Portrait of my grandfather and namesake an intensely emotional journey from 1916 when the photograph was taken

My grandfather played the saxophone and clarinet in the orchestra pits of movie theaters (many of them great palaces) to entertain audiences when the silent movies were playing. His name was Salvatore Pellecia. My mother, a Hebrew school teacher, named me after him—translating “Salvatore” into “God helps” and then debating between “Joshua” and “Joel Ezra” names which in the Hebrew she decided meant the same thing.

Some photographs take on special meaning.  In my life, this portrait (in the same frame) stood on my mother’s nightstand and chest of drawers for the entire time I knew her—a time which ended a year ago next week according to the Hebrew lunar calendar (which marks periods of mourning and remembering the dead) as my synagogue Brit Shalom, here in State College, reminded me in a note: Time to say Kaddish for your mother.

When Mother, Miriam Pell Schmerler, died last year, her possessions were put in boxes which my younger daughter Amelia unpacked last tonight as I watched her over a Skype connection between State College and the University of North Carolina at Ashville where she is completing her senior year.

This portrait was the one thing I wanted most and Amelia scanned it and sent it to me—the only photograph I have ever seen of him.

The rear of the photograph, which before I was born had never left the frame, revealed the information that it was taken at the State Fair in the summer of 1916 in Kewanee, Illinois.

There is a story here. A story I will not tell this morning as I remember my mother and the legacy she left behind of Salvatore who died before I was born. http://voicesweb.org/eulogy-blog-funeral-day

--Joel Solkoff, September 25, 2011

In 1976, I was diagnosed with cancer from which I have been cured

I was successfully treated for cancer, diagnosed originally in 1976 when I was 28 years old. I am now 63. The New York Times op-ed article reproduced below was written while I was in the midst of my first round of radiation treatment.

While I often pride myself for remembering events, nothing could induce me to reconstruct the emotional details of that now long ago experience which I wrote down in my reporter’s notebook in the streets of Washington, D.C. while sick from the treatment that would save my life and which a generation earlier would have certainly resulted in my unpleasant death within 18 months of diagnosis.

After my treatment in 1976, I had a surprising recurrence of Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of the lymphatic system.  In 1989 I was again received radiation treatment. Since then I have been of free of cancer.

Yesterday, my two daughters returned to their homes after visiting me here in State College, PA. Joanna, who will be 27 this month, is returning to her job as an ambulance driver and EMT before beginning nursing school. (She also happens to be a specialist in Beat literature.) I was able to father her after my first round of radiation treatment.

My daughter Amelia is returning to her senior year in college after spending her junior year abroad in Pamplona, Spain where she ran with the bulls. I was able to father her after my second round of radiation treatment.

In the past, I have written about and discussed my experiences as a cancer survivor, but I have not done so recently. As my daughters left the parking lot at Addison Court to resume their own adventures, I could not help reflecting that Joanna, Amelia, and I are alive today because of the miracles of science and technology. I have at times been notorious for my criticism of health care in the United States, but there are times in life when gratitude is obligatory and this is one of them.

--Joel Solkoff, State College, PA

A 7 year-old eulogy of a friend from first grade

[I miss my friend Lee. Certainly, this blog exists for remembering old friends especially one of my classmates at the Hebrew Academy of Miami Beach where Lee was voted most likely to become Secretary of State. Flamboyantly arrested and taken out of Manhattan’s flagship Brooks Brothers store in handcuffs for embezzlement to support substance abuse, Lee was simultaneously one of:

·        my best friends

·        most spiritually-advanced

·        most decadent

·        best dressed

·        most charming people I have ever met

·        a bemused and loving uncle to my daughters (often invoking the blessings of a moderation he rarely possessed).

[Sometimes, Lee seemed to be an incarnation of Proteus.

[Lee died shortly after a great run as a lobbyist (http://bulk.resource.org/gpo.gov/hearings/107s/78596.txt; see witness list for this Senate Judiciary Committee hearing) with two master degrees in substance abuse testifying before Congress on the importance of rehabilitation therapy. He died when each of us were experiencing spectacular reversals in our personal and professional lives. This was a time when we had little to give ourselves and therefore nothing to give each other except the remembrance that from the age of 6, we each shared lives as friends.

