Like diving for pearls in the Sargasso Sea, at every turn your ankles snagged by coils of dank oily weed, this vast blathering tiresome but essential Like diving for pearls in the Sargasso Sea, at every turn your ankles snagged by coils of dank oily weed, this vast blathering tiresome but essential biography might choke even dedicated fans to death from lack of oxygen before they get to the last page.
Ugh.
These two authors are in permanent abstruse waffle mode and the two translators viciously thought they would pass the authors’ orotund vapourising into English with zero attempt to make it more readable. They are bad people and I hope they catch frequent colds this year.
EXAMPLES
Beyond the invocation of a god, or of absent gods, there is the contemplation of things as they are. Rohmer makes this contemplation the foundation of modern cinema. P177
To be sure, we could discuss the gap between the logos and the libido, as it is manifested more obviously than ever in Frederic.
We can recall that between the end of one filming and the writing of a new project, Rohmer accorded himself a long period of reverie (preferably associated with walking or with desultory conversation) that allowed him to gradually clarify the ideas he had in mind. P 441
[My my, you don’t say so, what a novel way to work.]
What is cinema, if not the hope of re-creating the link to the mother? P457
In his “costume dramas” Rohmer offers a historical portrait of a way of seeing. He situates the spectator at the heart of the story by assuming the systems of representation chosen and meticulously reconstructed. P476
BEING BORING ERIC
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Okay, they have a tough job to do, because Eric Rohmer’s actual life was really boring.
Regulated as it was by this logic of habit, Eric Rohmer’s life has almost no interest for the biographer! Without scandal or uncomfortable secrets, it was simple, tranquil, reassuring and no doubt dull; but certainly happy p127
So, he was married at the age of 37 and that was that. Before the age of 37 he was a nerdy film critic, part time teacher and failed author.
So this huge book is a careerography. The biographical stuff takes up about 20 pages.
Eric was the patron saint of late career starters. He thought he wanted to be a novelist and published one novel – it sank like a stone. He got to direct his first feature in 1959, that also sank like a stone. He got fired as editor of his film magazine because they thought he was an old fart. Finally, at the age of 47, he made a second film La Collectionneuse and that was a hit. After that he didn’t stop. His last film was made when he was 87.
STUBBORNLY COMMONPLACE
That’s a felicitous phrase from the book which sums up all of ER’s films to the point where they have been famously described as “like watching paint dry”. Middle-class French people (mostly those magnificent girls, see below) gab endlessly about themselves and their unsatisfactory but not actually especially distressing relationships in various stages of self-delusion and in beautifully photographed French locations until there’s a little tiny plot twist in the last 20 minutes and all is resolved. (He also skewers male self-delusion brilliantly.)
These movies are gentle wry comedies full of social awkwardness and tepid affections; so soft that if anyone does have an argument, which is rare, your local librarian wouldn’t even notice it, wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow.
People who can’t see the magic say that these films are extraordinarily narrow, that you never see a black person or an old person or a working class person in any of the 23 features. Well, that’s pretty much true. I don’t care. There are plenty of other good movies.
TYPICAL QUOTE FROM AN ERIC ROHMER FILM
“I think a lot about my thought.”
THESE MAGNIFICENT GIRLS
“To someone who asked him : ‘But how do you manage to have tea every day with these magnificent girls?’ he replied ‘My secret is absolute chastity.”
To the point where in the brief nude scene in A Winter’s Tale he couldn’t bear to watch, he ducked out the back until it was done.
Rohmer movies are all about the girls, which some might more accurately describe as women. There are one or two in every one of the 23 feature films, the films are all about them.
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UNIQUE WORKING METHODS
He used to meet people and think this guy or that woman would be exactly right for a part he had in mind. It didn’t matter if they were actors or not, if they had ever had the least idea of being in a movie. When he liked them enough he would have endless conversations with them and tape the conversations. Then he would put their own words and their own anecdotes into the script; so they were playing an amalgamation of Rohmer’s fictitious character and themselves. After he got famous, young actress wannabes would write to him all the time, and some of them did end up playing the lead in a movie he built entirely around them.
Also, all his movies were very low budget and he never bothered to advertise them. He would just ring up various cinemas in Paris and say would you like to show my new movie? Then the word would get out that there was a new Rohmer movie and other cinemas would phone him up. Even his failures never lost any money. (OK, one did.) He never expected any of his movies to be popular, and when some of them were he was most surprised.
