I was at a blog site reading a posting about brushes with famous writers, and I started thinking about them. About brushes with fame.
When I was in grad school at Purdue, people would sit around for hours and talk about their brushes with fame. How they met James Cagney or Al Pacino or Martin Luther King. How they had slept with Mick Jagger or Bob Dylan. How they were hitch-hiking and got a ride from Jim Morrison. That kind of stuff.
When I was in grad school at Purdue, people would sit around for hours and talk about their brushes with fame. How they met James Cagney or Al Pacino or Martin Luther King. How they had slept with Mick Jagger or Bob Dylan. How they were hitch-hiking and got a ride from Jim Morrison. That kind of stuff.
I haven't had many of those brushes with fame. I once ran into Tom Ewell (he was in The Seven Year Itch with Marilyn Monroe) in a subway station in chicago. This was shortly before he died. He was in Chicago to do a play, and he was in the subway, staring at the wall above the third rail. He looked tired, worn, unhappy, gloomy, like an ice-cream bar that was melted and refrozen. I didn't say anything to him.
(Suddenly, I'm thinking that maybe not many people remember Tom Ewell. That's what fame is like. What's Sinatra say? You're riding high in April and then you're shot down in May. Anyway, to jog your memory, that's a picture of Tom Ewell at the top of this blog. He's the one next to Marilyn Monroe.)
(Suddenly, I'm thinking that maybe not many people remember Tom Ewell. That's what fame is like. What's Sinatra say? You're riding high in April and then you're shot down in May. Anyway, to jog your memory, that's a picture of Tom Ewell at the top of this blog. He's the one next to Marilyn Monroe.)
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Whenever I think about brushes with fame, I think about what Isaac Bashevis Singer said about his favorite writer Dostoevsky: "I wouldn't cross the street to talk to him."
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I feel that way some times about meeting writers. There's a kind of ecstacy that I feel in reading, and when I meet the writer of what gave me that surge I don't feel that ecstasy. I'm not sure why that is, but I just don't feel it.
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Maybe it's like when we get high with someone, and then later after the high starts wearing off we're standing around and wondering about what it was we were laughing at, and all we notice is that we're both wearing gray wrinkled suits.
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PS: I just remembered that my daughter Lillian had an amazing brush with fame. Rosa Parks came to her class when she was at the Illinois Math and Science Academy, and Lillian had lunch with her! That means I've had lunch with somebody who had lunch with Rosa Parks!
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PPS: After I showed a draft of this to Lillian, she asked me, "How can you write a blog about brushes with fame and not mention your most famous brush with fame?" I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "Don't you remember the time you almost ran over the nobel-prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow?!?!?!"
PPPS: Well, I guess I have had a brush with fame, maybe even two.
If you've had one and are willing to talk about it, I'm willing to listen. It'll be like a brush with fame!
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Alan Nothnagle
bluesurly
Caracalla's Amanuensis
dragonlady
Patie
Salon.com
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You are missing one of the few nice days Chicago has been allotted this millenia. I'm surprised there were not spontaneous little explosions of joy going off around here. I went all day w/o my coat and was hot!! IN FEB :D Everyone is wearing a grin, but driving like dicks.
I'm going to be in Chicago on Thursday to do a poetry reading at the Polish Museum of America (on Milwaukee Ave). I hope the weather is as beautiful as late spring in Tuscany!
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My experience with Keillor supports your theory that writers are much more interesting in print than in person. GK was pretty grumpy, and he clearly didn't have much empathy for a novice comedy writer who'd gotten in over her head. I don't know how he creates such believable regular folks in his monologues, but I suspect that he, like a lot of talented creative people, pours the best of himself into his art.
One more writer story: My best friend in high school was a writer named Mary Gaitskill, whose novel "Veronica" was nominated for a National Book Award two years ago. My mother and I appear as thinly disguised characters in her first novel, "Two Girls, Fat and Thin."
