Month: July 2022

Apart from becoming a Scientology fanatic, it’s fair to say that the last 40-odd years of Tom Cruise‘s life and career have panned out hugely, exceptionally and phenomenally.

It’s just that the idea of Joel Goodson being five years away from the classic retirement age of 65 makes me feel that the locomotive pace of life is moving…well, a bit faster than I’d prefer. I know, I know…60 is the new 50 but still.

For me, Cruise turning 60 is roughly at par with McCartney turning 80. Anyone who was around when Risky Business opened knows what I’m talking about, and I don’t want to hear from any scolds.

HE’s 15 Richest, Best Crafted, Most Compellingly Performed Tom Cruise Films (in this order and excluding all of his high-powered, robo-bunny formula action franchise films): Jerry Maguire, Collateral, Risky Business, The Firm, Born on the Fourth of July, Rain Man, Jack Reacher, American Made, The Color of Money, Tropic Thunder, A Few Good Men, Edge of Tomorrow, Losin’ It, Interview with the Vampire, Magnolia.

HE’s 14 Least Favorite Cruise Films (excluding all of his high-powered, robo-bunny formula action franchise films): Cocktail, Far and Away, Legend, Days of Thunder, Eyes Wide Shut (very well made, compulsive watchable but finally a curiously chilly experience), Minority Report (irritating Kaminsky bleachy-gray color scheme), Vanilla Sky, The Last Samurai, War of the Worlds (good film with atrocious ending), The Mummy, Knight and Day, Valkyrie, Lions for Lambs, The Outsiders.

I can’t remember how I feel about Rock of Ages.

When I was 15 or thereabouts my mother drove her three kids down to Washington, D.C. Stroll around, see the sights, absorb the governmental atmosphere. Motoring from Westfield, N.J. to the nation’s capitol and back again took about eight hours; I seem to recall flopping in some modest motel in a D.C. suburb.

At some point in the late afternoon my sister and I were both suddenly anxious about attending to #1. We were in the car and my mother was having trouble figuring where to drop us off (hotel, restaurant, anywhere). At one point we drove by a large fountain in Dupont Circle with water shooting out from 15 or 20 spigots, and my mom said “oh, God…a bad thing to contemplate in this situation…don’t look at it.” I recall glancing at her with irritation and thinking “Jesus, that’s an annoying thing to say, and certainly not funny.” But here I am recalling this decades later. The things that linger in the mind

9:25 pm: This morning I wrote 150 words about there being no rational basis for doubting the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson. Somehow they were accidentally obliterated. But she’s the real deal — a hero — the new John Dean.

…since the late ’70s. Definitely catchy — you could even say throttling — in a flashy, one-hit-wonder way. The opening guitar-and-bongos prelude (the first 51 seconds) is the best part. I saw Dirk Hamilton and the band play a set at the Bitter End sometime around ’79 or ’80, and it was clear he was dealing with a serious case of stage fright. He quit music for two or three years but then came back to it, and is still plugging along.

“Unless Donald Trump is held accountable, I would say that our democracy is in grave danger. [Attorney General Merrick] Garland has said he’ll go to the top if that’s where the evidence points, and that’s certainly where it’s pointing now, and there are indications, certainly from the searches and seizures of both John Eastman and of others…strong evidence that the Justice Department is not stopping with the foot soldiers…it’s going to the generals, and the biggest general of all is Donald Trump…I do think the odds are that he will be indicted.”

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Joe Turkel (1927-2022) burned his way into the acting legend annals three times, and is the only actor of note to be hired by Stanley Kubrick three times.

His finest and most incendiary performance, hands down, was as the anxious and cynical Private Pierre Arnaud in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (‘57).

Early on Arnaud frets not so much about dying but the painful manner of death he might suffer (bayonet, machine gun). He’s later knocked unconscious after a fist fight with Ralph Meeker’s Corporal Phillipe Paris, and is pinched awake just before his daybreak execution. French bullets!

Turkel’s eerily stoic turn as Lloyd, the ghostly bartender, in The Shining (‘80) is the performance that most people recall.

Turkel was also vivid as Dr. Eldon Tyrell, the inventor of Rutger Hauer ‘s replicant “Roy”, in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (‘82), and he spoke a line that served as a poignant epitaph for the life of a large-living cyborg — “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very brightly, Roy.”

He also played “Tiny” in Kubrick’s The Killing (‘56).

At age 48 or 49 Turkel didn’t make a huge impression as a member of the San Pablo crew in Robert Wise’s The Sand Pebbles (‘66), but there he was in a first-rate allegory about the Vietnam War.

Turkel was an excellent actor with a face that conveyed a certain inner steel and turbulence, and he was graced with a deep, slightly Brooklyn-accented voice. But for some reason he didn’t work very much after Blade Runner, at least as far as his Wiki bio indicates.

Turkel wrote an autobiography titled “The Misery of Success,” due for publishing later this year.

Two weeks shy of his 95th birthday, Turkel passed on 6.27 at Santa Monica’s St. John’s hospital.

