Zoom conversation #3 will take place on Saturday September 23 at 3-4pm EST. The focus is memoir, and you are invited to submit questions ahead and to bring questions to the gathering. All PAID subscribers are welcome, and you can sign up to become a PAID subscriber in the link below. To RSVP to the Zoom, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.
What can you do with a sudden memory? In today’s post, I used it as a prompt to see what I could make of it. I wasn’t interested in what had really happened or why the memory had surfaced. I honestly don’t recall what I was thinking when this story popped up, and it didn’t pop up in the form you’ll read. I liked the memory because I appear weird, lonely, and part of a group. I wrote it this way to make myself happy and make you happy, I hope. It’s one way to work, and at the Zoom, I’ll offer steps to follow if you want to try something like this.
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The Despair of Joan Collins
Gardner had died. It was 1990, and I was out all the time. I couldn’t stay inside, and I was writing in a notebook in places where I could sit. A new shop opened on Broadway, a bakery that was also a café in the low 80s or maybe the 70s, on the east side of the street. You could sit there a long time with a coffee and maybe after god knows how long you would also buy a muffin out of obligation and shame.
The owner hated his customers because he’d created the wrong kind of monster in us. We were a band of deadbeat loners off whom rose different kinds of sadness that united us into watchful resisters of the boss. He was a loud and theatrical gay man I also felt for because he may have been as lonely as we were, and he was trying to establish a business. I don’t remember if he had a boyfriend. I remember the startling freedom he claimed to express his contempt for us, and by us, I don’t mean the customers who came and left briskly and didn’t turn his place into a campsite. He would thrash about, sighing and slamming down the cups he bussed after one of us moved on. It was theater. The boss staged his show of frustration, and we were the audience.
In the Spring 2002 issue of Threepenny Review, Geoff Dyer published a memoir called “The Despair of Art Deco.” It’s a wonderful piece about nothing, really, meaning it’s my kind of writing, in which for seven pages or so Dyer recounts a recent visit with his girlfriend to South Beach, Miami, where he plans to write about the art deco hotels that attract visitors. Instead, he sees his first dead body, or at least the soiled socks of a woman who has jumped from a balcony to her death on the sidewalk, careful to avoid landing on a passerby.
Earlier on the visit, Dyer and his girlfriend are asked to take a photograph of a couple standing in front of the house were Versace was gunned down. The patch of sidewalk has become a site of what I would call “dark tourism.” Dyer doesn’t call it that, but he understands there is some attraction people feel to standing in proximity to where something gory and grisly has taken place in order to feel the double thrill of not yet being dead and also being reminded that every life goes in one direction.
One afternoon, walking on his own, Dyer comes upon the recent suicide, cordoned off by yellow tape, as police are bagging the woman. Another passerby tells Dyer the dead woman was 72. He says the heat of Miami makes people crazy. Dyer offers that Rome is just as hot and people don’t routinely pitch themselves from balconies there. In Miami, Dyer suggests, perhaps the despair of art deco causes people to jump, the despair that rises off architecture that always looks better from the outside than the inside.
It’s a moot question, the cause of this woman’s death, but there is also something about Miami that produces sites of “instant pilgrimage,” Dyer’s girlfriend observes, and so the next day Dyer brings her to the patch of sidewalk where the dead woman landed, and together they commune with her, hoping that when they are 72 they will prefer hobbling along on arthritic feet to leaping to their deaths.
What was I writing in the notebooks I carried to the bakery-café? I was writing dreck. I wasn’t writing dreck in my published work, but this was years before I’d meet Richard and together we’d establish better guidelines for writing in notebooks than I had at the time. The dreck I was writing was about one piece of the sadness rising off me or another. In these awful entries, I’m clutching at the damp hankie of my life. I’m not so much sad about being in the world without a man. I’m sad about facing starkly my troubling personality in the unshaded world without a man. I knew this was not a fit subject for writing, but I didn’t stop writing the dreck. I don’t think I even tried.
One day Joan Collins paid a visit to the bakery-café, and the excitement still lingers in my mind. Joan in the bakery, a streak of glamor, like the façade of an art deco hotel, sent to lift us from our forlorn existences. According to Geoff Dyer, part of “the despair” of art deco is that it includes a wash of shabbiness as well as brilliance, and you could perhaps say the same thing of the glamor of Joan Collins or the glamor of anyone looked at close up.