By doing movies in this odd way he avoided 99.9% of the heartaches and hassles usually associated with making good movies. But the actors and crew were often pretty fed up to find they had to pay for their own meals when they were filming.
ELUSIVE BUTTERFLY
None of his films will knock you out of your seat. Take another French director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet – he has a unique eye-goggling style and he’s made at least three ten-out-of-ten masterpieces. But Eric Rohmer’s films are true, they’re as aggravating, insufferable and amusing and endearing as people are; it’s inextricable.
Five stars for this book as a celebration of a great artist
Two stars as a pretty ghastly reading experience
I guess averages out to three.
Rounded up to four, because I couldn't bear to give 3 stars to a book I'd been waiting so long for....more
In the early years he knew each and every one of his lines but he improvised. He insisted on many takes and each one was different, and, they said, eaIn the early years he knew each and every one of his lines but he improvised. He insisted on many takes and each one was different, and, they said, each one brilliant. Later on, he didn’t bother to learn his lines at all, he’d have cue cards stuck all over the place, for instance on the shirt of the actor he was playing opposite, and he’d explain this by saying that in real life people didn’t know what they were going to say before they said it. So he would be looking around for the right cue card and that would be more realistic.
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He had wives, ex-wives and girlfriends all over the place. He said he always had four or five plates spinning in the air, meaning women, so if one dumped him it didn’t matter. Pretty much none of it mattered to him. Wives, girlfriends, one night stands, whatever. What did you say your name was? From the age of 22 he just had to tilt an eyebrow and they’d be right there. So many you couldn’t count.
He had a huge house on Mulholland Drive and some islands near Tahiti which were a money pit, he thought he could turn them into an eco-tourist paradise and it was a disaster.
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He had a lot of kids and most of them did matter and there you get the other side of paradise which is the pure sheer hell of when your kids screw themselves up so bad and you can’t do anything, I don’t care if your name is Marlon fucking Brando. So, famously, his oldest son shot and killed the boyfriend of his oldest daughter. It was a whole circus, you can imagine. You think that was bad enough, but no – five years later the daughter hanged herself.
Everyone knows that this greatest screen actor of all time was mostly in total turkeys. But did you know how many? After Guys and Dolls in 1955 you have to wait until The Godfather in 1972 for a movie people actually liked; and only two of the SEVENTEEN movies made between 1955 and 1972 have you actually heard of…. 17 turkeys all in a row, including Bedtime Story, The Chase, A Countess from Hong Kong … I could go on. The two you have heard of in this 16 year period were Mutiny on the Bounty and Reflections in a Golden Eye, both of which were hated.
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Time said about Mutiny on the Bounty: it wanders through the hoarse platitudes of witless optimism until at last it is swamped with sentimental bilge. Oh yes and I gotta tell you this one. In the preliminary discussions about Mutiny Marlon said they should shoot it in Tahiti, a place which at that point he didn’t actually know that much about. So they went there, because he suggested it, and hired a group of Tahitian women on the spot to work as extras.
Their come-hither looks turned out to be unusable because their teeth were marred by brown stains and streaks, the result of chewing betel nuts. To cover these flaws, they were required to wear temporary dentures. Some five thousand were flown in from the United States. The women were delighted, they took the teeth caps and vanished to admire themselves in their home mirrors. They went missing for days…. The sand was equally disappointing. It was black powdered lava, ugly to the camera. Tons of white sand had to be trucked in from a faraway beach.
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So this incredible reputation depends on seven performances –
A Streetcar Named Desire The Wild One On the Waterfront Guys and Dolls (maybe) The Godfather Last Tango in Paris Apocalypse Now
I must say that I just saw A Streetcar Named Desire for the first time, and they’re not wrong about the impact he has in that otherwise fairly kitschy melodrama - he’s brilliant. And likewise in the other six listed above.
But when I look at the films of Robert de Niro I see fifteen great performances before he decided to phone it in and make all those stupid comedies.
So this is strange. Marlon Brando is like Elvis Presley. Wham! From 1956 to 1959 Elvis upended popular culture and gave the world rock and roll. Then after 1960 he Xeroxed himself twice a year in those endless stupid musicals and otherwise ate burgers.
