HAD I NOT BEEN BORN ME...

THE BACKUP PLAN I WISH I HAD would be to have been able to arrive here on Earth on earth 9 years earlier than I did; become a guy who grew to manhood with a receding hairline, wore hats to hide his partial baldness; donned gloves in his performances, because he thought he had hideous hands; was a song-and-dance man; had a romantic attraction to death; found it impossible to practice the fine are of fidelity, in that there were too many beautiful women in his world with their grace and style and intelligence and mystery to live up to the demand of monogamy; most were dancers and actresses; and in the world where he worked they were the women he met. 

 He appreciated other things too: jazz; nightclubs; vaudeville jokes, the New York Mets; Fred Astaire; children; boxing and football and air hockey; New York Post headlines; his daughter; his cat; and, of course, cooking good food and bringing it to perfection; and while he was in the kitchen, inside of his head, he was creating songs like Steam Heat and Big Spender and Bye Bye Blackbird. 

 His rehearsal hall was up on the 11th floor of 850 Seventh Avenue at 56th Street, around the corner from the Carnegie Deli, where he'd have lunch almost every day with friends, mostly writers like Paddy Chayefsky and Herb Gardner, trading trading lines, drinking coffee, smoking tons of cigarettes; then go back and look down at the sleazy hamlet he liked to call his own, the one square mile of earth he cared for more than any other, with all the glitter and neon; and watch folks out for a stroll, thinking that every one of them must have some kind of story to tell, harder and meaner and more exciting than the fairy-tale Broadway of Damon Runyon.  He once said, "I see a hooker on the corner, and I can only think there's some kind of story there. I mean, she was once six years old."  

 Quite simply, he wanted to be the best at what he did.

 He arrived on the 23rd day of June in 1927, born in Chicago, Illinois, the second youngest of six children, moved to the City of New York with the ambition of being the next Fred Astaire.  In the '50s and the '60s; when he was between women; he was usually engulfed by a bleakly romantic sense of loss; no male friends were as important as women or the possibility of love.  He then met one woman, and was swept away; one who combined humor, vulnerability, toughness, and sensuality, in shows he designed, choreographed, and directed; one of which was called Damn Yankees.  

 Her name was Gwen Verdon and his name was Bob Fosse. 

 They married, then separated in the  1970's, mostly due to his obvious flaws constant infidelities, but never divorced; and she would forever remain at the center of his soul as his inspiration for every venture after that, from Sweet Charity to Chicago, where she helped him develop and crystallize a jazz dance style that was immediately recognizable, exuding a stylized cynical sexuality of turned-in knees, sideways shuffles, rolled shoulders, and jazz hands.   Even though it is impossible to separate the two of them, he was also a fine director of other women.  Liza Minnelli and Anne Reinking did their best work for him; he was the first one to recognize that Jessica Lange could be a superb actress when he saw her in the movie King Kong and would eventually cast her as the Angel of Death in All That Jazz, which was appropriate for Fosse, who else could have imagined death as a bewitching  women, one who could invite him into her loving arms when his time came to die?

 Fosse was 47 years old in 1974, when he had his first ferocious heart attack, was in critical condition in bed, trapped  in a ganglia of tubes and wires. He was competitive, and cared, perhaps too much, about the way he stood in relation to other directors; and because he worked so hard, and because he knew how much pain was involved in the making of a show or a movie, Fosse generally despised critics, believing that their sensibilities were blunted, so much so, that he thought of them as unable to respond to amazing theatrical moments; that they were responsible for the failure of his movie Star 80, which was about the death of the former Playboy Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratton; and said, "Maybe all they want is shit.  Maybe it's over for people like me."  

 He was still working at the end; trying to choose between a movie about Walter Winchell, a movie version of Chicago, or something completely new, based upon his experiences in the Second World War.  He had gone to war and was a 17-year-old sailor working in an entertainment unit in the South Pacific; was with the first Americans to enter Japan at the end of the war and remained horrified at the scale of destruction in Tokyo and the stupid brutal way so many American soldiers treated the Japanese, particularly the women, and would one day say, "That was the first time I was really ashamed to be an American."  The contrast between the idealism of fighting the war and the morally corrosive realities of victory was a splendid setup for a Fosse movie, but he was uneasy about it, "That world is gone, that music, the way people were...Most of the country wouldn't know what I was talking about."

