HUGH JACKMAN and ELIZABETH BISHOP

CO-STARS IN THE STEADYING STOICISM OF LOSS, LOSING, LETTING GO

(Above: A contemplative Hugh Jackman. Photo by Nino Muñoz. He has yet another Wolverine movie coming out this week, Deadpool & Wolverine. Almost sixteen years ago now, I interviewed him for a cover story in Parade magazine about another Wolverine movie and ended up talking about deeper subjects. Six year ago, I took him to task on social media for celebrating his 50th birthday with, among others, Ivanka Trump. I had to let that go to write this column today about letting go.)

Yesterday, as I was doing my research for the A POEM FOR A SUNDAY series that I send out to our Paid Subscriber community, I decided to do a two-for-one column highlighting two poems by friends Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, a poem by each dedicated to the other. But I also read and re-read one of my favorite poems which is by Bishop, “One Art,” and, doing so, it led me to contemplating both its message and my time with Hugh Jackman when I was writing a cover story on him for Parade magazine and we ended up having a spiritual discussion about loss and losing and letting go, the art of it all.

I lay in bed back then - close to sixteen years ago now - in Beverly Hills and noticed the message light blinking on my hotel phone and wondered if someone had called to wish me a happy 53rd birthday that Saturday morning on March 28th.  I punched in the code on the phone and heard instead the voice of Hugh Jackman’s publicist telling me that his photo shoot for the cover of Parade was running late out in Malibu so our lunch had to be pushed back by an hour.  I shrugged at the message and focused on the job at hand.  The extra hour gave me just enough time to shower and peruse my notes concerning Jackman’s juggernaut of a career as well as his disciplined adherence to a twice-a-day meditative practice that such a career conversely engendered in him.

I’d been up late the night before, in fact, reading about his devotion to the School of Practical Philosophy upon which his meditative practice is based, one that has emerged from the teachings of Hindu philosopher Advaita Vedanta.  Having already memorized most of the information, I only gave my notes a perfunctory fifteen minutes.  I then folded them and stuffed them into my back pocket before having the hotel doorman hail me  a cab from the queue of five or six at the ready for east coasters like me. To be seen in a cab is anathema to a Los Angeleno.   It’s almost as bad as lowering one’s price or losing to the Celtics.  When I’ve pulled up in one out there I’ve seen some people roll their eyes.  Others grow quiet.  All recoil.

Once I got to the Peninsula Hotel,  I had to wait still longer after Jackman’s publicist called yet again to tell me that they were stuck in freeway traffic.   I read my notes once more then sat and watched the swirl of tourists in the lobby - a bevy of bejeweled Arab women arguing about something in a language that lifted and fell in a kind of ancient flyting ritual, a couple of towheaded children telling each other secrets, a bride-to-be from Brentwood, I surmised, sweeping in with some garishly dressed girlfriends for the shower they were throwing for her over in the Verandah Room.

Jackman suddenly came bursting through the front doors looking around for someone who had been described to him, no doubt, as bald and short with a tape recorder at the ready.   He spotted me and I laughed at his harried state, thankful for it. I had worried I was the one who would be slightly rattled that day.  My dark birthday mood that morning had scared me, making me think I really might be as mad as a March hare.  Hugh, who hated being late, appeared rather mad and hare-like himself as he hurried toward me.  We calmed each other down by canceling out the other’s beleaguered state and by the time we actually ordered some food we were, around 3 p.m., the only ones left in the Peninsula’s Belvedere restaurant.

We had the place all to ourselves.  I relaxed into the resulting privacy and was prepared for another coy give-and-take with a carefully coached celebrity.   I was also prepared to ask him any question I felt compelled to ask.  What I was not prepared for was the one question  he felt compelled to ask me.

“I turned 40 last year and it didn’t bother me at all,” Jackman said when I told him it was my birthday.  “Life has only gotten better.”

“Yeah, well, 40 didn’t bother me either,” I said. “But turning 50 sure did. When I  moved to New York back in 1975 there were old coots like me now - well, gentlemen of a certain ilk really, the art world’s Henry Geldzahler and the poet Howard Moss  - who told me, ‘You should have been here in the 1940s and 1950s, kid, when New York was New York.’  I’m at that age now when I hear myself talking to young guys about how great New York was in the ‘70s when Times Square, like sex back then, was dirty. But it’s our youth we miss not any earlier version of the city. What we miss is that earlier version of ourselves when we ourselves could be dirty and innocent at the same time. ”

“Have you seen American Swing?” Jackman asked.  “It’s that documentary about the sex club Plato’s Retreat during the  ‘70s.  I really want to  see that.”