[As with many of my good friendships, there were many moments when each of us said the unspoken to the other, “How can I be friends with him?”

[The police found Lee’s decomposed body in his apartment in Washington, DC and had him cremated. His priest and close friend Robert Finamore located Lee after considerable effort. My name and phone number were in Lee’s wallet. Robert invited me to the memorial mass he was conducting at his parish and asked me to deliver a eulogy. Some news is so terrible I could not stop crying.

[Last weekend, I opened a box that had remained sealed for over a year. The box had been sent by my friend (and as it turns out archivist) Bonnie Blumenthal Finkelstein who proofread the original of the eulogy. Some boxes, just as some memories, are best left unopened. For everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under Heaven.

[I created this blog to provide a home for the kind of questions Lee’s eulogy raises in my now 63 year-old mind about the nature of life and friendship. The forces that caused the box to be opened also reveal tales for another time.

[Suffice it to say that the magical weekend the box was opened, my elder daughter Joanna was driving an ambulance while preparing to enter nursing school, my younger daughter Amelia was running with the bulls in Pamplona, and I was preparing one of my trademark exotic celebrations—this time concerning Ernest Hemingway.

[Lee (who bequeathed to me the meaning of “spiritual calling” while simultaneously abjuring not to make too big a thing of it) would have been amused that his eulogy has appeared below as a piece of objet trouvé before summer turns to fall.

[Soon cold and darkness will require the unusual (with a moral you have to find yourself)—a story uncovering the special meaning of why Lee learned to ice skate at a hotel in Miami Beach (during the 1950s) when the temperature outside was in the 80s.]

EULOGY FOR JOHN (LEE) AVERY (APRIL, 1948--SEPTEMBER, 2004) AT HIS MEMORIAL MASS, ST IGNATIUS CHURCH, FORT, WASHINGTON, MD http://www.saint-ig.org/, OCTOBER 30, 2004, DELIVERED BY JOEL SOLKOFF, LEE’S FRIEND SINCE 1953

Good afternoon.

We are here today to celebrate Lee’s life.

I first met Lee in first grade in 1953 at the Hebrew Academy of Miami Beach, Florida—a school commonly referred to as a yeshiva. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbi_Alexander_S._Gross_Hebrew_Academy and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNjrrHJnKyc

We took Hebrew and eventually Aramaic classes in the morning and English classes in the afternoon.

I was there for 8 years. Lee graduated a year later having become president of his class in the yeshiva.

In 1972, on the day Lee’s mother died, he was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church in Miami Beach where he had secretly been attending religious instruction for months. A year later he regarded his conversion as complete when he legally changed his name from Lee Avery Rosenhouse to John Avery.

He chose the name John as homage to Pope John XXIII, who had inspired him.

To some of his friends and colleagues he was known as John. When I once suggested to Lee that I would call him John if he preferred, he gave me a noblesse oblige glare and said, “No; because you are an old dear friend, you can still call me Lee.”

This is a good time to pause and focus on the life of a man whose name changes require me to clarify just who it is we are mourning today. My daughter Joanna observed that the manner of Lee’s untimely death makes today especially difficult because you and I did not have the chance of saying goodbye properly.

Over the course of my life, I have seen Lee go from being a law school student to an executive at Brooks Brothers, from an alcoholic with other drug-related problems (most notably cocaine) to a recovered survivor who received two master’s degrees in his disease and ran a substance abuse clinic——eventually becoming a Congressional lobbyist on behalf of treatment professionals.

The often operatic drama of Lee’s life and the charm and talents we experienced in his presence made it difficult to know who Lee really was. Much of the time, Lee was engaged in an elaborate form of denial which he referred to as “Let’s pretend.”

It is hard to look at the reality of his death without feeling anger and sadness at the unrealized expectations we had for Lee.