 He closed out of town on the 23rd day of September in 1987 at the age of 60.  Gwen Verdon was with him when he lay down for the final time on the grass of a small park in Washington D.C. after suffering another attack to his heart; was sent to the George Washington University Hospital; gave his final goodbye with her by his side; they had both had been there to see a revival of Sweet Charity at the National Theater.  His ashes were then taken by his wife and daughter to Quogue, New York, where they were scattered into the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, with the two of them watching, as his remains were gently swept out to sea.
      
 Toying with the notion of his own death, he had created a semi-autobiographical film, All That Jazz, about a womanizing, drug-addicted, choreographer-director; which was, in reality, not so much about his attraction to death, but the impossibility of fidelity; and it became his masterpiece, winning the  Palm d'Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980; he also garnered an Academy Award as Best Director for his second film Cabaret over Francis Ford Coppala for The Godfather; captured two Tony Awards for Pippin and Sweet Charity; and polished-off one Emmy Award for Liza with a Z...  

 Not a bad track record a balding guy who didn't like his hands all that much...  

IN THE CROSS-CUTTING OF MEMORY...

I LEARNED EARLY ON that there were many things about the written word which dazzled me.  I would read in parked cars while riding with my parents, in my back yard when I finished mowing the lawn, inside a tent when I went camping, in those jagged hours between dawn and getting up for the day and eating breakfast and going to school.  I was enamoured by Frank Yerby, and African-American historical novelist, who wrote The Foxes of Harrow when I as ten-years old, and The Golden Hawk when I was twelve;  the Italian/English novelist, Raphael Sabitini, who penned memorable epics filled with adventure and romance,  with titles like Scaramouche and Captain Blood, when I was fourteen; as well as Graham M. Dean, who delighted my mind with novels of lesser note, like Herb Kent, West Point Cadet and Slim Evans and His Horse Lightening when I turned fifteen; and became completely absorbed by a writer born in North Dakota when I reached sixteen; a man whose daughter asked him one day, "Daddy, why do you write so fast?" And he answered, "Because I want to see how the story turns out!"  His name was Louis L'Amour and he wrote about Hopalong Cassidy and a family named the Sacketts and Son of a Wanted Man and The Broken Gun, and other great adventure stories of the wild-wild west. Other than playing the game of baseball, the written word knocked my socks off...

   ...So the older I got, the more I read, and the more I read, the more bounteous my mind became, humbled by the writings of Ulysses and The Great Gatsby and Of Mice and Men and Fahrenheit 451, with names like Jane Austin and Harper Lee and Mark Twain and Charlotte Bronte and Miguel De Cervantes and Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald; and I then became hooked with the reading of contemporary stories by Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Coe and John Cheever; as well as journalists like Murray Kempton and Jimmy Cannon and Robert Ruark and Westbrook Pegler; I carefully read every word that Jimmy Breslin wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, hoping that one day I, too, could write like that.  In the best of all possible worlds, of course, this would have continued on forever. 

   And then they came, ennobled at first, even informative, folk like Edward R. Murrow and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite and Frank McGee, who began to appear on our televisions sets, updating us on what was happening in the nation and around the world, and we Americans put our books aside to give them a look and a listen.  

   It took awhile before the others began to bob-up like dead fish in a polluted sea, several decades, as a matter of fact; the yahoo crusaders, wonks and dweebs full of superficial snark, informing us that they were fair and balanced, that we were not smart enough to understand the truth of what was happening around us.  The power of mass media had now arrived in the form of bully tyrants like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity; telling us that they had the fixins' to fix everything, with heart-stopping reality about what the future may hold if we made the wrong choices. On the flip side, we were then urged to lean forward by the hot air specialists over at MS NBC, with the always grouchy Chris Matthews and ever giddy Rachael Maddow, beseeching us to smother the personal chaos that O'Reilly and Hannity were spouting, to subordinate it, erase it, because they wanted to douse us their own interpretation of straight stuff.  Obviously, in spite of the specifics, this great glob of bum steered information from either side consumed us.    

