LETTER FROM LONDON: THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT DISAPPOINTMENT
Welcome to my new Substack column. I decided to begin this adventure on Substack by writing about my latest two-month one here in London where I arrive to have what I have come to call a “cultural sojourn.” These first columns will be a series of Letters from London where I will be living until June 1 with a few-days detour to Cannes in midMay during the start of the film festival. I have combined three earlier Facebook postings to introduce these springtime Letters from London. Next up will be a few theatre and opera and ballet reviews of what I’ve seen so far. And I am hoping to book some interviews while here. As I get this up and running, there will also, no doubt, be technical mistakes to be corrected as I figure out how to navigate the technology of this site. Forgive me. I apologize upfront about that. Be patient - as I try to be patient with myself which, come to think of it, is what London continues to teach me, how to have more patience and, having it, discover perhaps a deeper forgiveness that has itself been patiently waiting to be found.
But first, this introduction:
On the afternoon of March 31st, I got off the A train at Howard Beach and headed for the AirTrain to take me to Terminal 4 at JFK to catch my Virgin America flight to London at 6:45 p.m. There was a cute young guy on the AirTrain I noticed but he didn't get off at Terminal 4. I did wonder where he was headed because I have been coming to London enough now to have gotten a whiff of a certain sort of Brit about him, that soft handsomeness of the unharried who wear herringbone so well and give a bespoke balance to the unspeakable hooliganism of football fans but can delve into a discussion about the game with statistics and a story about their childhood that lends just a tad of static to the stillness they are taught to present in the equipoise that passes publicly as one's life. I watched his stillness. I studied it. And tried to keep my large suitcase from rolling toward him to disturb it even as it disturbed my own. We were fellow travelers who were not.
After arriving in London and dropping that suitcase at the home where I have a room in Kilburn - the previous airbnb guest was still sleeping at 8:40 a.m. and not checking out until around noon - I headed to my favorite little cafe around the corner, Hart & Lova, to have the best croissant in town. I then decided to go to the box office at Royal Albert Hall to see if I could buy a ticket to the Olivier Awards on the 10th because one had to have a Mastercard to buy one online since Mastercard is sponsoring the ceremony and I only have a VISA debit card these days. I got back on the Bakerloo line and changed at Paddington Station for the Circle line to High Street Kensington. When I got to the platform to catch the Circle line there was the same young man I had seen on the AirTrain to JFK from Howard Beach. He was with other young friends whose soft handsome beauty - another male, two females - matched his. They seemed excited to see him and he was telling them a story of his trip. I was suddenly aware of a kind of static in the air between us as this latest Heightened Coincidence in my life stilled me with a kind of awe in the moment of being aware of it.
And there already it was for me: the feeling of balance instead of the writing of a paragraph that would use the concept to make some poetic point about a guy just this side of pretty. The poetry of such a moment is as wordless as the acknowledgement that passed between that young man and me when our eyes met and he nodded just enough so that I would know he did but his friends would not. I remained still and in my nodless stillness he knew I knew who he was even if I never will know who he is.
And another trip to London began in the unknowing knowing that keeps me coming back, the answer it gives me to the mystery it withholds. That stillness. That static. This story.
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I was so looking forward to seeing The Collaboration at the Young Vic on my first Saturday which is about the friendship between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat and starred Paul Bettany and Jeremey Pope. But when I arrived I was told that both of the last performances of the run that day had been cancelled - I had missed the email - and indeed the whole last week had been cancelled because one of them had come down with COVID. The previous evening at the Royal Opera House where I had headed my first night to buttress my denial of my jet lag by basking in new balletic work at the Royal Ballet by choreographers Christopher Wheeldon and Kyle Abraham and Crystal Site, the company’s Artistic Director, Kevin O’Hare took to the stage to tell us that COVID was running through the company and he wanted to thank its members who weren't sick for stepping up and keeping the production schedule from having to take a pause. And then he announced a replacement for one of its stars.
To say I was disappointed that day at the Young Vic is a bit of an understatement and I am not one, as this letter will continue to attest, who goes in for understatement. I was deeply disappointed not only because I knew Andy and was both Senior Editor and Executive Editor for a couple of years at his Interview magazine, but also because I adore Bettany who played him. I first met Paul on a set in Prague when he was making The Knight's Tale with Heath Ledger. Bruce Weber and his overly lovely army of assistants and stylists and I headed over there to do one of Graydon Carter's star-making covers for Vanity Fair, this one on Heath. We had done one earlier for Matthew McConaughey which I wrote and Herb Ritts shot with less of an army, especially in the Mojave Desert where it was basically just Herb and stylist L'Wren Scott and an RV full of clothes and I out there with him in the middle of nowhere. It had been a long, boring, dusty, car-sick conjuring drive out there in the back of a chauffeur-driven black sedan for me when I remember wondering what the fuck am I doing with my life. But we had a helicopter come pick us up to take us back to LA as the sun was setting - L'Wren stayed behind to travel back with the clothes in that RV - and I'll never forget that ride coming over a ridge and looking down through the transparent floor of the helicopter and seeing all of LA's lights wildly twinkling below us (time refuses to tame them, unlike it does to the kind of stars that exist there) and knowing those lights were at Matthew and Herb's feet, not mine. I even told Matthew through the mic and headphones we were wearing in order to be heard over the noise from the blades swirling above us to remember that moment and that day because once the story came out, his life would never be the same. It wasn't. Matthew would win an Oscar playing a man who died of AIDS. Herb did die of it. L'Wren committed suicide. But that's all a different story, an echo.
