AS THE PARADE PASSES BY
LESSONS I AM STILL LEARNING FROM THE CAMINO WHICH I AM STILL WALKING ALTHOUGH I AM NOT ON IT
(Above: Writing in my journal when I was walking the Camino several years ago, a pilgrimage that continues today without having physically to be present and booted upon the path but spiritually present as I reboot the impulse that remained within me to search not for answers, but for new questions. )
The other day when I got back to Paris where I am now living for a couple of months from my 67th birthday trip to Versailles to see a brilliant modernist take on Swan Lake by Ballet Preljocaj at the Opera Royal Theatre ensconced in the palace, I decided, while stopping for breakfast in the 8th before heading back to my writer’s garret on Rue de la Baume, to take a look at what some random horoscope site said about my being born on March 28th now that I am on this cultural and spiritual pilgrimage in my life having shed almost all that I owned to discover all that I am. This is how the litany ended. I took a screenshot:
I smiled at yet another Heightened Coincidence, as I call such occurrences, and spent a lot of the rest of the day working on an upcoming FIVE QUESTIONS FOR … column for SES/SUMS IT UP with Ben Daniels which I will be posting on Monday, although I did take a long walk to contemplate what this pilgrimage I am now on is meaning to me five months after I began it back in London. Later, as I was cooking dinner on my two-burner hotplate, I listened to the recently released cast album of the Broadway revival of Parade that just opened, the musical by Jason Robert Brown concerning the tragic Leo Frank saga set in the south. Exhausted and full of pasta, I then fell asleep early but woke up in the middle of the night unable to return to my dreams, which is maybe what this pilgrimage is about, returning to them once I can remember what they initially were in my life.
I reached for my phone in the darkness and, in its eerie light as I turned it on, began to scroll through Facebook to lull me back to some semblance of slumber. The first thing to come up was a post put up by my former editor at, yes, Parade magazine - yet another Heightened Coincidence - Lamar Graham. When I was a little sissy boy back in Mississippi filled still with the audacity to dream and hope had yet to fall into the category of self-harm, I’d run get the Sunday newspaper that had been tossed into our gravel driveway out in the countryside so I could retrieve that week’s Parade. Before I’d sit down to eat my breakfast of Sunday biscuits slathered in margarine and homemade syrup made from my Uncle Benny’s sugar cane crop and refuse yet again an accompanying glob of grits but gladly take some extra eggs my grandmother always scrambled softly to my liking, I’d lie on the floor on bent elbows to read what was contained inside Parade that week, my hands forming pedestals beneath my chin from which to peruse the articles, their fisted forms finding a function other than fighting: the plinths from which I, stomach-down, splayed, could read. I’d begin with the Q and A column that opened the contents each week, the pseudonymous “Walter Scott’s Personality Parade,” which was written by Lloyd Shearer who also wrote cover stories about celebrities under his own byline. He more than penned that “Walter Scott’s Personality Parade” from 1958 to 1991; he copyrighted the name and column. He owned the damn thing, the most popular part of the magazine. When he retired in 1991, he sold it back to Parade for a sum that has never been disclosed. I think I grew up to be a better writer than Shearer - though one in the same vein - but I’ll never be as financially savvy as that.
Another writer who had a long career at Parade was James Brady. He even took over being “Walter Scott” for a time before he was given his own column, “In Step With …” which he wrote for over 25 years. He, like Shearer, had a military background as did Walter Anderson, who had a 32 year career there as editor and publisher. Sometimes, as I got older and my fascination with the publication became a bit more knowing and cynical, I wondered it were some sort of CIA outpost within the media world since it was the most popular periodical in the country for decades with a circulation of over 32 million at its height and a readership of over 50 million which made it thus the most powerful when it came to shaping public opinion in mainstream America. Indeed, Shearer was known for being the most connected man in the media world from his perch in Los Angeles. His connected tentacles reached back all the way to Washington, D.C. and politics and government. Hillary and Bill Clinton were best friends with one of his kids who became Ambassador to Finland after Clinton became president with more than a little background help from Shearer connecting the threads of power for him as he rose in politics. His other children had positions in the government. The Clintons were often visitors to his home in LA and he even named his guesthouse for Bill. He was also best buddies with Henry Kissinger and could get CIA Director William Colby on the phone with the alacrity he could get the Gabor sisters. Shearer was much more than a celebrity hack journalist but being a celebrity hack journalist sure could be a great cover for the kind of power he seemed to have with all his vaunted connections. Hollywood might have just been a hiding-in-plain-site bivouac for him. I would have liked to have sent in a question to “Walter Scott” asking him about that.
