Born on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1821, a Scorpio with Sagittarius ascendant and the moon in Gemini, Fyodor Dostoevsky was, according to Father Zossima, a prophet greater than all his sons, including the immortal Karamazovs: the saintly Alyosha; the brilliant Ivan; and Dmitri, the sensualist, who is the customer that commercials have in mind when they advertise the happiness of bottles of beer on a beach.
Dusty taught Nietzsche a thing or two about suicidal nihilism and the mirage of total permission granted by an absent deity. In Crime and Punishment, he perfected the inverted detective story, in which the culprit commits the crime before our eyes and it’s only a matter of time before the detective nabs him and send him to Siberia. The transcendent spirit of Christianity, known only to those compulsive sinners who have descended to rock bottom, pervades Dostoevsky’s novels. He has the craziness of the true believer. Murder is forgivable; a loveless marriage, isn’t.
Nowhere is the gap between the writer and the man wider than it is with the author of The Brothers Karamazov. The books are sublime, but the man’s behavior was beneath contempt. Thomas Mann, who admired Dostoevsky’s work, wrote, “In foreign countries, in Baden-Baden and in Wiesbaden, where he had to flee from his creditors, he tried to ameliorate his impoverishment by gambling, only in most instances to complete his ruin. Then he would write begging letters in which he speaks the language of misery of the most depraved characters of his novels.” Somerset Maugham, another admirer, wrote, “Dostoevsky was vain, envious, quarrelsome, suspicious, cringing, selfish, boastful, unreliable, inconsiderate, narrow and intolerant.”
Strakhov said: In Switzerland, in my presence, he treated his servant so badly that the man revolted and said to him: “But I too am a man!"
Dostoevsky suffered from epileptic fits (see The Idiot) but did well in his examinations though he loathed mathematics. On April 23, 1849, the twenty-seven-year-old Dostoevsky was arrested for belonging to a group of crazy liberal loudmouth intellectuals. He was sent to Siberia, was sentenced to be executed, and faced a firing squad in the freezing rain. But it turned out to be a mock execution and Dostoevsky went back to his cell the shape and size of a coffin convinced that it is better and wiser to be a saintly fool in Siberia than to pimp in St. Petersburg. Released in 1854, he wrote Crime and Punishment in a hurry because he needed the money to cover his gambling debts. He was a compulsive gambler. He borrowed and lost thousands and thousands of Roubles. Confronted by Sartre on the matter of his anti-Semitism, he reminded the Frenchman that he was not alone in this particular vice, naming Ezra Pound and Edgar Degas as similarly stupid on the subject of Jews.
There are three key psychological facts to consider about Dusty:
(1) He could have died but didn't.
(2) Like the survivor of a game of Russian roulette, he became a gambling addict. He lost and lost and lost. He had no shame. He begged for money and promptly squandered it at the tables.
(3) The silver lining is that, to pay off his debts, he wrote his majestic novels.
Or, in the form of a tanka, two haiku conjoined by a two-line stanza, seven syllables per line:
In Siberia,
sixth in line to be shot, he
lived to tell the tale.
Life was a gamble and he
couldn’t stop gambling; he lost,
lost more, borrowed, lost
most, wrote books to pay debts; lost,
debts, books, debts, books; debts.
There are, according to the Passover Haggadah, four sons: wise, wicked, simple, and clueless. Dostoevsky amends that. The sons fall into four categories: the beautiful idiot, the intellectual who kills himself, the guy you’d like to have beers with, and the bastard who believes that the fault lies not in the stars but in ourselves that we are underlings.
Natasha Issacher likes to say you can understand the history of nineteenth century Russia by reading two books, Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. George Steiner observed that Tolstoy was epic, Dostoevsky, dramatic. Tolstoy believed in history, the people, and the crimson sunrise. Dostoevsky believed in the soul of a peasant. Tolstoy arrived at humility by logic; Dostoevsky, out of desperation.
In War and Peace, the growth of Pierre’s consciousness begins when he overcomes his youthful enthusiasm for Napoleon. But the Corsican military genius who crowned himself emperor remained the model for young men who believed that success proceeded not from lineage but from will. If neither the army nor the clergy allowed him to rise, he would nevertheless climb ladders to reach his lady’s boudoir; he might be poor but theoretically he could be a genius, whose every act is justified because it was he who committed it. Behind the formation of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, as behind Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, stands the Little Corporal who equaled the French Revolution itself in importance. Napoleon made the whole century happen either in his name or against it.
Dostoevsky's birth pattern -- a full house, with only one empty chamber -- is replicated exactly on the second day of August 1914. On this slender bit of stellar evidence, Lucy Garnet spun out Backstory, the six-part series based on the fantasy that World War I was a bloody allegory of the Gotterdammerung that hangs over every page of The Brothers Karamazov.
The celestial mechanics of Saturn, Neptune, and Pluto intimate that Dostoevsky’s birth would coincide with the end of a war, and indeed, the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, which would have been the novelist's ninety-seventh birthday. From the last page of Garnet’s Backstory:
The men crowded around the ashtray. The bloodshed had ceased. The flu that succeeded it was deadly. The ambassador fumed. If only the ministers of war and culture had heeded the warnings of The Grand Inquisitor. Peace would have come four years sooner if, in the prison of his days, the free man had learned to praise. The mood was grim. The German minister smoked a Turkish cigarette in a jade holder. "Nothing ever happens in Brussels," he shrugged.
The more you learn about Dusty, the less savory he is: a reactionary; an anti-Semite. He betrayed you, me, anyone. To Turgenev, who had lent him money, he said, “I despise myself profoundly,” but couldn’t resist adding, “‘But I despise you still more.” What an asshole. Nevertheless the pathos was real; he understood that a widow might make her children dance on the street for an extra kopek. The sphere of the novelist’s soul exceeded that of his consciousness. In Papa Karamazov he devised the universally despised victim, the ideal corpse. Which of the three brothers did it, or was there a fourth?
E. M. Forster wrote that George Eliot was a preacher while Dostoevsky was a prophet. As proof, he focused on a singular moment in The Brothers Karamazov. Dmitri Karamazov, accused of killing the old man, has strange dreams that leave him oddly refreshed and grateful to his prison captors who made him comfortable when he slept. It is (though Forster doesn’t put it this way) at this precise moment that Dostoevsky takes over your mind and fills it with the most paranoid impulses soothed by the benevolent kiss of a woman with the heart of a whore.
Therefore, on the day of Dusty’s death, in graveyards in the Ukraine and Byelorussia, in Latvia and Estonia, I urge school children in tatters to join me and shout, "Hooray for Karamazov!"
-- David Lehman
Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!
If in your bright leaves we would read the fate
Of men and empires 'tis to be forgiven
That in our aspirations to be great,
Our destinies o'erleap their mortal state
And claim a kindred with you; for ye are
A beauty and a mystery, and create
In us such love and reverence from afar,
That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves a star.
Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
See the astrological profile of John Keats here
Shelley was a classic Leo who was long thought erroneously to have Taurus rising. According to Mark Shulgasser, "the generally accepted birth time has placed 26 Sagittarius on the ascendant, which makes so much more sense, and then Jupiter is the chart ruler, squeezed between Neptune and Mars in the 9th house, a perfect set-up for death by drowning in a foreign country.”
Born 4 August 1792, Shelley was the middle man in the greatest double-play combination of all time, Keats to Shelley to Byron. He had the confidence of a madman and he was idealistic, with Saturn, Neptune, and Venus dominant among his planets and Libra, Leo, and Taurus among his signs. He shares his birthday with Louis ("the trumpet of a prophecy") Armstrong, which gives you some idea of his influence. He may be said to have presaged Walter Pater's proclamation that music is the art to which all others aspire.
Barack Obama was also born on August 4th. Other astrological birthday cousins include Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother; David Raksin, who composed "Laura"; Maurice "the Rocket" Richard of the dynastic Montreal Canadiens; Cleon Jones of the 1969 Mets; Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, Louis Vuitton and more TV actresses, rappers, and reality stars than you can shake a stick at. All or some may be said to share the Leonine spark of the author of “Ode to the West Wind,” an autumnal poem of urgency if ever there was one, a call to action, summoning wind and wave to a romantic storm, unlike the serenity Keats beheld in the season of mist and mellow fruitfulness.
The symmetry in Shelley's natal chart is fearless. He is a man of heroic temper -- without Byron's lusty humor or Keats's morbid sensuality but with a power of breath equal to the wind. He died, fittingly, in a squall, at sea. The fire and earth in his chart were vanquished by the elements of water and air. His moon was in Pisces, his Venus in Leo.
Shelley made love to women sincerely, with attentive care, and wrote poems to her, whatever her name was, Jane or Mary or the third one. He didn't "hold" with monogamy. He went to University College in Oxford and got sent down for writing "The Necessity of Atheism." He was a strong swimmer, though this ability availed him naught in the end. His heterodox views made Shelley the hero of wannabe poets for a century after his death. To get a flavor of that old romantic aura, read Andre Maurois's wonderful bio, Ariel. Alas, Shelley's literary reputation took a hit from Arnold, an even more wounding thrust from Eliot, and then came the backlash in full intensity, with Leavis getting the credit for finishing the job.
Everyone at the campfire had to tell a spooky story. Byron and Shelley had good ones, but Mary Shelley won with Frankenstein. They were in Switzerland. Who was Jane? He serenaded her with a guitar.The lyrics were lovely. She kept his picture in a locket along with a lock of his hair, and everything that he touched acquired posthumous value. Henry James's "The Aspern Papers" centers on the archive of a poet modeled after Shelley and what a single-minded biographer will do to get at it. History has been kinder to Keats's reputation than to Shelley's, but it used to be that if you mentioned one you had to mention the other or you would have bad luck all day, the same as with James and Edith Wharton.
If Dante had been reborn as an Englishman, it would have been in the person of Shelley, who venerated Rousseau. Socrates may have propounded the parable of the cave with Shelley in mind. Rousseau and Shelley spent an afternoon in the cave, writing notes on what they witnessed. After emerging outside into the fading daylight, they made a run for a canoe and paddled their way back to their home ship. Then, over calvados, they compared notes and, in the weeks that followed, Shelley set about transforming the notes into five hundred lines of terza rima.
