The Acrobat by Edward J. Delaney

 The Acrobat by Edward J. Delaney

This is a fictional biography of a fictional person. It includes the contemplations of the real person who transformed into a celebrity and what he makes of the happenstance of this bizarre international movie stardom.

The real person fictionalized here is Archibald Leach, the son of, not even a tailor, but a pressor born and raised in Bristol, England. The fictional person fictionalized is Cary Grant. The novel deftly time travels through the early years of the acrobatic vaudevillian, gently bouncing us to the mind of the 50 to 60 year old star as he looks back at what was that all about while deciding what to do next.

The Acrobat, published in late 2022, is also timely in that it explores the LSD psychological therapy he undertook. There is a 21st Century resurgence into the idea of using psychedelics as a powerful tool for personal growth and renewed understanding of oneself.
The novel fits in with the work of popular best selling author Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind about his late in life explorations of various psychedelics. A follow up book This is Your Mind on Plants expands that study. How to Change Your Mind has been adapted into a four part Netflix documentary series which is bound to reach far more people than the diminishing number of book readers in the moving image age. The series serves as almost a commercial for psychedelics in that it is a far more positive view of this stuff than mainstream commercial entertainment did the first time around when it ping ponged from ridiculous and ineffective propaganda such as Art Linkletter’s unfortunate daughter, this is your mind egg in a frying pan PSA TV ads. All this after an extremely confusing introduction of the substances via hit new music, Are Your Experienced, rock star Beatles, and Leary evangelical promotion.
Another art LSD project played NYC last year. This one oddly enough was a Broadway musical Flying Over Sunset (FLYING OVER SUNSET - Montage). This musical is by James Lapine, a hit show maker with Stephen Sondhiem in the past and played at Lincoln Center. It is about the psychedelic explorations of Aldous Huxley, Clare Boothe Luce, and Cary Grant. (This writer has not seen or read this show's book.)

This reader tries to stay clear of celebrity, movie, rock star biographies. The notion being that after the early wannabe years in which bio info of stars might be practical and instructional, there is little point at gazing up at the kings and queens of our culture. Their lives are so extreme and odd they provide little useful info to the common person. We are all complicated and human, it is really more interesting what the simple complicated folk do to get by than the rags to riches freaks among us.

So why read The Acrobat? This reader was interested in the popularization of LSD, the new interest in it and how it was going to be shown in the novel. It was not new information that Cary Grant was an advocate and participant in LSD therapy. This reader in fact asked the star about this in a Q&A segment of a traveling live show Grant did 38 years ago at Proctor’s Theater in Schenectady, NY in 1984. The question was about LSD and he didn’t back off in the slightest. The battle shaming him over this was almost 25 years in the past. He said it was a significant experience for him. https://www.carygrant.net/articles/schenectady.htm   

Cary Grant oddly enough was one of the first high profile personalities to talk publicly about LSD therapy and how he felt it benefitted his life. There was Huxley of course but not a movie star and not the biggest of movie stars at the top of the heap like Cary Grant. In this novel it involves a situation of mentioning it off hand and off the record to a showbiz reporter, but Grant thought this could harm the business of two movies he had in the can: Operation Petticoat and North By Northwest. So he denied ever having spoken to the reporter which couldn’t work out for him since the reporter had recorded an audio tape and also had photos. The reporter sued the star for defamation and they settled in a way that involved a wider distribution of the LSD story. Ultimately it was not a problem and had no effect on his career.

Grant was introduced to the therapy through one of his marriages, to Betsy Drake. They had met on her very first movie Every Girl Should Get Married. So naturally he married his co-star who should get married and did. They were married from 1948 until 1962, his longest marriage and her one. Betsy Drake never remarried and eventually got a Masters of Education from Harvard and became a child therapist while having no children herself. With the two of them hings had gone bad when he had an affair with Sophia Loren while they were making a movie together and wanted to go off with her except she then married Carlo Ponti. So Drake went to Dr Mortimer Hartman as part of dealing with the upset in their marriage and suggested that Cary do as well.  

The novel handles the LSD experience quite well. This is done by staying away from dealing with it directly. The chapters tend to begin with an italicized page of two of dream like scenes, These could be interpreted as compilations during the blindfolded LSD sessions, but Delaney doesn’t tell us directly that it is a function of the LSD. This is the safe route. LSD, psychedelic experience is not easily or at all explainable through text and speech, and it’s the type of thing that one cannot assume is like alcohol or some other drug or cannabis. From reading the novel it is impossible to tell if the author himself is experienced and that is just fine. The focus of the novel is the turning point of an aging man in a very odd position in life that he doesn’t entirely understand since his life had become the role of Cary Grant. This gives the novel the appeal of a story that the average reader can get something from. Aren’t we all in masks, playing a type of role that is us but also oddly not? The novel is good in that it focuses on the point of the therapy, not the tools used in exploration or the razmataz special effects that the tool is famous for.

