Interview With A Starlet

(I spent a few years writing for Variety – not the show biz pub, but a trade magazine for five-and-dime stores. Still, I was able to finesse my credentials and do a profile on a hot young actress that the Variety I worked for didn’t want since, after all, she had nothing to do with chintzy retailing.)

When I arrived for my chat with actress Minerva McCall in the arboretum cafe of the chic Hotel Skink, I was surprised – but not really – that the fair-haired, young, and recently-Oscar-nominated nova was wearing an outfit matching the wallpaper. “Over here, Shep,” she waved to me as I scanned the room trying to pick her out, eyes crossed, heart sinking. Hers was a languid, ’50s-style movie star wave melded to a girlish kind of flutter you would expect to find at some teenaged suburban sleepover. This kind of dualism in her personality – as well as her ability to become a character, just like the wallpaper – has won the newcomer a big crossover audience and critical fave-raves. “I like to blend in,” she noted after lassoing my attention. “After all, isn’t it the actor’s job to observe then report, not to report then observe, or just observe with no reportage at all?” Yes, oh yes.
A native of L.A.-town, Minerva now splits her time between here and three ranches two hours north. “When I was trying to break into the business as a youngster, I resented the fact that I already lived in Los Angeles, that I wouldn’t have the chance to make a grand entrance into the big city. But today I love it – still do. People are shocked when I say what a great place it is to live. But, then, I love getting any kind of reaction.”
Legendary filmland pioneer Gregory Peck provided the first big break for this comely Angeleno. “The film we were going to shoot never actually got made, never got financing, never even really got cast. But Mr. Peck allowed me to include in on my resume – and that piece of paper started opening the doors for me.” A by-now apocryphal tale, but worth retelling, every time.
Did her current co-star remind her of that legendary filmland pioneer who had acted so gracefully in her early career without ever having to really act at all? “Richard Hapsburg – my co-star in the Gatsby project – is a fine man, and has that charisma the older generation of superstars exuded. Of course,” she giggled exuberantly, again all girlish swirl, save for the knowing gaze in her twinkling eyes, “he’s not that old.”
The Gatsby “project,” as she refers to it, is the big follow-up to her award-nominated performance in last year’s box office champ Sister Picante. Was she daunted by the idea of attempting an American classic? “I hadn’t read the book as a youngster – my private school mostly covered the modern stuff. But I had, of course, heard of it, and was awfully surprised when I glanced at the synopsis and realized how dated it was. Fitzsimmons was a great stylist, of course, but the ’20s, the ’30s, they were a whole different time, textually, and texturally. We wanted to make sure our own version lived and breathed, and also spoke to a modern audience.” Who’s masterstroke, then, to take the rich Ivy-Leaguer of the novel and stick him in chaps and a holster? “The concept of doing a western version of Gatsby was a collaborative one – the writer, the director, and I, we all worked on it, night after night. It seemed a natural switch, since the perceptions and moral questions we’re faced with today are a lot closer to frontier times than the earlier part of the last century.”
This fiery artist, who will be doing all her own stunt riding, in addition to most of the authentic period catering, took on the hardest look of sincerity I’d ever seen in a soft, unblemished face. “Jingle Jangle Jay will be a bold venture, and we’re going to catch heck for it. But, then, who got into this business just to work, anyway?”
And with that, the minxy lynx finished her Schweppes’s Bitter Essence and toddled off. And me? I ordered something from the very impressive menu.

Carl LaFong: Literary Maven

(Here's a chat with publishing pioneer Carl LaFong, whose legendary little magazine Lettrers featured some of this country’s finest writing for three generations. I spoke with Mr. LaFong one day before lunch ... and before I found out that no publication in the land was interested.)

CC: You started Lettrers -- and how is that pronounced?

CL: Just how it sounds. A lot of people thought it was French. But I just made it up. (Chuckling.) We did get a lot of mangled versions. One of our proofreaders called it "Latrice," but that was because he was dating some girl with that name.