Shelley looked liked a poet. Coleridge was his superior intellectually; Keats, always better loved, was Milton's true heir, able to pack as much sensual pleasure in a line of verse as pentameter allowed; Blake was crazier; Byron funnier; and Wordsworth captured, all in all, the spirit of the age more successfully than any of his contemporaries. But Shelley was the closest thing to a romantic revolutionary in the lot. Back in the day, a cameo of the poet in an open-necked shirt would have been the perfect talisman for English majors at Bryn Mawr or Oberlin. When Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man sees a woman on the beach and composes a villanelle about her image, it is in the manner of Shelley.
For a great poet Shelley wrote some really bad lines, in which he stumbles and falls and bleeds in his efforts to shed his corporeal self and merge his romantic soul with the wind that is the creative breath of God. His skylark sings to us less melodiously than Keats's nightingale, but that's paradox for you -- that Shelley, who was given to seeing things in retrospect, would oddly favor the bird of early morn.
On July 8, 1822, Shelley and his friend Edward Williams went out boating in Italy and drowned. They were going to burn the bodies, but Shelley's heart defied the flames, refused to burn, and was rescued by Edward Trelawny. Byron said that his much misunderstood friend was the greatest man he had ever known. -- DL
Antigone, a classic Aries with Sagittarius rising and a fair amount of Leo and Gemini in her chart, epitomized the feminine powers extolled by Ovid in the Metamorphoses. She was very beautiful, with a profile like that of Greer Garson in Pride of Prejudice,and a force of personality that overshadowed that of her worthy husband, Walter Pidgeon, the perfect number two man, in Mrs. Miniver. He could cross the Channel in his little skiff to keep the evacuation of Dunkirk; she beat that by single-handedly disarming a German soldier.
In Chinese astrology, Antigone was born in the year of the rat, a sign that explains her quality of eagerness and readiness. The rat is the first of the twelve Chinese signs, representing industry, not disgusting vermin. As a matter of honor, a female rat will not procrastinate but will use trickery if need be to achieve her ends. In the competition to cross the river, the rat jumped on the back of the ox, and got off before the shore, winning the race over the tiger, the snake, etc. What she didn't realize was that she (as a water sign) would need to unite with a cheerful, extroverted goat (earth). The goat doesn't always communicate his needs, but if he is able to keep up with the charismatic rat, the relationship will endure.
The ghost of Antigone continues to roam. She rates very high in intensity of sex appeal, the passion she arouses varying directly with the likelihood of no consummation. Her Capricorn asleep in midheaven January and her Mars victorious in April are usually cited as reasons for this particular enchantress's eternal fate, making her a symbol of resolve and heroic resistance, who would live to an grand old age if she weren't willing to die for the sake of a principle, then outlive her death as a myth.
Antigone lived centuries before the Gregorian calendar regularized things. Consequently, the exact date of her birth is the subject of controversy, with some favoring April 9 and others April 12.
Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, was also his sister. As Sophocles recounts in the third play in his Oedipus cycle, she rebelled against the tyrannical rule of Creon, who didn’t let her bury the dead body of her brother Polyneices. In a fierce display of hubris Creon ignored the contradiction between his son Haemon’s love for Antigone and his own authority to boss his son around. Everyone died in the Greek manner, Haemon killing Antigone and then taking his own life.
If it was Creon’s tragedy, it would have been a bore and a box office failure. Just as Shakespeare preferred dealing with Antony and Brutus rather than wasting his genius on Caesar, so Sophocles cast into the starry heavens the vision of Antigone as loyal, faithful, rebellious, loving, self-sacrificing, steadfast. To be a rebel while proving your loyalty is a consummation devoutly be to be wished, and Antigone in Paris emerged as one of France’s most alluring leading ladies, a symbol of resistance against the Nazis during World War II.
As Sophocles maintained, one look at the world would prompt any baby to return instantly to the womb. Making the best of a bad business, Antigone decided to act even at the expense of her own life and love, thus ensuring that she would always be the young attractive woman she was at the time of her death. Did she want children? No one thought to ask. But her treatment of her brother came to a high erotic climax without violating the tabu on incest.
According to Indian astrology, merely bearing the name Antigone gives you a leg up on the trail to creativity.
When Antigone’s moon is in Jupiter or Neptune, she is willing to engage in moral dilemmas in the public eye. Of average height, with brilliant eyes, a mesmerizing oval face.
Asteroid 129, named after her, was discovered on February 5, 1873 at Clinton, NY by C. H. F. Peters. It is about 84 miles in diameter.
‘TIS the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
The world’s whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.
Study me then, you who shall lovers be:
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.
All others, from all things, draw all that’s good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ;
I, by Love’s limbec, am the grave
Of all, that’s nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown’d the whole world, us two ; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else ; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.
But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown ;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know ; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means ; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.
But I am none ; nor will my sun renew
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night’s festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is.
-- John Donne (1572- 1631)
"Considered by many to be the greatest of all Capricorn odes." -- Alastair Crowley
Born today, Grace Kelly was twenty-six when she married Prince Ranier and became the princess of Monaco. Thus ended a brief but magnificent cinematic career. Astrologically, her charm, beauty, and royalty are all prefigured in her chart: Scorpio is not only her birth sign but also her rising sign! Born on Philadelphia on November 11, 1929 -- on Veterans' Day, just two weeks after the stock market crashed -- Grace had the perfect first name, face, height (5'7), and acting chops. Her status as an Earth Snake (in Chinese astrology) with a magic number of 8 prefigured her fate. If only her moon had not been in Pisces, she might have lived a longer life; she died in a car crash in 1982, months shy of her fifty-third birthday. "I can't see myself as an old woman," she confided. "I will always be the model on the cover of Harper's Bazaar." Gracve Kelly shares her birthday with Demi Moore, Leonardo Di Caprio, and Dostoievsky.
Whether playing a quaker lady dressed in virginal white in the Wild West (High Noon), or lounging amid the leading luminaries of Newport society while Louis Armstrong plays his trumpet (High Society), Grace Kelly was one of the most glamorous of all the screen queens of the 1950s, a Harper's Bazaar cover girl who enjoys dinners at 21, vacations in St. Tropez, and knows how to plan a picnic or stand up to a killer. Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra sang to her. Did Cary Grant prefer her (in To Catch a Thief) to Ingrid Bergman (in Notorious)? Did Hitchcock? In Mogambo (1953), she competes with Ava Gardner for Clark Gable's affections. Little-known fact: Bennington College rejected her application because her mathematics scores were not up to snuff. Given the choice of playing against James Stewart in Rear Window or Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, she chose the former. That may be all ye know of her, and all ye need to know. --DL
At 3:15 in the morning, in London, England, one hundred and twenty-something years ago today, the great film director Alfred Hitchcock was born, a solid Leo with a macabre imagination (moon in Scorpio).
When August 13 falls on a Friday, as in 1993, 1999, and 2021,you may expect bats to fly in through the slightest opening in the bathroom window, and the phone will ring at 11 PM and it will be someone you have never met, who asks you for a job and sounds drunk. Hitchcock was short (5'5) and stout and perhaps unaware that he shared his birthday with both Annie Oakley and Fidel Castro.
There is a tremendous amount of fire in his natal chart (see below): more than 50%. This accounts for his energy, drive, ambition. The water in his chart, topping 18%, indicates a man of subtlety and sensitivity. He has three times as much yang as yin in his personality, and no one should be surprised to learn that a man whose dominant planets are the sun, Venus, and Mars may luxuriate in bathtubs in the English manner and have an almost phobic distrust of showers, which comes through in such movies as "Vertigo" (in which Kim Novak does not drown in the Pacific Ocean) and "Pyscho" (in which Janet Leigh meets her shocking fate behind a torn curtain). Leo, Sagittarius, and Scorpio are the predominant signs of a man whose self-confidence can lead him to commit the sin of pride. I hear that Janet Leigh greatly prefers baths to showers and has ever since working with Hitch.
A picture of the master of suspense emerges from a study of Hitchcock's chart. He is a Roman Catholic; a lover of blondes (especially American blondes); and a prankster of the imagination who knows that a straight face is best for effects either comic or scary and that the best way to get an actor and an actress to understand their parts as quarreling lovers is to handcuff them together and lock them in a room overnight, as in the filming of "The 39 Steps."
When he was a boy, Hitchcock's dad sent him to the local police constabulary with a note instructing the officer on duty to lock the boy in jail for a few hours. This experience had the desired effect on the lad, who worked out his guilt complex by dispatching heroes, heroines, and villains to their deaths from the top of a church tower or the Statue of Liberty; from a moving train, or in a wood stove, or by an attack of killer birds, or in an out-of-control merry-go-round at an amusement park, or by a nasty piece of goods who uses his necktie as a strangling device, or sometimes with a gun, a knife, or a pair of handy scissors. The leonine Hitchock had his sun and his Venus in Leo. This makes him a most logical man, a constant man, generous in his affections but domineering, and almost tyrannically loyal to his lovers and friends.
Given this man's stellar combination of assertive confidence and deep-seated guilt, it comes as no surprise to students of the great man's chart that (1) the great Hitchcock actors (male) tend to be old-fashioned types (James Stewart, Cary Grant) rather than the method-trained new breed; (2) in some (not all) of the best Hitchcock movies, the villain is either more interesting than the hero (Robert Walker versus Farley Granger in "Strangers on a Train"), suave and attractive(James Mason in "North by Northwest," Ray Milland in "Dial M for Murder") or exceptionally complicated in an attractive way (e.g., Joseph Cotten in "Shadow of a Doubt," the birds in "The Birds," the real imposter in "Spellbound")); and (3) the perfect Hitchcock heroines are Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Doris Day, Janet Leigh, Teresa Wright, and Tippi Hedren. Hitch shows us the craziness inside every man and his (almost invariably) blonde fantasy lady.
