I kept rewriting as Mr. Altman and his crew moved into the St. Paul Hotel in June, and truckloads of camera and lighting gear got unloaded in the alley behind the Fitz. I wrote a wheelchair version of the script after Meryl Streep had knee surgery and then she called to say she was ready to dance, so I rewrote the rewrite to un-handicap her, and then Mr. Altman saw Mickey’s, a classic railcar diner around the corner and wanted to shoot a noirish scene there, so I wrote two, one for the open and one for an epilogue, and meanwhile the crew was laying down tracks for the dolly cameras and getting ready to start shooting. Mr. Altman did not flinch when I told him that I still had revisions in mind. He was an improviser himself. He kept encouraging his actors to toss in bits of business. John C. Reilly improvised a cowboy fart, and Altman approved with enthusiasm.
I met Meryl and Lily at the Fitz the Sunday night before shooting started. They had been rehearsing songs, and they wanted me to hear them. Meryl wore a red skirt and poofy white blouse, and Lily was in jeans and denim jacket. They claimed to be nervous and flounced around and got all girlish and then launched in. Meryl sang lead, Lily alto, and the harmonies were perfect, sweet and sisterly, pitch perfect. It made me want to rewrite the whole script and make it about them and send everyone else home.
Altman and I went to lunch and I got him to talk about World War II, which Kathryn said he never did. I asked him if it was true, as I’d read, that he lied about his age to enlist and he said it was. “A lot of young men did,” he said. “It was a very different time. We believed in good and evil.” He got into the Army Air Forces and became a very young bomber pilot, flying B-17s against Japanese installations in the South Pacific. It was a roaring loud plane, freezing cold at high altitudes, no fun to fly, but he survived, and it occurred to me that maybe that was what made him a fearless independent. When you’ve wrestled with the controls of a roaring machine, freezing your ass off, as people below are shooting at you, why would you worry about last-minute rewrites and improvisation?
I reported for work in the morning. A trailer for makeup was parked on Exchange Street, and a commissary wagon where you could order an omelet and pour yourself a cup of coffee. And there, eating breakfast, were a dozen old pals from the early days who’d been signed up as extras, the Powdermilk Biscuit Band, the Brandy Snifters, Peter Ostroushko, Butch Thompson, about to make their Hollywood debuts. I walked into the theater and the lobby was a warehouse of lighting gear and props. Young production assistants were buzzing around, and one of them handed me three pages of script, the day’s shoot, and there was my name. As an actor. I got to sing a duet with Meryl, which I saw later on video playback—she is luminous, startling, gives off waves of feeling, and I look like the liability guy from State Farm. I did a scene with Lindsay in which she walked over, her eyes brimming with tears, and accused me of being a heartless jerk. I had written her lines but nonetheless she made them sting. We did the scene six times, and each time her eyes brimmed and the lines stung.
I did a scene with Virginia Madsen in which I chewed an apple. Kevin Kline said my chewing was evocative. And almost every day, I reported to the theater with rewritten scenes in hand. “Are those for today?” a producer said, turning pale. “The actors already memorized the pages from yesterday.” “Bob said it’d be okay,” I said, which was a lie, but the changes got put in. In between scenes, Kevin sat and played the piano, so I wrote him a scene in which Guy Noir sits and noodles and sings a few lines from Robert Herrick, with a bust of F. Scott Fitzgerald on the piano. Why not? I wasn’t going to make a career of this, so I might as well have a good time.
One day Lindsay handed me the shooting script for the next day and said, “You aren’t going to make me say all that, are you?” She was right: I’d stuck her with a whole page of exposition, a big doughy lump of speech. So I rewrote it into a scene. They shot it. It went well. It was interesting to see that Miss Lohan, a hot item in gossip columns at the time, was so intelligent about her line of work. She knew crappy writing when she saw it and she said so.