   So we allowed our reading habits to diminish and watched the buffoons on the tube more frequently, newspapers vanished, bookstores became filled with commissars of opinion instead of literature full of adventure and love and daring thoughts, and long-form investigative journalism began to disappear.  In this bleak house, nothing else mattered except being right and dismissing anyone one the other side.  Not laughter. Not love. Certainly not the simple pleasure of reading a book on a summer's afternoon. 

   There was no longer room in this dark vision for an Emily Dickinson or Jack London or John Steinbeck on the list of best-sellers; that was now reserved for the likes of Glen Beck and Ann Coulter and Donald Trump.  The written word was now devoid of fantasy or magic, no awe in the presence of human beauty, no desire for spiritual union.  We read nothing of decent husbands and loving mothers, of families that have triumphed over poverty, of those with intelligent hearts and pride in tact.

   Yet, there remained folks out there, in the millions, who wished to read something other than this fiercely correct world of rules and anathemas; those who liked to dance at the midnight hour, or listen to the blues, or feel the awe of just having a full-out heart-busting good time; who were never attuned to an airless, sunless world with out joy or wonder or fantasy or enchantment.  

   In the end, however, every tyrant fails, and perhaps that means we can all get around to switching off the tube and return to reading finely-spun classics again; or just spend a dandy afternoon with Louie L'Amour, by flipping through The Cherokee Trail or The Comstock Load... 

I WAS BORN AND REARED...

IN THE ONCE-PRISTINE CITY of Denver, Colorado with the majestic Rocky Mountain Range as its backdrop, which held luminous elegant rivers filled with trout and Aspen trees that made an about-face each and every Fall from green to a golden tan and flaring red, and where a summer's rain could bloom against  a sky of blue with the sun blazing brightly, a regular Utopian paradise for any child; but the best-loved place I have ever lived and worked, is the long skinny island called Manhattan, a mysterious mixture infused of past and present, of memory and myth.  I have an irrational love for the place, even if it is a city of daily annoyances, occasional terrors, hourly tests of conviction and audacity; a city where something always surprises you, something fills you with new admiration and bewilderment, a borough that is open to all.

   You can stand on any Avenue and watch the passing show, as comely women saunter up and down Fifth-Avenue; or take a hike over to Times Square, the crossroads of the world, where Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach once played at a place called Birdland; then walk on over to Forty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the great midtown center of the diamond trade, filled with rich Orthodox Jews and the Hasidim; as well as sauntering from about Thirty-eighth Street and up toward Fifty-fifth Street on the West Side near the Hudson River, where you once descended into a grungy mess known as Hell's Kitchen, invaded by an Irish mob led by a man by the name of Jimmy Coonan, and filled with pizza counters, streetwalkers, and drugs.

   There had been calls for reform for a long time, when two Mayors stepped up to the plate, David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani.  The clean up began, of course, with the attempt to save Times Square, starting at Forty-second Street.  At first, the changes were small.  The Port Authority was expanded, forcing regiments of vagrants off the premises, and The Deuce, as it is called, was becoming the visual symbol of changes that were taking place across the entire city. Welfare hotels closed, along with the porno shops.  The Disney people announced grand plans for the decayed old New Amsterdam Theater, built in 1903, once home of the Ziegfeld Follies.  Soon newspapers were running many stories of things to come.  

   Around the time that Disney and others were transforming Forty-second Street, similar changes were under way up in Harlem on 125 Street.  The former basketball star Magic Johnson opened a thirteen-screen multiplex, video stores opened, and record stores, and Ben & Jerry's ice cream, along with clothing stores and restaurants.  For Harlem, as for many other parts of New York, the plague years seemed to have ended; and way down on Fourteenth Street, a place once known for derelicts and knife artists, Union Square was for many years a spooky place, in the 1990's, it too changed. Barnes & Noble opened its flagship store, excellent restaurants abounded on the edge of the square and on its side street. Once more New Yorkers could loll in the sun or read on benches or sleep on the grass of a small park.

