From October 2020: This past UK Daylight Savings weekend there was a sizeable rise in the number of visits to my blog, “I’ll Be Dead Before You Break My Heart”, and I attribute this directly to the kindness of some person/s in letting my beloved John Wilson know about that perfect screenshot of him at the Royal Academy of Music. Visitor #1 from the UK was particularly intriguing. Visitor #1 may have started clicking on my postings as early as Friday night, and was almost certainly the same person who came back for more the next night, Saturday, returning for three more hours on Sunday morning. What was most gratifying is that Visitor #1 actually seems to have taken the time to read my postings, especially my more thoughtful ones, the ones where I talk about John and his work in the Classical Repertoire. (Visitor #1 almost certainly was the one who also downloaded my memoir of the nutty Gyllenhaals, which was doubly gratifying.) Whether or not Visitor #1 is the #1 Reader I’ve yearned to capture for 2 1/2 years [now 6 1/2 yrs, ed.], I’m stoked, and I intend to go on writing, and writing better, for John’s sake—but also for The Old Man, Mamoulian’s sake, who once told me, “Love with style, but also with a little sadness for the suffering involved.”
This is still especially for John, my English darling, but also for anyone else who wants to read on and not give me flak for my conclusions. There is no more contentious, infighting body on the face of the earth than the Kennedy researchers, except for The Brontë Society.
Fortunately, I’m not a “Kennedy researcher”. But I remember the Friday lunchtime when President Kennedy was killed in Dallas, and initial memories turn out to be very important in reconstructing what really happened way back then. Even the memory of an eight year-old girl in 4th grade class 900 miles away counts.
So that Friday before Thanksgiving. Mrs Weisberg got a call and told us the President was dead and we went into the library to watch the TV coverage. Like a good police procedural, the suspect was apprehended almost right away, and after that all seemed to proceed as normally as a TV show: bad guy caught, law prevails, life back to normal, only normal+a little mourning (Oh, God! “Salute your father’s coffin, John-John”)+a new head of the country. Which was going to be the same country as always anyway, right?
What a different world that was then. What a bunch of saps those murdering thugs took us for.
But I want to talk about what I saw and heard in the first broadcasts, when the police and newspeople brought out Oswald and informed us that he was 24, an ex-Marine, from New Orleans, well-traveled, the father of two, with a foreign wife. (They got that info pretty fast, didn’t they. Within minutes. This before the internet. Talaga.) My kind of male? I was already interested in boys, I wanted to check him out.
He was strangely resolute in front of the camera. “Did you shoot the President and Officer Tippit?” demanded the newsman.
“No, I did not,” he replied firmly, and I was impressed by his looks, his composure, his educated, non-regionally-accented speech. The boys around me were gathering for a Hate Minute: Of course he did it! Otherwise he’d be jumping up and down hollering his innocence!
But at the age of eight-going-on-nine I had two weird revelations staring at that thin pale face.
One: He knows something.
Two: I’m probably going to marry a man like that.
So by golly, number two came true: A white southener, self-educated, self-composed, brilliant but secretive, an average-looking, average-sized man who could pass for thousands of other average men—
And—an operative of Army Intelligence. I’m looking at my blind bearded baby in front of me right now, grateful the Ruskies didn’t shoot him down on some wintry street in Prague in 1968.
In Part Two I’ll talk about ex-friend Hollywood director Stephen Gyllenhaal, his shockingly idiotic, insulting, slightly treasonous project, and Abraham Bolden, for whom I wrote the screenplay, at his personal request, Bolden: The Untold Story of JFK’s Assassination.
There is a Meredith Willson-John Kennedy connection! It’s this peppy number, which was commissioned by President Kennedy for his Council on Physical Fitness for kids like us to do their daily school calisthenics to. Some people remember this number with affection, many don’t. Robert Preston sang it and the Warner Bros orchestra played it. It’s called “Chicken Fat”. Ten times!