If Lee had died a year earlier with a little money in his pocket, with his career as a lobbyist still intact and his HIV still under control, we could have lauded him as a success:

·        A man who had overcome alcoholism to help others afflicted with the disease

·        A man who had survived the AIDS epidemic still mindful of its consequences

·        A man who had survived with his faith in God intact

Instead, Lee died

·        broke

·        out of work and hope

·        probably drunk

·        neglecting his HIV medication

·        alone in his apartment

·        found only after his body had decomposed for several days

The issue is not that a “better” death would make it more comfortable to eulogize Lee. But the reality is that there were two Lees--the one his friends and I wanted him to be and the one he actually was.

I realize that the point will come when I can shed my anger and sorrow that the ever-changing nature of Lee’s behavior could not lead him to the life of happiness and fulfillment I would have wished.

Indeed, my intention in this eulogy is to focus on the Lee who actually was—the man we mourn today and the man I loved as a brother.

Lee’s gift to me was the opportunity to accompany him through key moments in his difficult life journey.  I will spend the rest of my time with you today listing the following six lessons I learned from Lee and discussing some of them:

1.      Anecdotes make it easier to confront reality.

2.      The rich are like you and me.

3.      Not being a homosexual, I really do not understand.  

4.      It is harder to stop drinking than you might think.

5.      Spirituality can perform miracles.

6.      Few problems cannot be solved by being dressed adequately for the occasion.

Lee could tell a story more effectively than almost anyone I knew.

One of the big difficulties Lee faced was the way Mose and Estelle Rosenhouse handled the fact that they had adopted him when he was an infant. When he was in college and the family was in the midst of a truly ugly fight about money, one of Lee’s relatives said, “You’re not really a Rosenhouse” and that’s how he found out.

Years later Lee commented he suspected he was adopted because his parents treated him “like a pet poodle.”

Lee told the story about a conversation his mother Estelle and her friends had on their experiences with childbirth.

When it was Estelle’s turn, she regaled the audience with bogus detailed descriptions of her labor pains with Lee.

When I met Lee in 1953, he seemed rich by all the standards of my childhood. His parents paid full tuition at the Hebrew Academy plus they were big contributors to our school. By comparison, my mother paid with difficulty at a deeply discounted rate.

There was considerable difference between the way teachers and fellow students treated the rich and the poor.

Shortly after we became classmates, Lee’s parents, as my mother described it, “adopted” my mother and me.

I was being raised by a single mother in the 1950s when divorce was a big taboo and my mother earned little money as a Hebrew school teacher.

Mose and Estelle established a lifelong friendship with my mother which began with our annual attendance at their house for Passover Seders.

I saw Lee’s life from the perspective of my apartment which was on the wrong side of south Miami Beach at a time when south Miami Beach was the wrong place to live.

I was soon to discover to my surprise that Lee was unhappy even though his house was in fashionable north Miami Beach. The house was large and artistically furnished—including a tasteful living room painted chocolate brown—a color Lee was to adopt effectively in adulthood when designing his drop-dead chic apartment in Roslyn, Va.

The Rosenhouse dining room contained a shockingly bad mural of Roman ruins and the dining room had enough space to accommodate all Lee’s large extended family over whom Mose presided with the genial air of a benign dictator.

Mose and his brother Dave were partners in their own highly-respected Miami law firm. Mose’s sister Sarah was his secretary. There were eccentric aunts and uncles on both Mose and Estelle’s side of the family, one of whom was always in residence in a spare bedroom with private bathroom. The room was reserved for relatives down on their luck like Uncle Mike (formerly a concert violinist) at the time working behind the counter of a delicatessen. In later years, Lee would wonder whether he had not in effect become Uncle Mike.

Lee’s aunts and uncles adopted me in a gush of Southern sentimentality— relatives whose alcohol, drug, and reality abuse Lee frequently compared to Tennessee Williams at his most decadent.

In short, when we were children, Lee had a very large family and I had a very small family. But my envy for Lee quickly changed. The fact that we were both such bad athletes that we were always the last two players chosen for kickball served as a larger image of what our rotten childhood was like and served as a bond between us.

Lee’s father died when he was in college. His mother died when he was in his mid-20s. By the time Lee was 30, Aunts Sara and Dora were dead and Lee spent a large chunk of his small inheritance going from funeral to funeral of more and more distant relatives.

