I Married the Icepick Killer: A Poet in Hollywood

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I Married the Icepick Killer

A Poet in Hollywood

Carol Muske-Dukes

IN MEMORY OF DAVID COLEMAN DUKES

Contents

PREFACE

A POET IN HOLLYWOOD, TAKE TWO

I MARRIED THE ICEPICK KILLER: SCENES FROM THE LIFE OF AN ACTOR’S WIFE

POETRY TONIGHT!

DESTINO

THE POET AND THE GOVERNATOR

EXILE

A LOST ELOQUENCE

DEVELOPMENT HELL

SLOUCHING TOWARD A BRIEF LITERARY HISTORY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

IN A HEARTBEAT

LET ME PLAY THE LION TOO: A REMEMBRANCE

FRENZIED NIRVANA: BEHIND THE SCENES OF A POEM

CHEEVER AT SING SING

MS. HAVISHAM RE-INTRODUCES HERSELF—ON FIRE

HISTORY AND THE ’HOOD

VANISHING WOMAN—ANN STANFORD: IN MEMORIAM

U-571: THE SILENT SCREEN

TWO POEMS: EAST AND WEST, RIGHT AND LEFT—POLITICS THROUGH THE EYES OF POETRY

SHAKESPEARE MEETS THE LONG GRAY LINE

CODA

PERMISSIONS CREDITS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

About the Author

I don’t have to live in New York. I could live in hell.

—GRETA GARBO

PREFACE

IT NEVER OCCURRED TO ME, as I was writing these essays, that I was writing, in part, an elegy. Yet now there is the unmistakable shadow of the valedictory drifting over what I’ve written here, though most of the essays were completed before the death of my husband, David Dukes, who suffered a fatal heart attack on October 9, 2000. Yet he is present in so many of these pieces, both as subject and as subtext, his observations (about theater, about life, about art) often underscoring and informing my own.

There is also the shadow of what could be called (speaking somewhat fancifully) a mourning for the once-welcomed presence of art and art’s ideal in ordinary life. And a little nod of regret for our diminished capacity to appreciate the imagination. Here’s to the fiction of the original—immortal, transformed beyond personality and ideology, beyond the twin tediums of the overly literal and the theoretical. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, we once longed to be more than ourselves, more than the endlessly mimetic manufactured selves that popular culture imposes on us. What art recognizes and speaks to, it seems to me, is the stranger in each of us. (After the horrors of September 11, 2001, this seems like fruitful speculation.) I borrow here from the lives of the poets, the actors, the interpreters of culture, the anarchist-Platonists—all estranged in Hollywood. The aspiration of these essays is not so much to investigate the unorthodox as to glance at what we take for granted.

It should be noted that the title essay, I Married the Icepick Killer, was published in The New York Times Magazine in the Lives section in March 2000. A gentle send-up of life with a performer, it elicited responses from a startling number of actors, industry professionals and their spouses—and was later reprinted in Actors’ Equity magazine. It seems relevant here that a short meditation on the nature of life with a familiar stranger registered as strangely familiar to so many in the acting life.

—Carol Muske-Dukes

Los Angeles, 2001

A POET IN HOLLYWOOD, TAKE TWO

NOT LONG AFTER I MOVED to Los Angeles from New York City, I attended a cocktail party with my actor-husband. At the party, which was full of film and TV types, a man asked me what I did for a living. I told him that I was a writer.

Right he said. Half hour or hour?

Neither I said, fixing him with an Oversoul gaze. Lifetime.

He smiled back. Oh, you work for cable, he said.

The anecdote above is (yes indeed!) a punchline about Hollywood which I originally included in a piece about poetry and The Industry (as it’s known)) for the New York Times Book Review—an anecdote which I’ve shamelessly dined out on ever since. But what appears to be yet another cheap shot at Hollywood’s unenlightened insularity, finally remains testimony to the ongoing peculiarity of what it is like to be married to an actor—in a one industry town or in the world at large, where poetry (like the act of writing itself) is generally misunderstood, Hollywoodized, trivialized, dismissed. So, predictably, my cocktail party questioner was bound to typecast my role as writer (I’ll include poet, wordsmith and even the dread literary here) as low-rung word-crank—or provider-of-words-for-actors-to-say—or words for actors to animate and directors to alter. Or, most likely, forgetting-you-as-you-speak-you-little-hack—type thing.)