From 2019: Search the term “bottle+rape+scene+dennis+hopper” and you’ll likely be sent to this entire film, my ex-friend Steve Gyllenhaal’s second feature directorial effort (at 42) and Hopper’s purportedly favorite role. Bottle rape at 42:00. There’s a creepy, dreamy, nasty edge in almost all the sex scenes of Steve’s movies, something I think he picked up from David Lynch in imitation of the form—but not the substance—of Lynch’s genius sex-weirdness… Steve, you might remember, directed the 20th episode of the 2nd season of Twin Peaks. But no, nothing of Lynch’s great vision rubbed off on Stephen; ever a journeyman, he was (and I say was, he’s no longer doing feature films, he’s making his bread shooting TED talks nowadays) more in the same bag with those mediocre, cold “auteurs” of his era John Carpenter and David Cronenberg.
If we were still talking I’d probably bring it up, but as he seems to have gone permanently off the rails with his bizarre blog (now defunct) and his equally bizarre 2012 Kickstarter(!) campaign I figure it would be pointless now.
UPDATE 11 Nov 19: Looks like Steve’s getting me in hot water again. Check out these now-archived bizarre reactions to this posting in the Hollywood Babylon group on Facebook. These females and their insulting, sexist, racist remarks impressed me so much I used their names in my latest porn novel.
UPDATE 11 Dec 2023: Lookee what I found still hanging around the internet! A full-scale takedown of me (a rehash of that takedown on the old Gawker) on a fan website dedicated to Jake Gyllenhaal—remember him?—from 2009 called OhNoTheyDidn’t, now archived here. Smelly unclean stuff. And you wonder why I dislike under-educated white girls. The book (really an academic paper, more or less) under discussion is A Poet from Hollywood: Love, Insanity, Stephen Gyllenhaal, and the Creative Processwhich I wrote in 2012.
I only caught this flick on Prime because Peter was in it, and Peter’s the only Gyllenhaal I think I’d actually enjoy having a beer with even now. The last time we met in New York he had just done Jarhead. Maggie was six months pregnant and being fussed over by her mother, Stephen was in the men’s room on his Blackberry talking to his analyst, and Jake was skulking outside the restaurant—we were at Balthazar—wearing a hoodie and hiding in the shadows. It was that kind of family.
Yes, teenage Cantara made out in early 70s Minneapolis with males who looked and dressed exactly like this. Peter Sarsgaard in Lovelace (2013).
One of the first things Peter did, after we were introduced and he gave first Mister Grumble then me a firm friendly handshake, was try to engage us in a conversation about Melungeons. “You know,” he told us mock-confidentially, “Elvis was a Melungeon.” I evinced surprise and interest—I’d never heard the term before, ever—and Peter obviously was about to launch into a carefully-considered patter about Melungeons, when Maggie came over to fetch him. He smiled at us a dazzling smile, excused himself and trotted off with her.
So for now, enough of Peter and on to the movie he was in: Lovelace, a 2013 indie based on the book Ordeal by Linda Boreman aka Linda Lovelace, which is chiefly about her experience making the influential porn classic Deep Throat (1972). As a movie it doesn’t play too badly; some hack wrote the script, but the same politically savvy gay filmmakers who produced/directed The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, Howl, The Celluloid Closet, etc evidently had a lot of artistic control over this project. So there’s quite a lot of fooling around with the narrative structure and other arty bullshit like that, but it’s not enough to hide the fact that there’s really no core idea or message. Not to mention there’s not a lot of entertainment value, either… Nope, in this package there’s absolutely nothing clever, insightful, sensitive, or aesthetically satisfying—all screen values, incidentally, which would NOT be out of place in a porn movie.
Peter was good, but Peter’s always good at playing soft-spoken villains. What really interested me was Hank Azaria’s portrayal of one of my directors, Gerard Damiano. A small role but well-executed. Mr Damiano himself was soft spoken, I remember, and very patient. His was the last word on the set. Everyone respected him. He also paid me a compliment I immediately put into my mental jewelry box, and there it’s stayed ever since…
Here’s another new film clip on my YT page, a mashup of Steve’s one and only featured film appearance (in the movie Crashing, written and directed by Gary Walkow, 2007) and the Swingle Singers rendition of Mozart’s Turkish March. Last time I looked, this vid made it into Funny Or Die.
