by Joe Donnelly
On the day before we leave Syracuse, the sun shines. Vince and I go to brunch at one of those old-style inns that are landmarks of the aristocratic village of Skaneateles on Skaneateles Lake, about twenty minutes from Syracuse. The drive takes us past the cemetery where his parents and ancestors are buried.
The inn delivers mediocre food onto white tablecloths with an air of old-world gentility. Vince says little at breakfast. Something’s brewing. Driving back, he suggests we stop and visit the cemetery, and I guess this has been the reason for his silence. The closer we get to the cemetery, the darker the skies grow, the stronger the wind howls. By the time we reach the gates, it is lightening and hailing. It’s as if the gods have been warning us away for days and now are indignant at our persistence. I agree with them. What does any of this matter anymore?
I ask my dad if he thinks it’s a coincidence that golf ball-size hail is bombarding us as we approach his family gravesite. “I doubt it,” he says.
The family plot is on a little knoll. I can barely make it out through the rain-soaked windows. The stones are dark silhouettes lit by lightning, as if from a horror movie. My dad rolls down his window and looks out.
“I told you about my mother wanting the stone with the lamb on it, but she could never afford it. She felt bad about it. I don’t know when I did it—a number of years ago—I got a stone with a lamb on it that said ‘Paul’ and put it in the ground. A flat one with a lamb on it,” Vince says. “As soon as I pull away, we’ll probably be the last family to ever go look in on it.”
I realize he’s right; I will probably never return here. I won’t have to, though, because my dad has taken me all the way in. There is nothing left unsaid or undone between us. No ghosts to haunt my memories. I won’t come back, but I will carry all of this with me wherever I go, even back to bright Los Angeles. It’s part of who I am and who I always have been—my father’s son, and for that I am grateful.
Back in Pittsburgh the news is bad. After reviewing the scans, Dr. Wong confirms the dire forecast of my dad’s oncologist in Vail. “At least we know what we’re up against,” Vince says.
My dad died six months later, surpassing expectations by eight weeks, breaking everyone’s heart in the process. I keep a vial with some of his ashes at home. Now and then I look in the container and think about the mystery of life and how something so complex can come down to something so simple.
Werner Herzog In Los Angeles
Originally published in the Los Angeles Times, April 12, 2017
Author’s note: One of the best things about doing the Christian Bale profile was that it afforded me the opportunity to talk to Werner Herzog. As I recall, even on the phone, he was casually hilarious and incredibly endearing. Nearly a decade later, I got to meet the man in person when, after a long absence from narrative filmmaking, he had two features coming out on the same weekend. The films came and went quickly, but Herzog endures. A man fully alive.
Werner Herzog is at a booth in a Sunset Boulevard restaurant, just down the hill from where he once rescued Joaquin Phoenix.
The rescue happened eleven years ago when the freshly Oscar-nominated Phoenix flipped his car on a winding road in Laurel Canyon. The actor, upside down and out of it, reported hearing a gentle tapping on his window, then a voice with a thick accent telling him to relax.
“That’s Werner Herzog!” the actor said to himself. “There’s something so calming and beautiful about Werner Herzog’s voice,” he told reporters afterward.
What Phoenix didn’t say, but Herzog did in the narration he provided for the 2010 animated short “When Herzog Rescued Pheonix” by Sascha Ciezata (of “When Lynch Met Lucas” fame), is that the upside-down Phoenix was trying to light a cigarette while gasoline dripped into the cabin of his car—a Dodge Challenger, if the short is to be believed. Herzog “confiscated” the lighter, smashed in the back window, dragged Phoenix to safety, and then dashed off, like a Bavarian Batman driving a Volkswagen Beetle, before the sirens drew too close.
One of the short’s more than 205,000 YouTube viewers commented, “God has the same voice as Werner Herzog…it’s weird.” To which another replied, “God’s real name is Werner, but he’s too shy to admit it.”
On this Friday afternoon of light breezes, mild temperatures, and unusual milestones even for a guy with a capacity for milestones, the voice of God is registering slightly apprehensive.
“It’s a little weird,” he says, acknowledging mild anxiety, “because there are two films out on the same day.”
The films—Queen of the Desert, starring Nicole Kidman, and Salt and Fire, starring Michael Shannon, Herzog’s new Klaus Kinski, some might say—are the director’s first narrative offerings in nearly eight years. If you didn’t know any better, you might guess he’d ordered up the combo platter himself to trumpet his return to fiction after his prolific near-decade of making documentaries, including last year’s Into the Inferno and Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World.
“Oh, for God’s sake, no. I wouldn’t have such a crazy idea. I tried to prevent it, but, uh, my influence has been limited,” the director says, dispelling the notion of an intentional Herzog double feature. “It might happen that the films obliterate each other… My output is too large. Too big.”
Though we may think concerns about the commercial fates of his films too petty for visionary iconoclasts such as Herzog, he says he’s not one to make art just for art’s sake: “I make them for audiences, always. Not for my own pleasure.”
Not that there isn’t some fun in coming back with a bang, right? “Yes, I try to see the fun inside of it,” he smiles.
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Herzog is a fit seventy-four, with eyes that actually twinkle and a traditional Bavarian Trachten jacket carefully placed on the chair next to him for a later photo shoot. Searching for the fun inside the mysteries of life, fate, and people’s obsessions would seem to sum up Herzog’s mission, whose arrival as a visionary filmmaker began in 1968 when his first feature film, Signs of Life, won a grand jury prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. That search has led him to death row, under Antarctic ice, into ancient caves, and up to the mouths of active volcanoes—usually with a sense of play about what he’s doing, even in extreme conditions.
The new films are set in deserts on opposite sides of the world, and though Salt and Fire could be taken as a lament, it’s still full of Herzog’s idiosyncratic humor, a characteristic he feels the media often miss.
