My Brush with Hollywood Stardom

This is of course a massive exaggeration. I had been visiting in Silver Lake with my friend Jack Pelton but he had to go to Portland to be with his nephew who was undergoing a very painful surgery for a young man, and there I was. Jack’s company rented revolving stages for movie shoots, and he’d sold one to a production outfit at Universal Studios where I had my encounter with the incredibly huge and expensive technical side of the film industry. It was my entrance to a real Hollywood sound stage.

Let me backup a minute. It had to be sometime in 1993. Michael Jackson had just been publicly accused of having sexual relations with underaged boys. Overnight he’d become poison, but he was also a huge star. Francis Ford Coppola’s 3D Imax movie, Dr. EO had been playing to full houses in Disney’s Epcot Center for almost a decade. A massive hit and huge money maker. But what to do when rumors and fierce public opinion emerged, and you have a sex offender of the most heinous sort cavorting in iMax 3D making no bones about wiggling his pelvis? You rush out a replacement as fast as you can.

1,000 × 605

Enter “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” or honey I blew up the kids. There were two versions. Sure to be another fantastic hit though I find the whole premise macabre--a nutty professor is working on a wonky machine in his attic and accidentally shrinks his kids to a miniscule size where ants prey on them in the front lawn, and rats accidentally fed into a copy machine chase them till everybody is scared shitless. In real life the wonky film technology has been perfected to make ants and rats jump off the screen and scare the be-Jesus out of ordinary middleclass white Americans venturing out of suburbia for a day of relaxation and adventure in the wholesome way Walt promised. It’s Hollywood so what the hell. We are all about avoiding any real conversation about child abuse so confront the topic head on, shrink and torture a few cute white kids due to the half-brained idiocy of one of their parents. Makes perfect sense, and I get a gig working the shoot.

The call was 6:30 AM. I had to stop and get something for the revolving stage, I think it was a full set of new Phillips Head screwdrivers so that Jack’s computer guy could fix whatever crisis came his way and keep the producers happy. I set out for Baller Hardware which opened at 5 A.M.. A good omen for the day--rushing to the tool section, I literally almost bump into Martina Navratilova in Fasteners. Forgetting the unwritten rule to avoid making a big deal about running into one of your favorite gay celebrities equipping herself for a day of DIY at her Hollywood mansion at five thirty in the morning, I smile broadly and wave hi. She waves back with an equally bright smile. This is Hollywood, real star encounters, and she is as wonderful in real life as I imagined.

I get to the Universal lot, find parking and make the call. Now this is going to take a bit more explanation, Jack has pulled some strings and I am actually going to make a few hundred dollars that day. I will be tending rats. Really. I will be a Rat Wrangler. In Hollywood lingo a “wrangler" is the person who tends to animals on the set. In rodeos the wrangler coaxed bulls into the pen before the cowboy or cowgirl rode them bareback till they were thrown off. On a movie set they kept the horses calm until the Lone Ranger and Tonto needed to ride off into the sunset or gallop to a gun fight. Hollywood code stipulates that there can be no more than 5 animals per wrangler. So for the scene that we were filming, a hundred or so rats exploding out of the copy machine, there were about 20 wranglers sitting on hard folding chairs, each tending five white rats in cages until the director said lights, action, release the rats.

This took a while. Rats, even clean and groomed Hollywood rats do not respond well to commands. I think it was 12 hours for them to cleanly fall out of the carefully engineered copy machine with some clear plastic tubes against the blue background which would accommodate some kids who are confused and scared shitless. I don’t remember much. I wish I’d brought a book but alas there was no book section at Smart and Final Hardware. No talking allowed, but the catered food for the crew was fabulous. I mean really spectacular. No greasy food truck. Bagels and lox till 9, sandwiches and salad for lunch and a full course dinner. The pay was more than I made for any day in that whole decade. I think close to 40 bucks an hour for sitting with a small metal cage at my side. My only real complaint was the fold up metal chair.

When Michael died in 2009, Disney returned a remastered Dr. EO to the screens at Epcot. Better to cash in for big bucks. The attention span for accusations of sex abuse is about 10 years so he’d served his time. Time to rid the world of fanciful child abuse by shrinking kids for white rats to threaten them.

