I watched him as he sipped some water and delivered his sermons, his observations and aspirations for his people, as though I was an audience more important than any other. He was captivating and obsessed at the same time. He was gentle, yet deliberate. His energy never dissipated. He paced and cajoled and entertained and preached. In these moments the destiny of Cuba seemed to be cradled in his arms. I wondered how long that would last. I wondered what would happen to Cuba when he died.
When he left, I hung his uniform in my closet.
When the maid came in to clean the next morning, she found it. She looked at me and then back at it. Had her leader sold out to an American movie star or had the movie star succumbed to the charms of the sugarcane fields? She smiled and left.
When I returned to Washington, I took the presents to the White House. I carried them in a large tote bag.
My limo drove through the gate and let me off close to the Rose Garden.
Í walked through the door, impressed that security had been so subtle.
I first went to Hamilton’s office. He wasn’t in. So I moved over to Brzezinski, the national security adviser. I had called to say I was coming. Zbigniew invited me in. He asked how my trip to Cuba had gone. I told him fine.
We sat in the sitting area of his office, chatting until Hamilton came in. He asked about Cuba too.
“I have something for you,” I said.
“Yeah, what?” said Hamilton.
“A present from Castro.” I pulled out the box of cigars.
Zbigniew jumped up. “You have a present from that murderer with you and you got past security?”
I looked at him in shock. “Well, yes,” I said. “I thought those metal detectors at the entrance were enough to tell us there’s nothing dangerous here.”
“Nothing dangerous?” said Zbigniew. “There could be a bomb in that box.”
“A bomb?” I asked. “How would it know when to go off? I had it on my lap coming from Havana.”
“What have you got there?” said Hamilton, ignoring Zbigniew’s alarm. “Did he send me cigars, I hope?”
“Yes,” I said. “And the box is beautiful, it’s hand-carved.”
“We have to disarm this box,” said Zbigniew, becoming more and more agitated.
“There’s no bomb in this box,” I said.
“And how do you know?” he questioned.
“Just let me have a cigar,” said Hamilton. “Never mind the bomb.”
“I will not be responsible for what happens when you open that box,” said Zbigniew.
“Okay,” said Hamilton. “I will.” Then he jokingly backed away from it. “You open it,” he said to me.
I looked at both of them. Zbigniew was, by now, up against the wall and Hamilton was having a sadistic good time.
I unwrapped the ribbon from the box and went to open it. I lifted the top tentatively about one inch. Nothing happened. My confidence increasing, I lifted the top all the way open. Suddenly a sharp, shrill alarm went off. I jumped back from the box and gasped. Could Zbigniew have been right? I looked over at him. He was smiling maliciously. I looked at Hamilton. He was chewing his gum and shrugging. He pointed to a computer-run safety device on the shelf.
“That thing monitors the President’s movements,” he said. “When he leaves the Oval Office, it goes off. That tells us where he is.”
Zbigniew continued to be tight-jawed and paranoid. Hamilton dove into the box of cigars, extracting one, and lit it. It did not blow up in his face, which was duly noted by Brzezinski. Tim Kraft came in.
“Are there Cuban cigars in here?” he asked. I offered him one, saying they were from Castro.
“Great,” he said. “I’ve always had to smuggle mine in from Switzerland.”
While the President’s men smoked their cigars, I pulled out Castro’s present to Brzezinski.
“This is for you,” I said. “He wanted you to have it.”
“What is it?” Zbigniew asked.
“Well,” I said, “maybe you should open it and I’ll tell you what he said.”
There was an outer box housing the inner box for the large peace pipe.
I slid the outer box off and handed it to Brzezinski. He picked it up gingerly. “This would make a good coffin for my daughter’s dog,” he said.
I blanched. What was wrong with this man?
I then handed him the peace pipe, which he extracted and held up.
“Fidel says he wants to smoke the pipe of peace with you,” I said.
Brzezinski turned it over, then threw it down on the table.
“I’ll smoke this thing with him when every last Cuban soldier is out of Angola and not a minute before!”
I looked over at Tim and Hamilton. Cigar smoke curled around their heads. They shrugged.
Brzezinski left his office. Tim and Hamilton wandered away. I stood looking around. Was this the way it was done?
I gazed around at the office of the man who was commissioned with the task of effecting peace in the world.
The shelves were decorated with replicas of nuclear missiles and high-tech rocket launchers. Brzezinski had proudly shown me these toys on a previous occasion as an example of how we would keep the peace for the free world. The free world? Free from what? And free from whom?
Hamilton’s secretary came in and broke my reverie of confusion.
“Mr. Jordan would like to see you in his office,” she said.
“Oh, sure,” I answered.
I walked from Brzezinski’s office, seriously skeptical about the artistic-performer-as-bridge concept, and into Hamilton’s office.
He invited me to sit down in front of his desk. The desk from which momentous advice concerning the entire planet would be given.
“So, did you get to the Riviera nightclub down there?” asked Hamilton.