Lee’s cousin Bobbie, who is in attendance this afternoon, can tell you the shock Lee experienced as the large all-embracing family of his youth was virtually extinguished.

As a child Lee thought he was rich. His father drove a new Cadillac every year. Lee had whatever material possessions he wanted including ice skating lessons—Lee became an excellent ice skater at the rink of a luxury hotel in Miami Beach, Florida. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6amr5ecQJWw&feature=related

One way the observers of Lee’s family measured their wealth was air conditioning. In the 1950s, air conditioning was not ubiquitous in Miami Beach. Only a few private individuals could afford the cost of keeping their houses cold——and the colder it was the bigger the status symbol. Lee’s parents constantly kept the house at 55 degrees when the temperature outside was in the 80s and 90s. You had to wear, a sweater when you went to Lee’s house. One of the secret parlor games of family friends was to guess the monthly air conditioning bill.

When Lee died, he had a cell phone because he could not afford a standard phone. He told a friend that he could be reached only at night because he had counted up the minutes and he could no longer afford the cost of talking before 9 at night.

Indeed, Lee was raised in a house of privilege and prestige. When his father died, for example, the funeral notice was on page one of The Miami Herald, hundreds attended the service. The mayors of Miami and Miami Beach attended as did Mose’s representative in Congress.

During his childhood Lee hated himself. His biggest challenge was achieving self-esteem. To Lee’s credit from childhood on he understood that the goal that matters most in life is not material, but spiritual. He later expressed his goal in such terms as the love of God, the forgiveness of Jesus, or (as I was always quick to add to his assent) Enlightenment.

The fact Lee was only partially successful does not diminish the heroic nature of his spiritual goal and the difficulty life gave him to meet it.

This brings me to the subject of Lee’s homosexuality. Our society may be approaching a day when the issue of a person’s sexual identity will be as irrelevant as hair color. However, Lee hated the fact that he was gay. His alcoholism helped lead him to a life of promiscuity that was as intense as the remorse he expressed the following day. The lesson Lee drew from his homosexuality, alcoholism, poor self-esteem was the conclusion that he had a call from God to become a Roman Catholic priest. Lee believed that his call would make it possible for him to transform his self-loathing to benefit others like himself. Lee believed he had G0d’s call to minister to gay men who felt they had been abandoned by God because of their sexual orientation. This belief became clearest to Lee in New York when the AIDS epidemic was at its worst. In the 1970s, Lee had become a novitiate for a Jesuit order in Philadelphia (http://www.jesuitcenter.org/grounds.htm) but he needed to return to the secular world for a while. When he emerged from the AIDS epidemic (which exacerbated his alcoholism), he was HIV positive. When he applied to join a holy order in Boston, the order rejected him (after serious consideration) because it could not afford the insurance risk. I believe that decision was a tragedy. Lee would have been a great priest and the satisfaction that comes from heeding the call of God and successfully ministering to his flock would have nourished him to the point where he would be with us today. .

No eulogy of Lee’s life would be complete with a discussion of clothing and style. Clothing served many functions for Lee. He could have written Dress for Success, which he once recommended to me with a long list of seriously considered exceptions. When Walter Mondale was vice president and Lee was an executive at Brooks Brothers, Lee accompanied the tailor to the Office of the Vice President and for months regaled friends with the story of how he saw the Vice President in his underwear. Powerful men from both political parties stopped by Brooks to ask Lee’s advice on what to wear.

There were times when his self-contempt got the better of him and he would sit on his Door Store chair in the chocolate brown living room in Virginia and list just how much it had cost for him to dress himself—designer suit, shoes, tie, shirt plus watch and other jewelry “$2500 plus.”

Then, he would compare how he looked to how he felt about his value. “It cost me $2500 to walk across the street, but I don’t feel like I’m worth 2 cents.”

But there were other times—times when getting dressed became like some Japanese tea ceremony, when Lee effortlessly put himself together, getting the tie just right, attending to the crease in his trousers, smoothing out his shirt collar, when Lee achieved his own self-realized style that transcended form—a style whose admirability nobody could deny. I choose to believe that Lee is now in a place where he no longer feels the necessity to deny his own worth or to change his name again.

