August 9, 2008
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also posted:
Chapter 26 |
One of my favorite trips was on the motor yacht Viking Star whose owner Peter Cocconi was a generous host for numerous cruises around the Cyclades and other Greek islands. The mixed bunch of about 18 or 20 passengers, mostly American, English and German, would gather on the deck for a Saturday afternoon cocktail party in Piraeus harbor after being allocated their cabins. This would be the first time everybody had met and it was always interesting for an old timer like me to speculate on who was going to play what role in the week or ten days to come. We inevitably were thrown together in the course of visiting a different island each day. It became my habit to return to my cabin after that first encounter and make a list of the dramatis personae sometimes putting myself on camera to describe some of the characters, so that when I came to videotape them later they were already known to my viewers. Cruise after cruise the same prototypes emerged: there was always some ostentatiously glamorous type, sometimes with a self-effacing husband in tow, who wore a different outfit for every meal. It was a delight to be continually confronted with different colors in the small dining room each day, as though somebody had changed the flowers in your window box. And there was always some little tubby guy with an endless supply of dirty jokes that got dirtier and dirtier as the week went by, and noisier too as they were shouted from table to table. Finally, at that initial cocktail party, I could usually locate one eligible lady who was unattached but experience had taught me I was not destined to benefit from this as she invariably and indiscreetly fell in love with one of the crew.
On one such voyage I was unconcerned because just before leaving I had struck up the acquaintance of the owner of a sailboat moored nearby, the Genesta, who had promised to take me on "a real cruise" when the Viking Star returned and, sure enough, as we pulled into harbor there she was waiting. Captain Jovanka, a 30-ish Hungarian refugee who could double for a young Ingrid Bergman, was astonishing and for my part it was love at first sight. What I didn't realize was that Mavis, one of the other two Genesta crew members, was her lover who didn't take kindly to this new intrusion into their happy idyll. Like Homer's hero we went leisurely, of course, to Ithaca following the charming advice of the Greek poet C. J Cavafy: "When you start on your journey to Ithaca, pray the route is long, full of adventure, full of knowledge...Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind. To arrive there is your ultimate goal. But do not hurry the journey at all". Fortunately, or maybe not, Jovanka was bisexual and by alternating her nights of passion between us, provided an interesting if at times melodramatic cruise. On one occasion a drunken Mavis got into a screaming row with the lady captain. "You always said everybody had to work their passage, that nobody could slack about. But you let him lie around and do nothing. You treat him differently. How I hate you, I hate you". And with that she ran the length of the deck and plunged into the sea. If it was an attempted suicide it was a bust. Sobered up by the sea, Mavis yelled for help, but by this time we were all in the water pulling her out. We finished off a bottle of rum and all went to bed--separately. The following year I was driving a small Fiat on a steep mountain road in the Peloponnese, with my Soho artist friend Vernita Nemec upfront and Jovanka in the back, when we were broadsided by an enormous truck. The car was totaled and all three of us carted off to hospitals, the women to one, and myself to another. It was months before I was able to walk again. Vernita and Jovanka were released earlier but both had been badly hurt.
At the hospital in Athens nobody spoke English but they couldn't have been kinder. My old friend Phil, boss of the local AP office, visited, as did the Cocconi family bearing a book--Paul Brunton's A Hermit in the Himalayas --that had a profound effect on my recovery. A sequel to his In Search of Secret India it described his sojourn in a secluded place in the mountains meditating and learning to calm the mind. A large box of chocolates arrived from Helen Vlachou, gutsy publisher of Kathimerini, the Athens daily which had been the sole enemy of the fascist junta that had earlier ruled Greece. "The only man in Greece is a woman" had been the assessment of one observer at the time and Amber and I had conducted an admiring interview with her. She died, aged 85, in 1995.