A tip of the fedora to Bernard Herrmann, a June Cancer, who wrote the music of Hitchcock's mind as well as soundtracks for such movies as "Citizen Kane" and Brian de Palma's underrated "Obsession." -- DL
Note: Readers of "astrological profiles" know that the use of astrological terms is laid on pretty thick but with tongue in cheek, firmly so, on the nervy assumption that the horoscope -- like the "haruspicate or scry," "sortilege, or tea leaves," playing cards, pentagrams, handwriting analysis, palm-reading, and the "preconscious terrors" of the dreaming mind in T. S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" -- may be a bust at prediction bur may turn out to be not only "usual pastimes and drugs" but the means of poetic exploration.
from the archive; first published August 13, 2015
Born to sing America’s all-time favorite movie song, Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow,” Judy Garland was as natural a Gemini as you will find – totally binary, loyal to a fault yet fickle, cheerful and proud yet sometimes suicidally desperate. She habitually came late to the set fortified with bottles of “Blue Nun,” “Liebfraumilch,” and similar white stuff, which tasted terrible but did the job.
On June 10, 1922, Judy Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at 6 AM. With her moon in Sagittarius, and her Mercury and Venus in Cancer (her rising sign), the great singer had the heart of a poet, the sensitivity of an eternal diva, and a really good voice. If only there had been more Virgo in her chart, and four inches more height, the girl who embodied Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have had greater career endurance. Great as her later work was, in the movies, in concert, or on TV with friends Sinatra and Martin, she peaked as a child actress. She is why the "Andy Hardy" movies are still worth watching. The absence of earth signs doomed her to a nervous disposition and the likelihood of an early death. The 2019 movie Judy did Judy no favors.
Born Frances Ethel Gumm, Judy craved the approval of father figures, was easily bruised by criticism, sometimes affected nonchalance but really cared very deeply about other people and wanted to be included in group activities. Her Saturn in Libra helps to explain her outstanding musical talent, and her will to succeed in motion pictures may be inferred from her midheaven in Pisces conjunct Uranus.
The death of Judy's father at age thirteen stunned the young actress, who eventually broke off relations with her mother. The amphetamines helped in the short run. She had five husbands and a torrid affair with lyricist Johnny Mercer when she was eighteen and he, thirty. He wrote the words of “That Old Black Magic” and “I Remember You” with her in mind.
An old astrological adage: The stars favor the stars. From the moment the teenage Garland sang to Clark Gable's photograph ("You Made Me Love You"), her astonishing rise to the heights of Hollywood glory was in the cards (Queen of Hearts high) as was, alas, the inevitability of internal conflicts and demons postponed but not resolved by the habitual use of narcotics. She was still in her teens when she and Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr sang as they danced along the yellow brick road leading to the wonderful wizard of Oz. That was in Technicolor. Already in the black-and-white of Kansas cornfields, she sang the anthem of eternal aspiration, “Over the Rainbow,” which was named the greatest song of the twentieth century in a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001.
As kids Judy and Mickey Rooney teamed up in movies, and their duet versions of “Our Love Affair” and “How About You?” are the best out there. She did “The Trolley Song” in one picture and “The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” in another. The two best versions of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," the best American Christmas song not writen by Jews, are hers and Sinatra's. She would have made a great Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s “Annie, Get Your Gun,” and we still have tape of the one song she did (“Doin’ a What Come Naturally”), but she was too fucked up to do the movie and the part went to Betty Hutton.
In Chinese astrology, Judy was born in the year of the dog. Her element is water. This is consistent with her destiny. Her relation to Minnesota mirrors that of Dorothy to Kansas except that there was no home to go back to. The three farm hands in the dream were almost recognizably there, surrounding her bed, when she awoke in Hollywood. Why did gay men have a thing about her? Because (a) they had good taste, (b) they could identify with her suffering, (c) they could admire her indomitable will, (d) they could smell the tragedy on her breath, (e) even macho boys could identify themselves with Dorothy Gale, (f) where gossip and conjecture overlap, anything goes, or (g) all, some, or none of the above. And remember: she was the mother of Liza Minelli, and all you need to do is see the 2014 revival of Cabaret (2014), good as it is, and compare Michelle Williams’s performance as Sally Bowles with that of Liza in the 1972 movie, and you will see the difference between an actress who is trying as hard as she can and a natural-born diva, with the vocal cords of a heroine and the soul of Judy Garland’s daughter.
In the 1960s Judy was hell on wheels to work with, if Mel Tormé's account in The Other Side of the Rainbow is to be trusted. Mel Tormé was the music director on her short-lived television program, “The Judy Garland Show” on CBS, and Tormé says she tormented him. Judy would call you in the middle of the night, make you come over and hold her hand, make capricious decisions, stand up guest stars like Lena Horne, skip rehearsals, tell fart jokes on the set. On the other hand she was who she was, and you loved her when she lifted her glass and said “l’chayem.” She was so earnest you couldn’t help pulling for her. “This television jazz is all new to me,” she said. “The Blue Lady helps to get my heart started.” She couldn’t stand what she called the Smothers’ Brothers “goyishe humor,” and the show had other guests of that ilk. But when Barbra Streisand was the guest star, it was incredible. The two divas did a duet of “Get Happy” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” that you can listen to over and over again – it is the ideal rendering of two of the Depression’s enduring hits.
Judy sang and danced with Gene Kelly (“For Me and My Gal”) and with Fred Astaire (“Easter Parade”), and the saints of St. Louis marched in and sang "The Trolley Song" in unison on June 22, 1969, the day of her death. She had a natural talent for the Al Jolson songbook ("After You've Gone"). At Carnegie Hall in 1961, with composer Harold Arlen in the audience, she sang "Get Happy," "Stormy Weather," "The Man That Got Away," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Five Grammy awards! She was dead at 46.
If Judy and Frank Sinatra had been lovers, they would have scored very high in passion, high in intimacy, average in synergy, and below average in commitment.
Louis Armstrong was born on July 4, 1900 if you believe him or August 4, 1901 if you believe your lying eyes. Let's assume the latter as astrologically valid. A Leo, then, with Aries rising, Aries in his moon, New Orleans as his native city, and a lot of moon in his chart, and what you get is a born performer and, with significant celestial activity in Capricorn to keep him grounded, an entertainer who will never lose his popularity because he knows his public and regards himself as an instrument through which the Lord expresses his moody blues and swinging jazz. Music is supreme in his soul and his rejection of be-bop must be understood in this context. He shares a birthday with Shelley. Whom did you think that poet was evoking when he wrote, "Be through my lips to unawakened earth / The trumpet of a prophecy"? Not Dizzy or Miles, I can tell you that, but the old cornet player from the Back O' Town section (Jane Alley) in N.O. Also born on August 4 was Barack Obama. Make of that what you will.
Satchmo should be on anyone's list of great Philo-semites. Just read "Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family," the keynote piece in Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words, Satch's selected writings (edited by well-named Duke professor Thomas Brothers and published in 1999 by Oxford UP). Others on the list of great Philo-semites are Nabokov and Emile Zola and. . . somebody please help me complete this sentence.
Louis loved the Karnofsky family that gave him his first job and encouraged his study of music. "I had a long time admiration for the Jewish People. Especially with their long time of courage, takin So Much Abuse for so long. I was only Seven years old but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the White Folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for." Notice the idiosyncratic and very deliberate use of italics and caps, his favorite emphasizers. Louis was a writer; he took his punctuation seriously, he took his typewriter wherever he went, and he was always going; he loved typing even more than swimming. He also loved Jewish food, including matzos. The Karnofskys operated a mobile rag and bone shop, and Louis played a little tin horn on the junk wagon. "When I reached the age of eleven I began to realize it was the Jewish family who instilled in me Singing from the heart." He wore a star of David around his neck.
The blues came naturally to him. The best recording of the Arlen and Koehler standard, "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," is Armstrong's, with voice and with trumpet. Listen to "West End Blues," "St Louis Blues," "St James's Infirmary," "Basin Street Blues" as performed by the Hot Five with Earl "Fatha" Hines on piano. You listen and you know why "saint" is in the title of so many blues. At the same time -- and here's where Louis's Leo stands up and takes a bow -- he (voice, trumpet) makes happiness real. And after embodying Jazz as a style, a phenomenon, and a musical idiom in the 1920s -- I mean "Cornet Chop Suey," "Potato Head Blues," "Struttin' with Some Barbecue" with Lil Hardin on piano, and "Knockin' a Jug" with Jack Teagarden on trombone -- Louis went on to swing the American Songbook: "On the Sunny Side of the Street." "Jeepers Creepers," "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," the amazing sides with Ella. The meaning of swing is in the lovelight burning in his heart. In 1967 he concludes a heartfelt letter to a jazz-loving Marine in Vietnam by typing out Hammerstein's lyric for "You'll Never Walk Alone." I once heard Louis recite the words of this song from Carousel, not sing them, just recite them, with the melody playing softly in the background, and there was not a dry eye in the house.
He loved gage and smoked it every day. He thought "gage," "Muta," "pot," or "some of that good shit," were better names for the heavenly stuff than marijuana. It was, he said, "a thousand times better than whiskey." He could write a whole book about it, he added. A day without Gage was a meal without wine. He also spoke eloquently of "the Genuineness of Asses." He loved his wife's (Lucille "always had the Choicest Ass of them all") but didn't see the point of denying himself the pleasure of "whaling" on the road. "Kissing will lead to fucking every time." One time at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas he "Grined" a lady he called "Sweets" -- "Struck Oil" -- and "planted a cute little baby." Jazz meant sex. Man, he felt alive. He was performing 100% of the time. But the horn redeemed the world. "I Can tolerate Anything, as long as it doesn't interfere with my trumpet."
Now I will play "Stardust," "Pennies from Heaven," "Alexander's Ragtime Band." Cutting up with Crosby on the set of High Society. Mixing with Sinatra on TV, "The Birth of the Blues." And then back to the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of "Weary Blues," "Potato Head Blues," "No (Papa, No)," "Tight Like This," "Weather Bird."
Like Phillip Larkin, Armstrong detested be-bop: "Mistakes, that's all rebop is. . . .New York and 52nd Street -- that's what messed up Jazz. Them cats play too much -- a whole lot of notes, weird notes." He saw it clearly, Jazz reduced to a form of chamber music that the devout would listen to breathlessly if uncomprehendingly in darkened shrines. "You've got to carry the melody," he insisted.