Lest we forget the source of our lately grief, this is Steve’s one and only book, which my small press published in 2006. The poems were good. The poet was a schmuck. And I say that in deference to his lovely (ex-)wife, Naomi, to whom he dedicated this slim volume of confessional free verse. I wrote about this in my nutty memoir A Poet from Hollywood, available for free in pdf download here.
Naomi, why do you purposely fail to believe me??? I turned the meathead down! Twice!! Above Stephen and Peter Sarsgaard (yes, that’s the back of Peter‘s head): Hugo Alfven’s “Swedish Rhapsody” arranged-conducted by Michel Legrand and played by his orchestra.
The dedication by Jamie Lee Curtis (she’s Jake‘s godmother so she did Naomi a favor by writing this for Steve, who was in a jam—well, just read about it here) is pretty adorable and for that sake I might try to hunt up the pdf galley and upload it here.
EXTRA! Not that he deserves the attention, but here are three of Stephen’s poems, recited by the idiot himself:
That however you live
There's a part of you always standing by
Mapping out the sky
Finishing a hat
Starting on a hat
Finishing a hat
Look, I made a hat
Where there never was a hat
I’m not a huge fan of Graham Swift‘s books, but I read his Waterland and Last Orders, and much prefer Last Orders as a novel but Waterland as a film, no matter how many trivial changes the screenwriter made. In Swift’s memoir there’s the amusing revelation that Steve got this assignment because although he was last on the list he was the only one available…yeah, that’s the Gyllenhaal Luck. Fortunately—really fortunately—Steve had with him a very good Director of Photography, Robert Elswit, and score composer Carter Burwell, whose music you can hear above.
I mentioned in another posting about his film work that “there’s a creepy, dreamy, nasty edge in almost all the sex scenes in Steve’s movies…” which certainly figures here. Not in the actual sex scenes between the teenage lovers, which are all lyrically rendered, but in that damn ABORTION SCENE in the woods, which never fails to get gasps from us females in the audience. Check it out. There’s a weird fairy-tale quality to this scene which is beautiful, but sooo the wrong tone.
Lucas Richman is a FB friend I share with Michael Seal because Richman’s brother Orien produced my old (ex-)friend Steve Gyllenhaal‘s last directorial effort, but also because I heard “In Truth”. If you love the kind of music my beloved John is famous for conducting, you will loooove this sensually and emotionally satisfying concerto.
Got to run out to pick up my heart pills so I’ll finish my train of thought about John’s musical upbringing in the 80s a little later. Meanwhile here’s my posting, from 2018, about the very thing Andrew Haveron introduced John to: “The Hollywood String Quartet and the Hollywood Sound“.
The Castro Theatre was our neighborhood picture palace back in San Francisco. Went to dozens of movies there, sometimes with Mister Grumble (when he still had his sight), sometimes with the The Kid, sometimes with both: King Kong,Casablanca, The Garden of Allah, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, that movie Steve’s son was in called Brokeback Mountain, etc etc etc. But the organ was always the best part.
San Francisco, open your Golden Gate
You'll let no stranger wait outside your door
San Francisco, here is your wanderin' one
Saying I'll wander no more
Here’s David Hagerty between evening shows giving the best of The Mighty Wurlitzer and ending (starting at 8:17), as he always does at every performance, with an inspiring rendition of the official anthem of my spiritual birthplace, “San Francisco” (Bronislaw Kaper and Walter Jurmann, lyrics by Gus Kahn, 1936).
Yes, teenage 
Taken by Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit (Waterland, Paris Trout) one Sunday afternoon May 2006. 
That’s Lena Headey in her first screen role. Above Lena, Grant Warnock and Jeremy Irons: 
"I'll Be Dead Before You Break My Heart" 