Back in New York, Gabrielle Schang had invitations printed for the party and rallied the crowd at High Times (which she had taken over at the death of Tom Forcade) to send support, and the lovely Rona organized a benefit for which Art D’Lugoff turned over the Village Gate. Apparently it was a great party, mc-ed by Anthony Haden Guest, with prizes donated by Abbie Hoffman (a pair of his boots), Woody Allen (tickets to a preview of his new movie) and a cover to the invitation done by Andy Warhol from a photograph on the back cover of my Venezuela book. This was a familiar technique of Andy’s and there had always been a rumor that the famous portrait of Elizabeth Taylor had actually been done from a photograph posed by art world idol Ruth Kligman. Rona, my longtime assistant, organized the benefit. So I asked her for a few random notes about what “the best party I never attended” was like.
Think about all of your artist and art dealer friends those are the ones I went to ask for donations. The ones I can remember are Leo Castelli and Marisol. However, there were many more. I don't remember who catered the event, but I think Art DLugoff had something to do with it. High Times printed and mailed the invitations. It started as a cocktail party with lots of exciting conversation, The Joy Ryder Band played a power set of fun dance music (we found them at loft parties and at CBGB's one night) and Anthony ran the auction. We didn't earn as much money as we would have liked, but everyone thought it was a great party. All of your friends came out to celebrate you including that curmudgeon, Joyce Greller with her pamphlets of harsh screed mostly about Noreen (Schnoreen) and a mention or two about me (Drona). If anything more crosses my mind I'll email. Meanwhile, we begin our retreats tonight. Hope you are happy and well. XXX Ronita I had loved Greece at very first sight and now, lying helpless in an Athens hospital, my thoughts turned often to the sun-dappled, whitewashed, twisting streets of Mykonos--built to confuse ancient pirates, they say--and its capacity to bring serenity to a restless soul such as myself. The barren hillsides behind the town are dotted with occasional farms but also with tiny white chapels topped by shiny, blue-rimmed domes. Almost all were the faithful fulfillment of a pledge by some sailor who survived a long-forgotten storm. The musty-sweet aroma of sage permeates the steep route to the beach and occasionally your solitude will be interrupted by the gentle jingle of copper bells and a maelstrom of bleating goats that are back-pedaling furiously as they confront you on the rough, narrow track. As I lay in my hospital bed unable to read, this was my dreamscape, day after day, as I wondered if I would ever be able to see it again. Please click here for on for more of Greece =========== Being told that "you'll never walk again" has come to be something of a cliché seeing, as in my own case, it often turns out not to be true. Maybe in these situations doctors use the formula to prepare their patients for the worst so that any lesser result will seem like a miraculous recovery. At any rate, there I was helpless--broken arms, legs, ribs, hips--unable to move, or even read. What I could do was think, and if ever there was a time to try to figure out what my life was all about this was it. The helpless state of physical incapacity is more than anything about the definition of "getting down to basics" and thus the first thing I started to ponder was who and what had influenced me to instill in me the beliefs and philosophy that had become my guidelines? Obviously I had been shaped to some extent by the ideas of people such as Tim Leary, Andy Warhol, Lenny Bruce, Henry Miller and even Doris Lessing through whose autobiographical novel, The Golden Notebook I had first come to realize the similarities of men and women. But after those first few names it got harder: Stan and Jan would be high on my list; my patient ex wife Amber, obviously; Richard Condon, probably, and...and...I determined to try and extend the list as far as possible. It surprised me to realize how much that relatively brief acquaintance with Condon had influenced my writing, especially the way it had made me appreciate just how much one could convey in a single sentence or two sentences without ever succumbing to tautology or ungrammatical structure.