Marlon and Elvis : the Burger Kings of popular culture.
On Bob Dylan’s album Tempest he has a song “Long and Wasted Years” – Bob has had a few himself (the 1980s) but Elvis and Marlon are the Lords of Wasted Years. The great albums Elvis could have made, but didn’t… the great movies Marlon could have made, but didn’t. Instead, he charged the earth for being in stuff like The Nightcomers, The Freshman and Christopher Columbus.
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Finally Francis Ford Coppola finished Apocalypse Now, except for one tiny little thing – he needed Brando for one last closeup (The horror! The horror! ). No more than an hour of his time. Brando replied that he would have to pay for a whole day of his time which would be $70,000.
I’m in the Marlon Brando business. I sell Marlon Brando. Would you go to the president of General Motors and ask him for a seventy thousand dollar favour?
So he had more of everything than you can imagine, money, sex, food, fame, adulation and also vituperation, tragedy, misery, depression.
I bet in the future they figure out a way that we can all be a famous person and live a year of their life, like a participatory computer game. A lot of people wouldn’t mind being Marlon Brando in 1956. Nobody would want to be him after 1960.
Elaine Stritch summed it all up:
There was never anyone remotely like Marlon Brando. Thank God....more
According to Scott Eyman of the Wall Street Journal this book is
A co According to Rex Reed, Pauline Kael was
always foaming at the mouth about something
According to Scott Eyman of the Wall Street Journal this book is
A convincing narrative of how a brazen woman with a basically unattractive but flagrantly domineering personality molded herself into a writer who could not be ignored… [it portrays] the woman in all her maddening overconfidence
Ouch, not a fan then, Rex and Scott? But yeah, you do not warm towards PK as you wend your way through the pages. In some ways it’s a cheerful tale – at 32 she was a single mother with a string of dead end jobs behind her and not much of an idea of how to make a living. Ten years later she was on her way to being “America’s most influential movie critic” or some such phrase. She was the embodiment of Nik Cohn’s formula for success : get obsessed and stay obsessed. She wrote about movies, that’s it. One after another, for 40 odd years. Then she stopped and died.
She got a big gig at The New Yorker at the same time that Donald Barthelme was publishing all his stories, but he doesn’t get a mention. Different worlds. PK’s gig was odd : 6 months on, 6 months off. They liked her but, you know, not enough to employ her for the whole year. And strangely nobody else wanted to hire her in the 6 months off per year.
Her private life was a bit of a sorry mess :
Again, Pauline was making a mistake that heterosexual women in the arts often made : they were surrounded by attractive, bright men unafraid to engage in emotional discourse, and they mistakenly thought that a passionate friendship could turn into an enduring romance. And the men, lacking strong gay role models, did their best to conform to what the women wanted them to be.
One time she got married to a guy called Edward Landberg.
She later told friends that she had cried all through the ceremony, knowing that the marriage was a mistake.
Edward agreed:
I soon found out that I couldn’t stand this woman.
Ouch, also not a fan.
She loudly broadcast opinions that were guaranteed to upset. She thought Last Tango in Paris broke through to some superior version of cinema (Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form. Who was prepared for that? ). She published a book on Citizen Kane which was then torn to shreds factually. She was very rude about Shoah. One could go on.
A lot of this book is about how she was unprofessional – picking favourite directors and schmoozing them, bigging up their pics and getting personally offended if they then didn’t do what she thought they should. (Robert Altman was the big one here). Or having numerous feuds with other critics. In these pages there’s always a teacup with a storm going off in it. Fellow crits come out with some great invective.
What she often practices now is an amalgam of idiosyncratic opinion, star gazing, myth-mongering, politics, sociological punditry and intervention
This stuff reached a peak in 1980 when Renata (Speedboat) Adler wrote a review/hatchet job of When the Lights Go Down, PK’s latest collection of reviews, which, she said, was
Jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless… Mistaking lack of civility for vitality, she now substitutes for argument a protracted, obsessional invective… [she uses images of] sexual conduct, deviance, impotence, masturbation; also of indigestion, elimination, excrement. I do not mean to imply that these images are frequent, or that one has to look for them. They are relentless, inexorable. … [her reviews are] bullying, presuming, insulting, frightening, enlisting, intruding, dunning
Ouch, really not a fan.
