To my chagrin, the words poured out not in script form but through the unskilled medium of prose (I’d “journaled” awhile some years ago but abandoned my entries as being too precious. I was always a bit stiff, and hope the reader will exercise patience as I limber up). In this case, I told myself all along that once I got it down I would be able, like a singer transposing keys, to convert the melody to whichever form was most ideal. I only knew the important thing was to capture as much of my saga as possible, now, at full gallop. It was lightning first and “message” second that needed to be bottled.
This slim book is the result.
As I said: I was at the bakery awaiting my latte when a young father came in, holding a babe in arms. Now we all warm to a doting, youthful man and his infant when no mother is in sight — it gives a kind of genial, beneficent balance to the world, sunnily deflating the notion men can’t be nurturers too. I should add that I’m almost forty, so lately there’s a twinkle in my eye when presented with such a scene, and a smug awareness that while at such an age a woman’s time clock is approaching its final hours, my own mechanism is there to be polished if not wound. I’ve always been a magnet for babies’ eyes. Whether it’s self-love or something about my aura, ever since I can remember I’ve attracted a nearly embarrassing focus, to the puzzled amusement of parent or caretaker. As if on cue, the boy pivoted toward me, squirming in his bib. Cockily preparing myself for the usual prolonged mesmeric reaction, his stare defied experience, and instead froze at some point above my own. He began to chortle, not with the stagy too-cute laugh that humankind seems to already master only weeks out of the womb but with a beguiling, joyful, unbridled music of sheer wonder. Dad and I tried to find what it was that captivated him, to no avail — he’d left the world far behind, fixated on something transcendent and beautiful, that even now does not seem an exaggeration to say encompassed the cosmos itself.
His laughter burbled on, without ever striking a false note.
“What do you see?” said his father, tenderly attentive. “What do you see?”
The little seer smiled, monitoring the ineffable of the blueness beyond. For a moment, I smiled too — and saw.
That was when I gathered my things in tearful tumult and raced out the door, on a mission.
~ ~ ~
BUT I DIDN’T PROPERLY INTRODUCE myself.
My name is Bertram Valentine Krohn (Valentine being the hero of Stranger in a Strange Land, and Henry Miller’s middle name too. Dad baptized me thus, and really showed his hand). I’m thirty-eight years old but most everyone calls me Bertie. The valentine-giving father is Perry Needham Krohn, creator-producer in perpetua of TV’s longest-running syndicated space opera, Starwatch: The Navigators. You may have heard of him — he continues, after many years, to be a staple of Variety, the Times, the Beverly Hills Courier and 213—not so much for his deal-making activities but in conjunction with whatever organization happens to be paying tribute (I should say he’s paying them), which seems to occur on a bimonthly basis. You see, Dad likes lending his name to good causes, attracting old/new money to new/old diseases, relishing the hubbub of silent auctions and black-tie balls — says it keeps him young. Mom hates all that, but I think vanity prevents her from attending the galas. More about her later.
I was raised, as you might have guessed, in a world of great privilege. In fact, sad as it may sound, I’ve always considered “Bertie Krohn: The Early Years” to be among the happiest of my life. And while this document tilts more toward reportage than memoir, the thought occurred it might be ideal to recount a few personal anecdotes from that era of my youth. As earlier alluded, it will help warm the muscles (I already feel a writer’s cramp coming on), and besides, it’s my opinion — and that of at least two critics, one biographer and a New Yorker short-story contributor, all friends of Dad’s who’ve been obliquely interrogated by yours truly — that the closer one is to the storyteller, the likelier one is to embrace what is told.
Like most of us, I failed to escape the minor joys, major heartbreaks, and brushes with mortality that apply to any youth’s rightful passage; so let me begin with Death and work my way back to Ecstasy. Remember that amazing show, Tales from the Crypt? It was actually a comic book before that. (Dad has a leather-bound set.) Well, allow me to flip through a few of my own illustrated panels — what Clea used to call the “not-so-funnies.” They’re a bit macabre but pertinent to my own tale, I assure.
I’m an only child. No one in the immediate family perished during my impressionable years (as opposed to the later, “depressionable years”—Clea, again). That said, there was an artistic cousin who died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma who lived somewhere in the Midwest and would be buried too in that same region of my mind. A few miles from our house in Benedict Canyon, the baby sister of a friend was struck by a car and killed, but, owing to my never having seen much of her before the event, the wraith became more ghoulish abstraction than cautionary tale. Upon entering high school, a bookish junior became trapped in a second-floor house fire on South Roxbury Drive and got the fingers of her hand burnt off; she returned in the second semester of the next year and was treated by the student body as if she’d joined an Indian caste in the interim: a mixture of Brahman and Untouchable, a kind of Mother Teresa horror-show saint. Then there was Aaron, whose folks owned the town pharmacy. He only lasted till the sixth grade, dying of a cerebral hemorrhage one summer near Indian Wells.
But the highest reading on the Richter Mortality Scale by far was the death of Leif Farragon, the handsomest boy I’d ever known and the funniest too. He was tall, tousled and fatherless, with a dimpled chin and a gorgeous mom who taught second grade at Horace Mann. I can still summon the smell of his skin through the velour turtlenecks then in vogue, evoking the gregarious, gemütlich, goyish life force that was irresistibly, quintessentially Leif. Every kid I knew had money except for him. Instead of going to El Rodeo or Hawthorne, he attended the very school where his mother worked, the poorest, fringiest, farthest flung of the four Beverly Hills publics, yet by virtue of bawdy sarcasm, athletic grace, and generosity of spirit, the charismatic boy had literally crossed over (Wilshire Boulevard) to join the upper echelon of the district’s social strata.
I remember being with him at a party on North Rodeo Drive. My girlfriend at the time — we were all of us nearing thirteen — was the aforementioned Clea Fremantle, daughter of legendary film actress Roosevelt Chandler née Delia LeMay Chaiken. I doubt that things have much changed but back then, rich kids began having serious parties at a fairly tender age, facilitated not only by the handy venue of mansions’ shadowy acreage and multiple trysting zones but the inept, well-meaning agenda of absentee parents zealously contriving to watch over scions through the indulgent, lackadaisical eyes of longtime live-in help. We young royals did plenty of frenching and groping and cupping of half-breasts; I can still remember Clea’s smells, less familiar than Leif’s and sometimes immobilizing in mysterious ways — like a fearful hunter, time and again I froze in my tracks while hand, heart, and gland gamely soldiered on, shaky finger on hairy triggers. We commandeered various guest rooms for musky, R-rated kisses under the benign gaze of Mom, in movie poster form. While suffocating ourselves with cavorting tongues that slo-mo fenced like thick forest slugs, I occasionally opened a wandering eye to take in the epic, voluptuous Roos Chandler, she of the requisite small-town transformation to deathless American icon, she of the self-anointed film noir nom de ciné, she of the occasional madcap nude night swim during bashful daughter’s fledgling soirée sleepovers, she of the three husbands before the age of thirty, she of the consecutive Academy Awards — Best Supporting, Best Actress, Best Actress.