Influences Continued I Remeber London (1966) The Dakota We stayed at the Dakota the last night. I’ve always thought that was very strange. The Dakota, I don’t know if you remember . . . the Dakota had some rooms . . . rooms up on the top floor that servants used to sleep in . . . babysitters and housekeepers. Some tenants had a room like that. Gillian’s friends used to stay in that little room. They were enchanting little rooms. We stayed in that little room upstairs for our last night.   And then we set off . . . we left in the morning for London. And I remember being at JFK. It was November . . . something like November 27, 1966. It was November 26 or November 27. And you were so trusting. You were just . . . you know . . . I said Adam; we’re going to London. And you were always just so trusting. And we’re at the airport and I’m talking to you about going to London. And we got on a plane and went to London. We . . . I think had about four hundred dollars maybe five but no more. I didn’t know. I just wanted to change my life.   Gillian had given me the name of what they call a “bed-sit.” They didn’t call them pensiones; they called them bed sitters. A writer she knew lived in one in Earls Court. She told me to go there and ask for him. It would be a place to stay.   We arrived in London at about ten o’clock that night. And I went to this bed sit and I asked for this writer. A woman said he wasn’t there. And she was hostile . . . the woman who ran it. You could tell she was shocked that I was Black and that I was asking to stay in this bedsit. I said, “Well doesn’t this writer live here?” She said, “He’s not here.” He’s in Paris or something like that. “You can’t stay here.”   Gillian had another name written down . . . the Basil Street Hotel. I didn’t know the Basil Street Hotel is one of the fanciest little hotels in London. So it’s ten o’clock at night. We’re trudging with our suitcases looking for a taxi. I don’t know a soul in London. All I have is addresses. Diana Sands’s theatre connections. So we go to the Basil Street Hotel at about eleven at night. And they were so nice. This beautiful little hotel. It’s right around the corner from Harrods.   I’m sure by now it costs a fortune. And it had these enchanting little rooms with wallpaper . . . like an Agatha Christie novel . . . Colonel so and so came down for breakfast. They gave tea dances. We were only there about two weeks, but they gave tea dances in the afternoon and Colonel so and so is dancing with his wife. And they were so nice to us. I think they were nice to use because . . . (pause) . . . you didn’t see many American Blacks in London. And I think people were just a little taken aback. I really do.   ________________________________ At my 80th Birthday dinner in Virginia, my grandsons Canaan and Jacob asked me about memorable moments in my life. “The births,” I said, “the births of the children.” At the dinner they sang to me and gave me drawings. Drawings by children are a source of joy. Along with my mother’s scrapbook, I had spent hours on summer days gazing at Adam’s London notebooks. He was six, seven, and eight. He made them at the Primrose Hill Infants School. I needed these drawings. I needed the stories of Joedy’s childhood photographs. On the night of the hurricane in the darkness downstairs on Meadow Lane, you could hear trees falling. They live in a woods. My grandson said, “You could write about tonight.” I had never been in a hurricane and wondered if we would all drown in the lane. I spent a lot of time recently looking at Adam’s London drawings.   London, Monday, September 16, 1964 Yesterday I went to the zoo and I saw a lion and he roared. I went home. Adam.   London, Tuesday, September 26, 1967 Once there was a prince and the prince had a father, the father had a daughter, and she went to bed and a ghost came. Father killed the ghost. Adam.   London, Primrose Hill Infants School, October 18, 1964 Once there was a monkey. The monkey killed the monkey. Adam. August 2011, New York I read that Jerry Leiber died, the very famous songwriter (“Yakety Yak,” “Hound Dog”). I first met Jerry in August 1969. He was on his way to East Hampton. My son and I were staying for two weeks in Al Maysles’s vacated loft next door to the Greenwich Theatre. Jerry came by to get a script from me. His wife, Gaby Rodgers, would soon direct a play of mine at St. Marks Playhouse. She had already told me how much Jerry liked Funnyhouse of a Negro. He couldn’t park the car, so I had to run down to give him the script. He was very friendly, driving a long black car, very handsome in a summer outfit, cotton shirt and shorts. I was quite taken with him. I realized he had a brown eye and a blue eye. In 1939 when I was 8 years old, there was a long article in the Cleveland Press about my father, a photograph of him with a caption at the top: Young Man With Vision: Transforms Cleveland Gangs ____ Clubs. A couple of years later, another long article caption in larger letters: HAWKINS Does His Job: How he made good gangs out of bad ones in submerged areas. I still have these (for me) hypnotic papers. When I was a teenager, my father introduced me to Louis Seltzer, editor of the Cleveland Press. He took me by his office near Public Square. Seltzer was sitting at his desk. “Your father is a fine man,” he said.   