Forward to Glory

by Brian Paul Bach

  ‘I met him once!’ – Oprah

  ‘I wish, he were mine.’ – Virginia Madsen

  ‘He’s mine first.’ – Lucy Liu

  ‘I wish to act with him, and I tell you, I will.’ – Katherine Hepburn

  ‘The kid’s got it all!’ – Milton Berle

  ‘Not since Brando. I can say no more.’ – Howard Hawks

  ‘Not only ‘not since Brando’, not since anybody.’ – John Ford, who had the last word.

  (And how often did Pappy Ford ever speak up like that?)

  Analysis was proceeding. They coined a label for his style, because they had to come up with something abstract. So they came up with something inadequate, but usable: Incandescence. Sometimes interwoven with: Transcendent.

  The ÆYRIE

  Late in the day.

  When he desired solitude, Butterbugs left the generosity of Vinejuice for the Case Study House austerity of his new ‘escape’ pad, The Æyrie, on up Meltone Canyon and along the top of the ridge a ways. Big views and intimate thoughts. The Modernism here was neutral, and very handy for thinking spells that were more open to the sky.

  Aside from script perusal, the star’s Industry ‘studies’ continued apace. Much of his reading included ‘Variety’, of course, particularly its backlog of past issues, set up on microfilm in a spare room, its walls painted matte black.

  The show biz chronicle’s coverage of the early ’70s fascinated him. A roller-coaster of exciting cinema every week. He even took an interest in the ‘Auditoriums’ page. And the seminal book, ‘Show Biz – From Vaude To Video’ by Green & Laurie was galvanizing. Never thought he’d be lucky enough to work with so many legends.

  For he was now part of the Legend itself.

  Yet, aside from these purposeful fascinations, his mind was in ‘inspection’ mode.

  What was up, anyway?

  He was, in fact, facing a kind of monolith. A barrier of perception. Apparently, there was some silly necessity to admit that things weren’t at all how he thought they would be.

  Should be.

  Especially at this stage of achievement.

  Certainly, he was an em-blessed individual, an en-loved one, someone who was privileged to partake of all the excitement and goodness that life has to offer. Why was it that there was no ‘trademark’ from which to gain strength right now? No ‘name brand’ that promised to provide comfort in light of all the express-style stress that was visited upon him at this bare hour?

  An hour of the lamp – when nothing else is illuminated but said illuminator, and the soul is in need of noontide. Like weathered pine cones in a barren high-country landscape, a certain sense of poeticism exists for anyone who might observe them. But what if no one ever does? Such objects remain in obscurity due to their lack of, shall it be said, sexiness. Thus, any potential attention flits elsewhere, to bleaker, emptier, but more fashionable hitching posts.

  Was he just an obscure object in the outlands?

  Why did he not rely on the essential inspirations that sustained him during the wilderness sequence in the Funeral Mountains, that preceded his appearance in this town? If Shakespeare, Terence, and Muhkoobah were not now consultative, why then should they save him from the New Blandness that threatened?

  The New Blandness!

  So that’s what was up.

  What did it promise? Some sort of dreariness, he supposed. Would it really enter his life, perchance to dominate? What if it stayed? Surely it would perpetuate itself. More of the same. And then, the same, only more of it. One generic triumph after another. A sense of comfortable conformity in consumer tactics. A strategy of creative laziness then, when all is presented without the word ‘effort’ being applied to any sensible enacting. Just going through the motions. One after the other.

  He always used to be comforted by such sounds as the creaking of a mizzenmast, be it the canvas backing of a poolside or director’s chair, or the rigging on a sailboat on set, by which he knew that a safety net of sorts existed that would usher him towards reliable pleasure after the day’s shooting underneath. No creakings just now.

  The meditations of an actor in internal struggle, perhaps? Why would any such struggle have to occur anyway, especially now? What was the excuse?

  These sensations and ideas gathered in front of him now, cluttering the display case of his conscience. If his public could see such trinkets, what would they think? Intrigue? Repulsion? Disinterest?… Apathy? Not to worry, his privacy was intact, and that gave him some relief. Still, he felt rather like a used cartridge of some unspecified substance right now.

