LETTER FROM LONDON: 12/19/25

Rob Reiner, Emma Thompson, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland, That Russian Soprano, Hampstead Heath, and "Pippin"

1.

The work of art above by Jacob Kamara hangs in my room here in London. I found it at Adorn the Common. It was the first piece of art I got in order to personalize the place a bit. It spoke to me because this is really all that remains of a home for me now in this pilgrim’s life. I liked the poetically succinct realism of it.

The poetic, succinct, much too real time between Thanksgiving and Christmas - even when you’re living in London where Thanksgiving passed as just another Thursday which I spent alone at the kitchen table writing and reading and nibbling - has since I was 8 years old taken on the texture of sadness that is not just a generalized sort of holiday malaise but has a specific feel for me, not just a feeling. It is tactile, though small enough now that I can hold it in my hand and no longer so large it must live abstractly in the heaviness of my heart. There is still alas a bit of heft to it as I peer at it in my palm then turn it over in yet another artful examination of it and allow it to spill onto these computer keys and seep into this week’s column. You writers out there must know that feeling of your feelings solidifying and their texture becoming an inversion: your text.

2.

My mother died of esophageal cancer on November 16th in 1964 (my father died the previous year in August in his car accident) and ten days after her death there it sat: Thanksgiving. I sat too in front of my grandparents tiny black-and-white television watching the Macy’s parade which NBC kept hyping as being broadcast in color and longed for a world that was not so blasted black-and-white. I focused on the grey shadows that day in my little life and on that little TV screen and remember honing in on Fred Gwynne’s face, gruesome and grey, as Herman Munster who was there on the screen in that parade that was supposed to be in color and wondered if Howard and Nancy, my parents, looked like him, not angelic but ghoulish, elongated, and as he sped by in some sort of Munstermobile, now gone. That Thanksgiving morning might have been the first time I was ever too mad to cry. I hated it, that day, with all the hate my all too real little heart could muster and wondered what Christmas was going to feel like. I soon discovered: worse. Every year since I have been some version of that stubborn little sissy boy angrily stuck in the sadness that became my home more than Mississippi ever did. I think part of my life as a pilgrim is finding places where it won’t find me. But this time of year it always does and settles in as it did once my parents died and it replaced them. These two holidays are family ones. Sadness since ’64 has always been family to me. And yet sadness doesn’t really make me feel exactly sad anymore. Just that: found.

This past week however was a bit overwhelming emotionally for all of us no matter our histories. There was the vileness and antisemitism needed for the father/son terrorists to massacre so many of the those celebrating Hanukkah on Bondi Beach in Australia. Brown University became the latest American school to serve as a setting for deaths caused by a gunman. And now for the past few days we have been confronting the shocking murders of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner and the arrest of their son, Nick, for those murders. My tiny bit of personal sadness within such a world during yet another year-end holiday interregnum was diminished even more by the grotesquery of it all. I have been again too mad to cry.

That grotesquery was then mirrored by the sociopathic narcissist whom America has grotesquely put into the Oval Office twice now. We all know the ugliness of what he posted about the Reiners and how he then doubled down on it in his later press conference. Since then there has been more vulgarity: the parodic perversion of a “presidential” address and the renaming of the Kennedy Center giving him top billing which was done at a meeting of the board at the Palm Beach home of Vegas gambling magnate Steve Wynn. But this has never fully been about such a vulgarian and sociopath being president but about the people who voted for him to put him in such a position of power. I will say it yet again: all I need to know about anyone is if they support this man because everything else about them flows from that one fact. One cannot deny how deep and dark his indecency is. It is always on full display. His supporters see it and say to themselves: that, that is what I want because that down deep is who I am. He is their political and personal id manifested. There is no other explanation. No other rationalization by them or by those of who know them makes any sense. They have not been found, but found out.

3.