“Yes. We did. It was great,” I answered. “A little old-fashioned, but great.”
“Pretty showgirls?” Hamilton asked as he winked.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, except they all dressed like Carmen Miranda.”
“Yeah?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“So,” he continued, “are you going to do a TV show from there?”
“I hope so,” I answered. “Fidel said he’d do anything he could to help facilitate it. He’d give us crews and equipment … everything. He wants America to see that Cuba isn’t as bad as the propaganda.”
“Great,” said Hamilton. “I love this idea of your doing a show down there. So would the President. You know what? We’ll get Miss Lillian to do a time step with you on the stage. She loves show business.”
“Do you really mean it?” I asked.
“Why sure,” said Hamilton. “Jimmy would love his mother to do it and you know she would.”
I was elated. Later I ran the idea by Tim Kraft and Brzezinski. They seemed to love it.
I returned to California, talked to the network, who okayed the idea, and sent an advance team to Cuba. They spent a week or so arranging what was necessary for a live broadcast from Havana.
Our creative team set to work doing research so our songs, comedy, and patter would be authentic. We were certain we had the earmarks of a classic musical show broadcast from a communist country ninety miles away.
Then the network called. They had changed their minds. It was too big a risk. I asked what the risk was. They said “the whole thing.” I called the White House and spoke to Hamilton. “What happened?” I asked. “Did you guys express concern?”
“No,” said Hamilton. “You know we loved the idea.”
“Did Brzezinski do something?”
“Who knows with him?” answered Hamilton.
There it was. Passing the buck, going with the philosophy of “when in doubt, don’t.”
So our show never happened. A small failure in the scheme of things, but I felt it could have made a difference. I didn’t know whether the Carter administration had been done in by the network or the network
had been pressured by someone within the administration. Who had time to wade through that morass? I laughed. Yeah, everybody sure loved show business. Too bad the leaders of the free world didn’t take the humanity of the rest of the world as seriously as we in show business did. Maybe we were bridges, but when would the politicians and powers-that-be venture across?
10
“WOMEN’S
PICTURES”
I have been blessed with doing some really good “women’s pictures.” That is to say, films whose subjects and casts appeal to a woman’s point of view. I’m not sure what that definition means, though, because the public is not as compartmentalized in its thinking as we often perceive it to be. If pictures with women are termed women’s pictures, why are pictures with men just pictures?
The term “women’s picture” never really came up in Hollywood until the middle of the seventies, when women were being redefined in our culture as a result of the success of the women’s movement. Until then, pictures about women’s lives starring Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, and Bette Davis were pictures for everybody. Those heroines of yesteryear must have made actresses feel they could play anything. There were love stories, family stories, stories of human values, and stories with socially redeeming messages of hope. The stories usually revolved around the female character because they were about feelings. The women were the leavening influence, the inspiration, the anchor. Or, conversely, they were caught in the conflict of ambition, jealousy, love triangles, bad marriages, backstreet affairs, mother-child troubles, or coping with a crumbling world…. Feelings…. Life.
Nobody is really sure what changed or why. We only know that now the average habitual moviegoer is between eleven and seventeen years old. They prefer action pictures, which are typically inhabited by men. With the advent of high-tech screen techniques, many of these action pictures have developed into showcases for special effects, usually peopled by men who either portray buddies to each other or enact the slave/master role in a story about the triumph of good over evil or vice versa.
When action pictures, science fiction, crime dramas, and stories of sexual perversity prevail, there is not much room for women unless we play dominatrices or outer-planetary dark goddesses. Violent action accelerates and men are required to resolve it.
Why do we need so many pictures like this? Because they reflect what’s happening in our society? The violence and deterioration of values? Of course, but there’s more. I call it millennium consciousness. The human race recognizes that the end of a millennium is, about to occur and this causes profound anxiety. We feel we can’t keep up with the changes—they’re all happening too fast. This causes deterioration, until finally we sense, on a visceral level, that we must reach inside ourselves and find some centeredness and peace in order to express what has been suppressed and get on with the badly needed transformation of our consciousness.
In many ways our modern culture has inflicted a kind of velvet control over our inherited, unresolved conflicts. We live with an overlay of civility, but often it’s only that—a surface. The violence, sexual perversity, racial hostility, anger at poverty, and revolt to experience human freedom are real. On some level we human beings intuit that we still function as if we lived in a jungle. We need to confront our unconscious jungle brains, and understand how they make us behave, before we can begin to feel the new energy of the millennium shift, the jump to a higher spiritual consciousness, and resonate to it.
Movies and television can help us do that, but instead they mainly reflect the violence and confusion that is occurring. Our industry is not living up to its responsibility to inspire and nurture the best in ourselves and our audiences. Art has a way of tapping into the subconscious of human life, which lately we’ve not felt we had the right to look at. Somehow in the last ten years, looking and feeling deeply has been considered self-indulgent, embarrassing. Films can help relieve this embarrassment. The films of the forties and fifties did just that. They were more conversant with human emotion and, because of that, starred more women—Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, Rita Hay worth, Loretta Young, Joan Fontaine, Olivia de Havilland, and so many others. In the sixties carne the Vietnam War and with it the violence we witnessed every night on the seven o’clock news.
