Gossip Central

Gore at Tribeca

There was more than global warming going on inside a black tent within the spacious Winter Garden where the Tribeca Film Festival held its opening night party on Wednesday. Everyone from Al and Tipper Gore to Jon Bon Jovi, Damon Dash and Rachel Roy wondered why we were crammed in; nary a canapé could pass. (The waiters did try.) Outside that tent, lavish hors d’oevres made their rounds; waiters served ginger martinis on trays. Guests could stand or sit in the elegant hall, festooned in marble and palm trees. Then again, inside the sweaty enclosure, it was easy to cozy up to Al Gore still riding high from his Oscar win for An Inconvenient Truth. Just seeing Al gabbing away with his fans sets me dreaming: “if only.” Taking me around for a picture, Al had me braced at the shoulder, his large arm bringing me close. This was the most secure I have felt since 2000. Fox 411’s Roger Friedman looked the big guy in the eye and said, “Here’s my theory, Al: Hilary and Obama will cancel each other out and you will announce your candidacy in the Fall.” Long, long pause. (Oh my God, he wasn’t saying no.) Taking a breath, Gore finally said, “I’m not planning that.”

                Okay. So he’s not planning . . .

                                                                                 Regina Weinreich

An Inconvenient Truth (movie trailer)

The movie trailer for the most terrifying film you will ever see.

Writers Gone Green

Green is no longer the color of envy. The new black, green is the color of smart and aware, vibrant, verdant, and vigilant. As the 3^rd annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature kicked off at Cooper Union’s Great Hall last night, 11 writers read works from other authors evoking environmental images, or put more plainly, to let us know landscapes and wildlife we have come to know and love are now an endangered species. When T.S. Eliot proclaimed April the cruelest month, he may have meant more than creating a downer out of Chaucer’s optimism. Will we soon be reading of Hamlet’s “unweeded garden” with nostalgia?

Gary Shteyngart said he was radicalized after seeing “President” Gore’s film, Roxana Robinson read from that great “proto-environmentalist” Anton Chekhov, Billy Collins read a sonnet about gated communities named after the wildlife they supplant, Jonathan Franzen read from Jane Smiley’s epic novel The Greenlanders, Pico Iyer read from Peter Matthiessen;s The Snow Leopard, Marilynne Robinson read from her own essay “Wilderness,” Salman Rushdie read a passage involving a “poisonous spill” from Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Other fine voices included Geert Mak from The Netherlands reading in Freesian, Moses Isegawa from Uganda, the Danish novelist Janne Teller reading from Knut Hamsen’s Pan, and Colson Whitehead reading from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

And speaking of Al Gore, he’ll be on hand at tonight’s opening of the Tribeca Film Festival. Talk about timing . .

                                                                                       Regina Weinreich

Kurt Vonnegut

It’s been a few days since I was awakened by a phone call at 1 AM on Thursday morning telling me that Kurt Vonnegut had died. Since that sleepless night, I’ve been moved by the avalanche of tributes: by Verlyn Klinkenborg in the New York Times, by Roger Friedman on Fox News Online, on CBS Sunday Morning. Charlie Rose replayed some interviews with Kurt taped over the years. I can’t get enough. For some of a certain age, Vonnegut was THE landmark writer. For me, the book was Cat’s Cradle. I still identify random recurrences of people as part of my ‘karass.” Kurt’s brand of absurdity, humor, cynicism, and genuine interest in humanity always spoke to me—and to each successive generation. When I would ask students, who is your favorite writer, Vonnegut was number one; most often it was Slaughterhouse Five that resonated for them. Having survived the bombing of Dresden, he was acutely aware of war’s toll. In the wake of the current unrelenting Iraq War, when I taught at Columbia University, Kurt would say, please remind your students of the protests of the ‘sixties. Wake them up, he exhorted.

                I cannot say when I first met him in the ebb and flow of New York literary life. Maybe I first spoke to him at a memorial for Nona Balakian, a mutual editor at the New York Times Book Review who died in 1991 mid-writing a biography of William Saroyan. We chatted about her and her book; Kurt cared that an important work about an important writer was cut short, especially as people were not paying much attention to Saroyan these days. Over time, he told me wonderful stories about the writers and artists he knew or glimpsed: Jack Kerouac, and others. At the recent Saul Steinberg exhibit at The Morgan Library, on December 1, he recounted a conversation he had with Steinberg, both reflecting on age: “I’m a novelist. You are an artist. What’s going on, how do we differ?” Saul said, “One sees the world historically, the other sees the moment.” I think Kurt saw both.

