What Is It All But Luminous Page 12

  It’s 8:10 on a Sunday morning in March. How much more do I have? I’ll walk off the psychic disturbance I awoke with in this north Orlando motel. “He hopes Paul Simon will agree to a future tour.” How they paint me like a fool. Last night in Ponte Vedra, I opened my show with “So I will share this room with you; and you can have this heart to break.” Can they? What kind of fool am I?

  Spleen. My work of recovery is about more presence in the diction, more volume, a greater being in my being, a higher leap of faith. Tonight I will play a show in Palm Beach Gardens—no. 65 since returning to the stage last year, all filled with fear and exaltation. I miss my family’s sweet embrace. Sunday night is Oscars. Monday, New York magazine. Should I cancel the makeup appointment? I’d like to avoid being done to. No driver to the shoot? I could walk there and sing in the street—call my soul my own and hope for retouching.

  We’re all in the throes of greater volatility.

  What are we sending up into the air?

  Is it largo turned to allegro

  or a dance of interaction in a frenzy everywhere?

  I walked across the Appalachians,

  Perfect undulations, ambler’s waves of joy;

  Ridge to ridge—four and a half miles,

  terrestrial corduroy.

  Weather is whatever;

  It never levels off.

  If it peaks at two in Pennsylvania,

  at four-fifteen, it lies in a West Virginian

  trough.

  Forget not, lest ye be forgotten.

  25 RECORDS IN THE ORDER THEY CHANGED MY LIFE

  1) Enrico Caruso  Aria from The Pearl Fishers

  2) The Andrews Sisters  “Rum and Coca-Cola”

  3) Nat King Cole  “Too Young”

  4) Nat King Cole  “Nature Boy”

  5) Carousel, the show  “If I Loved You”

  6) Bing Crosby  “White Christmas”

  7) The Crew Cuts  “Sh-Boom”

  8) Frankie Ford  “Sea Cruise”

  9) Huey “Piano” Smith  “Don’t Ya Just Know It”

  10) Sam Cooke  “You Send Me”

  11) The Everly Brothers  Songs Our Daddy Taught Us (LP)

  12) Johnny Mathis  “It’s Not for Me to Say”

  13) Ike and Tina Turner  “River Deep-Mountain High”

  14) The Righteous Brothers  “Ol’ Man River”

  15) The Beatles  “Here, There and Everywhere”

  16) The Beach Boys  “Good Vibrations”

  17) The Swingle Singers  Jazz Sebastian Bach (LP)

  18) The Hi-Lo’s  Suddenly It’s the Hi-Lo’s

  19) Simon and Garfunkel  “Scarborough Fair”

  20) Joan Baez  Joan Baez (LP)

  21) J. S. Bach  The Christmas Oratorio (3 LPs)

  22) Lenny Bruce  American (LP), “Frank Dell”

  23) Nichols & May  Nichols & May Examine Doctors (LP)

  24) Steve Reich  Music for 18 Musicians (LP)

  25) Chet Baker  any vocal

  War is not the answer; for only love can conquer hate.

  —Marvin Gaye, “What’s Going On”

  A Turkish worker, seeing my arms out wide,

  Hugs me for the embrace.

  The first thing you see is the other man’s point of view.

  I dust off the earth, the dance is done,

  the seat of my pants don’t matter none…

  There’s Laurie, there’s Steve, there’s everyone—

  was I too forgiving? I saw it all as true—

  what man does, and how funny it was what I did too…

  O Earth you are too wonderful for anyone to see.

  And blindest of all was me.

  The heart pushes wider; there is joy!

  Dear Sandy, Perhaps we’ve been exclusive with our love. The fifty-four years of our friendship are a construct. Is it constricting? Did Jonathan and David own a puppy?

  Now you are released from the first seventy-one, and I from the singing choir. Now we turn in the widening gyre. Embracing human dignity still, we open our arms to our beautiful women, to Jerry Speyer, to come what will, your sister Ruth, to our boys, to both of our blindness, to Jack and Rose, Sarah and Carl, l’chaim.

