Looking ahead to May 25, 2024—John, I have three stories in my repertoire I’ve been saving all these years for that one special person. Not Mister Grumble, not Mamoulian, certainly not Steve Gyllenhaal. You. You read the first one, the story of how I met agent-turned-producer Michael Linnit and had my first orgasm at the St Regis. This is the second. (The third is the story of how I got my job as Night Solfeggist at ASCAP. I’ll tell that one this summer.)
My mother at 19 looked just like this movie star when the Japs occupied Manila. You figure out that part of her story.
I’m writing it now when I have a few minutes here and there. Check back between when you finish up with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and before Glyndebourne. I’ll start it on your birthday. I’m still in love with you and want to give you nice things. Mahal kita, mahal ko.
It happened one evening in July, 1973. I was 18. I had just gotten that job as night solfeggist at ASCAP only a couple of weeks earlier, which is in itself a very interesting story I’ll have to tell you one of these days. Only now let’s get back to me walking down Broadway from 63rd. I loved walking home to the Village after work on a summer evening, when all of midtown was still buzzy with life and good times. After the night shift, some of my fellow solfeggists would go across the street to O’Neal’s Balloon to drink with the fancy Lincoln Center crowd (here’s my own favorite table showing up in Annie Hall), but I got a bigger kick being below 54th with all the theater people. On this particular evening I was approaching 46th…and right there on the corner of 46th stood a really good-looking guy, tall and blond and nicely dressed, who seemed to be scoping out one by one all the passers-by. For some reason he lit upon me. He got my attention. Then he asked me if I knew where a good jazz club could be found, the way you might ask any passer-by about a mailbox or the way to the Empire State Building… I told him I was new in town. Then he suggested we (“we”!) buy a newspaper and sit down somewhere and check the listings together. Oh, I was game. My first New York adventure! We went across the street to Howard Johnson’s where he bought me a hamburger and told me about himself. He told me he was an agent. He’d just put his client on the plane that day—his client having just been on The Dick Cavett Show promoting his new film, a comedy-horror flick that’s now a classic—and he himself was going back to London in the morning. He told me his client’s name, which I recognized at once, and then he gave me his card, which I kept for years until I gave it to an actor friend who said he was “looking for a UK rep”… Then he asked me about myself, all the nice polite questions a man’ll ask you beforehand… But we also talked about show business, shows, show music. I told him I liked Man of La Mancha. Having found no jazz clubs worth going to that night, we left HoJo’s and walked over to 5th Avenue, where we strolled back to his hotel room at the St Regis. I was ready for anything, expecting nothing. Even when he pulled the line, “Let’s get out of these hot clothes, shall we?” with that gorgeous limey accent of his, I still wasn’t sure we were on the road to making it…until we started making it. At that point we hadn’t even kissed. But oh, how he made up for it! I wasn’t a virgin, but here was the first man I ever slept with who actually knew how to take his time pleasuring a woman. By the time I was under him, gazing down at the back of his incredibly sexy legs, an electric shock went through me, and for the first time in my life, I orgasmed. So that’s the story of my first New York hookup. We parted in the morning, wishing each other well, and I even made it back to the boarding house in time for breakfast. A perfect sexual encounter with a happy ending.
I’m telling you this, John, because what Michael Linnit made me feel that night is nothing compared to how you made me feel when you conducted Elgar’s Bach Fantasia in Sydney three years ago. I’m not kidding. I had just fallen in love with you when I saw you shimmy to a Jule Styne tune in some video… But this time (it was about 2 weeks later) there was only you and the music on the radio. I’m not even crazy about Elgar, I was waiting for your Prokofiev. But I was so keyed up—for the past couple of weeks I had been vibrating with desire for you—that when a certain chord was played in the Elgar, a wave rolled through me, it was just so yummy… But that wasn’t all. As I lay there gasping, a little voice in my head went, You fool! Don’t you remember who’s doing this? And so I came again, this orgasm coming over me like a wave meant to drown…and I reached for you and knocked the lamp off the night table.
One day I’ll tell you about the other times (Vaughan Williams, Richard Rodgers). But I just wanted to let you know now how much you’ve meant to me, how much you still mean, even when you’re not wearing full dress.
The scene pictured/heard below is one of the reasons Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story (20th Century Studios, 2021) is the film version that resonates with me more than any other film version that ever was, or will be.
Above the Sharks: The soundtrack version of the anthem of Puerto Rican independentistas, “La Borinqueña”. And here’s the same anthem in a sweeter version
For one thing, the music remains intact. In fact, the music is better arranged and better placed in WSS2021 than in the 1961 version. More on that later.
For another, the script—meaning the dialogue, character arc, exposition, etc—is far, far better in the hands of Tony Kushner, not only a brilliant scenarist, but a stone New Yorker of my generation, and one of the few writers who knows how to take a big chunk of America in all its complexity and give it back to us in digestible form, no mean feat.