  The hidden conflict of a star who is outwardly limited only by the sky?

  He cracked a mild alcoholic beverage and shuffled out onto The Plain, the parallel that served as a back yard, sans railings. A neutral stab between floor-to-ceiling windows and the æther above the city.

  LA in the hours before sunset really was something that seduced the soul into thinking that vintage moments, and the rightness of them, would last, if not forever, then at least for some decently-proportioned duration. That way they could be properly observed, assessed, digested, and utilized for the good of the self – if not humanity.

  The same antique Golden Hour tones had been cast upon the last sequence of Ronald Wilson Reagan’s passage to entombment, the same nostalgic filter that cast itself on the wider tableau of mourning, worthy, almost, of a Flaxman relief, carved in Wild Turkey-tinted stone. It was a light that could even forgive Nancy’s 1980s goggle glasses, rendering all players with a kind of neoclassical elegance. Yet, when the western light faded, all sentiments came to rest in the finality of a configurement more related to Forest Lawn’s laws, though on a slightly higher plane.

  New Blandness at work, infecting the brain?

  The troubled ramblings of an artist heading for a crack-up?

  Why? Why now? Wasn’t horseradish supposed to be the multipurpose prophylactic to any such conflict? Of the body and its chemistry, yes, but this, this was an intellectual matter, a sort of crossroads, in which the artiste addresses subjects relating to craft and skill. Safer than some chemical imbalance, it nevertheless creates pitfalls of unknown placement and depth.

  Why would some notion like blandness, new or otherwise, even be worth considering? Unless of course, insecurity was behind all this.

  Except now, Butterbugs, without benefit of heritage by way of sampling any substances that might make him stoned, and without a criterion by which to judge such moments, instead gazed at the haze that surely washed the Pacific, far past the manmade matrix. He felt very little, except that something had seeped from him. Escaped from him. He wasn’t sure if the acknowledgement of such was worthwhile, or simply distracting.

  The course of one looking for distractions at all cost?

  LA before sunset! Seen from the Heights! The boulevard grid, the unremarkable filler, the humanity he knew must exist down there, despite the mechanical animation of waxing lights and their movement, the very honor system feel of it – everything seemed to go along as usual. For all he knew, the whole shootin’ match might only be a special effect. Just an upgraded, computerized LA version of the GM Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair. Little cars in slots, perfectly spaced, jittering along without pilots, but controlled by some transformer, out of sight. Heaven knew, there was a significant percentage of GM products making right angles 24/7 over the entire spread. But from this masterful vista, all appeared without organic life. Mechanical movements persisted in the layers of atmospheric perspective, and that was enough to believe that everything was under control.

  The growing sense of directionlessness?

  In a way, it was a pity that he had not, moments before, sucked in the smoke of some homegrown doobie from the sunlit memory patches of rural innocence, rolled up into a mind-altering experience so mild and benevolent that he could not help but to recognize its balmy effect on his overheated brain. It could have kindled up a memory waltz that would have justified, if no
t downright explained, the reasonableness of his current malaise, and thus, the possibility of its inherent and upright resolve.

  Trouble afoot?

  Indeed, Butterbugs did not know that he would shortly be cured of this funk, possibly for all time. There was no backlog of retained perception, no library of reference points regarding a cosmological or epistemological overview on these bland, bleak, disparate matters to draw upon; matters pertaining to his technique as a performing artiste, and all.

  What, an avoidance of intellectualizing? No, no, no.

  What Butterbugs was doing, doing with his performance and his talent, was as if it was being produced under the supervision of an extremely high-level processing of intellect, in order to display what could only be called ingenious dramatic acting.

