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In 1973, I met a handsome young model named Bruce Weber and a friendship was forged over a mutual obsession with Elizabeth Taylor’s beauty. He went on to become one of the world’s greatest photographers. He has shot Elizabeth many, many times (and has become a great friend). In fact, he and I exchange rare pictures of Elizabeth for Christmas and our birthdays almost every year.
Paul Rowland photographed Alana Zimmer & Rachel Clark in Casablanca, Morocco on the 2nd & 3rd day of August 2008. The head of the desert is palpable in these photographs. The length of the shadows cast makes it hard to tell if they were taken at the beginning of the day, or the end.
The physical intimacy of Alana and Rachel, in the Moroccan location, reminds me of Paul Bowles' novel The Sheltering Sky.
An Allegory of Man and His Sahara By Tennessee Williams The Sheltering Sky By Paul Bowles. After several literary seasons given over, mostly, to the frisky antics of kids, precociously knowing and singularly charming, but not to be counted on for those gifts that arrive by no other way than the experience and contemplation of a truly adult mind, now is obviously a perfect time for a writer with such a mind to engage our attention. That is precisely the event to be celebrated in the appearance of "The Sheltering Sky," Paul Bowles' first novel.
It has been a good while since first novels in America have come from men in their middle or late thirties (Paul Bowles is 38). Even in past decades the first novel has usually been written during the writers' first years out of college. Moreover, because success and public attention operate as a sort of pressure cooker or freezer, there has been a discouraging tendency for the talent to bake or congeal at a premature level of inner development.
In America the career almost invariably becomes an obsession. The "get-ahead" principle, carried to such extreme, inspires our writers to enormous efforts. A new book must come out every year. Otherwise they get panicky, and the first thing you know they belong to Alcoholics Anonymous or have embraced religion or plunged headlong into some political activity with nothing but an inchoate emotionalism to bring to it or to be derived from it. I think that this stems from a misconception of what it means to be a writer or any kind of creative artist. They feel it is something to adopt in the place of actual living, without understanding that art is a by-product of existence.
Paul Bowles has deliberately rejected that kind of rabid professionalism. Better known as a composer than a writer, he has not allowed his passion for either form of expression to interfere with his growth into completeness of personality. Now this book has come at the meridian of the man and artist. And, to me very thrillingly, it brings the reader into sudden, startling communion with a talent of true maturity and sophistication of a sort that I had begun to fear was to be found nowadays only among the insurgent novelists of France, such as Jean Genet and Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.
With the hesitant exception of one or two war books by returned soldiers, "The Sheltering Sky" alone of the books that I have recently read by American authors appears to bear the spiritual imprint of recent history in the western world. Here the imprint is not visible upon the surface of the novel. It exists far more significantly in a certain philosophical aura that envelopes it. There is a curiously double level to this novel. The surface is enthralling as narrative. It is impressive as writing. But above that surface is the aura that I spoke of, intangible and powerful, bringing to mind one of those clouds that you have seen in summer, close to the horizon and dark in color and now and then silently pulsing with interior flashes of fire. And that is the surface of the novel that has filled me with such excitement.
The story itself is a chronicle of startling adventure against a background of the Sahara and the Arab-populated regions of the African Continent, a portion of the world seldom dealt with by first-rate writers who actually know it. Paul Bowles does know it, and much better, for instance, than it was known by AndrÈ Gide. He probably knows it even better than Albert Camus. For Paul Bowles has been going to Africa, off and on, since about 1930. It thrills him, but for some reason it does not upset his nervous equilibrium. He does not remain in the coastal cities. At frequent intervals he takes journeys into the most mysterious recesses of the desert and mountain country of North Africa, involving not only hardship but peril.
"The Sheltering Sky" is the chronicle of such a journey. Were it not for the fact that the chief male character, Port Moresby, succumbs to an epidemic fever during the course of the story, it would not be hard to identify him with Mr. Bowles himself. Like Mr. Bowles, he is a member of the New York intelligentsia who became weary of being such a member and set out to escape it in remote places. Escape it he certainly does. He escapes practically all the appurtenances of civilized modern life. Balanced between fascination and dread, he goes deeper and deeper into this dreamlike "awayness."
From then on the story is focused upon the continuing and continually more astonishing adventures of his wife, Kit, who wanders on like a body in which the rational mechanism is gradually upset and destroyed. The liberation is too intense, too extreme, for a nature conditioned by and for a state of civilized confinement. Her primitive nature, divested one by one of its artificial reserves and diffidences, eventually overwhelms her, and the end of this novel is as wildly beautiful and terrifying as the whole panorama that its protagonists have crossed. In this external aspect the novel is, therefore, an account of startling adventure. In its interior aspect, "The Sheltering Sky" is an allegory of the spiritual adventure of the fully conscious person into modern experience. This is not an enticing way to describe it. It is a way that might suggest the very opposite kind of a novel from the one that Paul Bowles has written. Actually this superior motive does not intrude in explicit form upon the story, certainly not in any form that will need to distract you from the great pleasure of being told a first-rate story of adventure by a really first-rate writer.
I suspect that a good many people will read this book and be enthralled by it without once suspecting that it contains a mirror of what is most terrifying and cryptic within the Sahara of moral nihilism, into which the race of man now seems to be wandering blindly.