I found a short clip of my day's work on YouTube. https://youtu.be/rRdzBtE2mQU, The bit with the white rats and copy machine starts at 2:30. One full day for a split second. That's Hollywood.

A note on karma, story telling, the movie “Oppenheimer” and the opera "Doctor Atomic."

When I examine my conscience I ask myself not just what I did, but how bad were the consequences of my negative actions? Sometimes the immediate results are right there, a shattered relationship, a broken dish. I am not aware of any personal actions that have the possible consequences of splitting the atom, but if I were to examine the conscience of the Manhattan Project, how bad were the results, including the ones that became obvious only after Little Boy and Fat Man obliterated two cities? Worse, much worse than we could have possibly imagined.

We are sitting in a theater 68 years after the fact. Although Christopher Nolan begins Oppenheimer’s story much earlier than those eventful days, telling a story backwards is always difficult. From the storyteller's point of view, looking in the rearview mirror he or she can see how things played out in ways no one could not have imagined. But where is it in his or her job description that writers have to be omniscient? And to be honest about telling the story as it happened, how much of what we’ve learned after the fact can be scripted into the narrative before it becomes nothing more than a moralistic fable meant to instruct about the consequences of bad decisions?

There is a role for telling stories of good versus evil. God knows there are more than enough of them to claim our attention and compete for our vote. One of the problems in trying to focus humanity on taking the right steps in combating climate change is that alarmist tales where the payoffs still give cash and prizes hinder accurate telling. How can we possibly disconnect from burning fossil fuels when our lives and livelihood will be disrupted? It is a situation that can only be solved when the threat of human kind’s survival is an in our face life or death situation, or at least that is how it is portrayed in the accompanying story line. Humankind will take no action until we survey the wreckage, but then, like Hiroshima, it may be too late.

The men, and they were all men, who made the decisions that lead to humanity’s total dependence on burning fossil fuels to foster the industrial revolution, followed the time honored rules of self-enrichment; they just grabbed what was at hand and sold it for a profit. Did they see the ice sheet of Antarctica melting and the water in Florida becoming as hot as the hot tub in a beachfront condo? The answer is clearly no, they did not. They could not. Do Germans who bought into Hitler’s Third Reich after the economic disaster of the Weimar Republic share blame for the Holocaust? They claim that they are really decent people motivated by giving a new strong leader the chance of improving a defeated Germany’s economic condition and lost status in the world. The murder of millions was unforeseen. They claim ignorance and to some degree they are right. The horror of the camps was not broadcast. Did Oppenheimer and the other Los Alamos scientists foresee the insidious arms race that would stoke the economy for generations as well as the lethal consequences of unleashing the power of nuclear fission and fusion? Obviously they could not, or at least not in the way that it appears to us now. They were attempting something that they did not know could be done. It had never been done before. We have the wisdom of hindsight. Looking back, researching carefully, we might find evidence that was overlooked, neglected, even willfully hidden because it would have stopped the development of the weapon that military planners pinned their hopes on. In the Manhattan Project, there is evidence of fear in the hearts of some scientists that humankind was stepping into the unknown and that the powers about to be unleashed were of a scale that had never been seen in the history of the world, but these were suppressed by chain of command.

In each of these imagined scenarios, the protagonists could be straw men in a tale of right and wrong with far reaching consequences. But in storytelling, describing the reality of the moment when the event actually happened is very difficult and easy to botch with a lot of judgment and well intentioned afterthoughts. I will not argue that this lets us off the hook, but I will point out that if the narrator or writer or singer does not capture that immediacy, they have failed.

The story telling in “Oppenheimer” was masterful. I have some familiarity with the subject so in a sense it was a retelling for me. If I were the writer, there were a few details that I might have outlined more clearly, especially the role of Lewis Strauss in the post war campaign to destroy Oppenheimer’s reputation when he became an advocate against the disastrous arms race that has left the world with the ever present threat of mutual mass destruction, but I can imagine Oppy as the leader of the brainy team that won the race to detonate the Atomic bomb. His struggles were real, and as far as my reading of history, accurate. He studies the Bhagavad Gita, even during sex, and the famous quote “Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds” when he witnessed the first detonation stayed in the script.