And yet, PK regularly published collections of her reviews which always sold very well. What other movie critic did that? (I may add, what book reviewer has ever done that? ) So she sailed on, repelling all boarders, from the mid 60s all the way through the 70s and 80s. Up, in fact, to the point where the internet came along and cut the ground from under the big domineering cultural critics by allowing the hoi polloi to bray their jackass opinions all over the place.
CONTRARIANISM : A DIGRESSION
It can be an unsettling experience to leap into a movie or a novel with the fair wind of a thousand twangling five star reviews in your ears only to find that the bottom has fallen out of this particular carnival ride and you are falling falling, you hate this thing like poison….and… why are they saying these things? Can’t they see it’s meretricious, puerile, an insult to anyone’s intelligence? Am I alone here on Planet Earth?
I have had that experience with books and movies many times. To take a few well-loved novels which I hated and have issued acidulous one star reviews:
The Jewel in the Crown White Noise Possession American Psycho The Slap Gone Girl The Comfort of Strangers Independence Day Earthly Powers Extinction The Catcher in the Eye White Teeth The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Go, Piper Laurie, go!
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And a few critically bejizzed movies I likewise felt sullied by
Amadeus Gandhi I Heart Huckabees In Bruges Lust Caution The Matrix Moulin Rouge Pretty Woman The Squid and the Whale Suspiria The Consequences of Love Lost in Translation
All the above get a lot of love from all and sundry, except me. As there is no Goodreads film equivalent that I’ve been able to find the above one star vituperations exist only in my mind.
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. Said John Updike. I love that quote.
The Two Charlies : their decline and fall
There are remarkable paralleCelebrity is a mask that eats into the face. Said John Updike. I love that quote.
The Two Charlies : their decline and fall
There are remarkable parallels between Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin - the workhouse/desperate London poverty childhoods, the early success leading to the ever more gigantic successes, the world-bestriding fame, the popular genres becoming ever more elaborated (from Pickwick to Dombey, from Kid Auto Races to Modern Times), the leftish political slant and the zeal for social improvement, the appeal to the groundlings and the intellectuals, the great gouts of sentiment amongst the caricature comedy, and also the great crash of their popularity in the last 50 years.
Well, I think the same thing has happened to both of them – correct me if I'm wrong. Since the 50s at least, Chaplin's movies appear to be rated by critics a poor third to Buster Keaton's and Harold Lloyd's. And I think you'd have to look a long time with a strong flashlight in your local multiplex before you found a Chaplin fan. His stuff is too encrusted with the inexplicable past. It has too much surface noise.
Dickens – another bad case of the total eclipse of the art. Only us geeks would even think of picking up a Dickens and then we'd probably not because there would be The Pale King or 2666 which we hadn't read yet; or if we did get in the mood for some old school, we might find Wilkie Collins appearing in our literary mitts, because he's the Buster Keaton of Victorian melodrama.
Surface noise
I listen to old music a lot. When I say old, I don't mean the 1990s, I mean the 1920s and 30s. If you do that you have to accept surface noise. Sometimes it's real BAD, like on Charlie Patton records, where it's like Charlie himself is frying some sausage, eggs and bacon right there in front of you as well as playing "High Water Everywhere". It's ugly. Most times, though, surface noise is like a fine hissy undercoating, like on Al Bowlly doing The Very Thought of You. After a while, it becomes part of the atmosphere of these great old songs.
Other art forms have their surface noise too. In movies if you go back to the 50s you get – oh the horror! – black and white films. I know people who will not watch black & white movies. It's hard work for them. They think the dvd is broken. They imply with their slight uncomfortable body movements that we have dishwashers now so we don't wash up dishes by hand; we don't till the fields and raise our own chickens; so why would we want to watch a black & white movie? So that's the movies' version of surface noise. You have to accept it or be cut off from the great movies of pre-colour.