Delores Claiborne: Kathy Bates is a great actress. And Stephen Kindgs work is an ideal blend of story, landscape, and murder, as moving as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. September 2011 At my 80th birthday dinner in Virginia, my grandchildren asked me what were the most memorable moments in my life. “The births,” I said. “The births of the children.” This was September, and all summer I had ________ over my son’s childhood drawings, their photographs along with my mother’s scrapbook. During the fires from Great Dismal Swamp, the falling of the Red Oaks in the woods, the earthquake, I had gazed again and again at the drawings and photographs from the past. But that September evening, they sang to me, Canaan, Dori, Jacob, Caleb, Adam, and his wife Reneè. My son Adam publishes a series of interviews called Chronicling Greatness. One of the interviews is the recollections of a soldier during World War II. He recalled how he liberated a concentration camp and how the soldiers had given small portions of food to the prisoners because they could only eat small portions. Chronicling Greatness honors the veteran Zimmer. At that moment, when they sang, I felt honored. And I had champagne and chocolate cake. Canaan’s favorite songs are “She Will” by Lil Wayne, “Niggas in Paris” by Jay-Z and Kanye West, “Otis” by Jay-Z and Kanye West. Jacob’s favorite game is Skyrim. Dori’s favorite book genre is fantasy. They have a friend named Imagine Morrowind. Star Wars and the John Williams theme: All summer my five-year-old grandson Caleb watched Star Wars. I remembered in 1977 his father, when he was 16 and a student at Riverdale, told me there was this movie Star Wars coming. We went to see it on 86th Street near the old Gimbels. Adam bought a poster. I loved it too. In 2000 my grandson Eitra, now 23, had a desperate crush on Natalie Portman in Phantom Menace. In 2001 it was extraordinary that Portman was in my playwriting class at Harvard. I asked her to sign a Premier magazine cover and we all have copies. For years my grandson Canaan and Jacob, now 14 and 12, collected every Star Wars toy. Their garage in Virginia is filled with boxes that they are still saving. They want to hear over and over how I once met George Lucas at a restaurant in Berkeley, California, and once took a tour of Skywalker Ranch on a Sunday afternoon when it was just being built. I am in awe of the imagination that can produce such passion in a line of five members of a family. And it was the beginning of my crush on R2D2 and on Harrison Ford. Ford is the reason why I like Dr. Jack Ryan so much in Clear and Present Danger. On a July Saturday morning when the John Williams theme as playing, my former husband Joe Kennedy came for a visit from Washington. I cried when he left because for an instant he stared at me the way he stared at me the moment I stepped off the California Zephyr to join him in Denver, where he was stationed at Fitzsimmons Army Base, to join him for the beginning of our married life. We drove through the Rockies and went to Echo Lake. That weekend in Virginia, we watched Looking for Lincoln, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s documentary on Abraham Lincoln. The film has the excitement of A. Conan Doyle . . . a haunting composition.   As 80 got nearer, I tried to remember Matisse built a chapel in his eighties. Matisse and Picasso in their 80s. And I read Larry Grobel’s novel Begin Again Finnegan about a journalist who at 60 starts all over as the fiction writer he dreamed of being. He had dreamed as a young man of being James Joyce, To begin again Finnegan, to begin again Finnegan.   There was a great documentary of the building, not the sinking but the building of the Titanic in Belfast, Ireland. The majesty of the design, the beauty of details, scope of imagination, intellect, the risks, the passion, the spirit, and endurance. Today, journalist Ethel Payne is on a postage stamp. Margo Jefferson herself a Pulitzer Prize journalist who wrote this about Payne in an introduction to the Chronicling Greatness Series: “Ethel Payne made her way from segregated Chicago to post-war Japan. She covered Eisenhower’s white house and Mandela’s South Africa.”   