Those of you who have followed Night Thoughts At Noon over its seven-year journey through the sublime, the marginal and the totally ridiculous (all six of you) may remember old KD's uncanny ability to intuit the deaths of celebrities. My friend Diane once told me that she thought I had a version of ESP. Well, I'm not sure about the paranormal stuff, but it's happened too many times to be a complete coincidence: I'll be thinking about some notable person for no apparent reason, and the next thing I see is that person's obituary. I'm like Dan Ackroyd in Ghostbusters -- he inadvertently summons up the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man just by thinking about him. It's beyond his control.
It seems beyond mine as well. I don't will these people's deaths by any means; it's just that I have a habit of lurking around a corner somewhere nearby when the Reaper catches up with them.
James Baldwin. June Allyson. Bea Arthur. Igor Stravinsky. W.H. Auden. Even convicted killer Mitchell Rupe, who ate his way off Washington state's death row in 1994 by sneaking in enough junk food to make himself so fat that they couldn't hang him. Rupe died in 2006, and yours truly got a flash message from the angel of death before seeing Rupe's obit in the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Don't believe me? go to http://kelleyo.blogspot.com and do a search on "It Ain't Over 'Til The Fat Guy Dies."
The list goes on. It's eerie. I'm not always on-target, but sometimes my intimations of famous peoples' mortality scare even me. Full disclosure: as huge a baseball fan as I am, I received no messages from Beyond regarding the recent same-day deaths of Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver and St. Louis Cardinals slugger Stan Musial. Both deaths took me by surprise. (Then again, Weaver was 82 and Musial was 92.)
This morning I fear for veteran film star Genevieve Bujold. She has been much on my mind for the past few days, which doesn't bode well for her.
First things first: let's make sure we're all pronouncing this great lady's name right. As one who has struggled all his life with the creative ways Americans find to mispronounce French names, I'm sensitive to this. Only two people that I can remember ever pronounced my last name right on the first try: a pretty little desk clerk at the Hotel Bonaparte on the Left Bank in Paris, and a professor at San Diego State University when I was an undergraduate there, Jerry Piffard. Already a white-bearded old guy in 1976, Jerry was a professor of Old French at SDSU. Check that: not just French, but Old French. When we met, he had just completed his own translation of the medieval French epic, The Cycle of Guillaume d'Orange. Jerry not only got my name right, but also told me what "Dupuis" actually means in Old French: "Your bar bill is overdue."
Ha-ha, I'm kidding. I met Dr. Piffard one morning when we were both on our way to the commons to grab some lunch. When I told him that my name was "Kelley Dupuis," he replied, "Ah! A gentleman 'of the well!'"
But never mind all that. Back to Genevieve: her name is pronounced "Jean-Vieve." That's "Zhahn-vee-ev." Not "Jen-eh-veev." Her last name has a soft "J" sound in it: "Bujold."
(The letter "J" does a fan-dance from language to language. In Spanish it's pronounced "huh." In Portuguese it's "Zh." In French it's something more like a soft "yuh" sound: "Bu-yold." The Romans pronounced it as the French do: Julius Caesar was "Yool-ius Keezar" to his contemporaries.)
By the way, although I will never meet Genevieve, (which makes me rather sad), she and I actually do share a six-degrees-of-separation thing. The nexus is Clint Eastwood: Genevieve once made a picture with Eastwood, (about which more below) who went on years later to direct a film called Changeling, (2008) the screenplay for which was at least partially written by one J. Michael Straczynski. Joe Straczynski is one of my oldest and most cherished enemies. He and I went to high school and college together. I can't stand him. For more on Joe and me, go to http://kelleyo.blogspot.com and do a search on "Will Success Spoil Joe Straczynski?" I don't know how Eastwood found working with Joe, but I hope Genevieve was spared the experience of Straczynski. He was a promising wannabe sci-fi author when we were boys, but alas, he enjoyed too much success too quickly and became a full-of-himself, middle-aged blowhard.
Now, as distinguished as her career has been, Genevieve Bujold has not made a great many A-list pictures. Studying her filmography, one gets the impression that she likes to pick and choose her roles, and doesn't necessarily try to swing for the fence on every pitch. Her filmography is relatively small as compared with, say, those of some of her leading men, such as Richard Burton and Eastwood. These two guys have been film industries unto themselves. Genevieve has been more like the late Vladimir Horowitz, who emerged from retirement from time to time to play a concert, then vanished again. I wish Genevieve had made as many movies as Jackie Chan. That way I could have a Genevieve collection as big as my sister's Jackie Chan collection. Too bad Genevieve didn't make "martial arts" pictures. You couldn't pay me to watch a martial arts movie, but on the other hand, I think I would have been willing to plunk down a few bucks to watch Genevieve Bujold kick the shit out of Jackie Chan.