“I never wanted to see the real place that much when it was around,” I told him.   “The one or two times I went there I couldn’t get the smell of of it out of my nostrils for a day or so.”

“Yeah, I read about something called The Mattress Room they had there,” he said.  “Sounded kind of  ... ah .... redolent.”

“I don’t like public sex,” I heard myself confessing to him.  “But I’ll do anything behind a locked door.  If I don’t like it then I don’t it again.”

“That’s brilliant,” Jackman said, laughing as if I were joking. 

"Why another Wolverine movie," I asked back then, changing the subject - or I had thought I was.

"I wouldn’t have done it unless it was a great script and it interested me," he said. "Let’s face it, I don’t need the money and I’m not even particularly materialistic in that way or ambitious in that way. I never have been. But I will concede the validity in having a franchise. It does give you a little bit more time to play with your career. Success itself doesn’t motivate. To get down to the quick of it, respect motivates me."

"But you get respect in Hollywood by having success," I told him. "Even more than having talent."

"But I think actually to make a movie like Wolverine work commercially and also have some class to it is one of the hardest things there is to do in this business," said Hugh. "I just want to be seen to be able to cross lots of genres and still be 'fair dinkum,' as we say in Australia, which means genuine and true and unique."

"Well, you are combination of Gene Kelly and Gary Cooper with just a soupçon of Rosalind Russell thrown in for good measure," I teased him.

"I"m going to have to write that down. Promise me you'll put that in the article," he said, laughing.

"What appeals to you in the Wolverine character?” I asked.

“My favorite play I studied in drama school was The Bacchae.  It’s about King Pentheus who gets eaten alive by all the women in a kind of orgy. I love that idea of animalistic chaos and following our desires,” he said. “I think the Wolverine character I’ve played kind of represents that in an allegorical sense.  He’s a man who battles between the animal and the human in him, between the chaos in him and the self-control he must have.  We all deal with this to some extent every day.  At what point do we let go and do what we want to do when we should submit to rules?  This is a man who is terrified of the blind fury he gives in to.  It’s when he’s at his most glorious and at his most devastating - and yet at his most destructive. Coming to terms with our true natures and who we really are has always been a fascination to us humans. I know it's fascinating to me.”

"But that is who you are when, as you said, you get down to the quick of it," I told him. "Your whole study of the School of Practical Philosophy is about taking duality and finding the underlying unity of things."

"I should spend more time with you, Kevin. You have a way of summing up what I believe - in Rosalind Russell kind of way.”

"Look at me at your Girl Friday on this Saturday."

We laughed.

"The truth is that creation is ruled by dualities - night and day, etc. - and we live in a world of these opposites," said Hugh. "The real work in life is finding the unity."

“There is a sentence in Sanskrit ...”  I said.

“....Tat Tvam Asi ... ” he said. 

“Thou art that,” we said together.

###

Jackman and I finished our meal as well as our interview, touching on all the topics that Parade readers wanted to know about - not Greek kings being devoured by women in an orgy of appetites, but his adopted children, his parents and childhood in Australia, his then-wife long before their divorce, his hosting of the Oscar telecast that year, his stage and movie career.  The waiter, surprising me,  then brought out a piece of mocha-frosted cake with a lone lit candle stuck atop it.  Jackman must have told him to do it when he excused himself earlier, saying he had to make a quick phone call.   The waiter made an elaborate ritual out of it all and then Jackman serenaded me with “Happy Birthday.”

“Do you know about the Camino in northern Spain?” I asked him as the waiter handed us two forks. “It’s literally a spiritual path that people have walked for 2000 years.   I’m doing it in a month.  I’m walking from France.  Over the Pyrenees.   And, if I make it, all the way across Spain to Santiago where St. James is said to buried in the cathedral there.”

“And what do you hope to find once you start walking?” he asked.

“I don’t know.   I’m hoping it finds me.   I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro a couple of years ago and made the summit but what I went seeking was not what I found there.  So who knows.  I do think part of doing physical  things like that climb and this walk is to prove I’m still alive, that I can do it.  It’s defeating my fear of death in a way since I am HIV positive. I feel somehow I’m already walking The Camino having decided to do it.   Coincidences are becoming even more heightened. Everything is beginning to connect.  I just finished Shirley MacLaine’s book The Camino about her own walk along the path.  It’s a bit woo-woo even for me.  She talks about her inner spiritual journey in it as much as the trek itself.  While walking it, she had visions of visiting the lost land of Lemuria, which is sort of like an occult Eden as far as I could tell.  She had these gigantic ectoplasmic astral guides there. I have to admit all these heightened coincidences began to happen to me while I was reading her book.”

