By Stuart Mitchner
This week’s working title was “Marilyn Monroe at 100” when I got the news about Dolly Parton, who died at 80 on August 25. Monroe died on August 26, 64 years ago. Parton is on record as an admirer (“I always loved Marilyn Monroe”), and her fans have noted a physical resemblance between the two, posting photographs as evidence on Instagram.
I thought of Parton while rereading a passage from Monroe’s unfinished memoir, My Story, in which she dreams of having a child she’ll bring up “without lies. Nobody will tell her lies about anything. And I’ll answer all her questions. If I don’t know the answers I’ll go to an encyclopedia and look them up. I’ll tell her whatever she wants to know — about love, about sex, about everything! But chiefly, no lies! No lies about there being a Santa Claus or about the world being full of noble and honorable people all eager to help each other and do good to each other. I’ll tell her there are honor and goodness in the world, the same as there are diamonds and radium.”
I could imagine Dolly Parton nodding along with that spirited statement, at least up to the last sentence, a reminder that the book was being dictated to Academy Award-winning screenwriter Ben Hecht. And I can also imagine a touch of Dolly in Marilyn’s playing of Roslyn in The Misfits, Lorelei in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and the saloon singer in The River of No Return who ends up in a man’s shirt and blue jeans, her hair tied back, helping Robert Mitchum and his young son steer a raft through deadly rapids.
The Song Never Ends
I’ve heard Taylor Swift’s tribute to her lifelong muse and inspiration half a dozen times now and the sheer passion of the singing is so stirringly, searingly powerful — it’s as if Dolly were singing along with her. In fact, it took hearing “Coat of Many Colors and Heart of Gold” to make me begin to comprehend the dimensions of the loss that all the other tributes have been trying to describe. Swift sends the key phrases soaring — “In a coat of many colors she walked through every storm … with a heart of gold beneath the glitter … every thread became a memory, every tear became a song … the little girl who dreamed among the mountains showed the world where we belong … And when the last guitar is quiet and the stage lights disappear, the songs will keep on traveling through the hearts that hold them near … Somewhere a child will hear that music, pick up the dream and carry on. In a coat of many colors, she turned a life of simple beginnings into something like a work of art … a song that never ends….”
Dolly in Bloomington
The southern Indiana college town I grew up in was the scene of a candlelight vigil at the campus gate Saturday night. The Dolly Parton memorial combined open mic, live music, and personal stories. According to a story in Tuesday’s Bloomingtonian, “Attendees sang some of her best-known songs, shared memories, and reflected on how her work spoke to people raised in poverty, those experiencing grief, and anyone who had ever felt pressure to become someone other than themselves.”
The event was organized by Sarah Phillips, an Indiana University faculty member who teaches a course called “The Anthropology of Dolly Parton” and told the crowd Dolly was “all about being yourself, accepting others, and loving everybody.”
Pooh Returns
When I hear Dolly Parton singing, magnificently, “It’s Too Late to Love Me Now,” I’m thinking it’s never too late to love her music. But I also have Winnie-the-Pooh, my friend from last week’s column, reminding me of his illustrious fellow centenarians for whom there was no room last Wednesday, beginning with Marilyn Monroe, but also including Allen Ginsberg, John Coltrane, and Harry Dean Stanton. Plus this Wednesday, September 2, is jazz master Horace Silver’s 98th birthday. Maybe I can fit all these people into the same night club as I did more than a decade ago, this time with Horace at the piano, but what a guest list of those who left us on August 26. including Charles Boyer, Lon Chaney, Gail Russell, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Lotte Lenya. Probably I should put the party on hold until this New Year’s Eve.
Hemingway’s Last Line
Pooh, who will be 100 on October 14, thinks I need to say more about the ending of The Sun Also Rises. He wants to know what Jake Barnes is talking about after the woman he loves says “we could have had such a damned good time together” and he says, “Isn’t it pretty to think so.” Since my clone of A.A. Milne’s Bear of Very Little Brain likes to say “Show Pooh and Pooh knows,” I showed him a copy of the 1949 Bantam paperback with Jake on the cover looking deeply perplexed. The blurb at the top asks, “Could He Live Without The Power to Love?” A quote from the book displayed on both the front and the back says, “It was a rotten way to be wounded.” The blurb adds, “Only Hemingway, master of unspoken secrets, could successfully tackle this daring theme.”
A “Teddybear Quality”
Believe it or not, Pooh, Piglet, Owl, Eeyore, and company are also admirers of Allen Ginsberg, who was born two days after Monroe on June 3, 1926 in Newark, N.J. I can still remember Pooh’s unseemly behavior at a poetry reading in the 1970s, cheering as Ginsberg shared a salad dressing recipe. A glimpse of the moment shows up in “Ego Confessions,” after Ginsberg “overthrew the CIA with a silent thought” and provided a recipe “for salad dressing 3 parts oil one part vinegar much garlic and honey — a spoonful.”
The April 6, 1997 New York Times obituary commented, “If his early verse shocked Eisenhower’s America with its celebration of homosexuality and drugs, his involvement in protests kept him in the public eye and fed ammunition to his critics. But through it all, Mr. Ginsberg maintained a sort of teddy bear quality that deflected much of the indignation he inspired.”
John Coltrane
Born September 23, 1926, John Coltrane arrived for me in 1961, the year when the siren song of his soprano sax seemed to be soaring out of every window in Greenwich Village. The year began in January at the Apollo in Harlem as the screen went dark after a grade-B jungle movie and Coltrane stepped into the spotlight and proceeded to reinvent “My Favorite Things,” that catchy little Rodgers and Hammerstein number from The Sound of Music, and by mid-summer at the Village Gate, when he and his group have become a phenomenon, you can barely see him through the cigarette smoke, a heroic figure striving in the haze, the embodiment of the quest, of every human reaching beyond the grasp of possibility, living, dying, and coming back from the dead. Although several versions of “My Favorite Things,” live and otherwise, are available on vinyl and CD, the excitement has never really been captured on record, at least none that I’ve heard.
Parton’s Neighbor
Born 100 years ago, July 14, 1926, in West Irvine, Kentucky, Harry Dean Stanton played many parts, but his one lead was Paris, Texas (1984), a masterpiece he shared with director Wim Wenders. According to Stanton’s Wikipedia, playwright Sam Shepherd, who wrote the screenplay, ran into him in a Santa Fe, New Mexico, bar in 1983. “I was telling him I was sick of the roles I was playing,” Stanton recalled in a 1986 interview. “I told him I wanted to play something of some beauty or sensitivity. I had no inkling he was considering me for the lead in his movie.” According to a Turner Classic Movies “Overview,” the role of Travis called for Stanton “to remain largely silent … as a lost, broken soul trying to put his life back together and reunite with his estranged family after having vanished years earlier.”
Stanton also occasionally toured nightclubs as a singer and guitarist, playing mostly country-inflected cover tunes. In 1987, he starred in a music video for “Those Memories of You,” a song recorded by Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, and his Tennessee neighbor, Dolly Parton.