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