During the Little Rock crisis in 1957 he sent a telegram to Eisenhower urging the president to send in troops to assure the safety of the "little negro children" at Central High School. He called Ike "Daddy" and said that if he "personally" came "along with your marvellous troops please take me along. O God it would be such a great pleasure I assure you." Should the president wish to respond, he was advised that he could do so through Satch's "personnel manager," Joe Glaser, in New York. He signed off "Am Swiss Krissly Yours Louis Satchmo Armstrong."
There was no way you could dislike Louis Armstrong. Now close your eyes and pretend it's the first time you're hearing the opening cadenza of "West End Blues." -- DL
from the archive; first posted 2011
On June 10, 1922, Judy Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at 6 AM. With her moon in Sagittarius, and her Mercury and Venus in Cancer (her rising sign), the great singer had the heart of a poet, the sensitivity of an eternal diva, and a really good voice. If only there had been more Virgo or Taurus in her chart, the girl who embodied Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have had greater career endurance. The absence of earth signs doomed her to a nervous disposition and the likelihood of an early death. The 2019 movie Judy did Judy no favors.
On June 10, 1922, Judy Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at 6 AM. With her moon in Sagittarius, and her Mercury and Venus in Cancer (her rising sign), the great singer had the heart of a poet, the sensitivity of an eternal diva, and a really good voice. If only there had been more Virgo or Taurus in her chart, the girl who embodied Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have had greater career endurance. The absence of earth signs doomed her to a nervous disposition and the likelihood of an early death. The 2019 movie Judy did Judy no favors.
Born Frances Ethel Gumm, Judy craved the approval of father figures, was easily bruised by criticism, sometimes affected nonchalance but really cared very deeply about other people and wanted to be included in group activities. Her Saturn in Libra helps to explain her outstanding musical talent, and her will to succeed in motion pictures may be inferred from her midheaven in Pisces conjunct Uranus.
The death of Judy's father at age thirteen stunned the young actress, who eventually broke off relations with her mother. The amphetamines helped in the short run. She had five husbands and a torrid affair with lyricist Johnny Mercer (pictured right) when she was eighteen and he, thirty. He wrote the words of “That Old Black Magic” and “I Remember You” with her in mind.
An old astrological adage: The stars favor the stars. From the moment the teenage Garland sang to Clark Gable's photograph ("You Made Me Love You"), her astonishing rise to the heights of Hollywood glory was in the cards (Queen of Hearts high) as was, alas, the inevitability of internal conflicts and demons postponed but not resolved by the habitual use of narcotics. She was still in her teens when she and Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr sang as they danced along the yellow brick road leading to the wonderful wizard of Oz. That was in Technicolor. Already in the black-and-white of Kansas cornfields, she sang the anthem of eternal aspiration, “Over the Rainbow,” which was named the greatest song of the twentieth century in a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001.
As kids Judy and Mickey Rooney teamed up in movies, and their duet versions of “Our Love Affair” and “How About You?” are the best out there. She did “The Trolley Song” in one picture and “The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” in another. The two best versions of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," the best American Christmas song not written by Jews, are hers and Sinatra's. She would have made a great Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s “Annie, Get Your Gun,” and we still have tape of the one song she did (“Doin’ a What Come Naturally”), but she was too fucked up to do the movie and the part went to Betty Hutton.
In Chinese astrology, Judy was born in the year of the dog. Her element is water. This is consistent with her destiny. Her relation to Minnesota mirrors that of Dorothy to Kansas except that there was no home to go back to. The three farm hands in the dream were almost recognizably there, surrounding her bed, when she awoke in Hollywood. Why did gay men have a thing about her? Because (a) they had good taste, (b) they could identify with her suffering, (c) they could admire her indomitable will, (d) they could smell the tragedy on her breath, (e) even macho boys could identify themselves with Dorothy Gale, (f) where gossip and conjecture overlap, anything goes, or (g) all, some, or none of the above. And remember: she was the mother of Liza Minelli, and all you need to do is see the 2014 revival of Cabaret (2014), good as it is, and compare Michelle Williams’s performance as Sally Bowles with that of Liza in the 1972 movie, and you will see the difference between an actress who is trying as hard as she can and a natural-born diva, with the vocal cords of a heroine and the soul of Judy Garland’s daughter.
In the 1960s Judy was hell on wheels to work with, if Mel Tormé's account in The Other Side of the Rainbow is to be trusted. Mel Tormé was the music director on her short-lived television program, “The Judy Garland Show” on CBS, and Tormé says she tormented him. Judy would call you in the middle of the night, make you come over and hold her hand, make capricious decisions, stand up guest stars like Lena Horne, skip rehearsals, tell fart jokes on the set. On the other hand she was who she was, and you loved her when she lifted her glass and said “l’chayem.” She was so earnest you couldn’t help pulling for her. “This television jazz is all new to me,” she said. “The Blue Lady helps to get my heart started.” She couldn’t stand what she called the Smothers’ Brothers “goyishe humor,” and the show had other guests of that ilk. But when Barbra Streisand was the guest star, it was incredible. The two divas did a duet of “Get Happy” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” that you can listen to over and over again – it is the ideal rendering of two of the Depression’s enduring hits.
Judy sang and danced with Gene Kelly (“For Me and My Gal”) and with Fred Astaire (“Easter Parade”), and the saints of St. Louis marched in and sang "The Trolley Song" in unison on June 22, 1969, the day of her death. She had a natural talent for the Al Jolson songbook ("After You've Gone"). At Carnegie Hall in 1961, with composer Harold Arlen in the audience, she sang "Get Happy," "Stormy Weather," "The Man That Got Away," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Five Grammy awards! She was dead at 46.
If Judy and Frank Sinatra had been lovers, they would have scored very high in passion, high in intimacy, average in synergy, and below average in commitment.
-- from the archives; first appeared, in somewhat different form, on Judy Garland's birthday in 2014.
On this day in 1989, Sir Laurence Olivier breathed his last. The great actor was eighty-two when he shuffled off this mortal coil. He was a master of accents and disguises. As a young man he played the romantic (Heathcliff in "Wuthering Heights," "Hamlet," "Henry V," the dashing leading man in "Rebecca," Darcy in "Pride and Prejudice"). In middle age he brought Othello to life, played opposite Marilyn Monroe in one of moviedom's weirdest pairings, was the Roman boss in "Spartacus," embodied the seedy over-the-hill "entertainer," and had enough left in the tank to play the good guy Nazi hunter opposite Gregory Peck in "The Boys from Brazil," on the one hand, and the odious Nazi dentist in "Marathon Man," the best movie about dentistry ever made, which begins with a brilliant car chase (or race) pitting a Holocaust survivor versus an unrepentant Nazi and features a very menacing Olivier, suave Roy Scheider as a spook in Paris, and the earnest Dustin Hoffman as Scheider's younger brother running around the Central Park reservoir. [Ed.: That was quite a mouthful, DL, Split sentence in two?] Olivier and Gielgud play two important Dads in "Brideshead Revisited," which was the hottest thing in highbrow TV in 1982 and '83.
Laurence Olivier was born in Dorking on May 22, 1907, sneaking into Gemini but with as much Taurus trailing him as the clouds that trail the blessed babe in Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode." Olivier was grandiloquent. The risk of overstatement was always at hand. He had his Academy Award speech memorized and delivered it like a Roman emperor. Luckily it was not he but others who wrote the scripts of his movies. His best writers were Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, and Shaw. At the moment of his birth, Jupiter was approximately 180 seconds away from an exact conjunction with Neptune. The association with romantic characters of passion, melancholy, and excellent elocution -- Hamlet, Henry V, Heathcliff, the master of Manderley, and Mr. Darcy -- is implicit.
The dialogue among the earth (Taurus, Capricorn) and air signs (Gemini) accounts not only for the temperament but also for the ability to make the practical adjustments needed as middle age succeeds youth and makes way in turn for elder statesman status. Olivier shone in all three periods of productive adulthood. There is more yin than yang in his chart and his bisexuality was well-known but no big deal. He was crazy about Danny Kaye, and look at the lascivious looks he, the imperial Roman, gives to slave Tony Curtis in "Spartacus."
The fact that Larry's Venus is in Aries (fire) while Vivien Leigh's Venus is in Libra (air) may help to explain the legendary heat and intensity of their initial attraction in 1937. Two years later, when she played Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone with the Wind" while he lurked in the moors in "Wuthering Heights," they were just about the most glamorous couple in Hollywood (and the competition included Clark Gable and Carole Lombard). Leigh was magnificent but her nervous disposition exacerbated by two miscarriages (1945, 1955), a diagnosis of tuberculosis in her left lung (1944) and the natural decay of the aging process led her to extremes of depression. The marriage lasted twenty years. He saw her loss of physical beauty as an accusation made by nature or the fates, and the ungallant remarks he made after her death testified to their brutal lovers' spats (see Holly Greil, "The Times") and his arrogant self-satisfaction (according to Max McGlow, "The Guardian"). The aging of Scarlett O'Hara's gorgeous face made Leigh's role in "Ship of Fools," where she plays a "mature" woman, so poignant.
After the divorce Olivier married actress Joan Plowright and spent his late eighteen years with this sensible and intelligent woman. No one remembers the name of his first wife, however. If you know to whom he was married (for ten full years) prior to Viv, you could win big. Hint: her name was Jill Esmond. But who was she?
Larry became Sir Laurence in 1948. Not until many years later did people learn that Olivier in Hollywood in the early 1940s was a foreign agent operating in behalf of the British government to try to recruit the US into the war. This could have been foreseen if one had factored in that Gemini was his rising sign -- and his moon was in Virgo! (Source: David Niven.)
Sir Laurence (later Lord Olivier) and Marlon Brando were the exact same height (5'10) but otherwise had little in common. (The same goes for Mick Jagger and Victor Hugo.) Other Geminis born on May 22 include Richard Wagner and Arthur Conan Doyle, which pretty much explains the dynamic of eccentric British empiricism and high German myth-making that encircles the Brunhilde of virginity with the three rings of masterly artistic flame over which the hero must leap in the dramatic depiction of Sir LO's life.
Sir Larry won the best actor Oscar in 1948 and founded the National Theatre in London in 1962.