                About a year ago, on March 30, 2006, invited by Kurt’s wife Jill Krementz, I attended a performance of his play, L’histoire du soldat, (A Soldier’s Tale) about the only American soldier to have ever deserted who was executed for treason. The evening brought together many of his preoccupations, the protest of war, the plight of the individual caught in a bureaucracy—and it had a whiff of the current muzzling of protest under the banner of The Patriot Act. All this to the music of Igor Stravinsky, preceded by jazz improvisations. I last saw Kurt at Robert Altman’s memorial service. He’d been looking withered for a while, so I thought he would just go on that way, smiling his sweet, sort of shy and sheepish smile.
                                                                                                         Regina Weinreich

Inherit the Wind

                While his one-time wife Tammy Grimes wowed the crowd at the Metropolitan Room last night, Christopher Plummer wowed the courtroom and the estimable audience at the Lyceum Theater’s opening of the 1955 drama “Inherit the Wind.” Mike Wallace, Jill Clayburgh, Joan Rivers, Fran Drescher, Blair Brown, and Annabella Sciorria saw Plummer in a performance so good it is sure to earn him the Best Actor Tony—again (he won for “Cyrano” in 1974 and “Barrymore” in 1997). As lawyer Henry Drummond he paced and pondered, strutted and whooped defending a Hillsboro(read Smalltown) schoolteacher’s use of  Darwin’s Origin of the Species in the classroom. His worthy opponent in court is the streamlined Brian Dennehy (the actor’s lost 60 pounds), playing Matthew Harrison Brady, a Bible thumping defender of the faith. What’s at stake of course is freedom of thought. Young Conor Donovan, an actor to watch, plays a fresh faced student whose mind may be corrupted by such teaching. While the play written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee must have resonated during the McCarthy period, it now at first seems didactic and dated. But as Plummer’s Drummond, snapping his suspenders, moves through his oratory, blowing Dennehy’s Brady away, a whiff of current events lingers. During intermission, the theater’s lobby became an informal court debating the ethics surrounding Don Imus’ recent verbal transgressions. The lessons of “Inherit the Wind” hold sway.

                                                                                                                  Regina Weinreich

Tammy Grimes at the Metropolitan Room

From the first note of “Rose of Washington Square,” you know you are in the presence of a Broadway legend. Now taking stage in this intimate club setting, Tammy Grimes, two-time Tony award winning actress for the musical “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” (1961) and for Noel Coward’s “Private Lives” (1970) is taking her illustrious career to a new phase. “I’ve got no future but oh what a past,” she intones, and you know this is no idle lyric.

               Channeling the spirit of her husband (since 1971), the arranger/composer Richard Bell, and accompanied on piano by Dennis Bock, she sings wit-charged melodies:  Kander and Ebb’s “You Gotta Ring Them Bells” (what a girl has to do to get out there), “Martha” (by Tom Waits), “He Went to Paris” (by Jimmy Buffett), “More Than One Man in her Life,” “I’ll Never Say No to You,” “Can’t Help Loving That Man of Mine,” “The Snake,” “You Better Love Me While You May,” Noel Coward’s “If Love Were All,” “I Ain’t Down Yet;” and she told stories. When she met Gower Champion, he said, too bad you can’t dance. She replied, “Maybe so, but I’m a great mover.”

               On Wednesday night The Metropolitan Room was packed with fans and friends: among them Academy Award winning actress Patricia Neal, biographer Patricia Bosworth, Joan Rivers, Rex Reed, and George Ross, husband of her Chestnut Hill school chum Anne.

About that past: As one of her stories goes, Marlon Brando had taken her to see the play “The Dark is Light Enough” when one actor, Christopher Plummer, caught her eye. (She was married to him, briefly, in 1956.)  But what about Brando?!!! “Well, that was just an apprentice dating a star.” Of all the projects in her distinguished career she loved best “The Unsinkable Molly Brown”—she also thought Kathy Bates playing this character in “Titanic” was marvelous—and the Turgenev play, “A Month in the Country” in which she starred with her daughter Amanda Plummer. As to her late husband Richard Bell, “Oh, I spoke to him tonight.”

My only quibble with this wonderful evening is that I wanted more. Fortunately, Tammy Grimes will perform again on April 12 at The Metropolitan Room.

                                                                                               Regina Weinreich