The task of deciding who has been an influence on you, especially suitable to the bedridden, is also very rewarding because it makes you realize that some people don't have to have spent much time in your life for their presence to have had a lasting effect. A casual remark made by some acquaintance during an elevator ride might stick in your mind, and somebody you might have run into a dozen times over the years without ever having had a long conversation (a familiar scenario around the Soho art scene) might always have been--in retrospect--a credible witness. The next obvious line of thinking was what, if anything, did all these people have in common? And did that, in itself, offer a clue to one's own personality? The best I could come up with on this day was that at least the first few names on the list had been pushing the limits of what society would accept and although I was no adventurer myself perhaps my destiny was to be around and report the activities of these people who were walking on the edge. Then, exhausted with all this reasoning, I fell asleep. Long ago in my Voice days I had reviewed one of Henry Miller’s books in a Village Square column on April 6, 1961:
Although DORIS LESSING’s The Golden Notebook had been published in the early Sixties and had made an instant impression upon me, it wasn’t until 30 years later I realized how predictably I had reacted. 1993 was the year that the book was republished and its author said that-- published three decades earlier, it had been considered “quite an advanced book”. But recently it had been given to 15-year-old girls in a North London school and they had taken it in their stride. The book was also being assigned in history and political classes at schools and universities. Ms. Lessing said she was still receiving letters-- from men and women alike—who claimed that it opened their eyes to the feelings and experiences of women. What had interested them equally, they wrote, was the politics or the ‘style’ of the main American character who now seemed to them to be quite ridiculously macho”.
She had met women she recalled, who had read the book and given it to their daughters (or mothers) but she had also met a grandmother who gave it to her son who passed it on to her daughter. In this age of more-or-less equality it’s hard to recall how incredibly chauvinistic men were in that long-gone era. In the early days of the underground press, the women were still making the coffee and running the errands although that was a situation that quickly changed after fierce internal debates that eventually resulted in more than one paper being taken over by its female staff. When The Golden Notebook had been reprinted in 1971, Ms. Lessing was writing about Women’s Liberation.
After several weeks, still unable to walk, I was transferred from the hospital in Athens to an orthopedic hospital north of London where a stream of visitors, including a longtime Other Scenes subscriber, the writer Murray Sayle, brought me masses of books which, for the first and probably last time in my life, I had ample time to read. At the same time I became a fascinated observer of hospital ritual and the intricate manner in which it moved patients through the system, always pushing them to rehabilitate themselves faster than they believed possible. My specialist, designated in that reverse snobbism characteristic of Harley Street, as Mr. (rather than Dr.) Trickey would turn up every Wednesday with an awed group of acolytes--themselves skilled medical professionals--and after a few brief words and an inspection of my latest charts and x-rays would say: "Get him up and moving", or (two weeks later): "Get him out of that chair and onto crutches". By this means, plus constant painful physiotherapy designed to bend legs that the post-operative casts had left rigid, I was eventually hobbling around on sticks. My first task in the gym was to shuffle along on crutches between parallel, waist high bars. It’s harder than it sounds because my knees would bend only about 30% locked into an unnatural stiffness from ten weeks of immobility after the operations. Back at the ward would be an excellent lunch of steak and kidney pie which, like most British pub food (shepherds pie, sausage and mash, fish and chips, welsh rarebit) was a staple of the hospital menu. My friend John Walker came visiting. He’d quit his job as the Trib’s London drama critic to become Arts Editor of the glossy newsweekly NOW! whose publisher Sir James Goldsmith had previously been known for little more than owning L’Express in Paris where he lived openly with a mistress despite having a London wife, everyone knew as ‘Bubbles’. “It’s nice working for somebody with real money”, John said, recounting how NOW’s editor sought to do a picture story about the auction of the Nizam of Hyderabad’s jewels and was told that even to look at them before the auction required a deposit (returnable) of $12m. “When the editor told the publisher about this” John reported. “Sir Jams was totally unfazed. Okay then” he said, “put up the 12 million…” Before leaving the hospital I watched with admiration the way the staff dealt with disruptive personalities. An obstreperous little man who’d previously chosen to keep people awake by banging his bedpan, shouting for attention and being a general nuisance, took his obnoxious behavior a stage further by grabbing the nurse’s ass as she remade his bed. He’d been there a few days and managed to establish a certain amount of dominance over his closest neighbors acting, in fact, like a little dictator. But his latest performance sealed his fate. He was summarily transferred to another ward where he’d have to start all over to establish himself. Back in the real world, I didn’t like my surroundings any better. "Today, provincial Britainis one of the most depressing places on earth”, wrote Jeremy Clarkson in the Sunday Times. He cited "towns with their pedestrian precincts and endless parade or charity shops and estate agents". He said that Councils seemed to have lost sight of the fact that towns were for shopping, chatting and being a pack animal. "And that's before we get to the people. Who are they, with their faces like pastry and their legs like sides of beef?.. In the Third World you will see hopelessness etched onto people's faces but in provincial Britain it's gormlessness." Columnist Craig Brown railed against arrogant pop stars persuading stores to open after hours so they won't have to mix with the common herd were described as arock-stocrats. “Who would have imagined”, he asked” that the class system would receive its greatest boost from the very same people that...seemed most likely to destroy it? Stating that Britain had the worst railways in Europe, Spectator editor Boris Johnson grumped that most journeys could be made more reliably on horseback. And the weather wasn’t very good, either…. Nevertheless, stuck here for at least I while, I shouldered my video camera and set off to produce some new shows.
THE VILLAGE of Portmeirion in Northern Wales looks exactly like the movie set it has become, although built for an entirely different reason. It became known to the world through the allegorical British television series (1967) The Prisoner, which quickly earned cult status on both sides of the Atlantic. Among the 200,000 yearly visitors have been many American viewers who viewed it as a fantasy land, albeit one offering images that remained almost photographically in the memory. Architect and author, Clough (later Sir Clough) Williams-Ellis began building it in 1927 and kept at it until a few years before his death at 95 in 1978. This mélange of romantic styles was inspired, he said, by a childhood visit to Portofino. The AA’s Book of English Villages called Portmeirion "an extraordinary masterpiece-cum folly” and noted “a tasteful extravaganza of romantic buildings, exotic plants and warm Mediterranean colors set against the brooding grandeur of Snowdonia". Movie makers and TV (Brideshead Revisited) have been here as well as the MadMen for Renault Cars and the Wales Tourist Board. Portmeirion’s founder said he’d always dreamed of building such a place and, convinced that only an island would be suitable, learned to sail, spending "years as an amateur sailor”. He scoured the coasts of the British Isles for his ideal site, “like a seabird seeking a nesting place. When, the unforeseen availability of this perfect setting--almost on my own doorstep--suddenly settled my problem in to a miracle". He’d found his Shangri La. "It was still a neglected wilderness, long abandoned by those romantics who had realized the unique appeal and possibilities of this favored promontory”. Sadly, their “grandiose landscaping and improvement enthusiasm” which had resulted in “sorrowful bankruptcy..." Williams-Ellis had both taught and written books about architecture with the aim, he said, of correcting “uninterested and uninformed popular” to get support for architecture, planning, landscaping, the use of color and… design generally". Clearing the forested site, he agonized over felling trees ("no good tree is ever molested without very good reason") until he was convinced that it stood in the path of a necessary building. The village's car park is literally a park, with as many trees as parking spaces. What he termed the "free and easy" building procedure was possible because he was proprietor, client, architect, builder and paymaster. "It was all pretty sketchy", Most offers of architectural refugees to his "home for fallen buildings” could not be resisted. He’d worked on country houses and here, in 1925, movies were in their infancy. Sir Clough’s uncanny eye for the visually arresting made him the ideal set designer for a medium that was still to be invented. From the moment that actor Patrick McGoohan, playing