I see the blunder that the 13-year-old girl made in listening to Miss McCreary.   ________________________________   I keep thinking of the building of Titanic from the PBS documentary, the years of building in Belfast, Ireland. Men fell to their deaths during its construction.   I still enjoy studying my second favorite movie of all time Now Voyager (The Red Shoes is first). When I saw it recently on TCM, I understood in a new way how crucial Tina is to the emotional dimension of the movie. Tina is the young daughter of Jerry. She is placed in a “rest home” because her mother does not want her, and her father is at a loss as to how to handle his daughter’s dark anxiety.   It is this very rest home where Charlotte Vale went to when she was having her nervous breakdown. Of course Jerry is the married man whom Charlotte met on her recuperative voyage and fell in love with. Even though I have studied the power of this story endlessly, I sometimes have overlooked the brilliant placing of Tina. Though a secondary character, she is the crux. Yes she is Charlotte’s mirror image, but she is the metaphor for the underlying anguish in all the main characters – Charlotte, Jerry, Charlotte’s mother, Jerry’s wife – which gives this tale such overall power. I keep thinking of Henri Matisse and the Matisse chapel in Vence. Crippled with ailments, working from a wheelchair with a long stick, a brush strapped to his arm, pieces of construction paper placed on the wall, drawing the images of the murals: St. Dominic, the wandering preacher, the Virgin and Child, and stations of the cross.   I would like to journey from the center of Vence across the bridge that spans the Foux River, up Avenue Henri Matisse, past the Regina Hotel (once a retreat for Queen Victoria), and ascend the path to the chapel. I want to see a masterpiece completed at the end of this artist’s life. From Chronicling Greatness, Ethel Payne in conversation with Adam Kennedy: I think one who stands out, because I was associated with him long before I went into the news business is A. Philip Randolph, the founder of The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. He was the man who conceived the idea of the March on Washington in 1941-1942. In the mid-eighties... I was at a luncheon in Berkeley, Ca. Lunch was served at tables at the foot of a beautiful garden, a garden laid out on several levels. It was a spring Sunday afternoon. The man sitting opposite me said he had heard I wrote plays. “A very good friend of mine was a playwright,” he said. “He killed himself.” His friend was William Inge. Whenever I thought of William Inge, I always thought of the movie Splendor in the Grass, a movie that caused me to seek out the poem and learn the lines of “Splendor in the Grass.” Natalie Woods’s breakdown in her high-school classroom when she recites Wordsworth was a scene that made me desperate to learn Wordsworth. I met the director of the movie, Elia Kazan, once in his office on Broadway. It was a small plain office. He said he wrote there and wanted to work on his own material. He asked me about a play I had done recently at Actors Studio. He told me he loved the way Julie Harris looked in East of Eden and he thought Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita was a cipher. Told him how much I loved the scene in East of Eden when James Dean ran through the cornfield. He smiled. It was very difficult for me to believe I was talking to the man I had written a fan letter to after I saw On the Waterfront, to this very Broadway address. It made me dizzy, quite dizzy I was afraid. The Film Club (A Monologue by Suzanne Alexander) Often when I’m despondent, I watch Bette Davis’s movies. Yesterday I started to make a list of them. While I wrote I found myself remembering when my husband, David, was detained in West Africa the winter of 1961. He was missing for fifteen months. Often evenings in Accra, David read to me about methods of torture during imprisonment. It was from Fanon: “The brutal methods which are directed toward getting prisoners to speak rather than to actual torture. There is a mass attack . . .” In that winter of 1961, David’s and my life changed. As did Alice’s, my sister-in-law’s. Alice and I waited for David in London. I had flown from Accra, she from Washington. We expected David to arrive in London in a week. I looked at one of Alice’s movies today. In remembrance. I call them Alice’s movies because it was Alice who formed our film club, in 1959, typed our scripts, directed, and filmed scenes with all of us playing parts. She chose Bette Davis movies. And “adapted” them. She referred to them as “my films.” She even sent one to Kazan. That was also the summer we went to Birdland. Dizzy was there. I’m sure you know Alice Alexander’s poetry and her