“Yeah?  I’m listening,” Hugh said, licking some of the mocha from his fork.   “You know all this stuff fascinates me.”

“I was in Starbucks reading Shirley’s book when the door opened and I looked over and saw the most beautiful boy I think I’ve ever seen,” I told him.   “He kind of looked like an astral projection himself.  He was backlit by the sun and his blonde wavy hair seemed to be encircled by a halo.  He looked like an angel but angels like that don’t look at me anymore now that I’m past 50 so instead of cruising him I turned back to the book.  A few minutes later, the angel tapped me on the shoulder and said he couldn’t help but notice what I was reading and asked if I were going to walk the Camino.  He told me that he had walked it the year before but had to stop before he made it all the way because one of his knees blew out when he reached Burgos.  We talked for a while about his experiences walking it and he gave me his name and number and email in case I wanted to talk some more.  His last name was Amore.  He was an angel named love.  Can you believe that?”

“Yes.  I can believe it,” he said.   “I do believe it.”

I followed Hugh’s lead and licked a bit of frosting from my own fork.  “Then one night when I was on my way to see Geoffrey Rush in the Ionesco play Exit the King on Broadway I stopped into a frozen yogurt place called Mango to kill some time.  I never eat that stuff.  But I went in for some reason.  They asked me what topping I wanted so since the place was called Mango I told them just to put lots of that on there.  I hadn’t had mangos in years.  I opened up Shirley’s book and began to read that Lemuria section. I was rolling my eyes.  But then she asked the giant hermaphroditic spirit creatures who hovered about her there what they ate, how they subsisted.  They reached up into a tree and pulled down a mango.”

Jackman laughed.  I laughed along with him.

“Have you seen Exit the King?”  I asked.

“Yeah.  I did.  It  was amazing,” he said.

“Yeah.  It was,” I agreed.  “I even began to contemplate my upcoming Camino pilgrimage while watching it,” I said.  “Ionesco’s plays are usually about accumulation but this was all about depletion, about shedding.  I did some research about Ionesco and the play before going to see it.   Ionesco said, ‘This play is a lesson in dying.  I told myself that one could learn to die, that I could learn to die,  and that one can also help other people to die.  This seems to me to be the most important thing we can do since we’re all of us dying men who refuse to die.  This play is an apprenticeship in dying.’” I paused.  I put down my fork.  “So maybe,” I mused, “walking the Camino is an apprenticeship for my own death instead of any proof I’m still alive.  Maybe that’s all life is at its essence - an apprenticeship for death.”

Hugh Jackman and I sat in silence for a moment.

Neither of us looked at the other.

He then sighed in a way I had not heard since my parents would sigh at my troubling little sissy childhood presence.

“Did the Ionesco play speak to your own fear of death like it spoke to mine?” I finally asked.

“Of course,” he  said. “Not at the time particularly because I was so engrossed in Geoffrey’s performance and the virtuosity of it.  But I woke up the next morning to meditate and the first thing that came to my mind was that brilliant  ... well ... not a description so much as a showing, a sharing of that oblivion, the casting off of everything in that last monologue when the queen is talking and he, as the king,  physically, silently did what he did.  That’s what meditation is.  It’s that natural shedding of all this stuff.  It was a completely different meditation for me the next morning after seeing Exit the King and I’ve been meditating for 15 years.   But it somehow changed my view, my perspective, what they call in Sanskrit your bhavana, which means what you bring to something, what you feel about something.  I realized anew what a gift meditation is.  It’s dying twice a day.  I’d never thought of it that way.  It is a practice of dying - what it’s like to get rid of the ideas, the desires, the body even.  There is a part of meditation that is a feeling of bodiless-ness.”

Jackman turned and now looked at me.  There was and utter stillness in his eyes that, in turn, stilled me with its stern regard.   “I want to ask you a question, Kevin,” he said.  “I hope you don’t mind.  But I feel I must, in all seriousness, ask you this.”  He touched my arm.  “Have you fucked the angel?” he asked.

And with that, I had the sensation of leaving my own body by burrowing down to its deepest desire, the seam in its ore.  Hugh Jackman had just summed up my whole dilemma.   It was the pilgrimage I had been on my whole life.  How do I fully combine the spiritual with the carnal?  “Not yet,” was all that I could answer.

(Above: Elizabeth Bishop photographed by Rollie McKenna. 1951. National Portrait Gallery. Washington, D.C. )

ONE ART

by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.