I have never seen The Princess Bride which Reiner directed but I was out in Los Angeles one Christmas to interview Robin Wright who starred in it earlier in her career for a proposed Vanity Fair cover story which ended up being a “Spotlight” in the well. I often didn’t watch all of a subject’s films since I approached those stories as being about the person more than about their work and had to focus on the latest film they were promoting anyway. Oh, I’d watch enough of the work to know about it - I was an actor before I was a writer so I have a sort of shorthand knowledge for the artistry and craft of the profession - but I would dive more during our conversations into their life stories and dig around in those with them. I was already out in LA staying at the Chateau Marmont working on another article during this interregnum after Thanksgiving and was told just to stay out there over Christmas to conduct a couple of interviews with Wright and start the story. A colleague at VF told me that the reason given in an editorial meeting was that I was single gay guy who didn’t have to worry about being with anyone during the holidays so I got the assignment. I felt like crying at that but shrugged it off not in anger but in the don’t-take-it-personally detachment I had developed as a seasoned pro who was careful not to become a cynical one.

David Geffen and I were still pretty close back then and when he heard I was going to be spending Christmas week alone at the Chateau he told me to come out and stay with him in Malibu instead. It was kind and generous of him and if he hadn’t been I would have never had the experience of sitting on his porch on the beach smoking joints with Sue Mengers one day during my stay and crying not from sadness but laughter as she regaled me with stories about her roster of clients past and present and others in the cast of characters in her wide and wondrous orbit. David then told me to get in the car on Christmas Day because we were going over to Penny Marshall’s for our big meal. “She’s always got a full house,” he said. I helped out in the kitchen chopping vegetables and talking to Penny about the film she was then directing, The Preacher’s Wife, and gossiping a bit with her brother, Gary, who was also helping out and who later gave me an inscribed copy of his memoir to read. Carrie Fisher was there and I seem to have a memory of Rob Reiner coming over to spend some time that day with his ex-wife Penny and their daughter, Tracy, and watching Carrie making him giggle in a corner. That is what I wish for him now, that in some corner wherever he is, he’s run into Carrie, who had her own demons and addictions before her death, and somehow they are giggling. If there is such a thing as heaven then it must be a place where after such deaths happen those who die from them can find a corner there and if not giggle live in the echo of when they could, and did.

I do have a distinct memory of watching the very first episode of All in the Family when I was 14 years old. It hadn’t moved to Saturday nights yet and came on right after The Red Skelton Show on Tuesday in the old 9:30 slot that had belonged to Petticoat Junction. My politics were forming as I was turning into a teenager and Reiner’s character become a kind of avatar for my beliefs since I was surrounded by so many bigots down in Mississippi. I’d hone my own arguments by watching him make his as Archie’s son-in-law. Indeed, one of my favorite Rob Reiner films is The American President which starred Michael Douglas as the liberal title character and Annette Bening as his love interest, an environmental lawyer and activist. It was released in 1995 and written by Aaron Sorkin as a kind of precursor to his series The West Wing. The film spoke to my politics as well and a belief that America was always trying to be better instead of what it has become under the awful man, so full of a belittling bitterness, so full of bile, who has become its president twice now.

But let’s end this remembrance with the words from another person who held that office with dignity and empathy and grace. This is what President Obama posted after the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner:

“Michelle and I are heartbroken by the tragic passing of Rob Reiner and his beloved wife, Michele. Rob’s achievements in film and television gave us some of our most cherished stories on screen. But beneath all of the stories he produced was a deep belief in the goodness of people—and a lifelong commitment to putting that belief into action. Together, he and his wife lived lives defined by purpose. They will be remembered for the values they championed and the countless people they inspired. We send our deepest condolences to all who loved them.”

4.

On Wednesday afternoon I saw my new cardiologist in Chelsea for my actual heart - everything seems to be okay according to her based on an MRI I had done at Chelsea/Westminster Hospital during my last London sojourn - and that night I headed out to Highgate to attend the opening of Pippin at Upstairs at the Gatehouse which is one of the theaters here in London located above a pub. I have seen several musicals there and I’m always impressed by the calibre of the musicianship and the voices of the cast and how beautifully it’s all presented on such a shoestring production budget. Pippin is an anecdotal revue about the son of Charlemagne who is a bit of pilgrim himself trying to find the meaning of life.

The book of Pippin is a maudlin vaudevillian mishmash which can make my eyes roll but the Stephen Schwartz songs can still move me. I was amazed how many of them I still know by heart once they began to be sung. Lewis Edgar, who plays Pippin, was remarkable. He was, in fact, the best of the several I have seen over the years. When he began to sing his first number, “Corner of the Sky,” I unexpectedly erupted in tears and felt like both an old fool and the young boy who first heard that song and was still so full of hope. I am indeed old enough to have seen the original Broadway production so I felt as well the full sudden sweep of all my 70 years sitting above that pub the other night. And I thought of Irene Ryan who originated the role of Pippin’s grandmother, Berthe, and had also portrayed Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies. She suffered a stroke onstage while performing her big number, “No Time at All.” She died the next month. She too was 70.