--30--

Lee and I at my bachelors' party, October, 1981, National Press Club, Washington, DC

State College, PA - Celebrate Hemingway, the Running of the Bulls and the Scholarship that Makes Penn State More Than a Party School

State College, PA - Celebrate Hemingway, the Running of the Bulls and the Scholarship that Makes Penn State More Than a Party School

Poem: Last Year's Gift

It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any sort of

self-deception or illusion that a light will develop out of events, by which the path to

success may be recognized.

--The I Ching or Book of Changes, Wilhelm Baynes edition, Princeton University Press

LAST YEAR'S GIFT

You are the last in line.

It is a short line to be sure,

but the sister in fiont of you requires much.

We all require much.

"More" is the single Oliver Twist word

that dominates reality.

You require more of me more

of me as a father

and as the image of what a loving man can be, should be, might be...

I am flawed flawed,

flawed, flawed.

My health is often precarious,

my energy limited,

my money gone,

my fiiends exasperated, tapped out, and overwhelmed,

my career prospects tarnished by the deficiencies of my past.

But I have a fast scooter

with two drop-in batteries that are fully charged.

"Speedy Solkoff" (as I fancy myself called) scooting through the streets of

     New York City

that can do wondrous things for my lame image.

Your mother and I decided to have you

or our conception of you

after the pathologist said I had cancer for the second time.

You were to be our commitment to life,

a reason for keeping ourselves

attached to the future at a time

when the past was hard and the present harder still.

You were born two months too early

stubbornly refusing to breathe before the nurses.

Later, relieved of your heart monitor

you crawled out of your crib

months before the nearly-perfect model established by your nearly-perfect sister

I thought, in darker moments, that Joanna would pour into you

the effort we had poured into her.

She would carry the tradition your mother and I had created;

her first steps would be

metaphorically, if not actually,

your first steps.

She would irradiate in you

the joy we had irradiated in her.

Hah. Double hah. Whatever I thought, I thought wrong.

I did not realize you were a second child with first child needs

no sister could satisfy no matter how Machiavellianly-perfect she

     imagines herself to be.

You did not turn out as I had expected (aimed)

and I am glad.
Somehow, you have become an embodiment of Zen archery wisdom.

You also did not get the gifts you deserve,

but, at least, I have a fast scooter

and the promises such speed can bring. Zoom.

I imagine you saying to Joanna,

"Of course, I am Dad's favorite"

as a method of making smoke come out of Joanna's ears.

Of course, you are wrong. You are not my favorite.

Nor is Joanna my favorite.
You are, instead, locked into a contest for love

that has only winners

as long as my batteries are charged,

the street cuts are not blocked with slush,

and I can earn child support.

Your love for me may be unconditional,

but I feel better knowing I am worthy of you--

of providing gifts more substantial than words.

--Dad

a.k.a. Joel Solkoff

Routes 95 South, 85 South, 85 North, 95 North, Here-and-there; at least a year late,

January, 2004

Poem: Difficult

In Africa, lion after lion fell before the Colonel’s artillery.  Rhinos, hippos, antelopes, wildebeests, and all manner of game were struck down, helpless as Democrats.  When a skeptical George Creel asked one of Theodore Roosevelt’s guides how the former President, “blind in one eye, and myopic in the other,” could hit any of the animals that he accumulated on his safaris, the guide explained that when the Colonel leveled his, three other guns were also leveled, “ Mr. Roosevelt had a fairly good idea of the general direction, but we couldn’t take chances with the life of a former president.”

n  from America Enters the World by Page Smith

Difficult

You are difficult.

You are difficult.

Just because I love you…

Just because….

You were named Joanna

during the eye of a hurricane.

Your name meant passion.

You became the center of our lives.

I remember driving around Washington listening to your fetal heartbeat.

Tick.

Your Mother carried you inside her to the Great Wall of China,

the only humanly crafted object one can see from outer space.

Watching Diana win over the Chinese--winning slowly and persistently--gave a sense of your mother’s

     power and talent.