CC: You launched Lettrers when many little magazines were in print, when that whole arm, if you will, of the American literary scene was at a veritable peak, an apogee, you could say, when the written word was sacred, when there were tons of small, densely-packed, vibrantly alive temples at which to prostrate one’s hungry eyes, dontcha know, when the nation’s consciousness was splayed across the page for those who were most aware to feast upon. No?

CL: No. (Shifts in his seat.) I mean . . . yes. That was when we started, right. It was a great time. Wouldn’t have missed it. We couldn’t get any ads to save our ass, but, hell, we had plenty of writers, so we had no problems filling the thing, if that’s what you mean. Sure, sure, I’ve had a great life.

CC: You had an opportunity to publish Ernest Hemingway’s first short story in your inaugural edition, and yet you passed, or so the legend goes. Is this a correct telling? Here’s your chance.

CL: Yeah, we turned him down. I mean, he was a newspaper man, and we were doing fiction. And he had that staccato, telegraph style that nobody had seen before, in fiction, anyway. It wasn’t, you know . . . I didn’t think he had much of a . . . hell, in hindsight, of course. But, yeah, we said no, like you said.

CC: You passed, as well, on the chance to serialize U.S.A. by Dos Passos. Would that be an able rendering of the situation you faced?

CL: Dos Passos I didn’t really like. He was a bad drinker -- and when I say bad, what I mean is a sloppy drunk, used to spill on himself all the time, always had stains on his shirts. Something to do with a war injury to both his thumbs, I heard. Which was surprising because John was actually a guy with very good balance, good hand-to-eye coordination, except whenever he was holding something, grasping something with his fingers. Very strange. And unpleasant, at times, including the time he came to me with the idea of running chapters from the book. I thought about it, but you should have seen the writing style . . . (waves his hands as if dispersing a bad odor) . . . just crazy stuff. Unbelievable. So I nixed it.

CC: Was John crushed?

CL: About what?

CC: Your refusal to print his work, your denial of his life’s blood to catch a glimpse of the day’s light.

CL: Jesus, he got the thing published, or else you wouldn’t be asking. I didn’t burn it, just didn’t think it was right for our audience. Our subscribers were always my primary, um, my first concern. I wanted to make sure they had a good read. A fast-moving story. We got our share of left-wing kook stuff -- although, actually, I didn’t care so much about politics, I was looking for character and plot.

CC: As in the work of, say, Irwin Shaw

CL: Who?

CC: Or, assuredly, Carson McCullers?

CL: Well, yeah, she was great, or turned out to be. We never ran anything of hers. We turned down a few early short stories, because, frankly, I didn’t think they were very well-developed. And later she turned one of them into that play about a wedding and another into that novel about hearts and hunting, so naturally I felt kind of vindicated, you know, because obviously they weren’t that developed, they had to be expanded. She never offered us anything after those early refusals, and I never actually met her, but I always knew in my soul that she appreciated what I’d done.

CC: Then, when a new wave of young authors were challenging the established credo, exploring places fiction had seldom ventured, you were there, too, still putting out your little quarterly, still offering fresh and priceless papel for those new voices to utilize. Yes?

CL: No.

CC: No?

CL: No. We were not a quarterly. We came out three times a year. And that was a funny story . . . We never knew how to refer to it, this three-time thing. Trially? Sounded like a legal book. Thricely? A little too pedantic for what we were trying to do. What else? Well, we just didn’t know. So we didn’t even refer to it at all. Some years we didn’t even come out. I thought, the hell with it, it’s too much, just too goddamn much. (Pause.)

CC: And when you did come out, say in the 1950s, you were one of the first to showcase the Beats.

CL: I had a few of them writing music reviews. What did I know from bongos? Because, of course, everything else they wrote was lard.

CC: And yet you knew Kerouac personally.

CL: Jack I knew, sure. We never published anything of Jack’s. He wrote, as you know, on long roles of paper towels, or butcher paper it may have been, and we just didn’t have the technology to transfer it. But the big boys, they could print Jack’s stuff. They had the technology. (He shakes a finger.) The odd thing about Jack was that, in his everyday speech, he tended toward nautically-based clichés -- “Things are on an even keel,” he’d say, or “Any old port in a storm, Carl.” The great irony, of course, was that he wrote about driving in cars, on the land, and hitchhiking. I never got over that.