  Like many New Yorkers, each day something always caught me off-balance, something else made me more inquisitive, and I tried to live the time of my life as fully as possible.  But there was simply never enough of it to know all I wanted to know or to see all I wanted to see; like to attend a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, to stroll in Central Park for as long as I wished, or marvel at watching the Yankees play the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium, the house that Ruth built; or climbing-up the steps inside of The Statue of Liberty, taking more time to stare at the Empire State Building and the Chrysler and browse through book-upon-book at the Strand on Broadway and Twelfth, or walk about in Chinatown, then sit in the darkness of a theater in Shubert Alley, the geographical center of Broadway, in absolute awe at the talent I saw on stage; to surrender myself to the city's magic at the Guggenheim or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then hop aboard a New York Harbor Cruise, to see all of the spires and the bridges; to stroll over to Second Avenue, between St. Mark's Place and Ninth Street, to the place where the Ottendorfer Branch of the New York Public Library was once housed, which is still there, in its rich terra-cotta glory, a place  whose doors first opened in 1884, built by a German American named Oswald Ottendorfer, a man who truly used his wealth to help others; and near the end of the day, with the sun heading out to New Jersey and the sky suddenly lavender, head back downtown again, to the place where the city was created...

   And when I arrived there, I wished that I could hear the voices from the past and those who spoke them, that I could somehow wander back in time and witness those who marked their departures for the City of New York; the Jews and Italians and Belgians and Poles and Irish and Germans who traveled across land to the ports of Europe and then on to the creepy Atlantic and the distant harbor of New York; to walk with my Mom and see the amazement in her eyes,  as she first set foot on Ellis Island and laid eyes on the Statue of Liberty; to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants play just one more time; and mingle with Peter Stuyvesant and the Knickerbockers as they worshiped at Trinity Church; or meet Robert Fulton, who did not live to see the enormous changes that came to New York in the wake of his Steamboat. To sit in Greenwich Village listening to Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs and assimilate the birth of the Beatniks; to hear ragtime for the first time and see D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation at a Bowery theater back in 1915, then boo at what I had just seen, because it was the greatest recruiting device for a newly-minted Klu Klux Klan; or go back to a time when there were no electric lights, no typewriters, no telephones, and no telegraph, and I could imagine watching Horace Greeley and Stephen Crane and Edgar Allen Poe scribbling magnificent words in candlelight; or witness Abraham Lincoln  give his Cooper Union speech in February of 1860, before he had become the President of the United States.

   Yet, my favorite memory of all memories is that of sharing the time I spent with my Daughter; of walking arm-in-arm down a rain-soaked street, an umbrella hovering over our heads to protect us from the falling rain, the glistening street lights of night guiding our way, as we sang our favorite Broadway tunes with smiles on our faces and laughter on our lips; to watch her give a solo performance in an off-Broadway play at the Samuel Beckett Theater on Forty-second Street; or dine with her at a small restaurant on Second Avenue called The Tavern; to look across the water as we sat on a bench that ran along the west side of Battery Park City watching small blocks of ice moving long the river on a winter afternoon with a friend by the name of Barbara; to listen to music together from Evita and Chicago while lounging by the pool in her East Hampton home; or to just sit silently, watching her in wonderment, astonished that I could have such a breathtaking person as my daughter and thinking that the exuberance of the city I am ardent about has been incorporated into the soul of the Daughter I am wild  about... 

ON THE DAY MY INNOCENCE WAS BLOWN-AWAY...

A FRAIL SNOW was falling outside, as I lackadaisically made my way down an aisle inside of a Walgreen's drug store in the city of Denver to pick up some diapers for my seven-month old daughter.  I didn't have a care in the world. At age 27, I had lived through World War Two, gotten married, fathered one child, was a fanatic about the game of baseball, loved downing waterfalls of beer, adored my wife and daughter, and was congratulating myself on the fact that I had finally overcome a lingering cold.  

  Having paid for my merchandise, I paused to take a peek at a display television set while wrapping a scarf around my neck, readied myself to depart the store; and then the program was interrupted and the CBS announcer, Walter Cronkite, came on, his face grave, to say that the President of the United States had been shot in Dallas. Everything stopped.  In his blunt, crusty voice, the famed news anchor said that the details were sketchy.  The regular program resumed; the kids in the store went back to playing, while the adults slowly began to gather around the TV, then stood watching in stone-cold silence; and a few moments after that, Cronkite returned, removed his glasses, this time there was a tear in his eye and his voice seemed bewildered. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the President of the United States, was dead.