This fine, entertaining, short novel (267 pages) is packed with info on the early years of Archibald Leach through to the early 60s when he is pushing 60 himself and then stops. If the reader is already aware of the biography of this man, they might still get an interesting take on the star from Delaney’s point of view. Others will get an adequate amount of bio information to suffice and a good story about the inner workings of an aging and somewhat alienated man. It also shows how a difficult situation of a boy child and his mother, a confusing separation, can cause the man to perhaps have a hard time staying and trusting a long term relationship with a woman, a marriage or facsimile.

Recommended 
The book was a New York Public Library brand new paperback.
Free ride. 
       

American Anarchist (2016)

American Anarchist (2016)
“Written” and directed by Charlie Siskel

This documentary is a portrait of William Powell who in 1970, at age 19, wrote a book called The Anarchist’s Cookbook.
The Anarchist’s Cookbook is an manual of revolution, how to make bombs and stuff like that. I’m not exactly sure what is all in it having never read or owned a copy.

The movie is made by Charlie Siskel. Documentaries are funny. If a filmmaker points a camera at someone and asks them questions, and edits all that together, the filmmaker gets to take credit as having written the movie. That seems pretty strange to me, especially in a situation like this where the subject, Powell, does most all the talking, yet he doesn’t even share the writing credit. Who came up with these rules? Powell’s wife also appears some in the movie.

William Powell is a very good talker. The delight of the film is getting to hear what he has to say. He handles Siskel’s interrogations with patient brilliance. Siskel keeps trying to corner him, to rattle him, to get some doc cinema gold with some kind of outrageous or angry reaction. He fails with the cool, thoughtful, and articulate Powell. Where Siskel keeps attempting to give Powell enough rope to get whatever he is looking for, he ends up defeated, hanging himself, as a hack documentary maker thinking he is on some scoop with a ruthless outlaw.
Yet Siskel was more or less fair in the way he edited most of the movie. We do get to see what a wonderful man Powell became, whatever one thinks of his writing 48 years ago.

William Powell, who died on July 11, 2016 at the age of 66 three months before the movie was released, spent his life as an educator of children with special needs. He spent his life working outside the USA. Siskel does spend some screen time telling us about this aspect of Powell’s life.

Even though Powell, as far back at 1976, regretted writing the book and stated that it should be put out of print, Siskel interrogates him bringing up that the book was in possession of the Columbine High School kid killers and others headline sensational killers. This gets to be a bit much with the implication that somehow Powell is responsible in association for the actions to these lost killers. Powells is very good at handling this stating that he was not aware that these people had the book. He says how could he be? He was living out of the USA and not one to investigate on the internet mass shootings. Siskel keeps up with this kind of stuff taking it to a ridiculous extreme at the very end when he attempts to compare Powell to Gavrilo Princip the man who shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria on June 28, 1914 which somehow started WWI. Apparently Siskel is very proud of this moment. After he asks this he gives us the movie’s final shot with Powell sitting there a bit stunned at this silly implication and trying to think of a measured response. But what I saw at that moment was how a documentary maker can manipulate footage via editing to make his point, except this time it just doesn’t work because by that time we have looked into the eyes and heard the measured responses for 2 hours of a very good and decent man who clearly spent his entire life helping people, children, less fortunate than he.
Did Powell pay for his sins of free speech other than this interrogation by Siskel? He and his wife say that he did. Although very qualified in his teaching field of labor, when the employer institutions found out about the book, sometimes though anonymous sources, he was not hired at job after job. This is regrettable, most likely the children he could have worked with are the ones who suffered most from this.

But there is an association between Powell, the Columbine killers and other kid killers who may have had the book. Powell was bullied in schools as a child and sexually abused by an administrator. By the time he was 19 and inspired by the righteous and popular rebelliousness of youth at the time, he channeled his rage into that movement and produced the book.
So Powell did not create himself any more than school killers do? They are all a result of the bullying and injustice of school systems and the abuse of children that often happens there either institutionally or peer bullying, or both in the situation of young Powell. Powell was a bright boy and not a violent person. His reaction to the abuse, coupled with governmental injustice and the Vietnam war, was to call for revolution and write a book not act out violently.

The movie also implies that the Anarchist Cookbook is the only source of this type of information. It has never been so. Powell got some of his stuff from government pamphlets.  And although we see brief footage of Abbie Hoffman from Vietnam protest, the revolution is imminent days, there is no mention of his book that covers a lot of the same material and more and was released at the same time, Steal This Book. Meanwhile this type of bomb building information and everything else in these books has been available on the internet for a least 20 years.

American Anarchist is worth watching.
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It is currently playing on Netflix