The video above was made at the end of the curtain call on opening night. If you’re in London, check out this production. It’s certainly not the West End but that’s its charm. I judge things within their own context and within that criterion it’s actually better than some West End shows I’ve seen.

5.

Putin apologist and supporter, the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, who now lives in Vienna, is back at the Royal Opera House after controversially opening the season in Tosca. She is starring in Turandot, above, along with her estranged husband, tenor Yusif Eyvazov. They have received raves - especially Netrebko. Her pre-Christmas four-performance run of the role has been sold out but I checked the other day and there was a lone seat in the amphitheatre - i.e. balcony - so I guiltily bought it and attended the performance on Thursday night.

“And may we now expect a column in which you rationalize going?” a friend texted me.

“No,” I texted back. “Apologize.”

In fact, to assuage some for my guilt about going I went outside to photograph and video the supporters of Ukraine who were protesting both her appearance at the ROH and those of us who were attending the performance. At one point an overly furred and furious Russian woman tried to grab the microphone being used in the protest in order to praise Putin and Netrebko and Russia although she left out the words “war” and “crimes.” I did video the last bit of the next woman who spoke who was railing against Putin and Netrebko and all of us who had bought tickets. I also took some photos of the Ukrainian flags unfurled outside the ROH.

The performance? I actually find Netrebko’s sound unpleasant but there is no denying her star presence nor the fact that one becomes not only attuned to the unpleasant sound but rather entranced by it once the ear adjusts to its Callas-ness. I didn’t applaud her curtain call.

6.

(Above: Emma Thompson on the set of Down Cemetery Road and British poet Valentine Ackland.)

Rob Reiner originally offered the role of the environmental lawyer in The American President to Emma Thompson. I adore Emma. She was the subject of maybe the best cover story I ever wrote for Vanity Fair. Sometimes I go back and read it just to remind myself that I was actually good at writing all those stories when I doubt that I actually was even though the title of that particular one was “Don’t Look Back.” I just finished watching Emma’s series, Down Cemetery Road, on AppleTV, even the name of the damn thing evoking all the death that has come to define this year’s interregnum between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I really didn’t like the series that much. It was both a story about female agency being sought hung on a damsels-in-distress narrative. It was dizzying in that doubled-respect but still oddly dull. It was more about chase scenes and violence than any deeper storytelling. But AppleTV has already announced there will be a second season. I watched it for Emma and her costar, Ruth Wilson, although I kept wondering what they saw in the scripts for the 8-episode arc of the first season.

I did like Emma’s look in the series which gave her a butch spiky beauty, a kind of lovely lesbian elan she threaded into her hetero character’s louche allure. In that, she reminded me of the British poet, Valentine Ackland. who was the longtime partner of writer, Sylvia Townsend Warner. I had been reading about the two of them recently because a statue of Warner was just unveiled in Dorset and I became fascinated by their lives.

Esther Addley began her story in The Guardian about them:

“‘The thing all women hate is to be thought dull,’ says the title character of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1926 novel, Lolly Willowes, an early feminist classic about a middle-aged woman who moves to the countryside, sells her soul to the devil and becomes a witch.

“Although women’s lives are so limited by society, Lolly observes, they ‘know they are dynamite … know in their hearts how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they are.’

“Warner herself was anything but dull: a writer, translator, musicologist and political activist who wrote seven novels, extensive poetry and contributedmore than 150 short stories to The New Yorker, more than any other female writer. She was also a communist who volunteered for the Red Cross during the Spanish civil war and an LGBTQ+ pioneer, living with the poet Valentine Ackland for decades in a quiet Dorset village, in a partnership they described as a marriage.”

(Above: Sylvia Townsend Warner. Photograph by Howard Coster. 1934. Collection of the National Portrait Gallery. London.)