I met his colleague Brady down at a literary festival in Florida when my first memoir, Mississippi Sissy had just come out and he, an ex-Marine like Anderson (Shearer rose in the Army in its “journalistic” units), had recently published one of his nonfiction military books. We shared a publisher, St. Martin’s Press, and now we shared a magazine home as well since I had been hired to be a Contributing Editor at Parade. Some people saw that as a step down from my own long career at Vanity Fair, but I, ever that little sissy with my Sunday morning fists formed for reading, looked at it as a dream come true. “I hear you just came onboard at Parade, kid,” Brady said to me at a cocktail party to welcome all the writers who were participating at the festival. I was standing with Lucinda Franks, the wife of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who had just written a memoir about discovering her father was an intelligence agent during World War II - another coincidental sentence. She was the first woman to ever win the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for her investigation into the Weather Underground in 1971 and the youngest person to have ever won a Pulitzer of any kind. Lucinda and I were surveying the crowd when she introduced me to her buddy, James. “Got any advice for me?” I asked him. He smiled. “It’s the best gig you’ll ever have,” he said, all the surveillance he was doing - all that he had ever done - now aimed right at me as if trying to figure out why the hell I was now the rather too-old new kid on deck. “Don’t fuck it up,” he said.
“You just got his poetic seal of approval,” Lucinda whispered to me, laughing.
[An aside. I just got to this point in this latest column and decided to search for the word “parade” at Poetryfoundation.com. This is one of the poems that came up. It is by the deeply American poet Billy Collins who, in fact, served as Poet Laureate of the United States for two terms from 2001 - 2006.
The Parade
How exhilarating it was to march
along the great boulevards
in the sunflash of trumpets
and under all the waving flags—
the flag of ambition, the flag of love.
So many of us streaming along—
all of humanity, really—
moving in perfect step,
yet each lost in the room of a private dream.
How stimulating the scenery of the world,
the rows of roadside trees,
the huge curtain of the sky.
How endless it seemed until we veered
off the broad turnpike
into a pasture of high grass,
headed toward the dizzying cliffs of mortality.
Generation after generation,
we keep shouldering forward
until we step off the lip into space.
And I should not have to remind you
that little time is given here
to rest on a wayside bench,
to stop and bend to the wildflowers,
or to study a bird on a branch—
not when the young
are always shoving from behind,
not when the old keep tugging us forward,
pulling on our arms with all their feeble strength.]
(Above: On the Camino. Stopping and bending to the wildflowers. )
When, I arrived at Parade, the idea was floated my way that I would make a great “Walter Scott” myself, but I preferred the part of Shearer's old beat that was about writing cover stories under one’s own name. So we decided I’d do that as well as some additional columns from time to time and, maybe even some different sort of human interest articles. I do know that I never dreamed of being anybody else but who I am. Why else would I title my first memoir Mississippi Sissy even after another Mississippi writer, Richard Ford, warned me against doing so because it would ghettoize it. “But I honestly live in that ghetto,” I told him, this ever-morphing pilgrimage that continues in my life beginning back on those sissy Sunday mornings in Mississippi when I was fascinated by questions and answers about famous people crafted by a crafty guy hiding behind someone he really was not. Or maybe, more precisely, this pilgrimage is about admitting that I have been a kind of intelligence officer spying on myself my whole life. It is time now to come in from the cold.
Which brings me back to seeing what Lamar Graham posted on Facebook the other night when I was lying in the illumined darkness. He reminded me that I had posted a copy of an essay I had written for Parade on Facebook back on March 29th in 2012. It was about the beginning of this pilgrimage that had its start in my life by my walking the Camino. For some reason Parade’s Editor-in-Chief at the time, Janice Kaplan, decided not to run it. Maybe it was because it wasn’t right for mainstream America since I wrote about being a gay HIV positive man, one not only capable of spirituality but deserving unapologetically of a spiritual life. My title for the piece "The Deeper Stream” might have even understood that. I think Janice liked the piece but had to separate out her feelings for those of her tens of millions of readers in the Parade audience and maybe even the one reader named Anderson in the publisher’s office. Lamar did comment on that initial post that it was “one of the finest stories that Parade never published.” I publish it here to end this column.
(Above: Walking the Camino. The path continues … )
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