  Songs were ours to sing and we have sung them; stars shone down on us and now we swim among them.

  There was a moment I noted in the dressing room in Milwaukee. It was winter turning spring. Thursday, March the twentieth, seven-seventeen, eight o’clock show. The vernal equinox. I strained to feel our planet tilting neither toward nor away from the sun. The night was fifty months since I lost my voice. And on that fifteen hundred and nineteenth night, THE VOICE RETURNED IN FULL! 2014. In Chicago, two nights later, the seventieth show of recovery, stage legs returned, spring was here. I could sing again.

  When I was young I was Achilles.

  It was excellence, honor, bravery

  and blood all played out on

  the stage of the world.

  Now I am Odysseus, a voyager,

  a traveler for travel’s sake.

  As if something was forgotten,

  I go east.

  The star of the play now is the

  earth itself, Ireland to Istanbul.

  In the Beginning and at the End

  there was Light.

  The beauty of light finds a room

  in us—what is it all but luminous?

  The journalist came today. Pragmatic meets poetic. She came to “cover my walk.” Steak and cheese. Turkey au gratin. The Getter meets the Gotten. She got me coming through Tekirdag. We walked along the Sea of Marmara, next to the Ottoman traffic—German inquisition, rambling Turkish taffy. Alive and on display, how can I convey to her my trek of speckled radiance, this tour of a million magnificent steps?

  My Constantinople is colorful. Perhaps her beige bison is tan bull.

  THE DEATH OF MIKE NICHOLS

  Life will be different for us now. Mike Nichols is not alive. He was the most sparkling man among us. The self is a creation. Mike created an extraordinary star—so bright, so extremely clever—himself. When you were with him, he brought you up to your best smart self, and kept it light and funny. To act for him on camera was to glide on a liquid film of intelligence. Before each scene, Mike gave his actors a truly brilliant and subversive insight into the scene. As you were stirred, he then joked, you laughed, he walked away, and said, “Roll camera.” Now that he has truly walked away, the act of life is, for me, forever charmed.

  EuroWalk completed! Leg #30. Ipsala to Istanbul. I walk because I’m fiercely in love with being alive. I walk for the lungs to exhale and expel. I walk for the spine to be upright. I walk to hear the rooster. I am a Singer.

  I love to see decrepit things—history, old shacks. The beauty of six o’clock, of seven, of eight, the twilit lay of the land in lullaby. I play with mathematics. I calibrate. Lately I enjoy guessing the steps to the mosque up ahead. Every two steps is a five-foot pace; a hundred meters, sixty-eight of them, is a short home run.

  Most of all I walk to relax, a word that means the world to me, a door to everything I care about. The life within. Philosophy. The beauty behind the beauty—Shibooli. So I remember, I measure, I miss my loves at home. I empty out to come about. I am a Singer.

  After Laurie died, nights began to feel sadder than days.

  Going on the road for shows had an aching lonesome

  check-in time in strange hotels at night.

  Where am I?

  Why?

  I am spinning in black, longing for love, for the sun, for

  Showtime!

  Then some things are so easy to remember—September 19, 1981, our CONCERT IN CENTRAL PARK….All the band guys on stage around me. Pete Carr on guitar at my right. The sky cleared at five; the buzz around town was palpable, growing fast. I see masses of people, beyond the Great Lawn, under the trees. The wheel of fortune had spun to our slot. Now go to work: l
isten intently, blend the voices, match the texture, mix the volumes (little 64ths of an inch from the mic), breathe along with your childhood friend…

  We were front-page news of the New York Times next day. I voted myself a C+ as I walked offstage.

  —We blew it. (I wanted the nuances finer, more controlled.)

  —Are you crazy, Artie?

  With Luis Perelman, architecture schoolmate, in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York City, c. 1963

  When I was twenty-three, in architecture school, my classmate Luis, follower of Gurdjieff, invited me to his Saturday night party. “There’ll be smoking,” he whispered.