Note: Readers of "astrological profiles" know that the use of astrological terms is laid on cheekily on the nervy assumption that the horoscope -- like the "haruspicate or scry," "sortilege, or tea leaves," playing cards, pentagrams, handwriting analysis, palm-reading, and the "preconscious terrors" of the dreaming mind in T. S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" -- may be a bust at prediction bur may turn out to be not only "usual pastimes and drugs" but the means of poetic exploration.
-- DL
Poor Keats. A Scorpio with Virgo rising and, just to clinch the deal, his moon in Gemini. This is the equivalent of being dealt the Fool, the Lovers (inverted), and the Tower as the three culminating cards in an eleven-card Tarot reading. There is sadness in his life, illness, a consumptive cough. But he has a generous soul, he meets afflictions with renewed resolve, he is capable of great feats of self-discipline. Willing to work hours on meters and rhymes, he is a born dreamer, who can shut his eyes and transport himself in a second to fairy lands forlorn, an enchantment of mist, an early autumn of heirloom tomatoes and three varieties of peaches. Life is a struggle, but he prevails, and then dies young.
Born on the 31st of October, Keats had a soft spot for Halloween and tried his hand at writing spooky verses that would scare school chums sitting around the campfire during the season of burning leaves. The fact that Keats's moon is in Gemini, that the nocturnal northeastern quadrant is predominant in his natal chart, and above all that Mercury is his ruling planet, supports the view of this poet as a divinely-ordained messenger of the gods trapped in the frail body of an undernourished London lad with his face pressed against the sweet shop window, as Yeats wrote.[1]
Keats's Venus is, like his sun, in Scorpio. This is crucial. It means he is as passionate as he is sensitive and a gambler not by instinct or by social association but by his intransigent attachment to his ideals. He can be loved by many but reserves his own love for one. Auden's poem “The More Loving One” depicts a conflict that Keats resolved each time he picked up his pen to write. He felt he was destined to be the more loving one in any partnership, and he would not have had it any other way, but he didn’t live long enough to test his resolve.
Keats loved the four elements and presented their interplay with the clarity that Vermeer brought to the study of light. Vermeer, too, was born on Halloween. In an unpublished story by E. M. Forster with a strong hint of bisexuality and a blithe disregard of historical possibility, the seventeenth-century Vermeer and the nineteenth-century Keats -- accompanied by Dorothy Wordsworth (nineteenth century) and Virginia Woolf (twentieth century) – meet in Oxford and discuss aesthetics and metaphysics as they float slowly down the Isis on a punt.
The story that Keats died because of a bad review in an influential Edinburgh journal is to the biography of English poets what history was in the mind of the automobile manufacturer who invented the assembly line, bunk, but it was kept fresh by Byron’s oft-quoted couplet in Don Juan: “Tis strange the mind, that fiery particle / should be snuffed out by an article.” But the mischievous Byron, born on January 22 (1788) -- an Aquarius trailing clouds of Capricorn, and with Cancer as his rising sign -- was as conflicted on the subject of his younger Cockney-born contemporary as Emerson was about Whitman after the former praised the latter, who proceeded to enlarge Leaves of Grass almost beyond recognition.
The position of Mercury in the third house has caused the greatest amount of comment among professional astrologers. The consensus view is that Keats resembled certain musical geniuses in his extraordinary talent, his humble origins, and his early death. Though he was less dashing than the patrician Byron and less angelic of aspect than Shelley, all the women polled said they would welcome a relationship with Keats, especially if she is in England while he is in Italy writing long gorgeous letters to her about Shakespeare plays, the nature of inspiration, the smell of mortality, and what Adam felt like waking up in Eden. Keats proved that greatness descends on the novice only after he has opened himself up to the risk of failure or embarrassment.
If Shelley is the poet of the autumn wind, the wind that destroys and preserves, animating the leaves and the waves and the clouds in a fury of activity, Keats is the poet of autumnal ripeness. Here are the last three lines of “To Autumn,” his ode to the “season of mist and mellow fruitfulness”:
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
The closing music shows that Keats took to heart his own advice to Shelley (“load every rift with ore”). A comparison of the two poets -- the one prospective, anticipatory, the other all righteous fire and visionary fury but also retrospective and melancholy -- is a fascinating study in comparative astrology. It has been said that the single most revealing piece of information you may have about a potential dating partner is whether he identifies himself more with Keats or with Shelley.
The muse visited Keats often in the spring of 1819. First came “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the lovers rushing away into the night; then “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” the lover seduced and abandoned. These poems were as immediate as dreams. And then came the odes, the greatest odes that English has to offer: to Psyche, to a Nightingale, on a Grecian Urn, on Melancholy, to Indolence. No poet ever packed as much magnificence in a line or wrote stanzas of such melodious charm that a simple, naive statement of Platonic optimism, which in lesser hands would be anticlimactic or worse, should seem to penetrate the heart of the mystery: “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.”
[1] Note: If you mix up the names Keats and Yeats, or pronounce one as if it were the other, the chances of your appreciating either are diminished by a seventh but not eliminated. The two names are separated by nearly five decades but linked by lyrical genius, with the prophetic mode ascendant in Yeats, while Keats -- brainy, anxious, and quick as befits a son of Mercury -- wins the laurels for sensuality and freshness: the palpable bubbles in the wine glass, the burst of a grape in the satyr’s mouth, the humming of flies on the porch screen in August, keen fitful gusts of wind.
Born to sing America’s all-time favorite movie song, Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow,” Judy Garland was as natural a Gemini as you will find – totally binary, loyal to a fault yet fickle, cheerful and proud yet sometimes suicidally desperate. She habitually came late to the set fortified by drinking bottles of “Blue Nun,” “Liebfraumilch,” and similar white stuff, which tasted terrible but did the job.
On June 10, 1922, Judy Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at 6 AM. With her moon in Sagittarius, and her Mercury and Venus in Cancer (her rising sign), the great singer had the heart of a poet, the sensitivity of an eternal diva, and a really good voice. If only there had been more Virgo in her chart, the girl who embodied Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have had greater career endurance. The absence of earth signs doomed her to a nervous disposition and the likelihood of an early death. The 2019 movie Judy did Judy no favors.
Born Frances Ethel Gumm, Judy craved the approval of father figures, was easily bruised by criticism, sometimes affected nonchalance but really cared very deeply about other people and wanted to be included in group activities. Her Saturn in Libra helps to explain her outstanding musical talent, and her will to succeed in motion pictures may be inferred from her midheaven in Pisces conjunct Uranus.
The death of Judy's father at age thirteen stunned the young actress, who eventually broke off relations with her mother. The amphetamines helped in the short run. She had five husbands and a torrid affair with lyricist Johnny Mercer when she was eighteen and he, thirty. He wrote the words of “That Old Black Magic” and “I Remember You” with her in mind.
An old astrological adage: The stars favor the stars. From the moment the teenage Garland sang to Clark Gable's photograph ("You Made Me Love You"), her astonishing rise to the heights of Hollywood glory was in the cards (Queen of Hearts high) as was, alas, the inevitability of internal conflicts and demons postponed but not resolved by the habitual use of narcotics. She was still in her teens when she and Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr sang as they danced along the yellow brick road leading to the wonderful wizard of Oz. That was in Technicolor. Already in the black-and-white of Kansas cornfields, she sang the anthem of eternal aspiration, “Over the Rainbow,” which was named the greatest song of the twentieth century in a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001.
As kids Judy and Mickey Rooney teamed up in movies, and their duet versions of “Our Love Affair” and “How About You?” are the best out there. She did “The Trolley Song” in one picture and “The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” in another. The two best versions of "Have Yourself a Merryl Little Christmas," the best American Christmas song not writen by Jews, are hers and Sinatra's. She would have made a great Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s “Annie, Get Your Gun,” and we still have tape of the one song she did (“Doin’ a What Come Naturally”), but she was too fucked up to do the movie and the part went to Betty Hutton.
In Chinese astrology, Judy was born in the year of the dog. Her element is water. This is consistent with her destiny. Her relation to Minnesota mirrors that of Dorothy to Kansas except that there was no home to go back to. The three farm hands in the dream were almost recognizably there, surrounding her bed, when she awoke in Hollywood. Why did gay men have a thing about her? Because (a) they had good taste, (b) they could identify with her suffering, (c) they could admire her indomitable will, (d) they could smell the tragedy on her breath, (e) even macho boys could identify themselves with Dorothy Gale, (f) where gossip and conjecture overlap, anything goes, or (g) all, some, or none of the above. And remember: she was the mother of Liza Minelli, and all you need to do is see the 2014 revival of Cabaret (2014), good as it is, and compare Michelle Williams’s performance as Sally Bowles with that of Liza in the 1972 movie, and you will see the difference between an actress who is trying as hard as she can and a natural-born diva, with the vocal cords of a heroine and the soul of Judy Garland’s daughter.
In the 1960s Judy was hell on wheels to work with, if Mel Tormé's account in The Other Side of the Rainbow is to be trusted. Mel Tormé was the music director on her short-lived television program, “The Judy Garland Show” on CBS, and Tormé says she tormented him. Judy would call you in the middle of the night, make you come over and hold her hand, make capricious decisions, stand up guest stars like Lena Horne, skip rehearsals, tell fart jokes on the set. On the other hand she was who she was, and you loved her when she lifted her glass and said “l’chayem.” She was so earnest you couldn’t help pulling for her. “This television jazz is all new to me,” she said. “The Blue Lady helps to get my heart started.” She couldn’t stand what she called the Smothers’ Brothers “goyishe humor,” and the show had other guests of that ilk. But when Barbra Streisand was the guest star, it was incredible. The two divas did a duet of “Get Happy” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” that you can listen to over and over again – it is the ideal rendering of two of the Depression’s enduring hits.
Judy sang and danced with Gene Kelly (“For Me and My Gal”) and with Fred Astaire (“Easter Parade”), and the saints of St. Louis marched in and sang "The Trolley Song" in unison on June 22, 1969, the day of her death. She had a natural talent for the Al Jolson songbook ("After You've Gone"). At Carnegie Hall in 1961, with composer Harold Arlen in the audience, she sang "Get Happy," "Stormy Weather," "The Man That Got Away," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Five Grammy awards! She was dead at 46.
If Judy and Frank Sinatra had been lovers, they would have scored very high in passion, high in intimacy, average in synergy, and below average in commitment.