So I don't see her very often. Which is too bad, because I first developed a crush on Genevieve when I was 12 years old and saw her on TV playing the lead in George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. That was a long time ago.
So imagine my surprise when, last weekend, I caught two of her films on cable TV in as many days, subsequently did a little reading up about her career on the Internet, and even wrote her a poem. (Yes!)
I suppose if she knew about it, Genevieve might have been mildly pleased by all of this: movie stars, I have been told, do like it when people watch their films, and as for my little poem, women usually appreciate such small gestures, and anyway, celebrities have to get used to them. But if my knack for playing a reluctant Cassandra when it comes to the deaths of celebrities is at all in play here, this could amount to James Cagney yelling "Sound the general alarm!" in the movie Mr. Roberts.
The first of these two films was of course Anne of the Thousand Days. This is probably Genevieve's best-known movie. She played Anne Boleyn to Richard Burton's Henry VIII in a retelling of the story of the sorry fate of that sovereign's second wife, who got her head chopped off after giving birth to the future Queen Elizabeth I rather than the future Queen Edward. (Hank wanted a boy.) By the way, does anyone remember Rick Wakeman's version of this saga?
A bit of "Genevieve trivia": I read somewhere that after this performance as Anne Boleyn, Genevieve was offered the lead in Mary Queen of Scots. But she would have been working with the same bunch of people, and said she didn't want to "play the same role twice," so she opted out of that project, got sued by the studio and went on instead to appear in The Trojan Women with Katherine Hepburn. Vanessa Redgrave wound up playing Mary, Queen of Scots. Hey--another six-degrees connection with Genevieve! During my abortive career in graduate school circa 1979, I sat through Mary, Queen of Scots as part of a classmate's project in a history seminar. (My classmate critiqued the film's historical mendacity.)
Anne of the Thousand Days was made in 1969, when Genevieve was 27 and I was 13. I didn't get to see it until just a few years ago, because for some reason it has been maddeningly hard to find. I'm a fan of Richard Burton, and after reading his biography in 2006, which naturally included a discussion of this film, I went looking for it and couldn't find it anywhere. Then it popped up on cable. Strange are the whims of cable.
The other film I saw last weekend was Tightrope, in which Ms. Bujold teams up with Clint Eastwood for a story about a cop chasing a serial killer. I'd never seen it. I don't normally go in for thrillers, but I have always liked Clint Eastwood, and this flick had the added inducement of Genevieve's presence. I watched part of it on Sunday night, until it got too late and I was too tired and I went to sleep before it was over. But cable served it up again on Monday, and this time I got to see the end. (I won't spoil the climax for those who have yet to see this number, but I got to see Clint and Genevieve walking off just before the credits rolled, their arms around each other.)
Tightrope was made in 1984. Genevieve was 42, Clint was 54, and I was 28. That was also the year Richard Burton died and had himself buried with a volume of Dylan Thomas' poetry. I knew there was a reason I loved that guy.
OK. Since I have brought up the subject of poetry, and by the way since this is my blog and I can bloody well do whatever I want with it, here is the poem I wrote yesterday:
Friday Night and Monday Morning
for Genevieve Bujold
Some things do make more sense in dreams.
I got the joke, laughed in my sleep.
Come sunlight, the gag seemed absurd,
the downside of "it's-as-it-seems."
Day one: Anne of the Thousand Days.
Day three: Tightrope; cable TV
fast-forwarding through fifteen years.
The hands move, the pendulum stays
still. The battery's running down.
Speaking for myself, I'm transfixed,
but that clicking yard-sale nuisance
continues, silent in its frown.
Where were you? I was overseas.
So much of life’s “just showing up,”
and so much is invisible.
We remain, possibilities.
-- KD
Genevieve Bujold appeared in a new film released last year, Still. She co-stars with James Cromwell, whom I last saw playing a very bad guy in L.A. Confidential with Kevin Spacey and Russell Crowe, proof once again that I don't get to the movies very often. The film was featured at the 2012 Toronto Film Festival (Genevieve is a Toronto native.) She and her co-star play an aging couple dealing with the vagaries of being in love and getting old. There is a short interview with Genevieve on YouTube about the film.