Altman loved his work, loved being on the set in the hubbub with the crew, the extras, the people with headsets and clipboards—he’d yell, “What am I waiting for? Let’s boogie!” He could bark at cameramen and producers, but he was tender with the talent. He studied Meryl and Lily on the set, sitting before a long mirror, Lindsay reclining on a couch—Meryl and Lily are the Johnson sisters, reminiscing about their glory days on the road, and Lindsay is Meryl’s daughter, writing a poem about suicide—a gorgeous dressing-room set, all lamps and mirrors, festooned with photos and souvenirs, bejeweled gewgaws, jars of cosmetics, posters, showbiz memorabilia, which the designer Dina Goldman created in a bare basement. Altman sat in his high canvas chair in the shadows, having instructed his son Bobby on the timing of the dolly shot, and he says, “Let’s do one.” A distant warning buzzer. Vebe Borge, the assistant director, calls out, “Quiet on the set.” Mr. Altman leans in and peers at his monitor, and here we go again. The scene ends, and he says, “That was beautiful. Let’s do it again.” It was a good scene. I wanted to redo the whole story, make it a three-character dressing-room movie, no radio show, but the shoot was in its fifth week. Dang it. On the last night, after Meryl did her last shot and was officially released—at 2 a.m., standing in the intersection of 7th and St. Peter in downtown St. Paul—she hugged everybody and grinned and said, “Don’t have any fun without me.” A true benediction. A bunch of us stood around that night watching Altman shoot his last scene, at Mickey’s Diner, its interior like the Hopper painting Nighthawks, two patrons at the counter, a counterman in white, and then Kevin Kline as Guy Noir emerging, lighting a smoke, and crossing the rain-soaked street. There were six takes. Altman conferred with him after each take, discussing the angle of the scratch of the match alongside the door, the gesture of lighting, the exhalation, the path across the street. Both of them seemed completely absorbed in this simple wordless action.
And that was the end of it. Bob edited the movie that fall, and it opened at the Fitzgerald the following May. Meanwhile he had directed an Arthur Miller play and started production on a new movie. He died in action in November before shooting could start. A great man, and his last scene was the one he shot in St. Paul, about 5 a.m. He wanted to keep going, but the sun was coming up and you can’t stop the sun. I went to his memorial service in LA and heard a number of standard eulogies (How This Great Man Enabled Me to Become the Artist I Am) and instead of that, I told about his war service, the teenager at the controls of a monster plane, freezing cold, anti-aircraft fire coming his way, on a bombing run in the South Pacific. It’s good to have fresh material. People listened.
I truly wish I thought it was a good movie, but I don’t. Some critics liked it, and I was thrilled unreasonably when Rolling Stone liked it. It’s their obligation, in behalf of their Midwestern readership, to kick me in the shins.
Prairie goes down so easy that you probably won’t notice at first how artfully it’s done. . . . I don’t know how this movie works, only that it does. For those, me included, who used to think of Keillor’s radio program as tepid, self-indulgent, repetitive and flat, you might even call it a revelation. Take a swig of this moonshine. There’s magic in it.
I didn’t mind the “tepid, self-indulgent, repetitive and flat” at all—I’d thought the same myself often enough—and I wish I agreed with the word “artfully” but don’t. I saw the final cut twice, and that was more than enough: I could feel all the last-minute rewrites, the jumpy edits, the lines that made my head hurt. It made me admire J. D. Salinger for refusing to let anyone make a movie of Catcher in the Rye or Franny & Zooey. Salinger loved movies, and he also felt that some things belong on the printed page and nowhere else. It was fun working with Altman. I wish I’d given him something better.
A couple years later, I was having lunch at the Cafe Luxembourg in New York and Meryl Streep walked over and kissed me on the cheek.
Jenny Lind Nilsson and GK at the movies, New York, 200
6.
Miss Streep is a radiant being who emits light, and all eyes are on her most of the time. She said, “I love long slow elegiac movies in which not much happens, and you wrote a good one,” and planted two smackers on me. The café was full of show people and their agents and attorneys, and all of them saw it and I was momentarily very, very famous even if some people couldn’t remember my name.
30
Ingenuity! Art! Good Luck! Goodbye!