-- from the archives; first appeared, in somewhat different form, in 2014.
Poor Keats. A Scorpio with Virgo rising and, just to clinch the deal, his moon in Gemini. This is the equivalent of being dealt the Fool, the Lovers (inverted), and the Tower as the three culminating cards in an eleven-card Tarot reading. There is sadness in his life, illness, a consumptive cough. But he has a generous soul, he meets afflictions with renewed resolve, he is capable of great feats of self-discipline. Willing to work hours on meters and rhymes, he is a born dreamer, who can shut his eyes and transport himself in a second to fairy lands forlorn, an enchantment of mist, an early autumn of heirloom tomatoes and three varieties of peaches. Life is a struggle, but he prevails, and then dies young.
Born on the 31st of October, Keats had a soft spot for Halloween and tried his hand at writing spooky verses that would scare school chums sitting around the campfire during the season of burning leaves. The fact that Keats's moon is in Gemini, that the nocturnal northeastern quadrant is predominant in his natal chart, and above all that Mercury is his ruling planet, supports the view of this poet as a divinely-ordained messenger of the gods trapped in the frail body of an undernourished London lad with his face pressed against the sweet shop window, as Yeats wrote.[1]
Keats's Venus is, like his sun, in Scorpio. This is crucial. It means he is as passionate as he is sensitive and a gambler not by instinct or by social association but by his intransigent attachment to his ideals. He can be loved by many but reserves his own love for one. Auden's poem “The More Loving One” depicts a conflict that Keats resolved each time he picked up his pen to write. He felt he was destined to be the more loving one in any partnership, and he would not have had it any other way, but he didn’t live long enough to test his resolve.
Keats loved the four elements and presented their interplay with the clarity that Vermeer brought to the study of light. Vermeer, too, was born on Halloween. In an unpublished story by E. M. Forster with a strong hint of bisexuality and a blithe disregard of historical possibility, the seventeenth-century Vermeer and the nineteenth-century Keats -- accompanied by Dorothy Wordsworth (nineteenth century) and Virginia Woolf (twentieth century) – meet in Oxford and discuss aesthetics and metaphysics as they float slowly down the Isis on a punt.
The story that Keats died because of a bad review in an influential Edinburgh journal is to the biography of English poets what history was in the mind of the automobile manufacturer who invented the assembly line, bunk, but it was kept fresh by Byron’s oft-quoted couplet in Don Juan: “Tis strange the mind, that fiery particle / should be snuffed out by an article.” But the mischievous Byron, born on January 22 (1788) -- an Aquarius trailing clouds of Capricorn, and with Cancer as his rising sign -- was as conflicted on the subject of his younger Cockney-born contemporary as Emerson was about Whitman after the former praised the latter, who proceeded to enlarge Leaves of Grass almost beyond recognition.
The position of Mercury in the third house has caused the greatest amount of comment among professional astrologers. The consensus view is that Keats resembled certain musical geniuses in his extraordinary talent, his humble origins, and his early death. Though he was less dashing than the noble Byron and less angelic of aspect than Shelley, all the women polled said they would welcome a relationship with Keats, especially if she is in England while he is in Italy writing long gorgeous letters to her about Shakespeare plays, the nature of inspiration, the smell of mortality, and what Adam felt like waking up in Eden. Keats proved that greatness descends on the novice only after he has opened himself up to the risk of failure or embarrassment.
If Shelley is the poet of the autumn wind, the wind that destroys and preserves, animating the leaves and the waves and the clouds in a fury of activity, Keats is the poet of autumnal ripeness. Here are the last three lines of “To Autumn,” his ode to the “season of mist and mellow fruitfulness”:
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
The closing music shows that Keats took to heart his own advice to Shelley (“load every rift with ore”). A comparison of the two poets -- the one prospective, anticipatory, the other all righteous fire and visionary fury but also retrospective and melancholy -- is a fascinating study in comparative astrology. It has been said that the single most revealing piece of information you may have about a potential dating partner is whether he identifies himself more with Keats or with Shelley.
The muse visited Keats often in the spring of 1819. First came “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the lovers rushing away into the night; then “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” the lover seduced and abandoned. These poems were as immediate as dreams. And then came the odes, the greatest odes that English has to offer: to Psyche, to a Nightingale, on a Grecian Urn, on Melancholy, to Indolence. No poet ever packed as much magnificence in a line or wrote stanzas of such melodious charm that a simple, naive statement of Platonic optimism, which in lesser hands would be anticlimactic or worse, should seem to penetrate the heart of the mystery: “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.”
[1] Note: If you mix up the names Keats and Yeats, or pronounce one as if it were the other, the chances of your appreciating either are diminished by a seventh but not eliminated. The two names are separated by nearly five decades but linked by lyrical genius, with the prophetic mode ascendant in Yeats, while Keats -- brainy, anxious, and quick as befits a son of Mercury -- wins the laurels for sensuality and freshness: the palpable bubbles in the wine glass, the burst of a grape in the satyr’s mouth, the humming of flies on the porch screen in August, keen fitful gusts of wind.
Shelley was a classic Leo with Taurus rising. Born on this day (4 August) in 1792, he was the middle man in the greatest double-play combination of all time, Keats to Shelley to Byron. He had the vision of a prophet and the confidence of a madman and he was idealistic, with Saturn, Neptune, and Venus dominant among his planets and Libra, Leo, and Taurus among his signs. He shares his birthday with Barack Obama and Louis Armstrong, which gives you some idea of how he presaged the future of music, that art to which all others aspire, and the illusion of political change based on hopes that spring eternal in the human breast.
The symmetry in his natal chart is fearless. He is a man of heroic temper -- without Byron's lusty humor or Keats's morbid sensuality but with a power of breath equal to the wind. He died, fittingly, in a squall, at sea. The fire and earth in his chart were vanquished by the elements of water and air. His moon was in Pisces, his Venus in Leo.
Shelley made love to women sincerely, with attentive care, and wrote poems to her, whatever her name was, Jane or Mary or the third one. He didn't "hold" with monogamy. He went to University College in Oxford and got sent down for writing "The Necessity of Atheism." He was a strong swimmer, though this ability availed him naught in the end. His heterodox views made Shelley the hero of wannabe poets for a century after his death. To get a flavor of that old romantic aura, read Andre Maurois's wonderful bio, Ariel. Alas, Shelley's literary reputation took a hit from Arnold, an even more wounding thrust from Eliot, and then came the backlash in full intensity.
Everyone at the campfire had to tell a spooky story. Byron and Shelley had good ones, but Mary Shelley [right] won with "Frankenstein." They were in Switzerland. Who was Jane? He serenaded her with a guitar.The lyrics were lovely. She kept his picture in a locket along with a lock of his hair, and everything that he touched acquired posthumous value. Henry James's "The Aspern Papers" centers on the archive of a poet modeled after Shelley and what a single-minded professor will do to get at it. History has been kinder to Keats's reputation than to Shelley's, but it used to be that if you mentioned one you had to mention the other or you would have bad luck all day, the same as with James and Edith Wharton.
If Dante had been reborn as an Englishman, it would have been in the person of Shelley, who venerated Rousseau. Plato's parable of the cave could have been dreamed with Shelley in mind. He was probably the most complicated of the major romantic poets. Coleridge was his superior intellectually; Keats, always better loved, was Milton's true heir, able to pack as much sensual pleasure in a line of verse as pentameter allowed; Blake was crazier; Byron funnier; and Wordsworth captured, all in all, the spirit of the age more successfully than any of his contemporaries. But Shelley was the closest thing to a visionary in the lot.
When Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" sees a woman on the beach and composes a villanelle about her image, it is in the manner of Shelley. For a great poet Shelley wrote some really bad lines, in which he stumbles and falls and bleeds in his efforts to shed his corporeal self and merge his romantic soul with the wind that is the creative breath of God. His skylark sings to us less melodiously than Keats's nightingale, but that's paradox for you -- that Shelley, who was given to seeing things in retrospect, would oddly favor the bird of early morn.
On July 8, 1822, Shelley and his friend Edward Williams went out boating in Italy and drowned. Could Shelley swim? Perhaps not. But would he have survived the squall? Doubtfully. They were going to burn the bodies, but Shelley's heart defied the flames, refused to burn, and was rescued by Edward Trelawny. Byron said that his much misunderstood friend was the greatest man he had ever known. -- DL
In the TV show "To Tell the Truth," there were always three individuals pretending to be the prominent or accomplished figure, an adventurer or a football hero, and the panel had to choose who was the genuine article.
But Cary Grant stumped the panel.
Each of the three individuals named Cary Grant was extraordinarily handsome, suave, charming, and irresistible even though one was a glib ad man named Roger Thornhill, skillful at stealing a taxi cab or fobbing off girlfriends with gifts of chocolate and insincere praise. The second Cary Grant was a fast-talking newspaper editor ("Duffy! Get me rewrite!"), who can outwit Ralph Bellamy or whoever the designated rival is and recover the affections of alienated partners such as Irene Dunne and Rosalind Russell. The third showed up at the top of the Empire State Building to meet Deborah Kerr but she, though equally eager, gets hit by a car in the street below, and they do not consummate their affair to remember.
Born Archie Leach on January 18, 1904 in Bristol (England), Cary Grant spoke in an accent that sounds somehow British and yet is not out of place in any set of circumstances in the States. His versatility extended from the globetrotting realm of Hitchcock's thrillers (the England of "Suspicion," the South America of "Notorious," the French riviera of "To Catch a Thief") to comedies with leading ladies on the order of Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly and Eva Marie Saint. Possibly the handsomest leading man in the movies, though not the sexiest, he starred with both Hepburns, Katharine in a whole bunch of films and Audrey in Charade. He ties Jimmy Stewart as the most frequent Hitchcock hero. He became a US citizen in 1942 and never won a regular academy award, although he did collect an honorary Oscar in 1970.
Origin of name: Boring Hollywood legend has it that "Cary" came from his stage role as a guy named Cary in a musical with Fay Wray, and "Grant" was assigned to him by the studio. You and I can do better. "Grant me an hour, and I will carry you over the altar," he said sheepishly.