a secret agent whose desertion has made his kidnap inevitable, awakens in Portmeirion, the viewer is as awed an as mystified as he is.. What is this place? It was impossible to guess from the architecture; for every possibility failed to fit. Sir Clough's taste was uniquely eclectic but "Italianate" was the general verdict for this jumbled collection of domes, turrets, terraces, spires, colonnades, piazzas and campaniles. Sandstone Renaissance Gothic jostles for attention with English thatched roof and French provincial styles. A magnificent statue of Hercules is anointed with plaques celebrating various wondrous summers (as rare in England as vintage wines)...a head of Mercury adorns a pre-war petrol pump....gilded Siamese dancers sit atop piazza columns....the foot of the campanile displays a baroque Italian doorway....the stone boat, a concrete reproduction of Sir Clough's 1920s ketch, the Amis Réunis which was wrecked by strong gales, is 'anchored' permanently by the shore. A woodland path leads from the Town Hall with its 17th century barrel-vaulted ceiling and Jacobean mullioned window to the Playhouse, built to be Portmeirion's opera house and used for dances, fashion shows, conventions and musical performances. A 20-minute slide show runs continuously here all day narrated by Sir Clough. Naturally, I loved the place at first sight, and although I had never seen even one of the 17 episodes of The Prisoner many of which were directed by McGoohan himself while portraying the eponymous hero trying to make sense of his imprisonment, the management lent me the tapes. So, delightfully, I was able to video a scene from the screen and then go outside (often in the rain—this was Wales, after all) and film the real thing.
The structure of the The Prisoner saga bears a resemblance to Alice in Wonderland, even to segments where the participants go underground by descending a shaft that might be compared to a deep, vertical rabbit hole. Many of the things that happen can't be understood rationally but make perfect sense on the level of the daffy lunacy of dream sequences where people and things change surrealistically. Hints of chess and Shakespearian drama underpin stories operating on so many intellectual levels that the series has been used as the basis for college courses examining "some of the crucial questions in the survival game humanity is playing".
Long stretches do indeed, appear to be actual dreams and one episode concludes with a recumbent figure shaking himself awake and arising from a table obviously having dreamed the foregoing series of incidents. Significantly, however, it is not the Prisoner himself who is shown having had the dream but one of his captors. Another episode, all of which takes place outside the Village in London's busy streets, ends with the Prisoner closing the book from which he has been reading to his children, the obvious message being that the foregoing is just a story he has been reading to his children.
Among the early visitors to Portmeirion were George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. Bertrand Russell wrote one of his books while staying in the hotel around 1933 and Noel Coward wrote Blithe Spirit while he was in residence during one week in 1941. Sir Clough, who called himself "a building animal" had once confessed in his typically flowery style: "All my life I had consciously to fight down my innate inordinate craving for gorgeous elaboration, regal splendor and even more opulent display lest vulgar profusion should overwhelm my basic sense of fitness and propriety". Frank Lloyd Wright visited Portmeirion in the 1950s and, recounted Sir Clough, "to my profound astonishment he took it without a blink, seeming instantly to see the point of all my willful pleasantries, the calculated naiveties, eye traps, forced and faked perspectives, heretical constructions and all the rest of it." "Why I do believe you married an architect" FLW told Sir Clough's wife. PATRICK MCGOOHAN had discovered the unique village while playing in a 1950s spy drama, Danger Man, in five episodes of which it stood in for Italy, Austria and China. As The Prisoner, McGoohan plays "Number Six", objecting strenuously and continuously to being classified merely as a number and not a name. ("Number One" is never seen but it is implied that allegorically it is everybody's own alter ego). McGoohan wrote and directed many of the 17 programs himself in three episodes of which Leo McKern (now better known as "Rumpole of the Bailey") played the key role of Number Two. Other major UK stars made guest appearances: Peter Bowles, Eric Portman, Paul Eddington and Donald Sinden. McGoohan originally envisioned seven episodes for the series but ITV tycoon Lew Grade gave him the go-ahead without an argument and later asked him to do as many more installments as he could come up with. One of the more persistent arguments among fans is in