The mere sound of this deplorable word is like chalk screeching on a blackboard. It makes me shudder. The person who wrote this copy should be fined. Put it this way: My interest in watching The Gray Man just plummeted. It may be unresuscitatable.

Posted on 6.7.13: God forbid someone might record some of my private conversations and then transcribe them and publish an excerpt in which an ex-girlfriend alleges that I’m a “Wham-Bam-Thank-You-Ma’am”-er in the sack…Jesus.

So I feel mostly sorry for poor Rock Hudson having been outed by The Hollywood Reporter’s Stephen Galloway (by way of tapes and transcripts belonging to the late private gumshoe Fred Otash, which were recently made available to Galloway by Otash’s daughter Colleen) as a guy who didn’t last long in the saddle.

Some things are better left unsaid. Dead men should be afforded a certain measure of dignity.

On the other hand it’s a bit surreal and almost freakish that Phyllis Gates, who became Hudson’s “beard” wife in 1955 at the urging of Hudson’s manager, Henry Wilson, in order to protect Hudson from rumors of his homosexuality, would berate Hudson for not trying harder to cure himself of his affliction, and at the same time complain about “your great speed with me, sexually…are you that fast with the boys?” Hudson’s reply is an even bigger hoot: “Well, it’s a physical conjunction. Boys don’t fit. So this is why it lasts longer.” Boys don’t fit?

The other big revelation in Galloway’s story about the Otash tapes and transcripts is not the statement about Otash having “listened in on Marilyn Monroe having sex with [President John F.] Kennedy when he was watching [Peter] Lawford’s house in Malibu, allegedly while working for Howard Hughes, who was seeking general information with which to discredit the Democrats.”

I don’t remember where I heard or read it, but this episode came across my radar several years ago. (And by the way, Lawford’s beach pad wasn’t in Malibu — it was in Santa Monica about a half-mile or so south of the pier.)

The big thing is that the Otash stash “include[s] notes that he left for Colleen, in which he says he was conducting surveillance of Marilyn Monroe on the day she died.”

If I remember correctly Norman Mailer‘s book about Monroe mentioned some razmatazz about Otash bugging JFK and Monroe doing the deed plus her having had an emotional moment with Bobby Kennedy near the end of her life. But I’ve never read anything that indicated Otash was listening in as this argument happened, or that he was monitoring Monroe on the night that she left the earth.

“‘I listened to Marilyn Monroe die,’ Otash claims in the notes, without elaborating, adding that he had taped an angry confrontation among Kennedy, Lawford and Monroe just hours before her death: ‘She said she was passed around like a piece of meat. It was a violent argument about their relationship and the commitment and promises he made to her. She was really screaming and they were trying to quiet her down. She’s in the bedroom and Bobby gets the pillow and he muffles her on the bed to keep the neighbors from hearing. She finally quieted down and then he was looking to get out of there.'”

The tape of this alleged conversation apparently doesn’t exist — only Otash’s notes.

Wiki excerpt: “Gates and Hudson separated in 1957. She became irate upon hearing that Hudson had had an affair with some guy while on location in Italy for A Farewell to Arms. The divorce was eventually finalized in 1958.

“In Gates’ autobiography, published after Hudson’s death from AIDS in 1985, she wrote that she was in love with Hudson when they were married. She stated that she did not know Hudson was homosexual when they married, and that she was not complicit in his deception.”

Was it possible to really be that clueless, that much in denial?

“Gates later became a successful interior decorator. She died from lung cancer in 2006, at age 80.”

You’d think on the surface that “friends” you hung with for months or years on end in your teens or 20s…you’d think they might be up for an old times’ sake text or an email once in a blue moon. But for the most part they’re not. Either they don’t want to go back there or they’re afraid you might want to, or something in that realm.

In the late ‘90s and early aughts I kept in touch with a high-school friend. We met for a midtown lunch two or three times. But that melted away in the late aughts. You put that stuff away.

I was good friends with a Wilton guy in high school. We kept it going during his 18-month stint as a Boston drug dealer (467 Commonwealth Ave.). After he was arrested and imprisoned I visited him twice in Walpole. After he did his time the guy moved to Fort Lauderdale, and within a year of this relocation I flew from Los Angeles to visit.

He grew up, mellowed, got into home furnishings as a profession, got married, etc. And when I reached out to say “hi” a decade ago, he ghosted me. Because, I’m presuming, I represented the drug-dealing past, and he didn’t want to go near that with a ten-foot pole. This is how people are.

The only friends and acquaintances from the past who might occasionally share a hale and hearty “how ya livin’?” (and I’m including myself) are professional colleagues from 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. But forget college and high-school pals…they’re gone.

Wait…there’s an exception. I was friendly for decades with a Wilton pal whom I first knew in high school, but a year or two ago he turned “woke” (partly because he was showing loyalty to his three Millennial-aged daughters) and became Cotton Mather, at least as far as his judgmental shithead attitudes toward HE were concerned.