  As it was, simple truth prevailed. There was only his genius: pure, unadulterated, impossibly original. His extraordinary talent as a strolling player was the dynamic embryo that did not have to expand upon itself in order to remain powerful. Indeed, his genius retained its subtlety so that the ego could not actually detect it. Therefore, any mutation into a force for self-destruction was an out-and-out impossibility. Quite frankly, he completely lacked that very threat, so endemic in superstar souls. His was a sort of innocence that provided for a guile-free persona. That embryo, now growing, developing, creating, did not possess deleterious genes. There was a protective cyst around it, a draped membrane, with valves that only allowed for inspirational secretions to exit its sphere. The osmosis was one-way, all the time.

  Love, of course, did not apply in this arrangement. This was the system – intrinsic, visceral, automatic – of talent and performance of an actor, not the emotions of a lover-boy.

  It – pure genius itself – was self-renewing and did not require nourishment. His was naturally superstructural. It was evinced by the steady passage of its product to the greater body and mind that carried it and enacted its principles. If, then, his craft, talent and expertise were all biologically explainable (in ways that did not resemble any scientific method), then both the action and reaction that Butterbugs endeavored to portray on the screen were, now that they had been enabled, released, and supported, entirely native.

  It was not without accident or a resorting to trivialization that many thinkers in this world accurately called Butterbugs some kind of phenomenon akin to a force – or even a law – of nature.

  (It was testimony to the intellectual poverty of the times that no better turn of phrase could be utilized – yet.)

  ‘Nature’ was nevertheless an accommodating term, so protean was his art, yet so accessible.

  That may have been what others thought, but what about the thespian himself?

  A return to harmful introspection?

  Yet, within the levels of his mind that linked with emotions of personal standing and interrelations with the rest of the known universe, like Diana Barrymore and Montgomery Clift experienced before him, the germ of greatness was not necessarily enough to sustain one through the veering flaws that threaten a creaking rigging.

  A return to doubt?

  For good reason, his Hugo Gliggle products brought him sensible comfort, and the Sveere brand opticals by which he scanned the horizon in search of the scarcely perceived line of the Pacific duly empowered him. But he knew now, if all those brand name reliables didn’t provide any philosophical substratum by which to approach his portrayal of Wilhelm Furtwängler onscreen, what, then, would it take to realize the symphonic conductor’s dramatic soul?

  A return to failure?

  As the sun now chose a high-quality spectral array, first by spreading a maritime selection of azures and Caribbean blues that colored his ‘flatscreen’ wallow pool way out on the cantilevered terrace, and next, by projecting the most sensual and flattering tones by which to end an LA day, Butterbugs found the perfect environment for his ponderment.

  Nude amidst the beauty of his ultra-privacy, he was nevertheless so distracted by the premise of his funk, that when he attempted to fiddle with his private parts in the absence of any other agent (Justy and Saskia were shopping and loving in Budapest), the creeping disinterest in that primitive impulse steered him, for some reason, to a tucked-away built-in convenience-packed bookshelf of vital volumes, the commonality of which was their obscurity of imprint. Like a Digambara Jain, he zeroed in on what he knew were dependable homing points for wisdom: bound spines of books. What did he settle on? No scriptures, verses, or texts, only Victor Hugo’s ‘Toilers of the Sea’ – deluxe edition, five plates.

  In fuchsia-tinted light, horizontally projected, he scanned the major chapters and computed their value.

  Gilliatt the Cunning stood out as someone he knew. Someone he could understand. A man whose inborn resources conquered the massed flanks of nature and humankind, whose struggle proved a certain invincibility, with only a current lack of intimate communication as his weak point.

  ‘After I play the great conductor Furtwängler,’ proclaimed the star, still in private, ‘I shall portray Gilliatt on the screen!’

  A false alarm?

  No intellectual work of any kind was either false or alarming to him, from now on.

  So, he was restored. That’s all it took. His funk was as expired as the sun, now set over Malibu. The afterglow was proof positive that no drugs were necessary in order to educate a person of his sensitivity that Right Action need not be acquired through either Buddhism or a ménage à trois, nor from a selection of consumer items, and the hope placed in powers therein.

  Why was he asking these questions, mulling these problems?

  Because, he was doing just fine. He was just a little concerned about his next role, not of the conductor, or of Hugo’s literary character, but as Lenin in… ‘Lenin’ (UA).