collections of slave narratives. She died last week of an asthmatic attack in Washington, D.C. In 1961 we were staying in a room in London at 9 Bolton Gardens, waiting. We had no word from David. I became so distraught that one night I tried to climb into the closed garden to sleep. I developed ailments, nausea, breathlessness. My doctor tried to involve Alice and me in a theatrical reading he was working on with patients. They were doing excerpts from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. My doctor’s name was Freudenberger. He said, “The readings will distract you while you are waiting for your husband.” I read the role of Lucy and Alice read Mina. The doctor lived in the Little Boltons in a dark, damp dwelling. We didn’t know it but David was in trouble. Alice filmed our readings as well as us walking on Old Brompton Road. David and I have written several poems together. We record together and perhaps some of you have seen my most famous play, She Talks to Beethoven, a play set in Ghana during David’s first disappearance. I also teach the essays of Alice Walker, the poetry of Borges, Lorca, Ishmael Reed, and the plays of Wole Soyinka. Students at New York University are doing an early play of mine. The first line is: “Everyone is reading Catcher in the Rye.” In those early days Alice often told me plots of Bette Davis movies. She knew them by heart, as well as the stories of Davis’s life. She’d say: In 1930 Bette Davis stepped off a transcontinental train in Hollywood with a six-month contract in hand, a dream of stardom in her head . . . dreams that soon began to fade. She’d read from a book she’d bought at Marboro’s. She’d say: “Kate Bosworth, a young artist, meets a handsome lighthouse inspector, Bill (Glenn Ford), while spending the summer on Martha’s Vineyard as the houseguest of her guardian, Mr. Lindley (Charles Ruggles). Kate believes she is in love with Bill and he with her when her identical twin sister, Patricia, shows up and becomes enchanted by Bill. “Patricia and Bill marry. Determined to forget her by painting and studies with a cruel but brilliant artist, Kate hears that Bill and Patricia will leave for Chile to live. She decides to give up studying and retreat to the Vineyard house. When she returns to the Vineyard, she discovers Patricia did not go with Bill . . . “. . . For a while Kate pretends to be her twin, Patricia, hoping to gain Bill’s love. But one day she decides she cannot go on. And for the final time returns to the Vineyard. But Bill follows Kate to the Island, knowing now she is the sister he should have married . . .” That winter of 1961 every day we went to the American Embassy for word of David. After we left the Embassy we’d go to Windsor in the rain. Queen Victoria had grieved for Albert there. My husband, where was he? Alice clutched her Blue Guide and we went to see the Roman wall in the City. I remembered in our garden in Accra how David read me the love poems of Senghor. Now I was expecting our child, Rachel. Evenings in Accra David had often told me of soldiers who were prisoners. Generally speaking they had a noise phobia and a thirst for peace and affection. Their disorders took various forms, as the states of agitation, rages, immobility, many attempted suicides, tears, lamentations, and appeals for mercy. Alice continued to write David at the American Embassy in Ghana. But we didn’t know where he was. She wrote: “Suzanne wants to return to Africa and search for you. The doctor says she cannot travel back to West Africa. It might kill the baby. “In the rain we take the 30 bus down Old Brompton Road, past the South Kensington station, take another bus and walk into the Haymarket and wait for letters at American Express. And in the afternoon again we go to Windsor. “Suzanne is drawn to the painting of the tiny, sad figure of Victoria dressed in black mourning her husband’s death. We walk in Windsor Park until it is dark and we have to take the train back to London. Suzanne’s doctor phones. His theatrical group is waiting for us. We read from Stoker: ‘. . . All at once the wolves began to howl as though the moonlight had had some peculiar effect on them. The horses jumped about and reared and looked helplessly round with eyes that rolled in a way painful to see; but the living ring of terror encompassed them on every side –’ ” Dr. Freudenberger gave me the part of Lucy. These readings were for our amusement and I don’t think the others realized how strongly I was affected by the passages I read on Lucy. I began to utter them in my sleep. Lucy sleepwalks to the suicide seat on the East cliff. Dracula drinks her blood for the first time. She receives a blood transfusion. The wolf Berserker escapes from the zoo, breaks a window providing Dracula with passage