Diana received for excellence a US Department of Commerce specially minted coin presented by

     the Sectary of Commerce himself.

My life also became less interesting.

Remember you were the show.

We wanted Amelia because we so much admired your performance, we wanted more?

More?

I see you on the grounds of the National Arboretum.

You have a large ball in your hand

and are wearing an endearing look caught--as a perfect image.

Why are all the photographs we make of you perfect?

Were you an error-proof model in a previous life?

You are too close to me to write about you clearly.

I love you too much for dispassion.

I am who I am--the fellow who is there for you when you are about to trip. 

I am the fellow who anticipates danger and attempts to avert it.

Why is it the father-daughter/parent-child language’s sentiment is so sugary sweet in its

     sentimentality?

We both admit that we love each other.

Does that mean we are members of some special covenant?

You are quiet with me; you are angry; you are accusing, you are a number of words and paragraphs ending with the encoded words “and I’m glad to see you.”

I know you.

                                   -- Joel Solkoff

May, 2003, Durham, NC

A Nearly-Successful Attempt to Write the Perfect Role for Jacqueline Bisset—An Appreciation of “Mystery” Writer Ross Thomas

 “Kissing her, Stallings decided, was like kissing your first older woman—the one with all the wicked experience. He then decided not to decide anything else and simply go along with whatever happened except that what happened was far from simple. Instead, it was intricate, a trifle wild, totally sensual and innovative even to Stallings who thought, until now, that he long ago had crossed his last sexual frontier. At one point he experienced a miser’s glow when he realized that this night in this bed in suite 542 of the Manila Hotel would turn into his main account at the Bank of Fantasy—and that he could draw on it without limit for as long as he lived.”

I like the fact that Ross Thomas, often described as a “mystery” author, capitalized Bank of Fantasy in the previous paragraph. Yes, many of Thomas’ 25 books were published by The Mysterious Press and Thomas twice received the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award. [See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Thomas_(author).] Yet, when I think of the term mystery, I think of the 12 novels of S.S. Van Dine, published in the 1920’s and 30’s, whose main character is the rich and disarmingly pretentious Philo Vance. Vance’s name became a synonym for the murder mystery sleuth who gathers the suspects in one room and points to the killer. In a murder mystery, the plot centers on a dead body and the action revolves around solving who committed the murder.

The erotic excerpt in the first paragraph of this blog posting is from Out on the Rim, published in 1987, a year after Ferdinand Marcos went into exile and Corazon Aquino took power in the Philippines. Out on the Rim is the story of a plot to bribe a left-wing Philippine guerilla leader with $5 million to stop fighting. If Alejandro Espiritu (whom everyone not speaking Tagalog calls Al) retires, it will add to the stability of the new Aquino regime which needs all the stability it can get. As with Thomas’ other work, there may be a gratuitous dead body here or there, but the focus is not on solving a murder, but on stealing the money or getting involved in some other nefarious scheme.

When Thomas died in December, 1995, The New York Times obituary headline described him as an “Author of Stylish Political Thrillers.” The Times said, “The writer Stephen King, noting Mr. Ross’s gift for character and witty dialogue, once called him ‘the Jane Austen of the political espionage story.’ Other critics place him in the hard-boiled tradition of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.”

This is an appreciation of Ross Thomas whose fictional characters befriended me in times of personal disasters, such as radiation treatment for cancer and divorce, in a way that the heavy hitters in fiction could not do. The importance of light fiction was pressed home to me after my first divorce when I tried to ameliorate the pain by reading Henry James’ stylistically brilliant, low-on-action Wings of a Dove. It didn’t work.

Recovering from my second divorce, I read Ross Thomas, most notably; The Fools in Town Are On Our Side (1970). The main character Lucifer C. Dye has just been fired from a boutique intelligence agency known only as Section Two (definitely not the CIA). Dye is hired by Victor Orcutt Associates, a small company profiting from urban corruption. Orcutt hires Dye “to corrupt me a city.” When their city is sufficiently corrupted, the company’s reputedly reform-minded clients plan to take over after the fast-approaching municipal election.