But then there is another problem when we peer into the past. It's the surface noise of the mind. This is when you become aware of the various weird, outrageous, unfunny attitudes and just strange stuff the people in these old movies did and had. There are many scenes where the guy is driving along in a car with a girl and he'll be smoking, she'll be smoking, and he'll be chatting away looking at her and not even pretending to drive for three or four entire minutes. Well, of course, they weren't driving, it was a back-projection, but they do these scenes so contemptuously, it begins to look like it's supposed to seem fake, like some kind of Brechtian alienation device, but you know that's not what they were aiming at, so you get discombobulated. And in every scene from the 30s to the 50s, if a guy and a woman go into a room together, the guy has the woman's upper arm or elbow in a vice like grip. I mean, what? Was that polite back then? Also, the movies have titles like His Girl Friday – offensive on several levels! Try telling the modern misses of today that His Girl Friday is a cracking satire of tabloid journalism. You won't get far.
Chaplin was supposed to be universal, as was Dickens. We now see that their universality did not travel in time. What everyone - I mean EVERYONE - read, watched and loved in those days has become rarified truffles for the elite of geek. But Charles and Charlie were the guys who were massively popular first. They wrote the first book on how to be very very popular. Since Dickens and Chaplin, I'd count Elvis, The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Harry Potter and Twilight to be in the same phenomenal stratosphere. Can't think anyone else approaching those select few. Interesting that four out of the seven are British.
But I'll bet that the 20 year olds of 2080 will be glowering at Harry Potter and thinking to themselves whoever liked this glurking plaf? This blecking plaffy old movie. It's enough to make you goff your newts!...more
It's good that biography isn't hagiography, and if you go round censoring the lurid aspects of your subjLADY GAGA AND PRINCE HARRY - FINALLY THE TRUTH
It's good that biography isn't hagiography, and if you go round censoring the lurid aspects of your subject you're now engaged in PR which is a whole other thing. I dunno. Do we really need to know that Marlon Brando and J Edgar Hoover were lovers? Or that Richard Nixon sired a love child in 1960 who later briefly married Britney Spears? And this thing about Prince Harry - well, I can never look at a koala bear in quite the same way again. You see how tricky this stuff is. What with 24 hour celebwatch channels and Heat magazine and Walmart selling kits on how to liposuct your own baby it's not easy to keep an even keel.
Judy Garland was born not only without an even keel but without a keel of any sort. She wrote the book on how not to be famous. Your Britneys and Lindsays are following bravely in her rubyslippered footsteps but she had to do it all without the help of the 74 different varieties of space dust you can now purchase from your friendly neighbourhood dealer and the obligatory leaked home movie sextape. (Not done one of those yet? Make it your New Year's resolution!)
But if there were smart phones and internets in the 1940s, you just know Judy would have had her threesome with the very young Richard Nixon and J Edgar right up there for all to goggle at. And plus she did have large amounts of talent.
Judy married 14 guys, some three times, and each one stole all her money. Like Bob Dylan and John Lennon she had an unnatural ability to look like different people from one year to the next. That part may be due to the drugs and the extreme dieting regimes of course - same with John Lennon and Bob Dylan. I don't know about Marlon Brando. And Richard Nixon always looked the same, from the age of 19 right up to when he died and as far as I know he still does, like Lenin. (Not so Britney! (I loved her "raunchy biochemist" look.))
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note change of face shape from round to hatchet
HAPPY LITTLE RAINDROPS
Judy Garland crashed and burned several times as we know and after being gurneyed off to some sanatorium she always came back with a different career. From child star to grown up star, to impossible diva, to concert hall sensation, to character actress. Had she lived she may have joined the Black Panthers or have invented Tippex or become the leader of the Central African Republic. She was exhausting. She had one of the 20th century's great voices, unmistakeable after one note, and she sang a lot of the great songs although much of what went down on record is a little too ringadingding for me. (That hi-octane 40s swing style did nobody any favours, it's like a smile painted on a corpse).
She was the epitome of the great star who you thought was really just like an ordinary person lost in a whirl of Hollywood mania - like yeah, of course she was! so ordinary! - but she could really sell that ridiculous idea. She even sells it to me. It's like she had a special heat that melted cynicism. So I wanted to find out about her life, and now I'm slightly sorry I did. This also happened with Dusty Springfield. Books can be dangerous, they're not something passive, they jump into your head and ramify your mind.
As time slouches forward more and more of what was once popular - movies, music and novels, and everything - passes over into the land of the frankly As time slouches forward more and more of what was once popular - movies, music and novels, and everything - passes over into the land of the frankly incomprehensible. Is Charlie Chaplin still funny? A dwindling band of cinephiles say so, slightly more say Buster Keaton is, slightly more say the Marx Brothers still are... but what non-geek under the age of 40 will voluntarily watch a black and white movie from before the age of colour?