Before I met him, my late husband, David Coleman Dukes (he never highlighted the Coleman, alas) played a madman, an icepick killer, in a detective thriller film called FIRST DEADLY SIN (based on the novel of the same title) shot in New York City and starring Frank Sinatra (as the detective pursuing David, the killer) with Faye Dunaway as Sinatra’s terminally ill wife. David was starring in Bent on Broadway with Richard Gere at the same time he was shooting this film. Sinatra lent David his driver, Jilly, to ferry him across town to the theater in time for the curtain—at the end of each shooting day. Jilly never failed to deliver David on time for him to quickly re-invent himself in another role (Gere’s gay lover in a Nazi concentration camp) before the cross-town curtain. Sinatra was kind, Sinatra was generous—my late husband was also kind and generous. But, in the film, which I did not see until after we married—my kind and gentle husband was creepily sinister in his role as Icepick Killer—and Sinatra was a devoted family man as well as a dogged sleuth, a model of rectitude.

The deep strangeness of the transformative process of the actor as he or she becomes someone else still confounds me. Actors use their bodies, their physicality, their voices (and all of their consciousness) to turn into that Other—they go beyond dissembling, they cannibalize themselves in order to grow other selves into life. What’s particularly eerie is that actors draw on their real life and their own bodies as instrument—which means voice range, movement, facial and body expression, whole-being expressiveness. Actors (ok, like writers!) spy on other people, even as they spy on themselves. Often physical manifestations of character onstage or onscreen are scarily similar to those of the familiar person one sits across from at the breakfast table—or sleeps next to in bed. The way he laughs at his own jokes, the way he gestures with a piece of buttered toast, the way he answers the phone, blows a kiss goodbye. (More alarming: words or gestures associated with sexual intimacy that show up onscreen!) But then, there are the wildly unfamiliar embodiments too. As in: how did my spouse of several years end up turning into such a completely convincing serial murderer?

The imagination doubles in creating real character. If actors rely on canny physical invention and appropriation—they first must rely on the script, the words they must coerce literally into life. We celebrate actors as if, by playing a role, they aren’t playing a role at all—they just happen to speak spontaneously with dramatic resonance (audience members constantly confuse the actor with the character, to further this illusion.) Actors say the words we wish we all could spontaneously come up with—fast put-downs of bullies, heroic dying speeches. Of course, true spontaneity is what good actors rehearse tirelessly to convey. And what they are conveying is what the writer already invented and rehearsed: the boring writer gets there first. The writer, the lowly workmanlike writer, in a far more just world, could be considered the whole show: actor, director, editor—all rolled up in one imagination. But, in fact, the writer can’t do what the actor ultimately does with the words, with that mysterious possession by language, for that different art. Yet the writer apprehends it all in the eye of the mind, the theater of the imagination—hears it all resoundingly in consciousness—s/he revs up the magic-engine—for bus-driver of the mystery tour.

If the actor’s task (and the art of acting) is finally deeply intimidating—think of how the poet or writer masters necessary omniscience—seeing and hearing every possibility of performance. There is an extraordinary poem by the great poet Wallace Stevens, entitled Of Modern Poetry. In this poem, the poet is compared to an actor on a stage. Poet and actor here become one—they are both weighing words as they are conceived—for precision and credibility. One is on the page, the other on the stage. The poet/actor listens, in his innermost ear for sudden rightnesses—deciding, with split-second yet slow precision, what will suffice.

And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and

With meditation, speak words that in the ear,

In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,

Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound

Of which, an invisible audience listens,

Not to the play, but to itself, expressed

In an emotion as of two people, as of two

Emotions becoming one. The actor is

A metaphysician in the dark, twanging

An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives

Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly

Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,

Beyond which it has no will to rise.