Specifically, this posting is an appreciation of Thomas’ minor characters. The lovers who begin this article are good examples. Booth Stallings is the author of a book on terrorism and a Washington consultant. Georgia Blue is a cashiered Secret Service Agent clandestinely in touch with Imelda Marcos.

At the beginning of the novel Stallings first admires Georgia Blue from afar at D.C.’s stuffy Hotel Madison where he is waiting for power broker Harry Crites:

 “Harry Crites was twenty-two minutes late when the muscle walked into the Madison and read the lobby with the standard quick not quite bored glance that flitted over Booth Stallings, lingered for a moment on the two Saudis, counted the help and marked the spare exists. After that the muscle gave her left earlobe a slight tug, as if checking the small gold earring.

“Booth Stallings immediately nominated her for one of the three most striking women he had ever seen. Her immense poise made him peg her age at thirty-two or thirty three. But he knew he could be five years off either way because of the way she moved, which was like a young athlete with eight prime years still ahead of her.”

 My use of the term minor character might be better understood if we use the concept of fifth business employed by the late Canadian novelist Robertson Davies. Davies quotes Thomas Overskou: “’Those roles which, being neither those of Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain but which were nonetheless essential to bring about the Recognition or the dénouement, were called the Fifth Business in drama and opera companies…’” Davies observed that fifth business characters did not necessarily have glamorous roles; they had steady work because the plot could not continue without them.

So, well defined are Thomas’ minor/fifth business characters that it is possible to describe the plot of Out on the Rim without ever mentioning the book’s complex main characters. Crites hires Stallings because during World War II Stallings fought against the Japanese side-by-side with Al. Crites says that because Al knows Stallings and trusts him, Stallings is in an excellent position to bribe Al. Stallings negotiates a $250,000 fee for doing so. Later that evening, instead of settling for the fee, Stallings decides to steal the entire $5 million and realizes that doing so will require help. He then begins to employ a group of shady characters, one of whom is Georgia Blue.

Jacqueline Bisset plays her own shady Ross Thomas minor character in the 1976 film St. Ives. As an aside, Bisset, who Newsweek Magazine once called, “the most beautiful actress of all times,” is a primary and unexpected motivating factor in my writing this appreciation, not only of Ross Thomas but also of Bisset. Her role in Rich and Famous (1981) came to mind one bleak 5 degree day here at State College, PA. For distraction, I ordered a stack of Jacqueline Bisset DVDs by mail.

When I began watching St. Ives, a name that seemed familiar, but not immediately recognizable, the realization that Charles Bronson was the star vexed me. Bronson is an actor who performs every role as if he were a character from a one-dimensional Mickey Spillane novel, playing the private detective who orders bar whiskey and calls women broads.

Then I read the following screen credit: “Based on the novel The Procane Chronicle by Oliver Bleeck.” This startled me. Oliver Bleeck is Ross Thomas’ pseudonym for a series of five novels about Philip St. Ives, who wrote a column about crooks, lowlifes, and unsavory characters until his newspaper folded. By chance, a loyal reader, a thief, asks his lawyer to hire St. Ives as a middleman to sell back stolen jewelry to its owners. The fee from the first effort as a go-between is so profitable that St. Ives is able to survive by performing his brief services 4 times a year.

The inept casting of Bronson, an incompetent screenplay, and rotten directing destroyed forever the chances of Jacqueline Bisset to play a great role in a great Ross Thomas-based film. The roles I had in mind for Bisset were comparable to Myrna Loy playing Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934) and Mary Astor playing Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941). Both movies were based on novels by Dashiell Hammett, a writer to whom Ross Thomas has been compared. The movies gave Hammett’s characters a magical power best illustrated by the fact that after seeing, for example, The Thin Man I have never again been able to reread the book without envisioning William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles. That is a good thing.

Seeking to torture myself by cataloging just how brutally Bronson had destroyed my dream for Ross Thomas and Jacqueline Bisset, I sought to obtain a copy of The Procane Chronicle. Following Thomas’ death all but one of his novels went out of print. Recently, there has been a small Thomas revival. St. Martin’s Press has been reissuing his novels, and scattershot appreciations continue to appear in print and on the web. However, The Procane Chronicle is still out of print and my used copy from a reader in Oregon arrived slowly in time for spring.