The Sheltering Sky was adapted by Bernardo Bertolucci into a 1990 film by the same name starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich, with screenplay by Mark Peploe. In Bertolucci's interpretation, the bleak, sinister tone of the latter part of the book becomes a desert love story. The movie is filmed in Morocco, Algeria, and Niger and features powerful visual scenery.
Estelle Getty passed away yesterday. Her loss affected me deeply. Although I never met her, and she wasn't related to me, I feel like she was part of my family. When I was a child I would watch her show, The Golden Girls, with my grandmother. Now that I am older, I enjoy the show with my friends on DVD. Working in fashion, it amazes me how many people, from all countries, also love the Golden Girls. According to Cathy Horyn, of the New York Times, Helmut Lang is a fan. Estelle Getty gave us years and years of laughter and joy. She will be sincerely missed.
from the New York Times: Estelle Getty, ‘Golden Girls’ Matriarch, Dies at 84 By BRUCE WEBER Estelle Getty, whose portrayal of a crabbily charming octogenarian on the television sitcom “The Golden Girls” gave new prominence to elderly characters in prime time and endeared her to viewers of all ages, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. She was 84.
Her son Carl Gettleman confirmed her death. Ms. Getty had been suffering from Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disease.
Long before “Golden Girls” Ms. Getty had been portraying maternal types of all sorts on the stage.
“I am the mother,” she declared in her opening line in “Torch Song Trilogy,” Harvey Fierstein’s 1981 play about the travails of a gay man in New York City, and as a summary of her career, her character was right.
“I’ve played mothers to heroes and mothers to zeroes,” Ms. Getty wrote in her autobiography, “If I Knew Then What I Know Now ... So What?” (Contemporary Books, 1988). “I’ve played Irish mothers, Jewish mothers, Italian mothers, Southern mothers, mothers in plays by Neil Simon and Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. I’ve played mother to everyone but Attila the Hun.”
The book was a response to Ms. Getty’s sudden and resounding popularity in the most famous of her mother roles, the tart-tongued, white-haired Sophia Petrillo, oldest of the four previously married women sharing a Miami home in “The Golden Girls.” In the show, Sophia was the mother of Dorothy Zbornak, played by Bea Arthur who, in real life, was older than Ms. Getty.
Sophia, characterized by her bluntness and cranky lamentations about old age, treated her daughter with a kind of loving contempt, and their two roommates, the man-obsessed Blanche (Rue McClanahan), and the dim-witted Rose (Betty White), with the eye-rolling impatience of one who will not indulge the self-delusions of others. When Blanche complained that her life was an open book, Sophia witheringly replied: “Your life is an open blouse.”
The show ran from 1985 to 1992 and, in reruns, is still seen regularly on the Lifetime channel. Ms. Getty was nominated seven years in a row for an Emmy award for best supporting actress in a comedy series, winning in 1988. It was a remarkable coup for an actress then in her 60s who had worked for decades with almost no recognition at all.
Mr. Gettleman said in an interview Tuesday that his mother’s remark was, “After 50 years in the business, I’m an overnight success.”
Estelle Scher (she had no middle name) was born in Manhattan on July 25, 1923, the daughter of immigrants from Poland. Her father started a glass business that was eventually taken over by Arthur Gettleman, the man she would marry in 1947. Her stage name was derived from his.
A tiny woman, under 5 feet tall and less than 100 pounds, Ms. Getty wrote in her autobiography that her interest in acting began as a child when she saw her first vaudeville show; as a young woman she tried her hand at stand-up comedy. For most of her performing life, which she spent in community theaters, small theaters way off Broadway and regional houses, she made a living as a secretary.
In 1978, after seeing “The International Stud,” the first installment of what would become “Torch Song Trilogy,” she went backstage to introduce herself to the playwright and star, Mr. Fierstein, and they became friends. Some time later, she recalled in an 1984 interview, she said to him, “You’re such a hotshot playwright, why don’t you write a play with a mother in it, and I’ll play her.” That play turned out to be “Widows and Children First,” the concluding segment in the trilogy, and it changed her life. Rex Reed wrote in The New York Daily News that “Estelle Getty is the most endearing Jewish mother to be seen on the New York stage since Molly Picon, only prettier and more believable.”
The performance led to her being cast as Cher’s mother in the film “Mask,” and it was while she was on the road with “Torch Song” in Los Angeles that she auditioned for “Golden Girls,” getting the job after she showed up for the final audition in the costume and makeup of a little old lady.
Her husband died in 2004. In addition to Carl Gettleman, who lives in Santa Monica, Calif., Ms. Getty is survived by another son, Barry Gettleman of Miami; a brother, David Scher of London; and a sister, Rosilyn Howard of Las Vegas.
Ms. Getty appeared in two “Golden Girls” spinoffs, “Empty Nest” and “The Golden Palace,” and acted in guest spots on a number of other series. She played Sylvester Stallone’s mother in the 1992 comedy “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.”
Ms. Getty relished her late-in-life success, her son said. And she enjoyed reminiscing about more difficult times. In a 1990 interview she recalled one of her last secretarial jobs, at a company called Snap-Out Forms, where she kept her acting ambitions a secret for fear of being fired.
“At Snap-Out Forms, the first day I came to work, I had an audition, and I said, ‘Can I go for my lunch at 10 o’clock?’ ” she said. “The next day I had to go someplace else. I said. ‘Can I take my lunch at 2:30?’ The next day I asked if I could take lunch at 11 o’clock. The office manager said, ‘You have the strangest eating habits of any secretary we’ve ever had.’ ”