I FOUND MY WAY TO the Episcopal church after I married Jenny at St. Michael’s and went to 10 a.m. Sunday Mass when I was in New York and knelt in the cramped pew, sometimes thought of the tall girl in the VW, sometimes thought of my old college classmate Denis Wad-ley, a staunch liberal and devout Catholic. I had some anti-Catholic prejudices from reading about thin-lipped celibate priests denying birth control to impoverished Irish families, but he and I became friends. He earned a doctorate from Oxford and taught high school English in Minneapolis, and he died of cancer in his mid-fifties. He wrote about his approaching death, saying that Christians “have the presence of mind to consecrate inevitable suffering as part of the mystery of the cross, and by allowing that to remain a mystery, everything else is clarified. Dismiss it, and everything becomes mysterious, because nothing is fully answered. The church provides structure in the form of sacraments and defense of this revelation; and no one is more free and content than one committed to an outlook that holds that, contrary to all appearances, the spirit is the substance and the material is transitory.”
The cradle Episcopalians go down on one knee and genuflect shoulder to shoulder, spectacles to testicles, but I grew up evangelical and we don’t do ballet. Still, it’s good to be here, removed from the weight of ambition, the dread of old age, at peace with my life and grateful to God for His steadfast love. We rise and sing praise to the Creator, we hear from Isaiah and David and St. Paul and we sing Blest be the tie that binds as the priest and a deacon and the acolytes process down the aisle, the teenagers so tall and solemn as they hold the candles high, I am moved by the solemnity of teenagers, and we hear the Word of Our Lord. The homily loses me, too literary, so I write a limerick in the bulletin instead.
The book that we call Revelations
Is full of tremendous sensations
Of fear and trembling
And legions assembling
And the devastation of nations.
It was written by John
In a hot marathon,
Who was on some strong medications.
We stand to recite the Creed and kneel to say the prayers together and I think prayerfully of friends and family, my elderly classmates passing from the world, and I give thanks for eagerness and avidity in my old age and for my lively wife who is sleeping late this morning, and then it’s time to shake hands with all in my vicinity and declare the peace of the Lord, and then the offering. I go forward for Communion as we sing I will raise them up on the last day and I can’t sing, I’m crying. I grew up among Tightly Closed Brethren and now in my old age I am accepted at the Lord’s Table at last and this moves me. I listen to the benediction and the rackety postlude and then the priest in the back of the sanctuary calls out the charge to go forth and do that which we’ve been put here to do. I was put here to write. And I head home to do that.
It felt more urgent, what with my seventieth birthday ahead. I thought about the boy whose mother towed him up to me in the Minneapolis airport where I was waiting to board a plane to Seattle. I was waiting at the end of the line so my fellow Minnesotans wouldn’t see that I was sitting in first class. The boy’s name was Jared, he was eleven. His mother said, “He loves your poetry. He’s memorized a lot of them.” When she said “poetry,” I thought she meant sonnets, but no—she poked him and Jared said in a bright clear voice:
A young fellow from Pocatello
Said, “Why is my urine bright yellow?
Was it something I ate
Or maybe it’s Kate
Who I dated on Saturday—hello!”
And he knew:
A young Baptist lady of Aspen
Fell down groanin’ and gaspin’.
She thought she’d been bit
By a snake on her tit
But it was her Sunday School class pin.
And:
The young fellow answered an ad
And was hired and cried, “I’m so glad
To be given this chance
I could pee in my pants”
And we looked and saw that he had.
An alarming moment. Suddenly, waiting to board a plane, you’ve been informed what your legacy will be. You were hoping for better, but the Jared generation will decide. You will have no say in the matter. You hoped to be a journalist and actually you are a urinologist.
My aunts and uncles were gone, my friends were dying. Tony Judge and I went to see Studs Terkel in Chicago in 2008 as he was dying, and he wasn’t eager for visitors but he was defenseless, 96, sunk in a deep chair, his walker nearby, a bottle of J&B within reach, smoking a cigar and nibbling blueberries, newspapers strewn on the floor. Born 1912, shortly after the Titanic sank. Studs used to say, “The Titanic went down and I came up.” But now he said, “Ninety-six is enough. I’ve had my share. I’d like to check out. Let me tell you, kid, ninety-six is no picnic.”