In my poem I mention the "downside of 'it's-as-it-seems.'" The upside of being in the film industry, as I see it, is that whatever role you play in the productions in which you participate, whether as actor, writer, director, cinematographer or whatever, you're taking part in the creation of a work of art that will outlive you and your time. We all remember Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, James Cagney and all the rest for the wonder of what they left to us, and which we still treasure. It was once said of Franz Schubert and John Keats both that because they died young, they would never get old.
Genevieve Bujold is among this crowd. For me she will never get old. I'm 13 years younger than she, but I hope she is with us for as long as she can be. Pay no attention, Genevieve, to me or to that nasty bastard who seems to find me an amusing conduit, who stands with me around the corner, feeding me cue-lines for his own twisted reasons. I hope I'm wrong this time.
Dame, ne t'en vas pas.
Lady, please don't go.
Not yet. No, not yet.
 |
| Genevieve Bujold in Tightrope, 1984. Is it any wonder I had a crush on her when I was 12? (And I was 12 a LONG time before she made this film with Clint Eastwood.) |
James Baldwin. June Allyson. Bea Arthur. Igor Stravinsky. W.H. Auden. Even convicted killer Mitchell Rupe, who ate his way off Washington state's death row in 1994 by sneaking in enough junk food to make himself so fat that they couldn't hang him. Rupe died in 2006, and yours truly got a flash message from the angel of death before seeing Rupe's obit in the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Don't believe me? go to http://kelleyo.blogspot.com and do a search on "It Ain't Over 'Til The Fat Guy Dies."
The list goes on. It's eerie. I'm not always on-target, but sometimes my intimations of famous peoples' mortality scare even me. Full disclosure: as huge a baseball fan as I am, I received no messages from Beyond regarding the recent same-day deaths of Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver and St. Louis Cardinals slugger Stan Musial. Both deaths took me by surprise. (Then again, Weaver was 82 and Musial was 92.)
This morning I fear for veteran film star Genevieve Bujold. She has been much on my mind for the past few days, which doesn't bode well for her.
First things first: let's make sure we're all pronouncing this great lady's name right. As one who has struggled all his life with the creative ways Americans find to mispronounce French names, I'm sensitive to this. Only two people that I can remember ever pronounced my last name right on the first try: a pretty little desk clerk at the Hotel Bonaparte on the Left Bank in Paris, and a professor at San Diego State University when I was an undergraduate there, Jerry Piffard. Already a white-bearded old guy in 1976, Jerry was a professor of Old French at SDSU. Check that: not just French, but Old French. When we met, he had just completed his own translation of the medieval French epic, The Cycle of Guillaume d'Orange. Jerry not only got my name right, but also told me what "Dupuis" actually means in Old French: "Your bar bill is overdue."
Ha-ha, I'm kidding. I met Dr. Piffard one morning when we were both on our way to the commons to grab some lunch. When I told him that my name was "Kelley Dupuis," he replied, "Ah! A gentleman 'of the well!'"
But never mind all that. Back to Genevieve: her name is pronounced "Jean-Vieve." That's "Zhahn-vee-ev." Not "Jen-eh-veev." Her last name has a soft "J" sound in it: "Bujold."
(The letter "J" does a fan-dance from language to language. In Spanish it's pronounced "huh." In Portuguese it's "Zh." In French it's something more like a soft "yuh" sound: "Bu-yold." The Romans pronounced it as the French do: Julius Caesar was "Yool-ius Keezar" to his contemporaries.)
In
her heyday, (not that long ago, really), Genevieve Bujold was simply to die
for, as we used to say. That look, that presence, that slightly-ironic smile,
those incredible eyes. In my personal poll, only Audrey Hepburn matches her for
beauty, strength. talent and an ethereal vulnerability. She has combined what
the French call puissance with
what they call fragilite. An
iron butterfly, soit. (Now
don't start humming In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida,
my fellow geezers.) I had a crush on Genevieve when I was in junior high
school.
By the way, although I will never meet Genevieve, (which makes me rather sad), she and I actually do share a six-degrees-of-separation thing. The nexus is Clint Eastwood: Genevieve once made a picture with Eastwood, (about which more below) who went on years later to direct a film called Changeling, (2008) the screenplay for which was at least partially written by one J. Michael Straczynski. Joe Straczynski is one of my oldest and most cherished enemies. He and I went to high school and college together. I can't stand him. For more on Joe and me, go to http://kelleyo.blogspot.com and do a search on "Will Success Spoil Joe Straczynski?" I don't know how Eastwood found working with Joe, but I hope Genevieve was spared the experience of Straczynski. He was a promising wannabe sci-fi author when we were boys, but alas, he enjoyed too much success too quickly and became a full-of-himself, middle-aged blowhard.
 |
| At 70 she's still beautiful. I don't want to lose her, and I daresay neither do millions of her other fans. |
So I don't see her very often. Which is too bad, because I first developed a crush on Genevieve when I was 12 years old and saw her on TV playing the lead in George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. That was a long time ago.