A German friend says she was shocked when at the celebration at Los Alamos after the bomb was dropped in Hiroshima, Oppenheimer says, “too bad we didn’t get it done in time to drop on Germany.” I think that this is from an actual report. What shocked me more was when Truman says to his chief of staff after Oppenheimer’s visit to the oval office, “I don’t want to see that cry baby ever again.” That statement was definitely not recorded, but had the ring of truth. Truman’s attitude is so contrary to what I was taught. I came from a very politically conservative and activist Republican family; I thought that I had heard every suspicious utterance out of Harry’s mouth. 

Oppenheimer is not a glorification of war or the dropping of the bomb. If it were just a moral tale, there could have been cuts to the mass destruction of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, somehow hinting at the epidemic of cancers that started to appear in the tribal people who were unwittingly exposed to the radiation, but the film maker, Christopher Nolan, was disciplined. He kept focused on telling the story as accurately as he could about what actually happened when it happened. That was its strength. It was compelling. 

There is another side to my understanding in the story telling. I just listened to a politician in the US saying that it does not feel particularly good to have been right about the total incompetence of Donald Trump and the serious mess that he wreaked on our democracy. Feeling good or bad about predicting an outcome is not an answer to understanding karma. It is not taking responsibility for our actions or inaction seriously. In this case of Trump, the evidence was pretty clear from the moment he announced his bid for the office, but the story is really not so much about the hard facts of a narcissistic personality disorder as it is the acceptance by so many Americans of a political agenda contrary to our best interests.

Does the ignorance of any story teller, and that includes all of us telling our own stories, leave us off the hook for being responsible for the consequences of our actions? Include both the consequences that we could foresee as well as the ones that appeared over time, in hindsight. I cannot say. I can only make that call for myself.

Is there still room for a moral tale about the dropping of the bomb? Of course. I know one as compelling as “Oppenheimer,” one that doesn’t dilute either by mixing the poison with the antidote. John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic” tells the same story, but opera is meant to be a moral tale. I heard one of the first San Francisco Opera’s performances in October of 2005. Whereas Christopher Nolan used the book by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, “American Prometheus,” to write “Oppenheimer,” Adams could not enlist any of the librettists from previous operas so he and his producer, Peter Sellars, used the declassified transcripts available from Manhattan Project plus some poetry that inspired Oppenheimer. It vacillates between ordinary, even crass speech and the sublime. Adam’s music is also challenging. He does not hesitate to preach.

You hear it just after the curtain goes up. One of the very first arias sung by Edward Teller sets the tone: 

“First of all, let me say that I have no hope of clearing my conscience. 

The things we are working on are so terrible

that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.” 

The chorus sings a very dark stanza from the Bhagavad Gita: 

“At the sight of this, your Shape stupendous,

Full of mouths and eyes, feet, thighs and bellies, 

Terrible with fangs, O master, 

All the worlds are fear-struck, even just as I am. 

When I see you, Vishnu, omnipresent, 

Shouldering the sky, in hues of rainbow, 

With your mouths agape and flame-eyes staring — 

All my peace is gone; my heart is troubled.” 

Adams introduces a tribal Tiwa woman, Pasqualita, his wife’s maid who sings plaintively after the Trinity test, 

“The winter dawned, but the dead did not come back. 

News came on the frost, ‘The dead are on the march!’ 

We danced in prison to a winter music, many we loved began to dream of the dead. 

They made no promises, we never dreamed a threat. 

And the dreams spread.” (https://booklets.idagio.com/075597930238.pdf)

The hero’s plight is unresolved and leaves us hanging. The music, the dramatic setting aim for a different place in the heart. It is meant to plant a troubling question, one that was not clearly seen during the lead up. It is seen in the rearview mirror.

________________

Here is the message cloaked in prayer that General Norman Schwarzkopf, USA Commander-in-Chief U.S. Central Command, gave to the military on January 16, 1991 as he ordered the invasion of a Muslim nation. Billy Graham as “America’s Pastor” was at his side to sanction it.

“Soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines of the United States Central Command, this morning at 0300, we launched Operation Desert Storm, an offensive campaign that will enforce the United Nation’s resolutions that Iraq must cease its rape and pillage of its weaker neighbor and withdraw its forces from Kuwait. My confidence in you is total. Our cause is just! Now you must be the thunder and lightning of Desert Storm. May God be with you, your loved ones at home, and our Country.”

Father George Zabelka was the priest for the airmen who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He gave them his blessing. Days later he counseled an airman who had flown a low-level reconnaissance flight over the city of Nagasaki shortly after the detonation of “Fat Man.” The man described how thousands of scorched, twisted bodies writhed on the ground in the final throes of death, while those still on their feet wandered aimlessly in shock – flesh seared, melted, and falling off. The crewman’s description raised a stifled cry from the depths of Zabelka’s soul: “My God, what have we done?” 

There was no prayer in Los Alamos. There wasn’t even a church or synagogue until 1947, two years after the destruction of the Japanese cities and the end of the war--religion in the role of a mopping up operation, gearing its ministry to assuaging the conscience of the conquerors in the service of its generals.

Father Zabelka by the end of his life came to renounce his role in blessing the airmen and aircraft that carried the bombs. Norman Schwarzkopf was buried with full military honors at West Point. To the victor belong the spoils.

Robert Oppenheimer died on February 18, 1967. There was a service at Princeton attended by 600 people. 

A few days before Trinity Oppenheimer quoted Bhartṛhari's Śatakatraya:

In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains,
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good deeds a man has done before defend him.

The Gift of Tears

Remembering  my Mother, Leona Mare Carroll

August 9th, 1916 - October 4th, 2005

My mother, Leona Carroll Ireland, died 18 years ago. I wrote this piece when my mother began what would be the last years of her life. I dedicate it to you, Mother, and to all our mothers.

I woke up this morning missing my mother who has been dead now for several years. Given the contentious quality of our relationship for most of our 60 years together, I am surprised that oftentimes I find tears in my eyes when I think of her. We were locked us in absolute stalemate for almost 20 years. I still remember phone calls where she slammed down the receiver, long periods of not speaking—her cold punishment for my seemingly uncooperative nature—her steely resolve that by the force of her will I was going to get straight somehow, and marry.

A few short years before she died, I was blessed, or just got really lucky, when I was able to touch the pain her actions tried to mask. That alone took away their power to hurt, and allowed me to experience a kind of love that I could not have imagined.

There is a famous story in zen about a monk, Hsiang-yen, who, by most standards applied to monks, was a failure. He worked away in the monastery of his teacher expecting nothing - and he got nothing; he sat long hours in meditation - nothing; he did rounds of begging – right, again only scraps; he got thrown out of the hojo every time he presented himself before his teacher to check out how he was doing because he didn’t seem to be absorbing much. A hopeless case. So after many years of getting nowhere when his teacher died, convinced that realization was beyond his capabilities, he retired to a remote temple where he tended the teacher’s grave. One day, the story continues, as he was raking the stones in the orderly zen garden, (I like to imagine the ones you see in the fancy books with perfectly ordered lines in the rocks,) a small stone bounced off the garden wall with a Ping! Just that sound, and in a tumble his mind gulped in all his training in a single instant and he understood. He got his life.

Even someone who has never practiced long days of meditation can understand the appeal of this monk's story. Everyone I know has some dilemma like this in his or her life. For me my relationship with my mother was a huge conundrum.

I had flown to Tucson to be with my mother after her first serious heart episode. It was decided that she get a pacemaker; that the doctor would electrically jolt her heart, and, hopefully, restore a normal rhythm. Then the elements of a really bad melodrama started to unfold—my father disappeared for several days when he couldn’t take anymore, my mother brawled with her sister and a pretty buffed nursing attendant as she tried to put on her clothes to leave to go out into the street and hail a cab to take her home given that no one in her family seemed willing to obey her command and return her to a normal life. Eventually a really well-trained and compassionate case manager was the voice of calm, and mother agreed to the procedure. The drama to follow can be a quick note in the margin—further refusal on the operating table; family crisis; harsh words exchanged in anger; the heart specialist looks like the 14 year prodigy, Doogie Howser M.D., on the TV (I’m not kidding. He really did look like a teenager). I started to laugh, . . . this kid is going to thread electrodes through the arteries to my mother’s heart? What is she going to think? She thinks he’s cute, and refuses his treatment. Back to square one. That evening we would try again.

