I'm Not Giving Thanks For...

I routinely have a lot to give thanks for on Thanksgiving, and this year is certainly no exception. Last year, Thanksgiving fell on the day after my 35th and last radiation treatment—perfect timing I thought… until I sat at our Thanksgiving Day table unexpectedly unable to eat anything from the beautifully-arrayed plate of food before me. In the months to follow, I felt as if I was the roasted turkey. This year, thanks to family and friends and love, and the loving care of doctors and nurses, I will feast.

Ungracious as it may sound, today I find myself thinking contrarily of what I won’t give thanks for. Many will take that as a definitive sign that I’m feeling better. Wanting to share my skewed perspective with you tells me I am. But before I do, I want to touch on a few of the high points of Thanksgivings past.

For 37 years, we lived in an apartment with a large-as-life, premium view of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Families, the children the guests of honor, crowded at our oversized windows as float after float and balloon after balloon floated by, so close you felt you could almost reach out and touch something or someone in the parade. One year, I did something almost as unlikely as that. The revival of “Brigadoon” was a Broadway hit and its star, Martin Vidnovic, was perched atop one of the floats. I called to Marty, only once, from my window. And through the din, he heard me, looked up and saw me, grinned and waved. “Been too long,” I called, “let’s have lunch.” “Name it,” he said. “Russian Tea Room, next Wednesday. 12:30,” I responded. “We’re on,” he shouted. Neither of us bothered to confirm and both of us showed up as planned.

In April of 1984, I brought a sizeable sampling of Thanksgiving from Manhattan to Tel Aviv via “the balloon man” and four of his towering Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons, leading to one of the most comically bizarre episodes of my life. You can read it on this blog, but then please come back for what “I’m Not Giving Thanks For….”

As a rule, I don’t write when I have nothing to say. Too much has already been written, and, for that matter, said and sung, and if I don’t have anything new to say, or can’t think of a new way to say what may already have been said, I don’t. Having something new to say calls for passion, or something akin to it, as well as insight.

I haven’t been passionate about anything the past month except two Broadway dramas, the exceptional “Other Desert Cities” and the mercurial “Seminar.” I haven’t been angry about anything (not even anything Republican!), nor offended or indignant. In truth, the GOP has given me great pleasure this month thanks to the presidential candidates debates. I’m giving profuse thanks for them Thursday—and every day from now until election day 2012.

I’m not giving thanks for—or to—the 12 hopeless members of the failed special Congressional committee on deficit reduction. Nor, for that matter, do I have any thanks for anyone in the United States Congress. I think they should all go home for Thanksgiving and stay there.

I have no thanks in me for Texas, all of it, nor Arizona—not for the grief they’ve given us (as in U.S.). Ditto, the calcified and dividedly doctrinal Supreme Court, at least 5/9ths of it. In the larger picture, I’m not giving thanks, this year or any foreseeable year to the U.N. for what it’s become: the United Nations of Hypocrisy.

I’m not giving thanks for a living person anywhere in the world who has, in any way, betrayed the trust of children. Or for those who robotically repeat the euphemisms of journalists, jurists and sermonizers, hollow terms like endangerment, exploitation, trafficking, abuse. A child doesn’t have to be moved from one place to another for the offense to be child trafficking. Leaving a child with no choice is slavery, plain and simple.

I have not a shred of appreciation or compassion for any entity or organization that power has corrupted… or greed has infested and infected. “Corrupted” chiefly includes nightstick and pepper-spray wielding police, but doesn’t exclude unreasonably unruly mobs; autocrats, but also arrogant caucuses and sociopaths. The latter, “greed,” encompasses peddlers of gilt-edged schemes they wouldn’t sell to their mothers—in most cases. And other sociopaths.

I’m withholding thanks to professional sports organizations and outrageously-overpaid athletes until they get their Ps and Qs—profits and salary quotes—in order. Not so long ago, the Minnesota Timberwolves offered and basketball player Latrell Sprewell rejected a $21 million offer to extend his contract for three years as insufficient, because, said Sprewell, "I got a family to feed."

I’m not giving thanks to an Arab Spring that is metamorphosing into a bitter-cold Arab winter, contagious with unrest and pandemic in potential.

No thanks to or for Jon Corzine, Bernard Madoff, Mel Gibson (self-destructing is not enough), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, talk radio hosts, or anyone named Newt.