It must

Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may

Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman

Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

The poet/writer has to become (as performer-on-the-page) that invisible audience for herself. The writer, like the actor, splits in two. Watching my husband in roles like the Icepick Killer on film—or the gender-bending Gallimard in M. Butterfly on Broadway, in plays by Tom Stoppard or Arthur Miller—or the play ART in London—I witnessed the exact doubling process that Wallace Stevens describes. I also witnessed myself as audience/creator—becoming two-in-one—which is a definition of empathy. The imagination exists, I believe, to make us empathetic.

The playwright Tony Kushner once said that actors are sacrificial animals. I don’t find this statement at all melodramatic. What Wallace Stevens imagined for both poet and actor—in fact demands something more exposed, more psychologically shocking for the real-life performer. It’s the word made flesh experience—when the actor offers up the self, puts his or her body on the line—walks out onstage—or in front of the camera—committing a kind of artistic hari-kari.

Here is a poem of my own called Ovation, written after David’s death in 2000—written not long after I scattered his ashes with a dear friend of his, on the darkened stage of a Broadway theater (where he had walked and spoken lines many times.) In the poem, I struggle to get to where the actor must be—inside and outside—in order to light himself on fire on stage—in order to burn hot, propelling the plot’s trajectory.

Ovation

I try to make myself afraid,

the way you must have been afraid,

stepping out onto this stage –

but with a fear so pure, so

perfectly informed, that you strode

out shouting. Here, where

the neon yellow arrows painted

on the floor shoot forward underfoot

in blackness—beneath the hanging

sequence of tinted skies—out toward

that mindless immortalizing light, now

dark. Now I think I feel the heat you

must have felt rising from the front rows.

A gaping fire door, a furnace:

your single body standing here

with no shadow, swinging on itself.

Had you been a fool, you might have thought

that they loved you. They never love you,

you said. They are hungry for the god

in his gold eclipse, the pure you on fire.

John and I move quickly, each with a handful

of ash, scattering. The sound of no sound falling

into the cracks in the boards, the footlights,

the first row. A small personal snow: a prince

of dust, a villain of dust. Each part you played

drifting up again, recomposing. I open my hand,

I let you go—back into the lines you learned,

back into the body and the body’s beauty –

back into the standing ovation: bow after bow after bow.

I married an actor who was like a living projection of the imagination itself—a chameleon of an actor, as his New York Times obituary described him. He altered as he assumed roles, both public and private. He depended so urgently on the words that allowed him to escape into parts, that it was hard at times to track his true self, given the unpremeditated being that he was. I feel often that I never really knew him, sometimes he seems most real and memorable to me as the many characters to whom he gave breath.

As the playwright John Guare notes, We are all strangers to ourselves. So we act. We write. We perform within art—and get closer to the strange energy that we are.

The essays and reviews included in this book are randomly-connected meditations on this strange energy we give off in (sometimes) small daily transformations or in professional productions. (I haven’t written about the profound strangeness of flipping through TV channels and coming across the image of one’s dead spouse—as Edith Bunker’s rapist in All in the Family or as Josephine Baker’s band-leader husband on HBO (an Emmy-nominated performance) or as a cross-dressing cosmetic surgeon married to Swoosie Kurtz in the TV series Sisters—and so on. I don’t know how to articulate that experience. It’s as if one sees a ghost that everyone else sees—and does not think of as a ghost. And it is not a ghost. It is him, or her, it is the lasting image of a once-performance.)

So. Included here are New York Times Book Review essays or Op Eds—another is from the (former) L.A. Times Book Review—there’s a piece from the Huffington Post and a New Yorker Page Turner. A few remain unpublished. They elbow each other a bit to connect to the over-arching theme of acting or performance—and writing. I’ve removed some pieces included in the original published book (from Random House, 2002)—and added new ones. Now there’s John Cheever playing a role—or not playing a role?—while giving a talk at Sing Sing; there is an acting profile of MS. Havisham (a character I’ve always wanted to be) and an al fresco meeting On Poetry with Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger. I’ve retained a piece on performance poetry—which may sound like it includes both acting and poetry, but doesn’t manage to be either, exactly. Most performance poetry or spoken