Leeloo, continued (8/14/98)
____________
Acting on a whim that had [in truth] seized me months before but somehow lain dormant and unsatisfied, I stopped at the Music Library at the University the other night and [after browsing openmouthed for a considerable passage among their huge collection of celebrity bios] brought home the as-told-to autobiography of Marianne Faithfull. As usual I’d read the reviews of this when first it appeared, absorbed the essential lurid revelation [Mick wanted to pop Keith], and then forgotten it. But something nagged at me, some unarticulated fascination, probably just the fact that sometime around 1967 she seemed like the most beautiful creature on Earth, and the yen resurfaced as I was lugging a bagfull of screenplays home from the hunt. — So, I learn the following: [1] She was discovered by Andrew Loog Oldham who saw her at a party, muttered to himself the immortal phrase “an angel with big tits”, and dragged her straight off to the recording studio [2] She always liked Keith better or at least that’s what she’s saying now [3] She never fucked Dylan or Hendrix she isn’t sure why but obviously it wasn’t their fault because for instance [4] Dylan was still carrying a picture of her around in his wallet in the late Seventies and hit on her again [5] Even she thought
Girl On A Motorcycle was a ridiculous movie [6] She kicked heroin more times than I quit smoking and [7] She has a remarkably vivid recollection of her acid hallucinations but not of much else. — With regard to this last: it puzzled me for a long time that no one had ever written the Great American Novel Of The Sixties, until finally I realized that everyone involved had been too stoned to remember anything; and, appropriately, though I occasionally contemplate the project myself I keep spacing it out.
Drew Barrymore wasn’t bad as Cinderella, though the point somehow escaped me:
The Princess Bride without irony? Anjelica Huston made a good wicked stepmother, and Jeanne Moreau did a brief [and as always dazzling] cameo, but I think it wanted Wally Shawn and Andre the Giant.
Later.
____________More life and times (7/26/98)