Last, but not least: thanks but no thanks to the nation of sheep the U.S. has hastened to become. Either Erasmus, Anouilh or an English proverb (I’m not giving thanks for the lack of reliable attribution.) says, “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Beware the Cyclops who emerges to lead the bleating masses.

And this is me not being angry, offended or indignant. Happy Thanksgiving.

Elizabeth Taylor's Nine Lives

Years ago, when a million dollars could last you a very comfortable lifetime, a mega-major literary agent offered to get me a million dollars for a biography of Elizabeth Taylor. It was an offer I knew he could back up and in all likelihood already had. He was, he professed, enamored with her. I wasn’t. I had just come back from a distant trip with her that felt even longer than it was; had weathered and survived the traveling circus that was Elizabeth and Co., the center ring steadily drawing in fast-shrinking concentric circles of fans and gawkers who threatened to suffocate us in every airport, hotel lobby and public space we entered; and I was refreshing myself in the anonymous air of my New York. In one of those lucid moments when your life passes before you, in this case the future, I couldn’t see myself spending the time on her life it would take to write a book about her. Still, my lunch host had just put a million dollar offer on the table at, where else?, the Russian Tea Room. I told him I’d been invited to be her house guest in L.A. next week and said, “I’ll ask her.”

I related the agent’s offer to Elizabeth, thinking she’d have visions of sugarplum-shaped diamonds dancing in her head and foresee many more lavender dresses and shawls hanging in her vast dress closet. After musing momentarily about it, she said, “I don’t think I’ve lived my life yet.” I laughed and said, “The way I see it, you’ve lived at least eight of them.”

It was a relief for me to come up with an alternate plan. I had come to know Elizabeth as a wonderful story teller. After we were both injured in a car accident and consequently relegated to gorging ourselves on marzipan in the presidential suite at The Tel Aviv Hilton while we recovered, I managed, with simple prompting, to get her to tell me what seemed like every story she had in her. Our afternoons were like biopics: in addition to The Mike Todd Story, The Richard Burton Story and The (briefer) Eddie Fisher Story, her cast of characters and foibles included her friendships with Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson, royalty and roués and, get this, Anwar Sadat. Telling her I was concerned about her inevitably losing track of pertinent details of her truly singular stories, I suggested she tell me any that occurred to her I hadn’t yet heard and I would write them up. We would keep them in a drawer in her house until the time came when she was ready to tell The Elizabeth Taylor Story. She welcomed the idea. Unfortunately, her life in L.A. and mine in N.Y. being what they were, we never got to another story.

In her ninth life, she befriended Michael Jackson and stuck by him when he most needed a friend. She distinguished herself by becoming an early and leading advocate and fund-raiser for AIDS research. A genuinely good person, she used her celebrity to become an effective activist wherever she believed she could help.

Wherever she is, I’m confident she’s already embarking on life number ten.

Who But David Brown?

My perception of David Brown was his reality—he knew everybody. He knew people no one living is supposed to know.

When I mentioned using Irving Berlin songs for a musical about him, David said, “Ray, I speak to Irving on the phone every day. He won’t go for it.” When I mentioned I was writing a script about ballplayer-genius-spy Moe Berg, David said, “When Ernie Lehman [Oscar-nominated screenwriter] and I were cub reporters, we interviewed Moe at the Red Sox training camp in Sarasota.” And he unearthed a faded newspaper clipping from the ‘30s for me.

I’ve been introduced to some illustrious people by other illustrious people, but who but David Brown would take me by the arm and walk me across a ballroom to introduce me to Steven Spielberg? And introduce me in a way that Spielberg would remember me the next time our paths crossed? And take as much pleasure as I to learn that Spielberg knew and praised my two chief documentaries.

David was, in a word, gracious. When he heard I’d written my first screenplay, he called to ask, “Why haven’t I seen it, Ray?” When I answered, slightly embarrassed and on the defensive, “David, it’s not for you,” he said, “Ray, we’re friends. Let me be the judge of that.” He called within days of receiving it to agree with me—it wasn’t for him—but to say, “I want to see everything you write.” That’s a friend.

The one script of mine he became excited about was the one about Moe Berg. He suggested producing it with me and was briefly my partner, twice. As flickonomics would have it, he begged off—graciously—explaining he was just too overextended to do justice to “this very special” project.