  We met at his narrow brownstone on the topmost floor. His father, a psychiatrist, met his wealthy clients down below. The Rock Church was just next door. In those fabulous stoned Saturday nights, we passed a piece of reefer around in a circle of four and they ended with Sunday morning gospel singing from the church next door. Such a nice Manhattan scene. I had to bring my friend Paul Simon into it. We used the apartment as a rehearsal place for our first Columbia album. No drugs. This was the “cool” we lived within. We knew how to do “Sparrow” from the summer of working English folk clubs, but now it was “Benedictus.” These were the Kennedy years.

  We die incrementally. The lungs lose breath in increments. My baby learned sadness from his parents, fight by fight. Little murders every day. Why can’t I button the cuffs of my shirt? Identity dying. Fingerprints wearing away.

  The man who gave his life to you.

  My meager self remains,

  Witness to bereavement

  And winding sheet with bloodstains.

  Bold achievements bound in chains

  Acted on your stage;

  My written book is yours to keep

  My cold hand writes the index page.

  All’s asleep in camouflage,

  Spring became a November tree.

  Bitter pears are ripening

  In authenticity.

  I sang for a thousand Parisians last night and did my ninety-minute set. In the year 2015, I haven’t finished yet. At dinner with the promoter, after the wonderful show within a golden Rembrandt frame, sits the portrait of the artist we know. But I know his recent awakening…

  Paris—so warm to an American? I feel the room to grow. I see the buds of the croci—somethin’s comin’.

  Sometimes life is an unmitigated joy. James is Arthur Junior now. He’s twenty-four. The thrust of his argument is taking place in the wholeness of man. He sang onstage in my Tokyo show two months ago. With arms around each other’s waist we finished “Let It Be Me”—“So never leave me lonely, tell me you love me only. And that you’ll always—let it be me.” Then he kissed me on the neck, with a full embrace. The audience witnessed a father’s plea, and a son raised and bathed in love. Under the applause, I put in his ear: “This could be the finest moment.”…Miracles thread through a singer’s life.

  And finally one more shop—jewelers, flowers—then bookshop (can I humbly make my entry?) Can Sandy Greenberg, who’s been sightless since college (glaucoma set in in our sophomore yr.) lead us all toward the end of blindness by 2020? Will the global divide of 2015, along religious lines, so bloody and tragic, find a bridge?

  ART GARFUNKEL AT CARNEGIE HALL—OCTOBER 3, 2015

  Dear Todd,

  I had a home run last night in New York City—sold out up to the rafters. I was in form. My love showed. Stage legs are back. Less is more worked beautifully in the room.

  Two Great Artists (Garfunkel and Steve Gadd)

  Little Beau started the night with intense adorability. In his rented tuxedo, “Ladies and Gentlemen, here’s my Daddy.” I open with “April Come She Will,” then give them my piece, 3 Stages of the Fame Trip. 3rd stage—poor Domino, booked to work a five-year-old’s birthday party, and he’s lame. Now I walk forward. “I AM Domino” (I slip into the voice of Dylan Thomas). “I wasn’t always this way; I was once a lovely little curly-headed lad….Now I’m an old entertainer with a phony British accent. But the heart is young. And the voice is back.” Surge into “The Boxer.”

  Will my personal identity emerge in these final

  pages? I look over the hill for Arthur.

  Beau Daniel Garfunkel, age nine

  “I dare to be a man who loves pretty things—purple magenta, dusty rose…here’s ‘Perfect Moment,’ a song I wrote and put into the eleventh of my twelve solo albums.” Then I read my piece “Beau and the Globe” (bliss in the home life). I sang “A Heart in New York” / “All I Know.” The voice is firm, I’m on tonight.

  Little Beau has begun to play the harp. What could be more divine?

  I give them “The Texter,” my story of vocal vulnerability. When I get to the part where I walk off!, the Carnegie audience applauds me. “Ahh,” I say, “you applaud confrontation…but where, exactly, do you go from there?”

  After my bit on Nicholson, I do “Scarborough Fair” and never-before-heard “Side of a Hill,” the antiwar song tucked between the lines of Scarborough. Then the galloping “Poem on the Underground Wall,” and the first half ends.