Sylvia and Valentine were together for almost 40 years although some of those years were difficult because of Ackland’s indiscreet lack of adherence to monogamy. It was a literary alliance - they published co-written poems - as well as one based on love. Ackland died of cancer in 1969. Warner lived another 9 years. The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner was published in 1994. With so much ugliness recently gathered around so much death, here is Warner’s diary entry written on the day of Ackland’s death that finds a deeper beauty in it:

November 9th … 1969

When the first light sifted into the room I knew she was beginning to die. A gale raged round the house: a torn cloud let through the low sun. I saw a tall rainbow standing there. Hollins [the doctor] came. By now her breathing had changed—slow, harsh, like a tree creaking. His part was over, he went away. Sibyl [a friend to both] & I stayed by her, wiping her lips, I still holding her hand. The intervals between her creaking breaths grew longer, longer. Then, no more. The silence seemed to solidify, like hardening wax. We cleaned her face & Sibyl took away the soiled towels. Sibyl spoke of calling old Mrs Stewart to lay her out. I said at once that we would do that. So between us, we cut away her red silk pyjamas, & washed her beautiful beautiful long body, so smooth, so white, & re-dressed her. The pliability, the compliance of her dead limbs—the last token of her grace and obligingness. And we bound up her jaw.

Soon after her death, I saw all her young beauty flooding back into her face. It was the Valentine of forty years [ago], the Valentine I first loved. Binding her jaw slightly changed this. She had the tragic calm beauty of the dead Christ we saw carried in the Good Friday procession at Orta.

I put her wooden cross & rosary in her stiffening hand, and some sprays of wet rosemary and the remaining white cyclamen from the garden.

Later that day I rang up [British artist] Joy Finzi & asked her to come & do a drawing of my dead beautiful love.

(Above: the portrait that Finzi did of Ackland on November 9th at Warner’s request.)

7.

The other day, I headed over to Hampstead Heath to take a walk amidst the creak of trees and contemplate this time between Thanksgiving and Christmas as well as this time in my life 30 years after I was first there walking the Heath along some of those same arbored paths with Emma Thompson.

Here is the last section of that story on Emma from the February 1996 issue of Vanity Fair:

“A couple of weeks later, on Thanksgiving, Thompson repays my California beach tour by taking me on a walk through Hampstead Heath. It has been an unseasonably warm autumn here, and golden leaves still cling to the trees. Thompson is wearing a large windowpane-patterned wool coat. Her hair has been ponytailed, and earmuffs hide her ears. As much as she enjoys the California climate and clear skies, she is happy to be back where she belongs.

“‘Could you ever live in America?’ I ask.

“‘I’m sure I could,’ she says, to my surprise. ‘But I do love England. I love the people. Even if they’re not friendly, at least they’re funny. The northerners. The Scottish. The Irish. God, how I’d miss the Celts!’

“After a visit to Kenwood House, a stately home built in the 17th century, where she had the first read-through of her Sense and Sensibility script, Thompson takes me on a tour of the favorite arbored paths of her youth. ‘This must be where you’d walk with your boyfriends,’ I propose. ‘Do you, by chance, remember your very first kiss?’

“‘I do. I remember it very clearly. I was 12, and the chap I was kissing was 17. So he knew a thing or two. He’d been drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, and it was the best taste I think I’ve ever encountered.’

“Laughing at her schoolgirl memories, we both fall suddenly silent and stop in our tracks at the sight before us: three greyhounds are posed in a valley of trees, mist surrounding the sleek, muscled profiles of their bodies, as if they had come to life from a Mantegna painting. She’s trumped me—this is not something that Malibu can offer.

“As we approach the hounds and their owners—a crisply precise old couple—Thompson and I realize that one of the dogs, named Jessica, is blind. One eye has been removed, and all that remains is a furry slit of a scar; the other eye is fogged to a beautifully opaque blue. Thompson bends down, cups the dog’s face in her hands, and whispers secrets in its ears; understanding, the animal licks her face and nuzzles her woolen chest.

“Thompson stands, flushed with the British air and the hold that even a simple hound can have on her heart. Her own blue eyes are misted now with the empathy that is the very essence of, yes, her art. ‘That’s a face you’d want on film,’ she says of the slightly scarred, instinctively regal female animal. Her tone is neither sly nor highly British. It is instead quite practical. She turns her collar up and strides heath ward home.”

8.

Onward …