to Lucy again. Lucy dies. She is buried in a church yard near Hampstead Heath. Dr. Freudenberger sat behind his desk as we read. His nervous German wife, Heike, served tea, sat aside, and studied Steppenwolf. Alice wrote David: “On the Thames going to Greenwich Suzanne recites one of your favorite poems from Diop. She carries notebooks of your records of slave ships, slave quarters, slaves crouching below the stern on the ship. My husband, she told a stranger, gives lectures on slave ships crossing the Atlantic. We reach Greenwich and see the place where Elizabeth I was born. “She recites Diop as we cross the grounds up to the observatory. Her breathlessness is worse. And my asthma is bad. Yet she quotes the poem: The Vultures Way back then with their civilizing edicts with their holy water splashing on domesticated brows the vultures in the shadows of their claws were setting up the bloody monument of the guardian era way back then laughter gasped its last . . . “Suzanne must leave London, Dr. Freudenberger says, by the beginning of March. Often nauseated, she is still in the Haymarket at American Express mornings when the offices are still closed. She doesn’t want to leave Europe without word of you. Afternoons she sits by the gas fire and cries. ‘Do you rust Dr. F.?’ she asks. “Freudenberger walks us back from the reading along the dark curved street to No. 9, staring at Suzanne. “In three nights we plan to leave London. Our theatrical group reads sequences that Freudenberger loves. Jonathan Harker arriving at Klausenberg stays the night, leaves by coach for Castle Dracula . . . realizes he is a prisoner, watches Dracula crawl face down over the castle wall . . . enters the forbidden room . . . Dracula makes Harker write three misleading letters to England . . . Harker discovers his personal effects are gone . . . Dracula leaves the castle dressed in Harker’s clothes and returns with a child for the three vampire women . . . the bereft mother is killed by wolves . . . Harker climbs along the castle wall to the cellar where he finds Dracula in a box. “These sequences we read sitting in a circle. Sometimes it makes Suzanne cry. We have to leave London with no word from you. Our last day we sailed again on the Thames to Greenwich, returned and went to a movie in Leicester Square.” In three weeks we knew David had disappeared. I went back to Washington and lived with his family. Our daughter, Rachel, was born. David’s family says I lapsed into sleeplessness, hysteria. I began to exhibit signs of the prisoners David had described to me, states of agitation, rages, immobility, tears, attempted suicides, lamentations, appeals for mercy. We heard from the Ghanaian Embassy there was a doctor in Algeria who had once tried to kill Fanon. And this Sottan was behind the plot against my husband. We later learned this Sottan had us followed through the villages in Africa. We remembered an incident at our cottage behind the Ambassador Hotel, a man who said he was the gardener. And earlier on our voyage on the Elizabeth there had been a man in the ship’s orchestra who had befriended us. On the last morning in London Dr. Freudenberger and Alice found me wandering along the Embankment near More’s Gardens. I thought we were at one of our readings and began to cry the words of Stoker: “When I saw again the driver was climbing into the calèche and the wolves had disappeared, this was all so strange and uncanny that a dreadful fear came upon me and I was afraid to speak or move. The time seemed interminable as we swept on our way now in almost complete darkness . . .” My husband, where is he? Alice wrote that I was delirious and had started to speak of branches of trees cracking together wild roses, mountain ash, lines from Stoker. It was after the birth of our daughter, Rachel. We read in the Washington Post: “It is believed that Professor David Alexander, a native of Washington and a graduate of Ohio State University, was taken to dinner by a Swiss journalist in Geneva last winter, a journalist who was working for the French Secret Service. Alexander, who worked with Fanon, had been trying to uncover a plot against the revolutionary writer’s life. During the dinner observers say Alexander became violently ill after having an aperitif and was admitted to the hospital. Nothing more is known but it is suspected he was poisoned with filicin. His family has been unable to determine his whereabouts. As you may recall, Fanon died here in Washington last year. The Alexanders of 16th Street, N.W. here in the city have endured great sorrow this year. Two months ago the baby daughter, Rachel, of Alexander and his wife, Suzanne, was involved in an accidental death. Circumstances are not known.” After David returned sometimes we walked at night