And if the media don’t always get him, Herzog insists his audiences do. “They always laugh. It’s sometimes a strange, dark unusual sense of humor. It’s not the Eddie Murphy humor; it’s something else.”
Herzog says his humor has been buoyed over the past twenty years by his living in Los Angeles, which he turned to after things didn’t work out with San Francisco. “My wife and I found it not the most exciting place in the United States, and we said we want to move to the city with the most substance, and it was immediately clear that Los Angeles, that’s the place.”
As for “the glitz and glamour of Hollywood,” Herzog says, “that is a very thin crust. Behind it is an enormous intensity of culture and creative energy and things that ultimately decide the big things, the big internal movements of the planet. Things get done here.”
Among those things: “The collective dreams of the world in cinema and acceptance of gays and lesbians as an integral part of a dignified civilization, and many, many other things that are just wonderful. You see the influx of the Mexicans, which I find very invigorating… If you can imagine California or Los Angeles without the Mexican population, it would be the instant end of California.”
To Herzog, someone like Elon Musk epitomizes the spirit of Los Angeles, with his outsize ambitions to day-trip private citizens to the moon and eventually colonize Mars.
And yet Los Angeles, Herzog admits, has also contributed its fair sh
are to the “big cultural stupidities,” such as hippies (“The worldview was just not adequate to the real problems of the time,” he says), children’s yoga, the choco-nut smoothies on the breakfast menu here, and, despite his admiration for Musk, colonizing Mars.
“Mars is an ill-conceived idea. It’s definitely ill-conceived, and it’s not going to happen,” Herzog says. “We should look after the habitability of our planet rather than making an inhospitable planet, Mars, somehow livable.”
Herzog, though, might be willing to join Musk on one of his lunar jaunts—provided certain conditions were met.
“Well, I have said it to him, just to get some spark of a reaction out of him, ‘Yes, of course, I’d like to go—only if I had a camera along. Sure, that would be wonderful,’” he says, grinning. “They always send technicians out into space, and they haven’t sent a poet out there yet.”
The impulse to send civilians into space does strike a chord with Herzog, who thought the idea to give a seat on the space shuttle Challenger’s doomed tenth mission to schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe was inspired. “My breath and my heart stopped for a moment, because all of a sudden there was some new idea…send somebody who would go back to her classroom and have some exciting stories for the kids.”
Back on terra firma, Herzog says he’s always seeing something new and inspiring in Los Angeles. “All the time, all the time,” he says. “There’s never been a dull day here in Los Angeles.”
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Herzog’s first US city, however, was Pittsburgh, when, as a twenty-year-old student from the Bavarian Alps, he studied film at Duquesne University. “I had worked in a steel factory as a welder during high school to earn money for my first films. So I thought, that’s the right men out there for me,” he says. “But [the steel industry] was in decay already. It was in full decay and it was clear it would not recover.”
In Pittsburgh, though, and in traveling throughout the Midwest, Herzog says he saw the best of the country. “I was picked up, literally, from the street by a family who gave me shelter when I dropped out of university… I was homeless, and I had lost the money of the scholarship—and all of the sudden, enormous hospitality. In all the difficulties I had at the time, Americans of the heartland had been the best of the best.”
Herzog isn’t surprised that the issue of Rust Belt decay has finally found its way to the top of the national conversation. “There’s justice in it,” he says, “because for years, I have been complaining to my friends, liberals, Democrats—men and women who have a lot of sense, make good observations, but they came to politics between Seattle and Boston and New York and Los Angeles and would speak about the rest of America as ‘the flyovers.’ And I said, ‘That’s a cynic way to look at the heartland of America.’”
Though Herzog thinks “it’s good that the heartland found its voice,” he knows all too well what can happen when that voice curdles. “In my childhood and in my adolescence, I saw the aftermath of what should have never happened. But let me say something about America. America, no matter what, always has this enormous, mysterious way to rejuvenate itself and pull itself out of crisis, and that is something that always gives me confidence in your country.”
It’s reassuring, perhaps, that Herzog, an artist who has mined as deeply as any the absurdities and pratfalls of our existence, is optimistic about the future.
“I’m not into the mood of Weltschmerz,” he says, using the German word for world-weariness that describes how many are feeling these days. “I’m into the mood of joy of the world, absolute joy and curiosity. I’m full of projects. I’m full of joy and full of things that I see on the horizon.”
Acknowledgments
When I was a kid, the bathroom was sometimes the only place to get a break from a crowded and anxious household. When opportunity struck, I’d hide out there with the newspaper, Time magazine, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, whatever was within arm’s reach, and read with fascination about the types of people I’ve been lucky enough to grow up and write about—artists, athletes, and outsiders.
I’d be ecstatic if this book were to contribute to the tradition of fine bathroom reads and I want to thank Tyson Cornell and Rare Bird Lit for making it possible for the characters gathered here to fit neatly into our sanctuaries with us. And thanks, of course, to the generous subjects of this collection who shared more of their time and spirit with me than they had to.
I want to thank Trish Kiesewetter, Gary Rivlin, Tara Flanagan, Janet Duckworth, Manohla Dargis, Martin J. Smith, Scott Hulet, Gregory Blake Miller, Andrew Blechman, Scott Foundas, and all the great editors I’ve worked with for aiding and abetting my work and life. Thanks, also, to the many friends and family members who have helped me forge a path and leave a bit of a trail. There are too many of you to mention, but you know who you are and I am deeply grateful to you.
I especially want to thank Arty Nelson and Laurie Ochoa. There’s not enough space to do it right, but, Arty, you’ve been a great friend and inspiration for more than forty years, and, Laurie, most of this would not have been possible without you.
Finally, I’m most grateful to my greatest collaborator, Ingrid Allen.