Also, I waited on Robert Mitchum when I was working at Whispering Palms Golf Course at age 16. He tipped me $10 for bringing him something from the buffet line so he could be left alone.
I am not going to tell you who I slept with, chuckle.
My 1st wife and I headed for the fair because I wanted to meet him and maybe get his autograph. In the movie, "We're no Angels" he towered above Humphrey Bogart so I'm walking across the fairgrounds looking for a guy about my height, (6' 6".)
I passed by a crowd of people and as I was walking by my wife said she thought that I had just walked by him. I stopped and looked at that guy and he was short... maybe a foot shorter than me, and balding.
He turned out to be a great guy, very warm and friendly but what a shock it was for me to find out he was just human, like the rest of us.
We both waited for a bus......he was charming and positive...took the bus whenever he could...he treated everyone the same..with charm and respect.
My wife Linda and I were showing Chicago to her brother Bruce who was visiting from the east. We were driving around the U of Chicago area on the south of Chicago, and Bruce was saying, "Say this is a pretty campus, what kind of people teach her?"
I was driving and started in, "Well, this is one of the great universities in the world. There are probably more Nobel Laureates teachng here then in any other school in the midwest."
Bruce is a scoffer and he said, "Yeah, like who, any names an average guy would recognize?"
I'm driving around these narrow streets around the school and trying to avoid hitting anybody because it's a Saturday and people are walking to and from shopping.
Bruce thinks I'm ignoring him and he says again, "So name some of these Nobel guys!"
I say, "Well, one of my favorite writers is Saul Bellow and he won the Nobel prize and he teaches here."
And Bruce says, "Yeah? What's he like."
And I slam on the brakes to avoid hitting a guy with two bulging grocery bags who just stepped into the intersection, and I say to Bruce, "That's him. The guy I almost hit. Saul Bellow!"
And Bellow must of heard me call his name because he looked up at me and smiled, and nodded his head.
He was one of my favorites. He was a big star and then he was forgotten and then he tried to make a come back. I remember seeing him on the Mike Douglas talk show back in the mid-60s.
He seemed like a guy who needed a break.
One great book after another. He was terrific.
Several years ago, my husband, his daughter and I were having Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant in Santa Fe. Gene Hackman was at the next table. Unlike Brad Pitt, he did glow. At one point, our eyes met for a few fleeting moments. I glowed for the rest of the night, too.
I shook the hand of Bill Clinton and someone (forgot his name) who was part of the ruling triumvirate in Haiti at the time. I wouldn't have shook the guy's hand, except he seemed to expect it and I thought it would be rude to stick my hand behind my back.
I had a driver once who'd been Boris Yeltsin's driver when Boris Yeltsin was just another apparatchik in the Soviet Gov't.
When I was in Kenya in college, we were hitch hiking and an old car from the 40's pulled over and gave us a ride. We quickly huddled in the back seat. Really didn't get a good look at the driver or his passenger.
About a day or two later we were at the airport waiting in line and the people in front were talking about Hollywood kind of stuff. I almost fell over. It was the same guy and woman who had picked us up--Mick Jagger and his wife (Bianca?). This was in the 70's. They were quite sedate.
The Seven Year Itch is one my favorite movies.
I used to run into Princess Stepahanie of Monaco frequently and she always had that mad look in her eye as if she was going to take a big pair of lawn shears to her head and then run away and join the circus Oh yeah, I forgot. She DID run away and join the circus.
I had dinner with Jimmy Carter 25 years ago and he was just as polite and sweet as he could be but Bill Clinton was by far the most charismatic. I've run into Ringo Starr three or four times in different countries and we always look at each other with that "I think I know you look". There are plenty more, but these came off the top of my head. Thanks for the memories!
Most of my encounters seem to be with musicians, but , there were a few others. I spoke for few minutes with Micheal Jordan at the St. Louis airport. Once in Portland I nearly tackled Steve Allen, who was very cold and nasty about it. It was an accident and he was standing in the middle of the concourse reading a newspaper.