  So, that’s all there was to that.

  MOSCOW

  Some time later.

  Autumn. Late afternoon, clear, with plumes of vapor jetting from buildings far and wide in the frigid weather.

  Yevgeny’s apartment was in a brooding Stalin-era high-rise, a bizarre but heroic building, with vast views of the city, and suite after suite of authoritarian-styled surroundings; this one, filled with his books, carpets, and amped-up effects.

  Architectural details and fixtures of no known pedigree except their own. A melodramatically-decorated urn, visible from out the triple-glazed, geranium-framed windows. Stone stars atop pinnacles. Building-block obelisks and huge fruit-basket finials. Way over across the cityscape, another high-rise. Vampiric, vertical lines, impossibly steep gables, spiky cloud-piercers, gigantic rods to conduct Soviet lightning. Then another – several more really, a host of similarly-shrouded titans on the horizon, ringed around the core, like the old fortress-churches. A dark snowstorm was on its way in. Wonderful portent everywhere.

  Butterbugs was in town for major shooting of the much-anticipated ‘Lenin’, scripted by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, poet. Grigori Kozintsev, Tarkovsky, Bondarchuk, and Eisenstein directed various sequences at hand, forming the cohesive whole that made up this multi-minded super-production.

  Before stumbling (brilliantly and accurately, it might be added) upon the intermarried terms of Incandescence/Transcendence, ‘they’ who sought to analyze tried to pigeonhole Butterbugs’ acting style.

  What was it, exactly?

  ‘Stylized Realism’? ‘Exhortism’? ‘New People-ism’? ‘New Realist?’ ‘Newly Realist?’ ‘Revised Realism’? ‘Rediscovered Realism’?

  What?

  In Russia, they branded him as the embodiment of Socialist Realism – a veritable Stakhanovite of the screen – but Yevtushenko could not accept this. After wrestling with labels like ‘Transcendentalist Realist’ and ‘Transcendent Realism’ he arrived at, and duly accepted, ‘Incandescent’.

  A bright light. But with an added punch other users of the term never thought of: a bright light. From within.

  It was certainly a poetic progression. But it was Butterbugs’ subsequent close relationship with
the poet that convinced the star that his critics might not be too far off the mark in this.

  ‘You cannot yourself identify it,’ said Yevgeny. ‘Nor could you, ever. You are focused on the production of your own creativity, your artistry. It is up to we poets to point out your poeticism, because your style is as nothing we have seen so far in the modern world. You are the Evolver. The Mover-On. One who is advancing from a place we previously thought a terminal point. Reinvention is such an insipid term. What then are we to make of you? If Stanislavsky defined the realism of the 20th century, then you, Butterbugs, have defined it for the Century 21.’

  They both snorted Schtoli.

  ‘Speak, memory. As Nabokov used to tell me.’

  ‘You are right,’ said Butterbugs. ‘I cannot myself put any classification on how I do my strolling craft. From scene to scene, picture-to-picture, I speak. I gesture. I emote. I recite. I also run around in circles and shout. (Maybe I’m too shouty…) But it is certainly intimidating to have one such as you take on the assignment of doing this… this… taxonomy!’

  ‘Well, in Russia we have a saying: ‘Love thy neighbor, but build a fence’. You, Butterbugs, as an actor of world purpose and renown, have shown that we can place our ongoing limitations aside and yes, transcend them through the truly communicative arts of ultra-realism. You have taught millions that they can feel again, without fear, without want, and without the burden of hierarchy. Your work has brought we humans, as a group, together. Indeed, the machinery is in motion: we continue to come closer to each other. And because you emit a certain kind of light when you do what you do – from within – I can only think of… incandescence.’

  Butterbugs did not argue with the poet. Why should he? His modesty was shown simply and without guile. He gazed fulsomely at the elder man and at times bowed his head in respect.

  The sky had taken on an inky quality, though jabbed with a strong yellow/orange sun, striking all of high-rise Moscow from an oblique angle in the west. Such a Great Difference from LA’s version, as seen from The Æyrie.