September Song

It’s not an everyday love story. A robust young man is introduced to a glamorous woman more than twice his age. Famous and adored as she is, he, being several generations behind her, has never heard of her. She, seasoned and wiser, knows a good thing when she sees it.

Asked to drive her home from the evening’s event, he finds an unexpectedly long ride engrossing, their conversation full and flowing, her laughter endearing. She hasn’t had much to laugh about lately, and he makes her happy.

She invites him to a screening, and then, again and again to somewhere. Quite soon, they’re spending most of their time together. The months between May and December fade softly from sight. They’ve fallen in love.

A few basic facts: She was 81 at the time, he, 36. Less than a year later, he moved in with her. They were inseparable, but they didn’t rush anything: they waited five years to get married. She gave herself the wedding as a birthday gift.

A few more facts: He is an opera singer whose big baritone voice has also taken him onto concert, theater and cabaret stages. She is an actress/singer who has done it all in every show business medium. He devotedly collects the tangibles of her golden memories: of winning an Oscar; appearing in 34 films, 26 Broadway shows, and countless TV shows—including her own; recording 6 albums. Now, and long overdue, he is drawing on his own wealth of unlikely experiences with a solo cabaret show aptly called, “Memories… Are Made of This.”

He and she are Mr. and Mrs. Frank Basile. She is Celeste Holm. And if you are several generations behind, go to celesteholm.com.

“Memories… Are Made of This” is an unusual amalgam of song and patter—patriotic songs that don’t sound hokey, arias that don’t sound out of place in a cabaret room, popular and romantic songs infused with warmth and humor, and anecdotes that candidly acknowledge youthful folly as well as unexpected good fortune. Frank is having fun remembering, and his memories, even the bitter ones, are sweet, delivered with an irrepressible grin that seems as if it could only have been drawn by the sweep of a cartoonist’s hand.

This would not be New York if there were not skeptics in the room, and I sensed, not for the first time, that Frank’s unabashed homage to Celeste, radiant at 94, brought out the worst in more than one of them. Full disclosure here: Celeste and in time Frank were my neighbors and dear friends for many years, which gave me as good a chance to observe them—not always in the best of their circumstances—as anyone from the world of people looking either directly or askance at them. Let the skeptics cavil and carp about them all they want. They’re the real thing.

My favorite part of the evening? With apologies to Frank, it came after the show when his 73 year old mom, leaning down and hugging Celeste, looked up at me, her face beaming, and said, “I’m happy to be with my daughter-in-law.”
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Note: You can see Frank Basile in “Memories… Are Made of This” at the Metropolitan Room, 34 West 22nd Street, New York City. Remaining performances: September 20th and 27th at 7 p.m.

WHO WAS BASHIR?

In 1981, I told Bashir Gemayel that he would be the next president of Lebanon. He shook his head and replied that his enemies would not forgive him so soon. We were both right. On August 23rd, 1982, he was elected. On September 14th, 1982, he was assassinated.

All the acclaim currently going to “Waltz with Bashir,” the frontrunner (from Israel) to win this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film, begs the question, “Who was Bashir Gemayel?” 

A voice-over in “Waltz with Bashir” tells us he was “a star, an idol, a prince…” Indisputable, but insufficient. An often literally nightmarish history of the 1982 Israeli-Palestinian conflict waged on the fields, streets and beaches of Lebanon, “Waltz with Bashir” is a hybrid animated documentary, a brilliant one. It is not a biography, and film has its limitations. Having known Bashir, having enjoyed an easy rapport with him and been stirred by him, I feel compelled to pick up where the film leaves off.

To meet Bashir was to be inspired by him. He was strong (to excess, according to his critics) when Lebanon, which had suffered from a history of "laissez faire-type" govern­ment, needed bold, determined leadership. He was committed: believing from the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 that he and his people were re­sponsible not only for their own destinies, but also for the destiny of their country, Bashir gave up his law practice to become a soldier.

In beige business suit, dress shirt and tie when not in military fatigues, with boyish voice and cultured candor, he looked and sounded more like the best man at a wedding than the Commander-in-Chief of the 25,000-strong coalition Lebanese Forces and the emerging charismatic political leader on whose shoulders the future of Lebanon would barely have time to perch, much less rest.

Before he paid for his aspirations for his country with his own life, he paid a price even dearer—a car bomb intended for him took the life of his eighteen-month-old daughter, Maya. He stoically told me it was a "tribute" he was forced to pay, "the same as many Lebanese." 

A Christian Maronite who sought to be president to Christians and Moslems alike, Bashir was staunchly pro-Western, unfettered by Pan-Arabism, friendly to Israel and hostile to the Syrians and to the Palestine Liberation Organization. With his combination of intel­ligence, courage and confidence, he impressed me as having the potential to emerge not only as the leader the Arab world lacked and needed so badly, but also as a pivotal leader on the world stage. He was the only principal player in the Arab world with the imagina­tion and the courage to fill the void left by Sadat. No one since has surfaced to change that.

The details of Bashir’s death are lurid and heartbreaking. Chief of his nationalist Kataeb party, he routinely attended a weekly Tuesday afternoon meeting at a party headquarters in Beirut’s Ashrafieh neighborhood. As president-elect of Lebanon, he insisted on going “for the last time” before resigning his post. Habib Chartouni, an assassin in the employ of Syria, had family—by varying accounts, grandparents and/or a sister—living in the office’s building, where he had planted a mammoth TNT bomb. His urgent phone calls to them giving various excuses to leave the building failed—they lingered to get yet another glimpse of the beloved Bashir. Reports say the explosion lifted the building into the air before it collapsed into rubble.

No one would believe Bashir had met ill. Word spread that his attempted assassination had failed; their hero lived! Church bells pealed in celebration and soldiers fired into the air. His corpse, unearthed with many other victims, lay unidentified initially because his face was so badly crushed he was unrecognizable—until identity was established by the discovery of a nun’s letter to him in his pocket and a distinguishing finger ring. “They didn’t kill a man,” a woman is said to have screamed, “they killed a country.”

His disciples—for that in effect is what they were—were in shock and inconsolable. The voice-over of a former Israeli soldier in “Waltz with Bashir” coolly expresses, “I think they even felt an eroticism for him…. It was as if their wife had been murdered.” They took their revenge within days in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by massacring hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children. The Israel Defense Forces, ringing the outskirts of the camps, were accused not so much of complicity as of callous indifference. “It was obvious they’d avenge his death in some perverse way,” says the voice-over. In the waves of world-wide shock and revulsion that followed the exposure of the massacres, the think­ing world, which had barely a chance to consider Bashir when he was alive, lost sight of Bashir and never got to consider what it lost. The magnitude of his death was dismissed as quickly as his body was interred.

Lebanon is still in the hands of ill-intentioned intruders—Syria, Hezbollah and other surrogates for Iran—not the Lebanese people. Two Arab countries flanking Israel, Egypt and Jordan, enjoy peace with her—but not Lebanon. As more Arab countries recognize Israel, more Arab countries will be forced to recognize Israel—and as a consequence, be uncustomarily faced with peace. The waltz, a mournful one, continues; the band plays on.