which order they should best be shown. One icon of the Village was a "penny farthing" bicycle (one large wheel, one small one), appearing on taxies, the village flag and canned foods in the shop.McGoohan liked "this symbol of gentility, of another age. I thought it was an ironic symbol of progress. The feeling is that we are going too fast--we don't have time to assimilate as much as we should. Every year one has to learn quicker and quicker, because there is so much information pouring out in every direction. So that was a symbol of progress to me. I wish we could go a bit slower but we can't. I think we should pull back and consolidate the things we have discovered, as opposed to tearing off at faster speeds in bigger aircraft, the Concorde for instance, which crosses the Atlantic two hours faster. I don't see any merit in that at all. I think progress is the biggest enemy on earth--apart from oneself".The ambiguous program never became any easier to understand and at the conclusion of the final installment--which didn't seem to "explain" anything--viewers were enraged. They flooded the ATV studio switchboard with angry calls, hammered on McGoohan's door and screamed at his children coming home from school. "We had to go and hide in Wales for a couple of weeks, in the hills with no telephones or any contact with the outside world” he recalls. “The reason it was confusing and that they were disappointed, I think, is because they expected the ending to be similar to a (James) Bond thing and of course it wasn’t about that at all. It was about the most evil human being, human essence, and that is ourselves. It is within each of us, that is the most dangerous thing on earth, is what is within us. And so therefore that's what I made Number One--one's self , an image of himself, which he was trying to beat". McGoohan, now 80, and living in the US, has never returned to Portmeirion although he is credited with being the Society’s honorary chairman. He rarely gives interviews and has always declined to ‘explain' The Prisoner, preferring for people to think it out for themselves and interpret in their own way. The Prisoner was filmed in color but shown on TV in black and white--"a collection of futuristic ideas, unique images, symbolism and mystery" wrote Max Hora. The series still pops up occasionally on cable television and rumors have surfaced through the years about a $50 million movie for which McGoohan is said to have written the script. In April 2008, it was reported that AMC and Britain’s ITV were about to shoot a remake of The Prisoner—six one-hour episodes—in Cape Town with Sir Ian McKellen playing the mysterious Number Two and James Caviezel reprising the McGoohan role.
Soon, my health completely restored, I was back in the U.S. but still devoted to travel, publishing chap books, or mini-mags as I chose to call them. Their content was again the weekly travel column, Nomad for which there was never a shortage of material. Even when I wasn't traveling, raw material would pour through the mailbox. A Guilford, Conn. firm sent me announcement of their postcard catalog. On offer were postcards from just about every tourist spot in the world which you could order, address (and presumably even write) before setting off, thus saving valuable time while in the country itself. Writing and addressing 50 postcards, the brochure estimated, took up four hours of the average traveler's vacation time. Tokyo department stores have a similar idea which is to cash in on the Japanese custom of sending friends specific local gifts associated with various resorts. By stocking the already wrapped souvenirs, customers could buy and then mail them without even setting foot outside the capital. Nomad graded Amsterdam’s coffee shops; the best cheese pies in Athens and why Greyhound buses in Australia were so superior to the American version.. Best of all, from a subscriber's point of view, was that we offered impressive-looking free Nomad press cards, "good for what you can get away with". And in some of the world's remoter outposts, our readers gleefully reported, you could get away with an awful lot. We introduced The Strategic Traveler whose tactics may seem pretty obvious except for the fact that few inexperienced tourists planned anything in advance; things such as searching for a cheap bus to town outside the airport instead of leaping into a limousine or--if arriving by train with a lot of luggage--spending your first day in the nearest acceptable hotel to the station giving you time to look around for a better one while unencumbered. Of course, the kind of budget traveler that I was always writing for needed such tips, although he soon got savvy enough to always carry a spare bath plug and look for the key of the sometimes-locked bathroom hanging on a hook in the maid's room down the hall. Click here for Sex in Jamaica
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