In 1988, I produced an evening honoring David—and pounced on the occasion to lure a hard-to-get Shirley MacLaine onto the program. Capitalizing on her notoriety for her faith in past lives, her opening line was, “I’ve been in love with David Brown for two thousand years.” David called me the next morning to say, “Ray, you’re a great producer,” a great (disproportionate) compliment coming from a great producer when he could have stopped at thank you. Gracious.

And of course David would be one to call to make me feel like I was already a winner when one of those aforementioned documentaries was nominated for an Oscar.

I think of David every time I think of his witty opinion from his book, “Brown’s Guide To Growing Gray,” to wit, no one was ever offended by being over-tipped. And think of him every time I pass what passes today for the Russian Tea Room and wish we’d had a few more lunches together at the old Tea Room. Another former RTR habitué, agent Jeannine Edmunds, likened David to Fred Allen, “wise about the business,” adding choice words for him like “informed” and “attentive.” David was as good a listener as he was a conversationalist. His New York Times obituary referred to him as “courtly” and “urbane,” while London’s Guardian captured his charm in one succinct sentence: “Indeed, Brown was exceptional in his modesty and self-effacing geniality, traits rare in Tinseltown.” All in all, David was as kindly as he was courtly. And always, infallibly, a consummate gentleman.

The last time I saw him, he thanked me when I told him how good it was to see him, and then turned the conversation to me.

When David reached his ultimate destination, I’ll bet he was on a first-name basis with his greeter—and asked what he or she’d been up to lately.

Eminent Producer and social lion David Brown died on February 1st of this year. For his detailed achievements, please see imdb.com.

"Now That's Power!"

Former superagent Sam Cohn is dead. But if there are phones in the afterlife, he’s already tying up two of them.

So Sam is history now, but what a history he had. If this were the eighties, the walls of his agency, ICM, and the chandeliers of his daily lunch site, the Russian Tea Room, would be shaking and lights might even be dimmed on West 57th Street between 5th and 7th Avenues for a commemorative minute. Sam Cohn was the film business in New York.

From our booth at the Russian Tea Room, film archivist Herb Graff and I once watched Sam tie up the main aisle to the tables with a telephone cord stretched from the hostess’s station to his booth. Oblivious to the hostess, the customers waiting to be seated and the waiters trying to serve their tables, Sam chatted for as long as it took to make the deal. No one interrupted or even gestured to him. Herb said to me, “Now that’s power!"

Sam knew power. He dressed indifferently—or perhaps deliberately—to prove it. His ubiquitous worn-looking pale pastel crew neck sweaters, counter de rigueur for anyone else, were standard attire for Sam at lunch, office or opening nights. I hope someone thinks of burying him in one.

I was having lunch with director Joan Micklin Silver one day after she had been on the cover of the New York Times Magazine—no small thing, particularly at the Tea Room. Sam walked right past us. “Doesn’t your agent say hello to you?” I asked her. “Sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn’t,” she replied.

Sam loved New York and everything it offered. He couldn’t have traveled much because he was always present at the usual Manhattan haunts. Hollywood came to him in a trail of glittery stars and dark Hugo Boss suits.

But it was stopping and stooping at the table with the conspicuous kid in our presence that I remember Sam for. I saw him hand McCauley Culkin a dollar bill. And soon another, and another. I knew it wasn’t for a film and it wasn’t a bribe—McCauley’s deportment was beyond reproach. After McCauley and his parents left, I asked Sam about it. He explained they were playing their simplified version of Liar’s Poker (which I suggested they dub Cohn-Culkin Poker), matching eight-digit serial numbers on their respective one dollar bills to see who had the highest and won the other’s money. I chose not to ask Sam how he managed to lose every round to his client.

I was far from the first to observe it was a good thing the napkins at the Tea Room were linen or Sam would have eaten them; he was famous for eating paper. At a gala event in L.A., Robin Williams told the audience Sam Cohn is the only man who can eat paper and screw you at the same time. And everybody got the joke. That’s power, too.

But power is as fleeting as fame and eventually he fell from it. An epitaph etched in stone in a show business hall of fame somewhere should state he was the founding father of the superagent. In his illness, he may have become forgetful, but he’s not likely to be forgotten.