt, ascetic type with feverish dark eyes, the neurotic son of Mme. Duvenet, played by Beverly Churchill, an especially elegant actress who was to have a good career at U.C.L.A., fading into the mist after graduation.

  The story evolves from an apparently “unclean” photograph Eloi has received in the mail. Finally, he burns down the house, his mother screaming, “Fire! Fire! The house is on fire, on fire, the house is on fire!”

  Curtis is brilliant; the audience, spellbound.

  To celebrate after these and other performances, Anne would drive us—Curtis, Dean, and Dean’s friend, George Ditmar to a bar on the beach in Santa Monica—a beer joint,  Judy Garland’s “Somewhere, Over the Rainbow” inevitably playing on the jukebox; a generally mixed crowd, predominantly male; a kind of bootleg gay bar, which meant it  might be infested with vice squad waiting to lure anyone they could to jail. South of Muscle Beach and the Santa Monica pier, the area was called “Crystal Beach,” a run-down collection of buildings, a moldy bath house, locker room for changing clothes—outside, the smell of salted, buttered popcorn mixed with that of the salty sea.

  How we missed Crystal Beach in later years! wonderfully untamed before they tore down the bath house and hot dog concessions, before parking lots wiped it all away; signs posted, proclaiming NO to every imaginable activity normally associated with pleasurable pursuits. NO alcohol, NO music. . .

  Ah! remember well those glorious Crystal Beach summer days when you could get smashed on beer and run out of the bar into the ocean to frolic in the surf; and if clever enough, make love beneath the waves.

  This calls to mind Wyatt Cooper who, in 1949, lived in a gloomy apartment above Muscle Beach. Wyatt was a theatre major, but we didn’t trouble ourselves to discover much about each other then; so Wyatt’s real ambitions to become “author and screenwriter” were unknown to us.

  Wyatt Emory Cooper was born in Quitman, Mississippi in 1927. When still a child, the family moved to New Orleans. He was, as I remember him, a gentle and elegant man, proud of his Southern heritage; and no reason to think he changed much during ensuing years. Our paths would cross again. In the 1950s he lived in West Hollywood where he became friends with Dorothy Parker and husband Alan Campbell, living nearby, writing a “widely-read profile of Dorothy Parker for Esquire.” A brief stint in New York finds him appearing in “The Strong Are Lonely.” It ran one week.

  I last ran into Wyatt in 1962 in the unemployment line on Santa Monica boulevard after my summer in the “Pilgrimage Play.” He had written the screenplay for “The Chapman Report,” he said. At a barely furnished apartment in West Hollywood, he told me, “They butchered my screenplay—they completely ignored the thrust, in effect, censoring it.” Several weeks later I saw Wyatt riding on Sunset Boulevard near Schwab’s Drugstore in a vintage black limousine with a lady, her faced veiled. Gloria Vanderbilt, as it turned out. He married her on December 24 in 1963.

  From his 1975 memoir: “In my sons’ youth their promise, their possibilities, my stake in immortality is invested . . .” Anderson Cooper is today fulfilling that promise.

3

  Dean Hoffmann, perhaps 27, is a transfer from U.S.C. where he majored in engineering. He allowed me access to his charms with some reluctance one night in his home in Huntington Park where he lived with his mother (absent for the evening). He hesitated a little before we jumped into his upper bunk bed, saying he felt like a roué, even though we were only six years apart. How could I resist his muscular, well-formed body, his wide set brown laughing eyes? (We both agreed, Dean never should’ve served asparagus with dinner.)

  Anne called Dean, “Bone Structure.” He is story teller, rapid-fire raconteur. On campus, spending time with Dean means spending time with his close friend, George Ditmar—indeed older than all of us—a psychology major, tall, thin sardonic cynosure with barbed tongue. We gather most mornings before class beneath small arches fronting the Quad just outside Royce Hall 170. Afternoon tea klatches in Kerckhoff Hall become a ritual. Ditmar is cynical resident critic saying clever things. More than once outside a campus phone booth, I’ve waited for Dean as he chatters away with George on the other end.

  George and I manage a baroque encounter of our own one overcast afternoon on the beach at Point Dume while the others have gone off for hamburgers and cokes. He lives in the valley across the street from the Adhor Milk Farm. His mother calls me his “little man” but our fling is short-lived.

  Dean loves telling stories of operas—especially to the ignorant. Anne doesn’t care a hoot for opera, but Curtis and I allow him to sizzle on, mostly for my benefit—the still wet-behind-the ears neophyte. Ditmar is sure Anne is in love with Dean, no matter how disinterested she seems. Curtis knows better. (Surely, it must be Curtis Anne was in love with—if she loves anyone at the time. Their lifelong friendship perhaps confirms this.)

  Dean confesses he got exposed to opera during the war in New York City at the Metropolitan Opera through “Astor Bar connections.” I picture him, striking, handsome ensign in white and gold naval dress, taking favors from admirers he meets at this watering hole for closeted servicemen and women. But it’s clear, current intimate encounters are to remain secret.

  Anne tries to force me to confront myself with what I really want out of life—to take charge, serve my ambitions by leading, not following, but I’m reluctant—too caught up in the adventure. Revelations materialize in commonplace settings—mostly at Kerckhoff Hall tea klatches, and are consumed eagerly. My offerings are meager.

  Al Supowitz makes an occasional appearance, regaling us with humorous, impromptu tales: a movie review of “Naked Jungle” starring Charlton Heston. Al summarizes the plot—the populace is threatened by man-eating ants on the march. “And here they come again—The Mara-bunta!” he proclaims with reverberating sounds. His future as Alvin Sargent, screenwriter, will garner him Academy Awards. He spins out an irresistible shaggy dog story—rambling through an elaborate tale of “Gloop Makers” aboard a large ship as they test the mysteriously named “Gloop” by sending it through a series of Rube Goldberg tubes. On it rattles and clacks, finally reaching its destination, the side of the ship where it shoots out from the tubes and drops into the ocean. The “Gloop-Makers” listen expectantly, cheering their success as they hear from below the sound from the ocean, GLOOP!  GLOOP!  GLOOP! (Alas! today Al is totally incommunicado, after  his beloved wife died several years ago.)

  Dean and Ditmar on ballet and opera; Curtis on German Lieder and pianist Gieseking (Walter Winchell calls Gieseking a nat-zee). Curtis has seen the marvelously versatile Laurence Olivier at the Old Vic playing on the same night the tragic Oedipus, followed by farcical Mr. Puff in “The Critic.” Curtis, soldier student in a college near London after the war, got to see all Old Vic productions starring Olivier and Ralph Richardson. The Old Vic’s glory days.

  Sharing more wonders, Anne, Dean, and I cram into Curtis’s small rented room in Westwood, listening to 78 rpms; for the first time hearing Jussi Bjoerling sing Nessun Dorma; Marian Anderson’s dusky contralto filling the room with Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Sometimes it causes me to tremble . . . tremble . . . tremble.

NEXT – Theatre Department’s faculty, and more on-stage minor miracles