So imagine my surprise when, last weekend, I caught two of her films on cable TV in as many days, subsequently did a little reading up about her career on the Internet, and even wrote her a poem. (Yes!)
I suppose if she knew about it, Genevieve might have been mildly pleased by all of this: movie stars, I have been told, do like it when people watch their films, and as for my little poem, women usually appreciate such small gestures, and anyway, celebrities have to get used to them. But if my knack for playing a reluctant Cassandra when it comes to the deaths of celebrities is at all in play here, this could amount to James Cagney yelling "Sound the general alarm!" in the movie Mr. Roberts.
 |
| The image of Genevieve that most movie buffs remember: Anne Boleyn in Anne of the Thousand Days (1969.) |
A bit of "Genevieve trivia": I read somewhere that after this performance as Anne Boleyn, Genevieve was offered the lead in Mary Queen of Scots. But she would have been working with the same bunch of people, and said she didn't want to "play the same role twice," so she opted out of that project, got sued by the studio and went on instead to appear in The Trojan Women with Katherine Hepburn. Vanessa Redgrave wound up playing Mary, Queen of Scots. Hey--another six-degrees connection with Genevieve! During my abortive career in graduate school circa 1979, I sat through Mary, Queen of Scots as part of a classmate's project in a history seminar. (My classmate critiqued the film's historical mendacity.)
Anne of the Thousand Days was made in 1969, when Genevieve was 27 and I was 13. I didn't get to see it until just a few years ago, because for some reason it has been maddeningly hard to find. I'm a fan of Richard Burton, and after reading his biography in 2006, which naturally included a discussion of this film, I went looking for it and couldn't find it anywhere. Then it popped up on cable. Strange are the whims of cable.
The other film I saw last weekend was Tightrope, in which Ms. Bujold teams up with Clint Eastwood for a story about a cop chasing a serial killer. I'd never seen it. I don't normally go in for thrillers, but I have always liked Clint Eastwood, and this flick had the added inducement of Genevieve's presence. I watched part of it on Sunday night, until it got too late and I was too tired and I went to sleep before it was over. But cable served it up again on Monday, and this time I got to see the end. (I won't spoil the climax for those who have yet to see this number, but I got to see Clint and Genevieve walking off just before the credits rolled, their arms around each other.)
Tightrope was made in 1984. Genevieve was 42, Clint was 54, and I was 28. That was also the year Richard Burton died and had himself buried with a volume of Dylan Thomas' poetry. I knew there was a reason I loved that guy.
OK. Since I have brought up the subject of poetry, and by the way since this is my blog and I can bloody well do whatever I want with it, here is the poem I wrote yesterday:
Friday Night and Monday Morning
for Genevieve Bujold
Some things do make more sense in dreams.
I got the joke, laughed in my sleep.
Come sunlight, the gag seemed absurd,
the downside of "it's-as-it-seems."
Day one: Anne of the Thousand Days.
Day three: Tightrope; cable TV
fast-forwarding through fifteen years.
The hands move, the pendulum stays
still. The battery's running down.
Speaking for myself, I'm transfixed,
but that clicking yard-sale nuisance
continues, silent in its frown.
Where were you? I was overseas.
So much of life’s “just showing up,”
and so much is invisible.
We remain, possibilities.
-- KD
 |
| In Coma with Michael Douglas and company, 1978. |
In my poem I mention the "downside of 'it's-as-it-seems.'" The upside of being in the film industry, as I see it, is that whatever role you play in the productions in which you participate, whether as actor, writer, director, cinematographer or whatever, you're taking part in the creation of a work of art that will outlive you and your time. We all remember Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, James Cagney and all the rest for the wonder of what they left to us, and which we still treasure. It was once said of Franz Schubert and John Keats both that because they died young, they would never get old.
Genevieve Bujold is among this crowd. For me she will never get old. I'm 13 years younger than she, but I hope she is with us for as long as she can be. Pay no attention, Genevieve, to me or to that nasty bastard who seems to find me an amusing conduit, who stands with me around the corner, feeding me cue-lines for his own twisted reasons. I hope I'm wrong this time.
Dame, ne t'en vas pas.
Lady, please don't go.
Not yet. No, not yet.
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