in Rock Creek Park. I reread Wretched of the Earth to try to understand what you had been through. Your symptoms: idiopathic tremors hair turning white paroxysmal tachycardias muscular stiffness anxiety and feeling of imminent death heavy sweating fits. We never got to see Frantz. Alice and I went to the hospital in Washington where we thought he was. We were not admitted. I still read from his life and search for the cause of his illnesses and death. My romantic sister-in-law, up until her death we all lived on 16th Street. I see her writing scripts, arranging us all for the camera. We never had a film club again. After David’s imprisonment Alice didn’t make films much. Several years ago at Thanksgiving we looked for Alice’s favorite scene of Now Voyager; it was missing. She believed she lost it that winter in London. I continued to read long passages from Fanon, but for now a brief segment: “But the war goes on: and we will have to bind up for years to come the many sometimes ineffaceable wounds that the colonialist onslaught has inflicted on our people” END Ellie Maxwell Ellie Maxwell, who has died aged 32, of complications from cancer, was a quietly spoken social activist with a grace, laconic wit and purposefulness that guided her life and work. At 21, she founded Firefly International, a Scottish charity whose mission is to foster multi-ethnic youth projects in Bosnia and elsewhere. To fund Firefly in the beginning, she enlisted fellow Edinburgh University students to canvass the neighbourhood. Edinburgh pubgoers were the most generous early givers. Later, the Princess of Wales Charitable Trust joined the list, giving substantial support. As Firefly grew in impact in Bosnia, Ellie was awarded Young Achiever of the Year (1997) at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, by the Queen, and Catholic Woman of the Year 1998. "For social change to occur," Ellie wrote, "people's networks of friends, acquaintances and colleagues must cross the boundaries of race, nationality or language, along which they are often based". Firefly was founded in a shed in Brcko, in north-east Bosnia. Ellie had gone to nearby Mostar to visit her father, Peter Constable Maxwell, then a UN aid officer. After helping carry water over Mostar bridge, and dodging sniper bullets, Ellie saw a need for a place of refuge for children. So she painted the Brcko shed. That refuge has evolved into three centres, maintained by Firefly associates, where Serb and Croat, Christian and Muslim young people play and learn together. Later, Ellie won future leaders fellowships from the Clore Leadership Programme and the Bertelsmann Foundation. These enabled her to work and study in Europe and the US. Ellie was educated at St Mary's school in Ascot, Berkshire, and Edinburgh. She was multilingual, extensively travelled and a voracious reader. Her activism might be called a secular evolution from a centuries-old recusant Catholic family. Though Ellie did not talk much of religion or lineage, the example of her ancestors lived in her. Her father is the descendant of two old Catholic families - the Maxwells from the Borders and the Constables from the East Riding of Yorkshire. Both families had remained Catholic after the Reformation and the family tradition is of loyalty to the "old faith". Ellie was singled out from birth. In March 1977, the Catholic Herald columnist Patrick O'Donovan wrote that "there was a baptism in our parish this week. It is true that the child was of a singular beauty - not the usual miniature Churchill, but a creature with a refined, bony and passionate small face and a fury of black hair ... God knows what the child will be ... It may even be an ambassador in Washington." In 2004, Ellie married Ben Courtney, an American graphic artist and web designer, who survives her. The couple's online wedding registry listed charities only, or gifts where part of the proceeds went to Firefly. Ellie's life was cut short, but her work continues. Through her initiative, a series of events associated with Palestinian students are to be held in Edinburgh this summer, with funding from the European Union. -Excerpt From The Guardian Tuskegee Airman Victor Terrelonge talks to Adam Kennedy: Interview Adam Kennedy: So the first big mission was a strafing mission then you said you went on a big mission. Terrelonge: That’s right. That is the one to Berlin. But we were not supposed to go to Berlin. We were supposed to meet one hundred and fifty bombers over Brux and escort them to an initial point where we were supposed to be relieved by a white squadron who would take the bombers into Berlin. But when we got to the IP there was nobody there. -Excerpt from Chronicling Greatness To Read More go to Adrienne Kennedy's Blog > Click Here to go to the Blog