The visit was not a surprise. We’d been informed about it for days and perhaps weeks by the usually irascible boss. He was her devoted fan. There were pictures of Joan on the walls. Suddenly, we had a purpose in his place. We were props in the setting of the boss’s bustling café. Did he instruct us to give Joan space and allow her radiance merely to fall on us? I hope so. I don’t remember. Let’s say he did let us know how we were to perform. In this moment, all of us are joined with the boss in his ardent wish to host Joan beautifully. All of us want him to be happy.
Joan pulls up in a town car. Paid for by the boss? He escorts her into the bakery-café, and ushers her to a table, showing her around a bit before she’s seated. It’s the period just after she has starred in the prime-time soap opera Dynasty, that ran from 1981 to 1989, and Joan will be a little at loose ends for a while after the towering success of her scenery-shredding portrayal of the vixen Alexis Carrington. She was great, snarling and camping. It’s her crowning acting achievement.
Joan was born in 1933. She’s 90 as I write. She’ll keep acting in movies, on stage, and on tellie. She doesn’t retire. Here’s what Wikipedia says about her recent work: “In October 2019, she worked on the feature film The Loss Adjuster, released in 2020. In 2021, she appeared in a short comedy spoof for Comic Relief in which she played Maggie Keenan, the first person to receive a COVID 19 vaccination. She was set to star in the historical television series Glow and Darkness, alongside Jane Seymour and Denise Richards which she began filming for in 2020; it was set to be released in late 2021. In May 2021, it was announced that Collins would have a role in the musical film Tomorrow Morning; the film was released in September 2022. Go, Joan!
In the bakery-café, she is full wig and fake eyelash swish, her vowels so sweetly plummy bees suddenly circle her head. She looks fragile. There’s a tottering uncertainty to her bearing. What am I doing here, she might have been asking herself? Who is this man who loves me? What is my role here? What is my role in life in general? Do we, the rabble, stay back and stare courteously? Do we say hello and smile? Does she leave with a box of pastries? Does she eat the bakery-café’s specialty rugelach or a napoleon? Is the boss happy? Does she stay long enough to make him happy? Can anything make any of us happy?
Yes. This memory makes me happy. While Joan is with us, the boss is gracious and Joan is gracious. They pull me out of myself, and I write a different kind of entry, thinking about all of us gathered there, thinking about the sadness of the boss. Somewhere, there’s a jaunty, outward-looking piece I attribute to Joan. Some kind of exchange is set in motion, each side a site of tourism for the other. We inject the glamor of our humdrum realness into Joan as she wafts the despair of her fading stardom onto us—the despair, like the despair of art deco, that always includes the wish to show a good face and can, in this case, brighten your point of view rather than prompt a leap to death.
Joan is plucky to have come and generous to have taken the time to sit in front of her makeup mirror and create for a fan the Joan Collins, with her sexy overbite, that slides into the world. At this time, she’s between marriage number four and marriage number five. She won’t marry again until 2002, when she weds Percy Gibson, who is 30 years younger than she is. Go Joan!
In time the bakery-café has to close. Probably, we are the cause. It takes a few years for this to happen. I’m sad when it’s gone.
I once had a chance to do makeup at the Tony Awards and afterwards got to attend their grand fete at the Marriott Marquis in the mid nineties. Many faces were there but the most breathtaking was La Joan Collins, resplendent as ever in navy sequins and sitting at a table. A small and respectful line seemed to form to wait to pay their respects, so I joined it. When it was my turn to say hello she was very gracious and I spoke of my love of "old Hollywood glamour" and she agreed that she was one of the few left of a certain generation. I then spoke of her ex-husband Anthony Newley, who passed away too young and was one of my favorite actors because of his role in the ORIGINAL "Doctor Doolittle" starring Rex Harrison. We chatted about his talent and briefly touched on a few other topics before I politely thanked her for her time. I will never forget meeting her. She remains my aging icon as I plan to carry a glam torch for all my years. xoxox
Thank you Laurie, a great piece. I reflexively recoil from celebrity culture, but your description of the visit turns into something like a Mario Benedetti short story. It's touching, with the focus on those in the bakery as much as on the empty void of celebrity. You fill this void with nostalgia, grace and a tribute to living with purpose at an advanced age. Thank you!