In The Procane Chronicle, St. Ives is hired to retrieve the detailed diaries of master thief Abner Procane. Procane’s diaries, referred to as leather-bound ledgers, detail each of his crimes and also serve as planning documentation for future jobs. After someone steals the ledgers from Procane’s safe, Procane fears that their disclosure could result in the police arresting him for his crimes or result in the necessity to abort a million dollar heist he has been planning for months.

Procane introduces St. Ives to Procane’s apprentice Janet Whistler. In the novel Thomas says about Whistler: “She was attractive enough if you liked tall, rangy girls with slender figures and easy, natural movements. I didn’t mind them.” The New York Times, reviewing Bisset’s performance in the role, says, “Finally, there is what must be the least explicit sex scene of the year, Miss Bisset sits down on [St. Ives’] bed smoldering. She puts one hand to her zipper and, believe it or not, the scene ends. Miss Bisset, who does wonderful things for silly roles and once in a while is allowed to do wonderful things for good ones, makes that unpulled zipper seem like an X-rating all by itself.”

St. Ives’ talented supporting cast, who sadly are unable to save this movie, also includes John Houseman, who plays Abner Procane, and Maximilian Schell, who plays a psychiatrist whom Procane consults with obsessively to make sure that Procane has not become the kind of criminal who likes to be caught.           

Early in the film Charles Bronson tells Jacqueline Bisset, in what is intended to be a flirtatious remark, “You have a lot of great looking bits and pieces.” As a 60 year-old I have special license to complain that part of the problem is the disparity in age between Bronson, then 55, and Bisset, then 32. There is no romantic chemistry between them (despite the fact the Bisset just can not help being sexy).   

Thomas’ St. Ives is in his late 30s, lives in a seedy New York hotel, and has a cynical, wisecracking manner that is engaging and appealing to a variety of fascinating women. New York characters often do not travel well when transported by directorial fiat to Los Angeles, thus making St. Ives’ quirkiness incomprehensible. Bronson lives in seedy Los Angeles hotel, but he also drives a new Jaguar.

Especially revealing is Bronson incomprehensible ambition. Thomas’ St. Ives proclaimed that his lack of ambition dominates his life. When Thomas’ St. Ives loses his job as a columnist, he does not write a novel. Writing novel is work. St. Ives prefers being a go-between because it lets him do nothing for most of the year.

By comparison, Bronson is portrayed as a columnist who quits his job (he does not lose it) to write a novel. When the movie begins, Bronson has already written three chapters. Throughout the film people ask Bronson how the book is going, something I would never do for fear that Bronson would shoot me and because I find it impossible to believe that Bronson could even start a novel. As for what a go-between actually does, the fundamental glue that holds the story together, Bronson is clueless. Sometimes he holds an airline bag filled with money; sometimes he doesn’t.

Still, I remain hopeful that additional movies will be made from Thomas’s work and Thomas’ characters will receive the respect they deserve. I am especially eager to see Georgia Blue on film, but have resigned myself to the likelihood that Bisset, now 63, will not be playing her.

In Rich and Famous, Bisset plays a fictionalized Susan Sontag standing by the fireplace in a California beach house passionately appreciating Marcel Proust, saying Proust was a genius with a brain full of nitroglycerine. My instant desire was to turn off the DVD, trudge through the snow, and obtain a copy of Remembrance of Things Past.

But that would be wrong. I have aches and pains I have not told you about. Meals on Wheels does not deliver madeleine. I have my loyalty to the characters of the mystery-espionage genre to protect, authors who have already demonstrated that I can rely upon them to see me through tough times, especially Ross Thomas, S.S. Van Dine, Rex Stout, Eric Ambler, and John le Carré.

--Joel Solkoff [written before the Presidential election of 2008, revived while reading Ross Thomas'  Missionary Stew to distract me from the way President Obama is destroying the ability of people who cannot walk to obtain power chairs and scooters from Medicare]