Back to Prague. On the set of Knight's Tale, I bonded with Paul as Heath was doing some awful jousting scene on horseback - you can imagine the take after take for that - because I noticed and was impressed that he was reading a book by Christopher Hitchens and made mention of it in the story I ended up writing. Later I did a cover story on Jennifer Connelly, Paul’s wife, for Allure, while they were in London where Paul was making a Woody Allen movie in which he played a dashing tennis player. Jennifer was very pregnant and we met for lunch. During it, Paul joined us. I had such a lovely afternoon with them, another of my London memories that has led to me living so much of my life here lately. Paul reads Hitchens and Jennifer told me that day that one of her favorite poets is Wallace Stevens. They are that kind of couple and each that kind of actor. So I wrote a story about her that I titled “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Jennifer Connelly” which referenced the Stevens poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
I was determined not to live in the momentary, deep disappointment of not seeing Paul as Andy Warhol and decided to see if I could make it over to the Harold Pinter Theatre in time to see Ruth Wilson in Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice directed by Ivo van Hove. I hurried across Waterloo Bridge and did make it with 15 minutes to spare and the gorgeous young woman at the box office sold me a seat in the middle of the orchestra for 20 pounds. It must have been a leftover Rush Ticket but since I had rushed there to get it, it did seem appropriate. Plus, we bonded over our shared disappointment at not seeing The Collaboration since she had a ticket for this week as well. Warhol fascinated her, she told me - her name is Dora - and when I told her of my history with him we bonded - as people often do - talking about a dead artist who means different things to them as they settle into the meaning and not the difference.
As I was next settling into the middle of the Pinter theatre, I had an idea for this letter as I sorted out all those thoughts. So here's where the earlier disappointment led me - not just to that seat, but to this sorting of it in thirteen ways.
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“Thirteen Way of Looking at Disappointment”
1. It whirled in the spring breeze, a small part of the pantomime.
2. I never knew that Andy wore a wig until I asked Bridget Berlin one morning what all those boxes held there in his downstairs office next to mine.
3. I was dashing across the bridge across the Thames across the minutes left me to get to the Pinter but no one had ever called me dashing. I do not play tennis.
4. A man and a woman are one. A man and a woman and disappointment are one.
5. I am a dog person who loves two cats who look at me and long for another kind of love from me.
6. Light tames us until we see it differently - like artists do.
7. The New Yorker writer Michael Schulman writing about Interview in 1988 mentions this: "Kevin Sessums interviews the French actress Carole Bouquet, who had just replaced Catherine Deneuve as the face of Chanel No. 5." I had forgotten I had although I haven't forgotten I interviewed Deneuve. She gave me a number so I could call her in Paris when I got there in a couple of months. I dialed it when I did. It wasn't a working one.
8. I put Divine on the cover of Interview. He died a month later of an enlarged heart. I still have the card he sent me saying I had made his dream come true. After he died, his mother sent me a note about her son because she knew what it had meant to him to be on that cover. She thanked me for my kindness.
9. Is thanking others for kindness - as I often do - an act of kindness itself or a replacement for one's own?
10. It's Brigid not Bridget
11. Disappointment is not despair.
12. I know noble accents and lucid, inescapable rhythms; but I know, too, that disappointment is involved in what I know.
13: Brigid talking about Andy to me soon after he died: Some people can be your best friends and you don’t see them all the time, but I saw Andy practically every day for over twenty years. It’s ironic - it’s hard to describe because in reality there was no mystery in it. It was all so comfortable. If I didn’t still come to the Factory every day I’d probably feel very lonely. I was just thinking this morning when I got to the Factory - I get here pretty early - how Andy used to call me around 8:30 knowing I was usually alone in the place. Sometimes I really do miss him. He’d call up - especially at 860 Broadway - and say, “Gee, Brig, what’s new? Who’s called?” And I’d say, “Nobody’s called, Andy.” And he’d say again, “What’s new?” I’d say, “Nothing’s new.” What’s new?” “Nothing’s new.” “What’s new?” “Nothing.”
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Ruth Wilson was the best thing in The Human Voice. That slight joke jostled aside the odd soaring stillness her performance had left within me to contemplate in my later seat at the Royal Opera House that evening since the final image The Human Voice’s director Ivo van Hove left us all with was the moment before she, arms flung wide like wings, fell winglessly to her death. A soaring stillness, after all, is what I come to the ballet so often to contemplate. I turned to the rather contemplative stranger in the next seat and told her that I had been there the night before and was thrilled to be seeing the second work in the program by Crystal Pite a second time. “Wait till you see it yourself,” I said to her.
She smiled and told me she too had been there the night before and came back to see that exact work again. Another Heightened Coincidence. She told me she sobbed though it the night before. It had made her feel as if she were high. She confessed a bit of what it had been about for her. I told her about the Mark Strand poem, “Lines for Winter,” that inspired the piece set to Brahms concertos for cello and piano and told her I had the same reaction of transcendence when experiencing it the night before. There was something exalted about it - prayerful even - yet visceral. I told her its grace had gristle. “I am a poet,” she said when I told her about the poem.
After the first intermission she told me she had used the time to read the Strand poem and it confirmed what she had thought about the piece. We plan to get together during my time here. “I didn’t meet you tonight,” I told her as I said my goodbyes for the evening. “I know you. We know each other.” There was - is - knowledge of the other in our same deeply felt reaction to “Solo Echo," the name of the Pite piece. Art can conjure many things other than itself. A London friendship - a duet of solos - was conjured that night. That was its echo, yet another.