I have other reasons to like Kushner. He scripted the role my son’s godmother was most famous for—the original Angel in his stage work about the AIDS crisis (AIDS took the life of the man I was in love with, in ’91) Angels In America (picture of Sigrid Wurschmidt and Robert DiMatteo here). Here’s a sample of his chewy good dialogue. It comes right after the Sharks break into the anthem of the independentistas and exit stage right, to whistles and applause among the vecinos:
Lt Schrank (to the Jets): We’re outnumbered, boys. Thousands more are on their way…and once they’re here, they pop out kids like crazy, am I right? … Work with me, fellas! Or they’re going to drive you off your turf! … Most of the white guys who grew up in this slum climbed their way out of it. Irish, Italians, Jews… Nowadays their descendants live in nice houses and drive nice cars and date nice girls you’d want to marry. Your dads or your grandads stayed put, drinkin’ and knockin’ up some local piece who gave birth to you—the last of the Can’t-Make-It Caucasians. (beat) What’s a gang without its terrain, its turf? You’re a month or two away from finding out, one step ahead of the wrecking ball. And in this uncertain world, the only thing you can count on is me. I’m here to keep the civil peace until the last building falls. And if you boys make trouble on my turf, Riff, hand to heart, you’re headed to an upstate prison cell for a very long time. By the time you get out, this will be a shiny new neighborhood of rich people in beautiful apartments…with Puerto Rican doormen to chase trash like you away.
Okay, as exposition it’s a lee-tle too much on the nose and just a lee-tle bit too prescient. But yeah, in a little over two hundred words—really, the first big speech in this let’s face it Shakespearean play—Kushner the playwright has given us the genuine patter of a New Yorker.
My bonny John was 30 when he recorded, with the orchestra that bears his name, this achingly tender theme.
I saw The Bad and the Beautiful (MGM, 1952) for the first time in New York when I was 20, at one of those great cinema art houses, the Little Carnegie I think. Anyone remember that fabulous nosh pit in the lobby of the Little Carnegie? It was set up to resemble an outdoor Parisian cafe, complete with wrought tables and chairs, painted scenery, etc… Here after the show my date treated me to a glass of cabernet and a flaky meat pasty, the leftovers of which the waiter wrapped up for me in a square of foil he molded into the shape of a swan.
What do you do when you’re a passionate actress still in love with a wounding bastard who’s a screen genius? You make the damn movie.
As for Bad+Beautiful: Cast headed by Lana Turner, Kirk Douglas, Gloria Grahame, Dick Powell, Barry Sullivan, Gilbert Roland, Walter Pigeon. Vincent Minnelli helmed. MGM, 1952 (trailer here). 5 Oscar wins. To feel the full effect, get your heart stomped on by a Hollywood louse before viewing.
“The Bad and the Beautiful“ Soft Lights and Sweet Music, album Classic Angela Morley Arrangements The John Wilson Orchestra John Wilson, conductor Vocalion, 2002
*Oscar-winning transsexual composer-arranger Angela Morley (1924-2009) has quite a story herself, which maybe I’ll get to in another posting. For now, here’s a 1977 article in the Independent that should whet your interest.
With 2 meals a day included it came out to $33 a week. You read that right. A place in Greenwich Village, breakfast and dinner, for thirty-three dollars a week. Try to imagine the mischief I got into with all the money I had left over from my weekly paycheck from my first job as a solfeggist at ASCAP, that it’s summer in NYC, it’s 1973, I’m eighteen, cute as a button and old enough to drink, and gorgeous men are everywhere. And imagine too that I’m singing a song (in my heart and sometimes aloud while bounding down the street) that every American girl of my generation inspired by Julie Andrews sang:
I have confidence in confidence alone
Besides which you see I have con-fi-dence in meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
The Queen of Broadway Bernadette Peters entices conductor John Mauceri with her many, many assets, courtesy of Leonard Bernstein and the great lyric team of Adolph Green and Betty Comden. “I Can Cook, Too” from On the Town. Fun starts here at 4:45.
I'm a pot of joy for a hungry boy,
Baby, I'm cookin' with gas.
Oh, I'm a gumdrop,
A sweet lollipop,
A brook trout right out of the brook,
And what's more, baby, I can cook!
Above Peters and Mauceri: Nancy Walker from the original Broadway cast sings this showstopping number.
In 1944, Frank Loesser wrote “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” for his wife, Lynn Garland, and himself (Loesser often introduced himself as the “evil of two Loessers”) to sing at their housewarming party at the Navarro Hotel in New York. They sang the song to indicate to guests that it was time to leave.
Garland wrote that after the first performance, “We become instant parlor room stars. We got invited to all the best parties for years on the basis of ‘Baby’. It was our ticket to caviar and truffles. Parties were built around our being the closing act.” In 1948, after years of performing the song, Loesser sold it to MGM for the 1949 romantic comedy Neptune’s Daughter. Garland was furious. She wrote, “I felt as betrayed as if I’d caught him in bed with another woman.”
This picture’s from the 90s. WhenIlivedhereinthe70s, the boutique was a kosher grocery that stayed open till 11pm. Above: Ella!
From the 1925 revue Garrick Gaieties. The song was introduced in the Gaieties by Sterling Holloway (eventually a Rocky andBullwinkle stalwart) and June Cochran.
Saw this first run in New York in 1976 with my boyfriend, another huge Brian De Palma fan. The loopiest, nuttiest romance in all of moviedom. In fact I like this movie better than Vertigo, another nutzoid Bernard Herrmann-scored love story: this one’s much more sexually transgressive, always a sure-fire turn-on for me.
Above Cantara and her lust: 
What do you do when you’re a passionate actress still in love with a wounding bastard who’s a screen genius? You make the damn movie.
Above Tim Curry, 
Above my old abode: 
Above Peters and Mauceri: Nancy Walker from the original Broadway cast sings 
This picture’s from the 90s. When I lived here in the 70s, the boutique was a kosher grocery that stayed open till 11pm. Above: Ella!
"I'll Be Dead Before You Break My Heart" 