  I recall whirling in pain and fury, slamming the bag full of diapers with my hand, and reeling out into the falling snow. A man of grace, wit, irony, youth, and courage was forever gone. All over the city, hundreds of other human beings were doing the same thing.  Doors slammed and the sobs of disbelief and sorrow began.  Mayhem was everywhere. Oh,my God, they shot the President! And They Killed President Kennedy!  And He's been shot dead! Near the corner of my house, I saw a neighbor crying beneath a tree. Another neighbor sat on a curb, sobbing into her hands in the falling snow. Men burst into tears, children were running with the news and bawling women everywhere.  It was a scale of grief I'd never seen before in any place on the face of the Earth.

  Fifty springtime's that have come and gone since that Godawful day, and for those of us who were young then, that day still lives on in vivid detail. We remember who we were in love with.  What we were wearing.  We recall images on television screens, black-and-white and grainy: Lee Harvey Oswald dying over and over again as Jack Ruby steps out of a crowd inside of a police station to blow him away; Jacqueline Kennedy's extraordinary wounded grace; Caroline's befuddled eyes and John-John saluting.  We remember the drum rolls and the riderless horse.  

   And now, several generations have come to full bloom with no memory at all of the Kennedy years; only that the Kennedy is the name of an airport or a boulevard or a high school; while I still remember him smiling in that analytical way, at once genuine and detached, capable of fondness and contempt, the wind tossing his hair. Certainly, the psychic wound of his sudden death appears to have healed and the mistakes and flaws of the Kennedy presidency are now obvious. Those who hated him on November 21, 1963, continue to hate him now, and time itself has altered his once-glittering presence.

  Nonetheless...

  Understanding that Camelot did not exist and that Jack Kennedy was not a perfect man, I still remain moved almost to tears when a glimpse of him appears on the television or I hear his voice coming from a radio?  I've talked to my daughter about him after she's seen me turning away from some televised image of Jack or take a sudden breath of air, or flick away away a half-formed tear. I can almost hear him speaking from the past about how the torch had been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in his century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace - and I'm gone.

 After all had changed from the world I knew in 1963, after the murder in Dallas and after the war in Vietnam; long after the ghettos of Watts and Newark and Detroit had exploded into violence; after Robert Kennedy had been killed and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; after Woodstock and Watergate and the resignation of Nixon; after the Beatles had arrived and departed and broken up; after John Lennon had been killed; after Ford, and Carter and Reagan had given way to the Bush dynasty with Clinton sandwiched in between, I was driving alone alone in a rental car late one afternoon through the state of Texas, on my way to Galveston.  

 It had been 40 years after Jack Kennedy had died, and I was moving through vast, empty stretches of unfamiliar land when my engine blew.  I pulled over - and quickly discovered that the car would no longer move.  I was alone in the emptiness of Texas. Trucks roared by, some cars, but nobody stopped.  In the distance, I spotted a small farm house.  A dusty Ford pickup truck was parked to the side.  It was getting dark, and for a moment, I considered turning back. Feeling uneasy, I walked toward it along a potholed dirt road.  

 And then the door opened.  A beefy man in a Stetson hat and old cowboy boots stood there glaring at me as I came closer.  He squinted and then asked me what I wanted.  I told him I had car trouble and needed to phone a car repair shop.  He again stared at me for a moment and then asked me if I first wanted something to drink.  I glanced past him into the house.  On the wall there two pictures.  One of the man standing before me when he was a young. The other photo was of Jack Kennedy.  Water? he asked.  Yes, I said, some water would be fine. 

  He had taken note of me looking at both photos on the wall.  That Jack Kennedy was one hell of a guy, the man said.  I agreed.  He told me to grab a seat before he added, I fought in the Bay of Pigs, the picture of me was taken just before we were sent to Cuba.  He paused.  Would you like a beer instead of water?  I nodded.  After he had offered to make a call to the repair shop to have my car towed; we spent the remainder of the late afternoon and on into early evening talking together and drinking our beer and laughing at our remembrances of the man - of our Jack.  

  He then decided to grill a couple of steaks and asked if I would like to spend the night instead of having to rent a motel room in town.  I said I would like that very much, and we talked and laughed some more; as day finally faded on into night, the two of us seemed to have had grabbed a bit of our lost innocence back for one brief shining moment in our shared memories of the slain President, which seemed to be just fine with the both of us...