Marital status: five times, with wife #3 (Betsy Drake) the marriage that lasted longest. He had a genius for screwball romantic comedies and was a natural straight man -- in Frank Capra's "Arsenic and Old Lace," example.
His last romantic hurrah: Charade with Audrey Hepburn in 1963. The Stanley Donen-directed film also exploits the talents of Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy, the Marche aux Timbres and the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Gene Kelly doing a carefree dance on the banks of the Seine (though filmed on a studio) is lovingly recalled by Miss Hepburn (Mrs Charles Lampert) as the hero and heroine hold hands under a bridge and a bateau mouche glides by. Cary Grant shrewdly insists that the romance begins on the lady's side -- he is acutely conscious of the age difference between him and Audrey Hepburn. But then you think about it and you realize that he is ever the pursued one -- that his good looks trump the ladies and he doesn't even have to make a pass to score. If life were a romantic comedy with a Nora Ephron accent, you could not do better than cast Cary Grant in the lead role.
From Charade: "You know what's wrong with you? Nothing." From North by Northwest": "The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I've no desire to make love to her." "What makes you think you have to conceal it?" "She might find the idea objectionable." "Then again she might not."
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There is, however, a blank where an identity should be.
Cary Grant took LSD more than 100 times, having been introduced to the narcotic by Betsy Drake. It helped him more than a posse of doctors in his lifelong quest to confront his identity. Best quote: "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant." The plot conceit generating North by Northwest, in which a Madison Avenue executive is mistaken for a CIA agent who doesn't exist, is based on an incident in Grant's biography.
A rose is just a rose: "I never had so much fun since Archie Leach died," he says in His Girl Friday. If you watch Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace, you'll see the grave of Archie Leach.
Posthumous scuttlebutt that doesn't shock anyone anymore: he may have been bi-sexual (LTR with flatmate Randolph Scott).
Dodger Fan Info: Shared exclusive box seats with Frank Sinatra and Gregory Peck at Dodger Stadium. Did not pay very close attention to the games.
Retirement job: Became a director of the Fabergé company and promoted the fragrance firm's products.
Vital stats: Rising sign Libra, moon in Aquarius; Water Cat (Chinese astrology); six feet one and a half inches tall.
The well-dressed actor's method was the opposite of the method of Marlon Brando. Brando wanted to find the character within himself. Cary Grant lost himself in the character he was playing.
Like a handful of other Hollywood giants -- Bogart, Cagney, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, John Wayne -- he was always himself and whoever he was depicting. When Bogart or Cagney want to shock you, they act like madmen, Bogart the paranoid ("The Caine Mutiny"), Cagney the psychotic bundle of rage who holds conversations with his dead mama ("White Heat."). Gable is always dashing, Cooper always stoical, strong, and silent, and John Wayne will never lose a fight or a battle. But Cary Grant is at heart a comic actor of supernal charm thrust into a melodrama of high gravity. And what he acts out is invariably a romance. No man is luckier in love than the Cary Grant that existed only in the movies. It is said that Ian Fleming concocted Jame Bond with Cary Grant in mind.
Judy Garland: The Road Gets Rougher
As a boy in Minnesota, Robert Zimmerman listened to a Minnesota girl sing the ballads of Harold Arlen and thought he could travel down the road taken by Dorothy and the Scarecrow. By the time he took up the guitar and changed his name to Bob Dylan, he had wandered so far into Woody Guthrie territory that a reader confronting an article in The Nation entitled “Woody, Dylan, and Doubt” could be forgiven for thinking that it concerned the singer’s relation to Arlo Guthrie’s papa on the one side and the condition of epistemological uncertainty on the other when in fact the piece addresses allegations that Woody Allen had misbehaved with his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow.
Judy Garland had to endure many indignities in her star-crossed career but the heartache of child abuse wasn’t one of them. Born to sing America’s all-time favorite movie song, Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow,” Judy was as natural a Gemini as you will find – totally binary, loyal to a fault yet fickle, happy and proud yet sometimes suicidally desperate, given to coming late to the set fortified by drinking bottles of “Blue Nun,” “Liebfraumilch,” and similar white stuff, which tasted terrible but did the job.
On June 10, 1922, Judy Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at 6 AM. With her moon in Sagittarius, and her Mercury and Venus in Cancer (her rising sign), the great singer had the heart of a poet, the sensitivity of an eternal diva, and a really good voice. If only there had been more Virgo in her chart, the girl who embodied Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have had greater career endurance. The absence of earth signs doomed her to a nervous disposition and the likelihood of an early death.
Born Frances Ethel Gumm, Judy craved the approval of father figures, was easily bruised by criticism, sometimes affected nonchalance but really cared very deeply about other people and wanted to be included in group activities. Her Saturn in Libra helps to explain her outstanding musical talent, and her will to succeed in motion pictures may be inferred from her midheaven in Pisces conjunct Uranus.
The death of Judy's father at age thirteen stunned the young actress, who eventually broke off relations with her mother. The amphetamines helped in the short run. She had five husbands.
An old astrological adage: The stars favor the stars. From the moment the teenage Garland sang to Clark Gable's photograph ("You Made Me Love You"), her astonishing rise to the heights of Hollywood glory was in the cards (Queen of Hearts high) as was, alas, the inevitability of internal conflicts and demons postponed but not resolved by the habitual use of narcotics. She was still in her teens when she and Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr sang as they danced along the yellow brick road leading to the wonderful wizard of Oz. That was in Technicolor. Already in the black-and-white of Kansas cornfields, she sang the anthem of eternal aspiration, “Over the Rainbow,” which was named the greatest song of the twentieth century in a survey conducted bythe National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001. She teamed up with Mickey Rooney and their versions of “Our Love Affair” and “How About You?” are the best out there. She did “The Trolley Song” in one picture and “The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” in another. She would have made a great Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s “Annie, Get Your Gun,” and we still have tape of the one song she did (“Doin’ a What Come Naturally”), but she was too fucked up to do the movie and the part went to Betty Hutton.
In Chinese astrology, Judy was born in the year of the dog. Her element is water. This is consistent with her destiny. Her relation to Minnesota mirrors that of Dorothy to Kansas except that there was no home to go back to. The three farm hands in the dream were almost recognizably there, surrounding her bed, when she awoke in Hollywood. Why did gay men have a thing about her? Because (a) they had good taste, (b) they could identify with her suffering, (c) they could admire her indomitable will, (d) they could smell the tragedy on her breath, (e) even macho boys could identify themselves with Dorothy Gale, (f) where gossip and conjecture overlap, anything goes, or (g) all, some, or none of the above. And remember: she was the mother of Liza Minelli, and all you need to do is see the 2014 revival of Cabaret (2014), good as it is, and compare Michelle Williams’s performance as Sally Bowles with that of Liza in the 1972 movie, and you will see the difference between an actress who is trying as hard as she can and a natural-born diva, with the vocal cords of a heroine and the soul of Judy Garland’s daughter.
In the 1960s Judy was hell on wheels to work with, if Mel Torme’s account in The Other Side of the Rainbow is to be trusted. Mel Torme was the music director on her short-lived television program, “The Judy Garland Show” on CBS, and Torme says she tormented him. Judy would call you in the middle of the night, make you come over and hold her hand, make capricious decisions, stand up guest stars like Lena Horne, skip rehearsals, tell fart jokes on the set. On the other hand she was who she was, and you loved her when she lifted her glass and said “l’chayem.” She was so earnest you couldn’t help pull for her. “This television jazz is all new to me,” she said. “The Blue Lady helps to get my heart started.” She couldn’t stand what she called the Smothers’ Brothers “goyishe humor,” and the show had other guests of that ilk. But when Barbra Streisand was the guest star, it was incredible. The two divas did a duet of “Get Happy” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” that you can listen to over and over again – it is the ideal rendering of two of the Depression’s enduring hits.
Judy sang and danced with Gene Kelly (“For Me and My Gal”) and with Fred Astaire (“Easter Parade”), and the saints of St. Louis marched in and sang "The Trolley Song" in unison on June 22, 1969, the day of her death. At Carnegie Hall in 1961, with composer Harold Arlen in the audience, she sang "Get Happy," "Stormy Weather," "The Man That Got Away," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Five Grammy awards! She was dead at 46.
If Judy and Frank Sinatra had been lovers, they would have scored very high in passion, high in intimacy, average in synergy, and below average in commitment.
-- David Lehman (2014)
On this day in 1989, Sir Laurence Olivier breathed his last. The great actor was eighty-two when he shuffled off this mortal coil. He was a master of accents and disguises. As a young man he played the romantic ("Wuthering Heights," "Hamlet," "Henry V," "Rebecca," Darcy in "Pride and Prejudice"). In middle age he brought Othello to life, played opposite Marilyn Monroe in one of moviedom's weirdest pairings, was the Roman boss in "Spartacus," embodied the seedy over-the-hill "entertainer," and had enough left in the tank to play the good guy Nazi hunter opposite Gregory Peck in "The Boys from Brazil," on the one hand, and the odious Nazi dentist in "Marathon Man," which is the best movie about dentistry ever made, and begins with a brilliant car chase (or race) pitting a Holocaust survivor versus an unrepentant Nazi, although in some ways the movie is unsatisfactory despite the excellence of the acting especially Roy Scheider as a spook in Paris) for reasons worth consideration (someday). [Ed: That was quite a mouthful, DL, Split in two?] Olivier and Gielgud play two important Dads in "Brideshead Revisited," which was the hottest thing in highbrow TV in 1982 and '83.
Laurence Olivier was born in Dorking on May 22, 1907, sneaking into Gemini but with as much Taurus trailing him as the clouds that trail the blessed babe in Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode." Olivier was grandiloquent. The risk of overstatement was always at hand. He had his Academy Award speech memorized and delivered it like a Roman emperor. Luckily it was not he but others who wrote the scripts of his movies. His best writers were Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, and Shaw. At the moment of his birth, Jupiter was approximately 180 seconds away from an exact conjunction with Neptune. The association with romantic characters of passion, melancholy, and excellent elocution -- Hamlet, Henry V, Heathcliff, the master of Manderley, and Mr Darcy -- is implicit.