CC: He was, though, a merchant marine in the days before writing success came his way.

CL: Jack Kerouac?

CC: Yes, absolutely.

CL: Where did you hear that? I do know that he never learned how to swim, that he in fact hated bathing trunks of any kind. (Wistfully.) It was almost a phobia with him.

CC: Of the many poets you gave space to --

CL: Archibald MacLeish was not one of them.

CC: Pardon?

CL: I thought you were going to ask if I’d published any MacLeish.

CC: No.

CL: I see. I’ll tell you, we had one poet -- Nat Malone -- we ran a lot of his stuff over the years. Now, he had been a sailor, a friend of Hart Crane’s, though not . . . well, you know. Anyway, this guy’s poems . . . (kisses his fingers like a French chef) . . . Magnifico! His subject matter, his oeuvre, all of his poems, they were about trees. More specifically, trimming trees. “I Saw a Shapely Branch, I Cut It Down,” “Ode to Pruning,” and, of course, his one detour, his great Whitman homage, “Leaves of Mown Grass.” Amazing stuff.

CC: Well, we’re out of tape.

CL: Okay. Tha

New Zoo Hopes to Tap Tourist Trade

(The following is an interview I did in response to news reports that more and more people are housing wild animals as pets. I came across this guy who was taking the concept a few steps further – opening an actual zoo in his backyard. It was very controversial in his hometown … too controversial, alas, for any local media outlets to run what I thought was a zinger of a story.)

Which of us, in our wonderful days of youth, didn’t consider, at one time or another, certain shared dream jobs when attaining life as an adult? Professional athlete. Fireman or police officer. Veterinarian or something else touching the animal kingdom.

Well, one local man has made that grade, reached the threshold of opening a business that most children only fantasize about.

That man is Ralph Squengen, and he is director of the new Neighborhood Zoo.

It was Squengen’s desire to provide his community with an affordable, educational and enjoyable excursion. “We wanted this to be a place for the whole family at a fraction of the cost of your ritzier tourist traps in town. Part of the reason an amusement park or aquarium charges a fortune is the land-cost factor. If you’re paying a few million for acreage, you gotta pass that on.”

Which is why Squengen decided to open the zoo at his home.

The idea first presented itself during a dinner party the former hat salesman threw for an out-of-town friend. “This buddy of mine, he favored derbies. He also liked animals very, very much. So he was visiting and, all of a sudden, got a strong urge to see a tiger.” Why a tiger? “I didn’t think to ask. But it didn’t matter since neither of us had a car. But then it was light-bulb time: How many people visit this city? A lot. How many want to see a wild animal as a bit fun? Plenty. How many of them don’t have a car? Enough. The idea seemed too obvious to pass up.”

And Squengen was the man to grab it. His family background had prepared him well for this type of venture. “My parents and grandparents loved going to the zoo, any zoo, and they kept a rhesus monkey named Shank in the basement. True, he was stuffed, but a love of animals, and a need to house them or their carcasses, has illuminated my life.”

Covering fully one-sixth of an acre in Squengen’s impressively landscaped backyard, his zoo is home to seven different species from four different regions. “We may not have a ton of animals, but what we have is cherce,” the director noted.

Apart from the more traditional creatures one expects to find in a collection of this sort, visitors will encounter a truly unique feature, the Bughouse or Bughaus. “This is quite rare, and really puts us on the map,” Squengen explained. “We have the largest grouping of captive insects in any one setting, except for possibly the Louvre. Our special emphasis is on the greatest array of houseflies in the world. Now, these are not your normal, garden-variety flies, although many of them are. Most of these flies, though, come from Germany, and possess a fabulous sort of Teutonic sheen that’s a joy to behold.”

The project has engendered its share of controversy. Accusations of gross negligence and public health and safety violations have cropped up in recent weeks. Critics claimed, for instance, that one of the animals jumped Squengen’s grape-stake fence into an adjacent city park, terrorizing a family picnic before being shot with a tranquilizer dart by an off-duty park ranger. “I’m afraid there was an overreaction on everybody’s part during that incident, and a minor incident it was,” the zookeeper said. “First of all, how much damage, really, can a kangaroo cause? You want to see damage, you should check out my poor garage and what that bloody leopard did to it. God, what a mess. Besides, people got a big kick out of watching that kangaroo hop across the park and through the duck pond, believe me. I think the publicity was immeasurable.