Before her surgery, she can have no food; even water is restricted—only small ice shavings. I hold a plastic cup and gently spoon the shavings on her tongue. She chews, and sucks, and swallows with smiles. I hear the ice click against the side of the plastic cup as I scoop it up. I use every bit of all my long zen training just to be with my mother for what might be her last moments of life—just her, just this spoonful, just this ice, just my breath and hers, just her pleasure in ice and water. It is very sweet, and I feel like the good son. If nothing else about zen, it does train you to be present in the moment. And that moment will have to be enough for this particular gay son after many long years of feeling outcast and abused. Yes, I decide it will be enough.

The medical procedure went as well as any scripted denouement on the Doogie Howser TV show. You couldn’t hope for more: the patient got well; the family crisis was temporarily resolved when the stubborn mother agreed to go to the nursing home; the father returned, shaken, humbled but unharmed, forgiven and loved; the gentle sister has taken over managing the mother’s care. And I boarded Frontier Air to return to San Francisco.

After the exchange of pleasantries, I discovered that my seatmates were going to San Francisco to be reunited with their birth mother whom they have never met (how could I make this up?), and I told them that I have been at my mother’s sick bed.

We are in flight. Staring out the window as we flew over the Rockies, across the desert and into the sky over Death Valley, I lapsed into a brown study, and sat mesmerized by the wonder of the world. The flight attendant offered me a second Diet Coke with ice. My orphaned seatmates passed the offering across the seats. I took a big gulp and as I swirled the ice around the cup, it clinked against the edge. In an instant my mind tumbled and I am no longer "me" in a plane over Death Valley, but I am in my mother’s life—I mean really, not some theoretical proposition—all of it, her hopes her pain her struggles her fear her birth her death, and I burst into tears and sob. My orphan seatmate understands something about finding mothers: she just reached out and gently touched my arm, holding me connected to the breathing world as my mind flies away. Did I thank her enough? Any trace of resentment, regret, bitterness, or recrimination about the way my mother treated me at any time in our lives together evaporates. She is just my mother, and I am finally able to enter into the mystery and wonder of being a son.

The plane lands in San Francisco. I mumble good-bye to my seatmates where the mother that gave them birth waits at the gate. I wish them well, and I walk back into my life, praying that everybody be lucky enough to find out who their mothers really are, to be able to step into their lives, and to cry when they are gone.

Kenneth Lawrence Ireland, Sr.

Aug. 8, 1913 - May 20, 2014

My Father was a remarkable man, and he lived a long and truly blessed life. When he died on May 20th, he was almost a hundred and one years old, and I might have entirely missed knowing and appreciating him.

I was sitting with Dad on the broad porch of his retirement home in Kennebunkport Maine. We were about 5 miles inland from the shore of the Atlantic. The sky was a very clear bright blue. A few light clouds were drifting slowly westward from the beach. He pointed towards the most distant and said, “Watch that one furthest out. It looks like it will roll in, but it won’t make it here. They all disappear.” I looked up and noticed that the sky above us was completely clear. Together we quietly watched the progress of soft white shapes drifting towards us as they gradually faded and then vanished.

My Father had just turned 100. I had flown in from San Francisco for the celebration and now a cab would take me to the train and back to Logan Airport. Although Dad was in very good health and his mind was as sharp as ever, I was not sure if I would ever see him again. Ashish and I had a trip planned to India the next year, and there was a quiet insistence from Dad that I travel to all the places he had dreamed of visiting. I felt a very deep sweetness in that moment. I wasn’t sad, perhaps a bit melancholy, but any regret had vanished just like the clouds drifting in from the Atlantic. It sounds trite, but I think we were both very much at peace. I loved this man very deeply, and finally after a lifetime of a strained relationship under all the Yankee emotional damping down, we were both just comfortable sitting silently side by side.