The dialogue among the earth (Taurus, Capricorn) and air signs (Gemini) accounts not only for the temperament but also for the ability to make the practical adjustments needed as middle age succeeds youth and makes way in turn for elder statesman status. Olivier shone in all three periods of productive adulthood. There is more yin than yang in his chart and his bisexuality was well-known but no big deal. He was crazy about Danny Kaye, and look at the lascivious looks he, the imperial Roman, gives to slave Tony Curtis in "Spartacus."
The fact that his Venus is in Aries while Vivien Leigh's Venus is in Libra may help to explain the legendary heat and intensity of their initial attraction in 1937. Two years later, when she played Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone with the Wind" while he lurked in the moors in "Wuthering Heights," they were just about the most glamorous couple in Hollywood (and the competition included Clark Gable and Carole Lombard). She was magnificent but her nervous disposition exacerbated by two miscarriages (1945, 1955), a diagnosis of tuberculosis in her left lung (1944) and the natural decay of the aging process led her to extremes of depression. The marriage lasted twenty years. He was a gentleman but saw her loss of physical beauty as an accusation made by nature or the fates, and the ungallant remarks he made after her death testified to their brutal lovers' spats (Holly Greil, "The Times") and his arrogant self-satisfaction (according to Max McGlow, "The Guardian"). The aging of Scarlett O'Hara's gorgeous face made Leigh's role in "Ship of Fools," where she plays a "mature" woman who travels with a paid companion, so poignant.
After the divorce Olivier married actress Joan Plowright and spent his late eighteen years with this sensible and intelligent woman. No one remembers the name of his first wife, however. If you know to whom he was married (for ten full years) prior to Viv, you could win big. Hint: her name was Jill Esmond. But who was she?
Larry became Sir Laurence in 1948. Not until many years later did people learn that Olivier in Hollywood in the early 1940s was a foreign agent operating in behalf of the British government to try to recruit the US into the war. This could have been foreseen if one had factored in that Gemini was his rising sign -- and his moon was in Virgo! (Source: David Niven.)
Sir Laurence (later Lord Olivier) and Marlon Brando were the exact same height (5'10) but otherwise had little in common. (The same goes for Mick Jagger and Victor Hugo.) Other Geminis born on May 22 include Richard Wagner and Arthur Conan Doyle, which pretty much explains the dynamic of eccentric British empiricism and high German myth-making that encircles the Brunhilde of virginity with the three rings of masterly artistic flame over which the hero must leap in the dramatic depiction of Sir LO's life.
Sir Larry won the best actor Oscar in 1948 and founded the National Theatre in London in 1962.
Note: Readers of "astrological profiles" know that the use of astrological terms is laid on pretty thick but with tongue in cheek, firmly so, on the nervy assumption that the horoscope -- like the "haruspicate or scry," "sortilege, or tea leaves," playing cards, pentagrams, handwriting analysis, palm-reading, and the "preconscious terrors" of the dreaming mind in T. S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" -- may be a bust at prediction bur may turn out to be not only "usual pastimes and drugs" but the means of poetic exploration.
-- DL
Born in O'Fallon, Illinois, on April 17, 1918, William Franklin Beedle was the most energetic kid in his class. He was popular among the boys because he was a good teammate in sports. The girls liked his good looks. His teenage years coincided with the Depression that brought his father, a chemist, to his knees. "We didn't talk about it much at home. We walked. My father was not big on talking. My father liked to walk. I liked walking with him." According to some accounts he came from a wealthy family whose fortunes brought them to Southern California in the 1930s but that's just talk.
The peripatetic young man played clarinet, sang in the school chorus, and got his big break when Barbara Stanwyck took a liking to him on the set of Golden Boy in 1939. She saved his job. By then he had changed his name to William Holden, the first of many shrewd career decisions. He and Stanwyck became lifelong pals.
It has been said that William Holden is the greatest celebrity born on April 17, the closest competitor being Khrushchev. It would be nice to have a movie of Khrushchev with George C. Scott in the title role and with William Holden as the hard-drinking, poker-playing (fictionalized) American secretary of state who didn't go to Harvard but averts war because his poker instincts tell him that Khrushchev would back down unless you didn't give him a chance to back down. Firing first was always a mistake with a potato farmer. Call his bluff but at the same time make a secret concession and you all come out ahead, though history doesn't quite work like that. A year after the crisis the young president had his head blown off and a year after that Nikita was out of office.
Holden has many of the traits of an Aries with Libra rising whose moon is in Cancer and whose dominant Venus is abetted by a thrust of Plato. The emphatic Venus in his chart suffices to explain why an able lad with rugged good looks would succeed in his chosen profession, as you would, if you turned twenty-three the year Pearl Harbor was bombed and you were blessed with courage, honor, leadership qualities, and a high libido, unless life threw you a curve ball in the form of a lousy marriage or some other trace of trouble in Tahiti that will someday blow up like a huge aerial photograph to expose the places that were bombed in the war.
Still, if you look like Bill Holden shirtless in Picnic or The Bridge on the River Kwai, you can't miss. You can be a Swedish industrialist who was neutral until he saw first-hand what monsters the Nazis were, or you can be Humphrey Bogart's high-living younger brother, or a journalist in a convertible in Asia, a corporate vice president who resists bottom-line pressures because he values quality, a TV network executive who's seen it all, the head of a band of hombres who rob trains and ride into Mexico just when cowboys are becoming a thing of the past. But the role that suited BIll Holden best was that of prisoner of war: in Stalag 17, captured by the Nazis; in The Bridge on the River Kwai, a captive of the Japanese in the jungles of Burma.
To understand why Bill Holden became a great movie star, emblem of masculinity, and hopeless alcoholic, you must understand that his brother, Robert, a fighter pilot, was killed in combat in World War II. Holden himself served in the army for three years, 1942-1945, and served valiantly. Yet he suffered in silence the guilt of the unworthy survivor.
What William Holden brought to the movies was a masculine ideal. He was a grown up, sometimes a wise ass but never a fool, who had what it takes to make it, whether "it" was an escape from or into danger. But he was versatile. He could as easily be found face down in a swimming pool, dead from the start like the narrator of Sunset Boulevard in 1950. In that movie Holden played Hollywood screenwriter Joe Gillis who meets a diva from the silent screen star era and becomes a kept man. Others have remarked that it seems as if his fate as a dead man who can't stop talking epitomizes the role of the writer in Hollywood movies.
Set in a German POW camp in a dreary December in World War II,Stalag 17 won him the Academy Award in 1953. Look at all the things he is in that all-male movie: a loner, a shrewd guy who knows the odds, a successful exponent of the free enterprise system, a scapegoat, the victim of a vicious beating, a detective, a skillful interrogator, and an expert planner. He turns the tables on the real traitor in the group and devises a means of escape that allows him, the outcast, to become a hero and save a doomed man from frostbite.
In Executive Suite he is the executive most likely to succeed because he is dashing, decisive, has a conscience and a vision, and is married to June Allyson who plays catch with their son. He has a natural ally in Walter Pidgeon, the world's greatest number-two man. Barbara Stanwyck, playing the sister of the corporate CEO was has suddenly dropped dead, unexpectedly throws in her lot with him, and he carries the day against Fredric March, an antagonist who sweats too much and whose chief ally, Louis Calhern, is unreliable. A pleasure to see them all at work, with elegant Nina Foch as the executive secretary. Also in the cast are Dean Jagger, Shelly Winters, and Paul Douglas.See photo of Holden, Stanwyck, and Calhern below: The cigarette smoke lingers in the air. "Is that what you want on your gravestone when you die -- that you raised the dividend to three dollars or four or even five or six or seven?" And at the end of the movie: "Who won?" "We did."
Holden plays not a cynic but a skeptic and a pessimist whose pessimism is validated in The Bridge on the River Kwai, David Lean's greatest movie in my opinion. Shears would much prefer to lie on a South Pacific beach with an army nurse drinking martinis. Anyone would. And he deserves it. He did his time in the jungle and escaped from a Japanese POW camp run by a sadist. To escape required tremendous luck. And here they were interrupting his lucky life, blackmailing him into returning there by parachute with the insufferable, hale-and-hearty Jack Hawkins, the Oxbridge-educated Brit who is able to speak seven languages competently. Also on the mission is a Canadian solider, a kid really, capable enough but with a thing about killing. They have to bomb the bridge that the crazy English major Alec Guiness is helping the Japanese construct. I will not give away the explosive climax, but the last word in the picture, spoken by James Donald, is "Madness."
What Holden's character has done that makes himself vulnerable to blackmail by British intelligence is exactly what Don Draper does in the Korean War in Mad Men but again I'm not going to give that away here.
I have written elsewhere about The Counterfeit Traitor, as fine a movie about espionage as has ever been made. In The Wild Bunch, Holden and pals Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, and Ben Johnson, ex-pal Robert Ryan, and old fogie pal Edmund O'Brien, preside o'er the slow-motion death of the west. Cars have made horses defunct, and machine guns can wipe out the whole lot of them plus innumerable Mexicans in uniforms led by a heartless slob with a vicious streak. The outlaws may be on the wrong side of the law, but they are on the right side of political history. The men know they will die. But they do not falter. After Holden finishes his business with the whore, he puts on his gun belt and his hat, walks outside, eyes the others, and says, "Let's go." Warren Oates replies: "Why not?" Holden's last word in the picture is "Bitch."
Holden was married to the beautiful Brenda Marshall. He served as Ronald Reagan's best man when the Gipper wed Nancy Davis in 1952. In Italy in 1966 he was charged with vehicular manslaughter and driving under the influence. This added another reason for drunken depression.
Holden was Joe Bonaparte in Golden Boy, George Gibbs in Our Town, Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard, Stefson in Stalag 17, Shears in The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Eric Erickson in The Counterfeit Traitor. It was downhill after his work as Max Schumacher in Sidney Lumet's Network brought him admiring notices in 1976.
Director Billy Wilder said that Holden was a good citizen, concerned about such things as endangered species. "What he didn't realize was that he was himself an endangered species."
Died drunk in his Santa Monica home on November 16, 1981. In 1982 Barbara Stanwyck received a long overdue honorary Oscar. She said, "A few years ago I stood on this stage with William Holden as a presenter. I loved him very much, and I miss him. He always wished that I would get an Oscar. And so tonight, my golden boy, you got your wish." -- DL
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