  Tonight I will do the Jimmy Fallon Tonight Show, and hope to sell tickets for this Saturday night’s Carnegie Hall show, where you practice, practice to get there. I practiced last week at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Junior joined me with “Let It Be Me.”

  My brother Jerome sells The Singer in the lobby. After the intermission, Arthur and I came out together. I say, “This is my son, I want you to hear him sing.” We duet “Devoted to You.” I leave. He solos “Smile.” He absolutely kills; the finishing notes are an octave higher than his father’s range!!

  I then read my “Note to Self”; CBS-TV wanted me to give my “life lessons,” I say. “What do we really ever learn about life, except that it’s a fabulous mystery, and you have to be kind to people? Fame is a kick—the party’s at your house. Then if you can embrace the differentness of another…” Into “Homeward Bound,” then Randy Newman’s “Real Emotional Girl” (work that stage, left and right), and the piece about my father, who gave me Enrico Caruso. It led to “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” I was five.

  “A fallen leaf blown through the grass.” It was Mike Nichols who inspired my piece “important lives will end.”

  And my life—a piece of work or a piece of nothing? I sing the most delicate “For Emily,” then a prose poem of mine: “I have sung for creatures all my life—humans in ’51.” I illustrate a Hebrew piece, a lovely minor-key memory….“Years later, I sang for cows. As I walked the country…I get weary and sick of tryin’, I’m tired of livin’.” I sing “Many eyes widen, one creature’s cryin’.” I say, “I’m feared of dyin’.” I sing with fragility. (Who says this in a pop performance, Todd?) Then into blue-lit “Bright Eyes.”

  Now Paul Simon, “Who will speak at whose funeral?”(Jack Benny deadpan pause.)

  I wait for the final blank page to come over

  the bridge and write me—tell me what

  this life amounts to. Is it a syncline?

  “The Sound of Silence.” When the drum track kicks into the second verse, we go rock ’n’ roll. Fade to black. Bows. Great mutual appreciation.

  Love is all there is.

  At the gathering after the triumph onstage, I see my foolish pictures taken. There—the age; eyeliner extended. What kind of fool am I?

  Who could stick by this man?

  Tab Laven and I do “Kathy’s Song,” the most beautiful singing of the night. Arthur Jr. returns, tribute to Phil Everly, “Let It Be Me.” Cheek to cheek, I sing to my boy, “So never leave me lonely.” His warmth, so palpable, Kim runs on, roses for us. “This is my bride, the great actress Kathryn Luce.” We kiss.

  Somehow, in a miracle of faith, it is my

  Kathryn, my Kim. She threw a party for

  me that was my life.

  I introduce “Bridge” with my bit about playing the Albert Hall. Soon I will rise onto the mesa. Enter the pop warrior….Be beautiful,
be a man….Go out on the field of praise to the apron, tell every stall….Tonight is all….When you’re weary, feelin’ small. We do verses, then out. Thunderous applause—the syncline.

  But before the party, onstage, I finished as usual, hand on heart.

  I leave. Return with thank God “for allowing me to be the conduit.” “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.” Softly, at the end: “Goodnight, New York.” Bows of deep gratitude.

  Now I belong to the back of the balcony.

  Beau about to pull my sleeve to leave. I threw it all to the upper deck.

  Onstage at Carnegie Hall

  For three and a half decades I have been following inspiration as it led me onto the page. Then Dan Strone of Trident Media told me: “You might have a book here.” (He especially liked that it was all handwritten.) I was absolutely thrilled when the great publishing house of Alfred A. Knopf accepted my writing. (Maybe my unusual book does communicate.) I started working with legendary editor Vicky Wilson. I was her student in Bookland. Thank you sincerely, Victoria, for your empathy. My thanks go to Ryan Smernoff at Knopf. Since God is in the details, his guiding of me to publication was godly. And my deepest thanks to Sandy Greenberg for his beautiful judgment.

  All of the images in this book are from the author’s personal archives, with the exceptions listed below:

  1 © Bob Gruen