I studied Studs because I’m thinking about hitting 96 myself and not stop along the way. It appeared that cigars and Scotch might be critical to success. His legs were gone, his bowels didn’t work right, his old friends were in the ground, but he was still lively and he did most of the talking because he was nearly deaf. He recalled the days of con men like Kid Pharaoh and Titanic Thompson who in 1928 lifted a half-million bucks off the gambler Arnold Rothstein in a rigged card game at the Park Central Hotel, back when Capone and Bugs Moran ran the town and if you handed a cop a ten he wouldn’t bother you. Back when Smith & Wesson was standard apparel. A poke in the snoot was the modus operandi. The old man loved to say “modus operandi.” “Titanic Thompson was the leading card mechanic of his day,” the old man said. “He knew how to shuffle a deck and change the weave.” Rothstein was the guy who put the “organized” in organized crime and fixed the 1919 World Series. He was no novice. He realized he’d been snookered and refused to pay up, which was not sporting of him, so they shot him, and on his death bed he refused to rat on the killer. He told the cops, “My Mudder did it.” Meeting the old man, I was shaking the hand that shook hands with the man who knew the man who beat Arnold Rothstein at cards. There is grandeur to that.
Studs was dying and he was worried about his hero Barack Obama. The election was approaching. Was America capable of electing a Black president? He doubted it. I told him Obama was a cinch, but Studs was wary of cinches. He got his education in the lobby of his mother’s hotel where he listened to the unemployed railroad men and alcoholic typesetters and old Wobblies argue about capitalism after the Depression crashed down. He got a law degree, became a radio actor, and in 1948 went into TV, then in its infancy. He was the host of Studs’ Place on NBC and was headed for New York and maybe stardom when an American Legion guy named Ed Clamage accused him of being a commie. He’d signed petitions against lynching, poll taxes, Jim Crow, and Studs was asked to sign a loyalty oath and on principle he declined and New York canceled him, and so, in his mid-thirties he was saved from premature success and found his long happy career as a populist historian (Working, The Good War, Hard Times) and radio talker on WFMT. As with me, failure had served to close the door to rooms he shouldn’t have gone in anyway. Now death was closing in, he was puffing on his Roi-Tan, worrying about the election. But he declined sympathy. He had canned beef and biscuits in the cupboard and some bottles of 1938 Margaux plus a case of Scotch and a hundred-year-old cognac. He totters to the door and bids farewell to the search party and gives his benediction:
Every night when the sun goes down
I say a blessing on this town:
“Whether we last the night or no,
>
Life has always been touch and go.
So stick with your modus operandi.
Ingenuity! Art! Good luck. Goodbye.”
We did the Rhubarb Tour in August 2008, seventeen shows in twenty days. Studs wanted to live long enough to see Obama win, but he didn’t want to see him defeated. He died on Halloween, five days before Election Day. He was born as the Titanic went down and he went out as Obama was coming in. He died hoping, which was a good way to go. Had he lived five more days, Obama’s election would’ve made Studs feel obligated to stick around and postpone the dying, and Obama in the White House would’ve made Studs question his own agnosticism and perhaps come to the Lord and at his age it would’ve been too much, having to learn Scripture and all. God in His mercy allowed him to die in unbelief. His ashes were mixed with those of his wife, Ida, and deposited in Bughouse Square, where the cranks and Wobblies and soapbox preachers held forth back in his youth. Peace to them all.
It was a beautiful Election Night the vast crowd waiting in Grant Park in Chicago, and the young couple walking out on the big stage with the two little girls holding hands alongside. Your heart went out to them, the two young strivers from the South Side who took the high road and somehow knew exactly what to do in every situation. In February, I went to Washington and spoke at the annual luncheon of the US Senate wives and there, sitting at my table, was the wife of the former junior senator from Illinois, Michelle Obama, now the First Lady. I’d been asked to tell stories about Lake Wobegon, and it was hard to make the leap from the Little Town That Time Forgot to the astonishing historic event before our eyes but I tried. I told about Miss LaVona Person standing in the aisle smiling as the fourteen-year-old me climbed up on the stage and said that we each have an angel smiling at us from our past. I recited the unrhyming limerick and they laughed. I remember how gracefully Mrs. Obama endured everyone’s awkwardness, I remember her warmth when she put an arm around me for a picture. She asked me for a limerick, and I wrote her one on a napkin:
That Time of Year Page 32