The more we observed the violence—bodies floating down the Mekong River, children burning with napalm—the more distanced we became from our own feelings. The more distanced we became, the less we found the examination of feeling even palatable. Add to that the technological advancements in communication, and there simply wasn’t enough time to keep abreast of it all. We became inundated with events and happenings outside of our own lives, which left precious little time to absorb and process what occurred inside our lives. The faster information traveled the less communication there was between human beings.
Slowly but surely, we have abdicated the recognition of our own deep feelings and, more precisely, the spiritual feminine in ourselves. Its presence on the screen, unless it is etched with comic relief or car chases, is usually unacceptable, it makes us squirm and wriggle. We are afraid of over sentimentality, of seeming unintel-lectual. Yet we know that the feminine side of ourselves is nurturing, we know our feminine side is intuitive. We know our feminine side is mostly, and at its best, patient and nonjudgmental. And our feminine side recognizes that we cannot go on as we are and expect to have a loving and peaceful world. Still, our feminine aspects are not considered commercial. They are not considered politically viable. They are not considered qualities of leadership.
We are afraid that these qualities will not excite audiences, will not elicit cheers and spark competitive rooting. We are afraid and embarrassed because the feminine is more internal, more attuned to a silent knowingness, more connected to the deep core of why we’re here and where we’re going. We feel, but we are unacquainted with our intuition. We don’t acknowledge the quiet recognition of the God spark within us.
All of the above, in my opinion, is why writers, producers, and studio heads are confused and bereft of ideas where the feminine is concerned. They are afraid to empathize with what feminine feels like. Yet pictures like Terms of Endearment, Driving Miss Daisy, Fried Green Tomatoes, Steel Magnolias, The Piano and Little Women are successful enough to warrant the production of more like them. So why more movies with women are not produced is a question no one seems able to answer, unless of course it is because female profitability is unacceptable. Women in equal economic control would expose everyone’s emotional attitudes about women, including those of the female executives who currently make decisions on a playing field controlled by men and according to the cultural dictates of the moment. If more “women’s pictures” were made and successful, the field on which Hollywood plays its game would change completely. No longer would women be relegated to decorative cages to be toyed and played with according to the whims of men. And more important than anything, if more women were in economic control, the men would have to face their fear and anxiety at being subservient to the female authority figure again. In other words, it would be a “mama” problem all over again.
The women’s movement has tended to amplify this problem, which before was subtly swept under the rug. But the battle between the sexes is exposed full-blown now, and the men and women who commit money to develop projects would rather avoid the “mama” subject than stigmatize themselves by revealing their ignorance of their feelings about their own mothers. In fact, they use politically correct attitudes to obfuscate their deeper conflicts with mama.
Therefore, we have, it seems to me, a crisis of feminine, mother-earth spirituality versus masculine commerciality in both men and women. Or more to the point, humanity versus money.
We seem to be shirking the recognition of the missing feminine, mothering parts of ourselves, in favor of focusing on what will keep us afloat in a world of masculine intellectual materialism. But it doesn’t keep us afloat. We are drowning and we know it. Instead of fighting to keep from drownin
g, we could surrender to the flow of the water and float. But this “law of reversed effort” is suspect, it does not command respect. It is considered weak and untenable, flimsy and emotional. More than anything, it is considered to have no strength, no stamina, no bite, no power. It is a vegetarian concept in a flesh-eating environment.
The notion of “let go and let God” is a spiritual, feminine, mothering fantasy that engenders nervous laughter and rolling eyes. It is too allowing.
Yet whenever a man has taken his masculine endeavors to the max, he returns to the serenity and peace of his female counterpart for sustenance, love, hope, and nurturing. He knows in his heart that the world out there is unbalanced and he knows why. The first person he knew and depended upon was his mother. She was allowing. The last person will be the female in his life, because she is allowing. He will want her as he goes to meet his maker. That is one of the few times he really recognizes her and, in so doing, realizes how he has denied the female in himself. Why does it take death to come to terms with such a spiritual truth?
Human beings have always had a general belief in the doctrine of the wholeness of the world, a spiritual belief that we have an ethical purpose for being alive. The purpose supposes a recognition of God within and without us. We live on Mother Earth and reflect Father Sky. The duality makes the power of One. It has always been considered a holy teaching, a philosophical tradition taught to young people as a preparation for their future life—the equal recognition of the masculine and feminine. This has been so in primitive tribes as well as in highly developed civilizations.
In our present civilization, this spiritual background has gone astray. Our Christian doctrine has lost its way. It is religious, but it is no longer spiritual. We have lost our balance because of it. We are drifting without orientation. Our lives are losing meaning because we ignore and negate the spiritual meaning.
In a world that believes we all swim in shark-infested waters, are there no alternatives to masculine solutions?
My Lucky Stars Page 22