Jean Harlow was once, briefly, a screen goddess, but she seems like a caricature to us now, all beestung lips, white hair and strange lizardlike movements. Sometimes, like in the excellent Libelled Lady, she gives the impression of being great fun, but mostly, as in the insane melodrama China Seas she vamps around in the way only drag queens do now. Novels age better than movies but still, the vast majority of even great fiction over, let's say, 50 years old is only read because it's on a required reading list. Except Jane Austen, that is. She seems to be the exception that proves that rule.
It's possible, though - I bet there was a time - say, in the 1970s - when every other young woman didn't HAVE to read Jane Austen.
Popular music, being more technologically driven, has specific hurdles to overcome before contemporary ears can hear it - I think 1965 was the first year that records were made which actually sound modern, maybe something to do with the engineers finally getting a good drum sound. I have a naive hope that something like "I'm Down" or "I Fought the Law" or "Like a Rolling Stone" will last for centuries because they just sound so great but when the 50 year olds who currently control rock criticism die off, maybe not. It's a melancholy thought that however great an artist's work is it will in a few decades become impossible to hear, see or read without having to be festooned with explications and a blizzard of footnotes. Citizen Kane used to be the greatest movie ever, but not now. No one except us few bookgeeks reads Dickens for pleasure.
The opposite of this argument is the Robert Johnson Effect. This is where someone who was completely obscure in their own times is rediscovered by the geeks and then - very rarely - is parlayed by cunning marketing into being the cool style accessory du jour. Robert Johnson sold a few hundred 78s in the 1930s, but the cd in the 1990s sold over a million. Likewise The Buena Vista Social Club, and in recent years Nick Drake and Vashti Bunyan. All these odd cases are worth consideration and it's much easier to do this with music which takes much less time to buy and consume than books or movies.
All of our cherished art will become cartoons, all will grow a carapace of inscrutability and it will take dedicated cultural miners in the future to haul them all back to the crowded surface for the crowd to puzzle over and scratch their heads and wonder what kind of creatures liked them in the first place. Poor Jean - she'll never be sexy again....more
A very fine biography which spreads out Hitchcock's unhappy psychology like a banquet for us to dine on. What was this fat ugly film director going toA very fine biography which spreads out Hitchcock's unhappy psychology like a banquet for us to dine on. What was this fat ugly film director going to do but hire a succession of lovely blonde actresses and then sexually assault them by proxy in his movies... culminating in Tippi Hedron's brutal rape-by-birds scene - he insisted on take after take, it went on for days. Well, this book fingers that scene as the nadir of Hitch's horribly creepy treatment of women - because at the time he was also attempting to take over Tippi Hedron's entire life. But the ultimate sadism is to be found in Frenzy, which is not for the squeamish. This is the only book I've yet come across which meditates on the fate of people who are ugly and know they're ugly. It's kind of a taboo subject.
Naturally that's not all what this book is about. Hitchcock was a genius. ...more
Stormin' Norman was on a British radio show called Desert Island Discs once. That's a show where you choose 8 "gramophone records" (as they quaintly sStormin' Norman was on a British radio show called Desert Island Discs once. That's a show where you choose 8 "gramophone records" (as they quaintly say) to take with you to a notional desert island on which you have been abandoned. Norman stated up front that he didn't really like music so he just picked 8 tunes which reminded him of his six wives and two significant others. What a tosser!
Anyway, Norman's unabashed drool of a book makes it clear that he would have liked to slot Marilyn in somewhere between Wife No. 4 and Wife No. 5. But some little fishies just didn't swim into his big craw.
Contemplating Marilyn's life & character is guaranteed to make me pontificate tediously about the common yet weird disjunction between outer aspect and inner reality with which we so often are jarringly confronted in this life. The very Marilynity of Marilyn on screen and in photos gives even the casual observer the idea that it just doesn't get any better than this. But of course, behind the effortless cartoony-sexy fun were 63 takes, ten nervous breakdowns, not much love, and enough antidepressants to trade for a 1953 tan and cream Studebaker saloon.
**
Always thought of myself as a bit of a failure For never reading anything else by Norman Mailure Except the Executioner's Song Which was really long....more
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