SUNDAY 7th & MONDAY 8th
|
|
Photograph by Donna Marie
Bergeniao 11/11/2003
A Thought for Today
Loss is something to be gotten over in
preparation for the gain up coming.
SLEIGH BELLS ON MONDAY
As the year winds down I will have a tough time deciding just where it was
I had the most fun performing during 2003. Carnegie Hall, Palm Beach, San
Francisco, Veterans Day in Branson, the madness of Maui, The William
Holden Foundation Benefit?
I know this much, this coming Monday with just me and a piano for an hour
looks to be the most challenging. It’s Saturday morning and so far I’ve
been able to narrow the number of songs and poems I plan to do (old & new)
down to about 35. Not a very neat number since there will only be room for
around 17.
I’m yearning to do some of the songs I haven’t performed in awhile (And to
Each Season, About the Time, Come Jef) but I’ve been writing so much new
stuff – poetry and songs - that it will be hard to resist the temptation
of adding a few of those efforts. Then too The Skirball Center is a lot
more intimate than say Carnegie Hall and wouldn’t it be fun to do one of
the great arrangements that Jerry Stembach has done for me. “It Never
Entered My Mind,” the “Heather on the Hill / There But for You go I"
medley maybe. Just think, I have two whole days to sort it all out.
As Ken mentioned yesterday I have the first act of “Dreidels & Sleigh
Bells” all to myself (no it’s not a holiday show it just takes place
during the holidays – if fact I see no earthly reason why it isn’t being
called “Mama Want’s Some Kwanzaa Or Papa Will Have To Pay.”)
Act two is shared by two of my favorite people Tyne Daly & Jason Graae and
YES, I’m as curious as you are to see what they have planned.
Don’t forget, the show starts promptly at 8:PM. Be on time please, you
wouldn’t want to miss my opening number ...whatever it is.
WEEKEND ROUNDUP
One of the little discussed disadvantages of dropping dead these days is
that most of the good obit writers went ahead of you. If you’ve taken up
space on this earth for 50 years or so it’s a good bet that the sum of
your days amounted to more than the line or two People, Newsweek or The
New York Times devotes to your dispatch.
Ah, but there is still the Telegraph in the merry old motherland. This
august London daily truly celebrates the lives of the celebrated. If you
have a friend like Bellingham, a great writer who loves great writing, you
may be fortunate enough to be copied on what they had to say about so and
so’s passing. Such is the case with the following.
R.I.P. DAVID HEMMINGS
David Hemmings, the actor, director and producer who died on Wednesday
aged 62, was involved with more than 160 films, although many of them were
unworthy of his talent.
A lauded child soprano for whom Benjamin Britten wrote the boy's role in
The Turn Of The Screw, Hemmings became one of the best-known faces of the
1960s after starring in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) - a
baffling, beautiful critique of "Swinging London" that many saw as a
profound indictment of cultural vacuity; others found vacuity in the film
itself.
Hemmings - who secured the role in the face of competition from Terence
Stamp - plays a fashionable photographer who enjoys a teenybopper orgy,
buys an aircraft propeller from a junk shop and then witnesses a murder in
a park - or does he? Hemmings was as perplexed as anyone by the film. He
thought Antonioni a "spectacular" director, but found Blow-Up very
confusing to make and had no idea how to judge his own performance. "To
say I was good or bad or not in an Antonioni film is like saying I like
the colour yellow in a Van Gogh," he remarked, with knotted brow.
Pauline Kael thought Hemmings one of the few good things about the film:
"With his Billy Budd hair-do, he's like a pre-Raphaelite Paul McCartney."
His looks certainly fitted the era; and with his sweet, cherubic choir-boy
face, and bright, debauched blue eyes, he was well-cast as the impetuous
Captain Nolan - one of Lord Cardigan's "Cherry-bums" in Tony Richardson's
Charge of The Light Brigade (1968).
The previous year, he had appeared as Dildano in Barbarella, starring Jane
Fonda.
Thereafter, Hemmings worked abroad for some years. He landed few leading
roles of distinction, although he had the knack, like Michael Caine, of
redeeming a bad product with a star-turn - as in the lumbering thriller
Juggernaut (1974), in which he gave one of the best performances, despite
having some of the worst lines.
Hemmings was not bothered. As he would often say, in his slow, deep voice
that he modeled on Richard Burton's, he considered himself fortunate to
have worked consistently, to have survived the bottle (he once reckoned he
would be dead at 40) and to have gleaned happiness despite a turbulent
private life.
David Leslie Edward Hemmings was born at Guildford on November 18 1941.
Although he was sent to Glyn College, Epsom, Hemmings later remarked: "You
can count the days I went to school after the age of eight on your hands
and feet. I don't regret it." David's father had been a dance band pianist
and encouraged his son to sing.
Hemmings was nine when he first sang for Benjamin Britten. For three years
he toured in The Turn Of The Screw, until his voice finally broke during a
high aria on stage at the Champs Elysee Theatre in Paris. His understudy
had been waiting, in full costume, throughout these three years, and was
brought on after a brief interlude; alas, his voice broke three days
later.