Just a few years before, this would not have been possible. I had entered the Jesuits after college, encouraged as much by separating myself from the emotional turmoil of my adolescence as by some vocation or higher calling. And in the process of unraveling those emotional knots, I had to separate myself from my parents. Thankfully that process didn't last beyond our life spans.

I have no idea where to begin, there are so many stories about my Dad’s intelligence, his impeccable memory, his endless curiosity and quick wit. His golfing buddies will testify how much he loved the sport and bridge partners will swear that he remembered every card played even when he was more than 100 years old. People will tell stories about his work ethic, his writing and stamp collecting. He was devoted to his family, our mother Lee, her sister Judy, his Dad, his brothers, our Uncle Donny and Rich, Uncle Chunk, his wife Freddy, and Bill, Don’s partner, his seven grandchildren and six great grandchildren as well as his many deep friendships.

I want to share one memory that changed our relationship. It’s also about memories. On one of my first visits to Huntington Commons, in part to hide my trepidation about not having visited for a long time (I almost called it off and probably would not have made the trip without Julie’s encouragement and support) plus my personal fears about not measuring up, I tried to start a fun conversation--reminiscing about growing up.

My father and I played a game: I can remember that friend with 5 clues. (Spoiler alert—Dad always won).

We went back to the time when he was a young dad, soon to have 4 kids, a new business, and the responsibility for an extended family that included our maternal grandmother, Nana, and mother’s sister, Judy, who was suffering from TB at a time when cure was far from certain. But our family life, thanks to both Mother and Dad, extended beyond those concerns.

Our parents had a close circle of friends, other young couples in Nichols. Bif and I went up and down Huntington Turnpike, and talked about the people we grew up with and their kids. Their shared experiences included learning life’s lessons during the Great Depression and fighting a great war, raising families and building schools, bike trips on Nantucket and family summers on Cape Cod. Bob and Louise Dunning, Dick and Barbara Sargent, Les and Shirley Nothanagle, Mae West, Dave Peck, the Flemming's with their eight kids, Bif remembered everyone.

Then there was the Milford Yacht Club, our memories of the countless summer weekends when we campaigned our Lightning up and down Long Island Sound and our sailing friends, Wayne Brockett, the life guards and sailing instructors who Dad had a hand in hiring. He spearheaded the first World Championship for the Lightning class in Milford, and that opened up the opportunity for him and mother to travel to Italy and Peru. When we talked about Ned and Emily Daly, their sons Ned and Jerry, he had me pick up the phone and call Ned Junior.

From the days of Ireland Heat Treating on the Post Road, we talked of his many loyal workers, his long-term secretary, Hilda Graff, who was almost part of our family, and the men who’d encouraged Dad to go out on his own.

We drifted in and out of this conversation over the three days we spent together. For more than 60 years I believed a story I made up: that my Dad was distant, that just because we’d had a difficult time communicating (and of course that was entirely his fault, not mine), that Dad was somehow self-absorbed and not really in touch.

Nothing could have been farther from the truth.

He remembered details that I’d entirely forgotten or never heard before. But what really astonished me was the level of feeling, the kindness and compassion in his recollections. He talked of the happy events and the sad moments, the setbacks as well as the accomplishments in a way that made them present. It was so clear that he cherished these men and women. As we talked I could see his face change. I felt his admiration for their successes, sadness for their losses, and gratitude for their friendship. I can also tell you that if there was any funny story about any of the people we talked about, he told it with his gentle laugh and bright smile. That weekend he gave me a real gift—himself.

When I talk to my friends about my father, they are amazed that he lived such a long life, and that it was such a happy and rich life right to the end. They ask, “What was his secret?” Those of us who were close to him know that he was not perfect by any means, that he had his share of disappointments and sorrows, but when I look at his life for an antidote to life’s sufferings I marvel at the wonderful way he connected with so many people, accepting and treating everyone with an even hand, balanced with good humor and love.