“As to my so-called neighbors and their ridiculous complaints, they just have to sit tight. They’ll get used to the stench. I don’t even notice it anymore. And traffic concerns? It’s a public street. If someone a few doors down throws a party and their friends park in front of my house, do I complain? Of course not. But some of these yokels don’t know any better. This is a perfect economic opportunity for everybody on the block. You know how much extra cash they could make by parking a few cars on their lawns?

“Unfortunately, I’ve come to expect this kind of behavior from my fellow humans. I mean, the permit people at city hall with their extortion demands, the animal rights jerks and their idiotic concerns over natural habitats, my shortsighted landlord and his petty gripes about property values. Well, the heck with them all. I honestly have a better time with the animals, just me and them, out in the yard, having a beer, throwing something on the barbecue. You will too. Come on over, we’re open all the time. And park anywhere you want. It’s a free country.”

Late Composer’s Stuff to be Sold Electronically

(Here was a scoop I got … that everyone ignored until they all picked up a less detailed version from AP.)

With the passing last month of composer Roger Horvath, American music closed the songbook on one of its more memorable chapters. And with Horvath’s death just a short week later, the rest of us came to mourn one of the great losses of 20th-century artistry.

But when E-Bay announced yesterday that the family would be offering key memorabilia from Horvath’s estate on the internet, there came the alluring possibility that anyone could own, and place in the old curio cabinet, a tactile legacy of popular culture from one of the greats.

Best known for his Broadway scores setting Tin Pan Alley melodies within an atonal structure, Horvath had a reputation in his private life as the “pack rat’s pack rat,” although he was referred to by his good friend Richard Rodgers as “the prairie dog’s alley cat,” and often went by the nickname (origin unknown) of “the nanny goat’s second aunt.” Cryptically, the artist called himself – in a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of his pithy liner notes – “Basil Rathbone.” Over his long life, he kept practically every item he ever encountered, and constructed a 20-room French Chateau to house the objects directly across the street from his primary residence, a Dutch-style home in a Bellflower, CA, subdivision. It is this lifetime’s worth of possessions that will go on the block come summer.

And what a bunch of stuff it is:

The composer’s souvenir spoon collection, for instance, which features a special grouping of decorative utensils from the Amana Colonies in Iowa, and of which Stravinsky once remarked, “God, that’s a lot of spoons.” (The collection, by the way, will not be broken up and sold individually, as had been reported, both for historical reasons and to save a lot of time.) Also included is the settee on which Horvath reportedly tried to seduce actress Shirley Booth, whom he sincerely thought was a maid named Hazel, based on the television character she played, and whom he deserted upon learning she was actually an Academy-Award-winning star, since he had vowed never to go out with another artist.

Horvath enjoyed a reputation as one of the country’s finest art collectors, and his practice of taking a different painting from his personal gallery to parties as his date is still fondly recalled by the dizzying circles he ran in. His tastes ran from the sublime to the stillborn, with a particular fondness for the Dadaists – specifically their “non-art” pieces invoking, and involving, plumbing fixtures. This special interest will be highlighted in a pre-auction sale held at a local Home Depot.

An additional offering will be Horvath’s 5,000 picture postcards, all depicting two-headed snakes from various roadside attractions in the Midwest.

Among the household items up for sale will be the blender he used to whip up the Brussels sprout concoctions he adored, and that provided Horvath with the right pitch for the infamous 80-minute overture to his Tony-nominated (and then -expelled) musical Tab to Margin. Plus, his egg coddler, and many of the eggs left behind in his refrigerator.

Of special note, artistically, is his final work, sure to fetch a high price, 13 pieces of blank paper that he liked to refer to as "my 13 pieces of blank paper."

The sale will commence this June, unless, as a family spokesperson pointed out, “We change our mind.”