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WEDDING & SCOTT 6/22/2013 5:45:58 AM
I am often asked, usually by those I care least about, why I rarely write about the most momentous event in my life — the marriage of Alex, the youngest daughter, to Phillip Faucette on June 21, 2008.
The reason is that I have already devoted a whole book to the event — WALL!, which remains unpublished, thereby perhaps accounting for its quality.
The event five years ago occurred on the first day of summer that year, and my memory of it remains blurred, confused and uncertain. That perhaps explains why it appears restricted.
In any event, you may obtain a synopsis of WALL! by going to authorsden.com/robertmills/books. WALL! is ostensibly a work of fiction, and all the names and places are changed to protect the guilty. But you know who they are.) Click on, or paste to your browser, http:authorsden.com/robertmills/books
Enjoy!
The regular column, SCOTT, follows:
SCOTT
A friend and likewise erudite broadcast journalist named Paul Robinson retired early from the daily grind in Rochester and moved from the frozen tundra to the paradise of Hawaii. In those halcyon years, I was moonlighting during my own adventures in TV/radio as a travel agency executive and spent an inordinate amount of time in the Islands.
From 1966 to 1987 I journeyed to the Sandwich Archipelago no less than seventy-seven times for stays averaging a day or two to a fortnight or more.
Many of those salad days and evenings were spent with Paul Robinson and a few of his friends, one of whom was a charming Hawaiian gentleman I will call Dunstead Kalani.
Robinson introduced me to Kalani, a rare pure-blooded native, at a Honolulu saloon during one of my early visits, and the three of us became regulars who often met for lunch in one bistro or another and remained situated therein, amidst much laughter and conversation, until well after closing.
Kalani, a tall, thin man of infinite talent and intellect, seemed to be a person of means (he nearly always picked up the check). I was never entirely sure what, if anything, he did for a living, but beneath his head of curly brushed cotton, behind his intense protean brown eyes, and buried in the burnished golden tapestry of his tight, smooth skin was an anxious and nervous observer of the passing parade, a person of remarkable reflective resource.
Do you know George C. Scott? he asked me one brilliant day in 1976.
I looked up from my first pint of the day. The actor?
The same. The General himself. Patton. Buck Turgidson . . . He is starring in a Hemingway piece called Islands in the Stream over in Kauai. I have a small part, non-speaking, a typecast extra actually. Wanna go over with me tomorrow and meet Scott?
Did I! The anxiety was overwhelming; I could barely sleep that night, and the next morning I was at the Honolulu airport two hours before our scheduled nineteen-minute flight aboard Aloha Airlines to the Garden Isle of Kauai.
Islands in the Stream, a pre-World War II tale based on a series of stories by Ernest Hemingway (the original would have become a novel had the author not put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger) and was titled just Island.)
But it was pluralized by Denne Bart Petitclerc (the TV/movie writer credited with Bonanza and Shane) when he had adapted the stories as a screenplay. The plot originally took place in the Caribbean, yet for reasons never made clear to me, it was being filmed in Hawaii — perhaps because the director, Franklin Schaffner, wanted to provide his cast and crew with a more memorable time than they might have found in Nassau.
Anyway, the movie would become a classic for Mr. Scott and garner for him another of many Oscar nominations.
When Dunstead Kalani showed up minutes before departure, he erupted with laughter at my schoolboy excitement. God, he guffawed, you look like something Dr. Seuss dragged in! Did you sleep here last night?
Two screwdrivers during the flight to Kauai made me a new man. But the moment I met George C. Scott, sporting a salt-and-pepper Hemingwayesque beard, I was reduced again to a trembling palm leaf of cinematic adulation.
Bigger than life? I might have felt that way about Claire Bloom, Gilbert Roland, David Hemmings, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Maureen Stapleton, Perry Como or Paul Newman, Robert Goulet, or Rachel Welsh — all of whom I had met at one time or another — but not George C. Scott. No siree, bob!
This guy was not just Bigger than Life — he was twelve feet tall! He was Gargantua! Pantagruel! King Kong! Enceladus! A 4-Star General in denim shorts, a Tillie hat, and a tattered t-shirt!
Hi, he said, his voice a dump truck unloading the rubble of Pompeii at my feet, you play chess? You like brandy? He stuck out his hand, but I, idiot to the end, stepped back and . . . saluted!
Hah! giggled the star of Dr. Strangelove and Patton; cute, good move! He embraced Dunstead. Are you sure your buddy here aint no actor?
At the end of a long and wide pier jutting into the Pacific was a gleaming Arabian kiosk, a tent open on all sides, broad and flapping in the gentle breeze, beneath which were a card table and two folding deck chairs arranged opposite each other. Stenciled on the canvas back of one: Mr. Scott. On the other: Loser.
In the center was a chessboard boasting 64 squares (red and black) and thirty-two ornate pieces of sculptured plastic (white and black). To the right of each side was a brilliant crystal goblet, and next to one of them was an ornate decanter of amber liquid I soon learned was Larressingle X.O. Grande Reserve Armagnac.
Tell you what, said the man who stole Anatomy of a Murder from Tyrone Power, Frank has got me scheduled for a dozen shots today, and I am supposed to be up for all of them. Yeah! Right! Between takes, you and me are going to play chess and drink cognac. One sip per move. Gulp, if you make a good one. Two, if you take a piece. You play chess? It dont matter none — I always win, anyway!
He held two bishops behind his back, and I chose the one in his left. White. I would move first. As I reached for the pawn in the third row, he said, Hold on. Fuel up first. He poured two inches into each goblet, sampled his and said, Ha! The Giuoco Piano opening. Bad start. I’ll have your queen in three moves. Give yourself a chance and start with a Ruy Lopez.
I had no idea what the star of Jane Eyre was talking about, but four drinks and five moves later my king was toppled and the first game was over. That day, as it turned out, we played thirty-seven games between his being called for takes, and I did not win even one, losing three in less than as many moves.
We did, however, consume four bottles of Larressingle Armagnac (actually, the man who had taught Paul Newman the art of understated dialogue in The Hustler consumed the lion’s share while denigrating whatever talent for chess I thought I had and emoting with nary a flubbed line in one scene after another for Franklin Schaffner
At the end of the day, just after sunset, when Dunstead and I departed for Oahu, he bade me a hearty farewell, putting his arm across my shoulders and saying, Kid, you shoot a good stick. But one thing you have to learn: playing chess is nothing like drinking brandy.
With brandy, you can think about a lot of other things. But once you touch that first pawn, with chess, all that matters is what you make happen three or four moves down the line. Kubrick taught me that, and he is the only guy who ever beat me. And Joe Papp taught me how to drink brandy and win acting awards. If you can memorize Shakespeare and do Richard the Third while three sheets in the wind, you can do anything!
Have a safe trip home. . . . Do they serve brandy on Aloha Airlines? They should!
Sadly, Paul Robinson is no longer with us, and the status of Dunstead Kalani is uncertain. George C. Scott shuffled off his mortal coil in 1999. I went on to play at least 38,537 chess games while becoming a less than an average player and losing more than 98.7% of the games played.
My only achievement worth mentioning: three magnificent children — none of whom have slightest notion what chess is all about, or who George C. Scott was.