At 12 Hemmings had begun acting in films. He left home at 14, had his own
flat in London the next year and, by the time he made Blow-Up, he had 48
(mostly forgettable) films under his belt - including Otto Preminger's St
Joan (1957). He was one of the original residents of Swinging London.
"John Lennon gave me my first joint," he recalled.
At the end of the 1960s he left London for a holiday in the Seychelles and
ended up working in Australia and New Zealand, making more than 20 films.
At one point he had co-founded a film and finance company called Hemdale,
which came up with a scheme for shielding actors and musicians from the
predations of the taxman under Harold Wilson's government.
For much of the 1970s, Hemmings was in Los Angeles, working as a director.
Among the films he directed were Running Scared (1972); The 14 (1973), for
which he won a "Silver Bear" award at the 1973 Berlin Film Festival; and
Just a Gigolo (1978), which featured appearances by David Bowie and
Marlene Dietrich. Hemmings later turned to directing for television,
working on episodes of shows such as The A-Team, Magnum PI and Murder, She
Wrote.
Three years ago, Hemmings's acting career began to enjoy something of a
renaissance. He was invited to appear in a cameo role (as Cassius, the
master of ceremonies at the Coliseum) in Gladiator (2000); he then had a
part in Tony Scott's Spy Game (2001); last year he appeared as a
19th-century aristocrat in Martin Scorsese's blockbuster Gangs of New
York; and he co-starred in Mean Machine, playing a prison governor
alongside Vinnie Jones.
Hemmings won praise for his performance in Last Orders (2001). Based on
Graham Swift's novel, which won the Booker Prize, this well-received film
features three lifelong friends (played by Hemmings, Tom Courtenay and Bob
Hoskins) and one of their sons (Ray Winstone) who travel from south London
to Margate, where they intend to scatter the ashes of their old drinking
friend (Michael Caine). Hemmings appeared most recently in The League Of
Extraordinary Gentlemen, alongside Sir Sean Connery.
A talented watercolourist, in recent years Hemmings had also devoted much
energy to exhibitions of his paintings. Selling a picture, he said, gave
him greater pleasure than acting. He was also a member of the
International Brotherhood of Magicians and the Magic Circle; in
restaurants he delighted in making the salt disappear. The enduring
popularity of Blow-Up allowed Hemmings the opportunity regularly to
address students of film at universities across Britain.
Asked if he was a workaholic, Hemmings replied: "You can put 'holic' on
anything that I am." Although he was coy about his drinking, he once
admitted that he had been "drunk for years"; and he had, it sometimes
seemed, almost as many affairs as film roles. He liked marriage, however,
and there were sometimes several people who claimed that he had promised
them that privilege.
Aged 19, he married his first wife Genista (Jenny), but the
relationship was over by the time he met the American actress Gayle
Hunnicutt in the late 1960s. Their first encounter was in Los Angeles,
where Hemmings was publicizing Blow-Up. They married in 1968.
"We were the poor man's Taylor and Burton," Hemmings recalled. At the
wedding, a swimming pool was filled with doves dipped in puce dye, the
Mamas and the Papas sang and Henry Mancini conducted the orchestra.
But the marriage foundered, and the couple divorced in 1975. Later,
Hemmings admitted that Gayle Hunnicutt had discovered that he had been
having an affair with his secretary, Baroness Prudence de Casembroot, as
well as an on-set relationship with Samantha Eggar, his co-star in The
Walking Stick (1970). In 1976 Hemmings married Prudence; but he continued
to have affairs, including a well publicized liaison with Tessa Dahl
(daughter of Roald Dahl), and they divorced in the late1990s.
For the past 10 years he had lived happily with Lucy Williams, a former
personal assistant to the milliner David Shilling, and last year she
became his fourth wife.
Extremely affable and boyish, always keen to entertain, he was on good
terms with most of his former lovers.
Last year Hemmings assessed his career thus: "I haven't really achieved a
great body of outstanding work that can be buffed up and put on the
mantelpiece. I've done some real stinkers, and I don't regret any of them
because I went into them in the full knowledge that they weren't going to
win an Academy Award . . I don't give a shit about fame, I have no vanity
in that department. I don't consider myself to have been a star; I just
married some pretty women."
By his first marriage, David Hemmings had a daughter; with Gayle Hunnicutt
he had a son, Nolan (named after Hemmings's character in The Charge of the
Light Brigade) who followed his father into acting and appeared with him
in Last Orders; by his marriage to Prudence de Casembroot he had three
sons and a daughter.
© Copyright by Telegraph Group Limited 2003. All Rights Reserved.
Sleep warm and I’ll see you later in the week.
RM 12/6/2003 4:25 AM PST.
Click
on the Stanyan House logo to buy Rod McKuen books, CD's and lots more
Click on the heart logo to
subscribe to the Rod McKuen mailing list
Catch Rod McKuen live!
Click on the links below for details of
concerts and appearances.
ROD McKUEN
CONCERTS
ROD
McKUEN APPEARANCES
|
