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"LOVE LETTER" TO JERRY LEIBER, The Book that Leiber Tried to Suppress NOTES... NO, NOT TOWARDS A SUPREME FICTION! BUT A PORTRAIT OF "J.L." "SLY""KILLERBOY" "BOOBY" LEIBER VEHICULAR GIRL-SLAUGHTERER, ROCK & ROLLER RADICAL-CHIC-LITHIUM-HEAD-PROSTATE-TORY HALL-OF-FAMER, THREE-MINUTE-GENIUS, MALE-SLUT, CHEMO-JUNKIE ALKIE-HYPOCRITE, SUBTLE STYLIZER, RINKY-DINK MILLIONAIRE DARLING & MONSTER, MOTHER GOOSE & GREAT COOK With a Preface Courtesy of Orin D. Snyder An Introduction of Shorts by Michael Stroller The Borderline Press Mulege Baja California Sur COPY RIGHT PAGE LEIBER 2 ROLOFF DEDICATION XXXX LEIBER 3 ROLOFF EMPTY LEIBER 4 ROLOFF HALF TITLE LEIBER 5 ROLOFF EMPTY XXX LEIBER 6 ROLOFF CONTENTS 6 Preface via Orin D. Snyder 7 Intro by Michael Stroller 8 I----A LA GOLDMAN 9 II- IN L.A. 10 INCIDENTS TEASED APART, DIFF TACKS & DARTS... 1---RE-ENCOUNTER AT THE MAUSOLEUM 12 A DAY IN LA VIDA 2---HOUSE NIGGERS 13 3---THE DOGBITE STORY 14 4---JL & WOMEN 15 5---JL's MEMORY 16 6---JL'S GRANDIOSITY& STYLE 17 THE TRANSFIGURED SELF-IMAGE 7---LYRICS PROJECT II 18 DEMISE OF THE PROJECT 19 9-- JL'S PROJECTS 20 AS SABOTEUR 10--JL ON MONEY 21 11--EMBARRASSMENTS 22 12--JL'S 38 YEARS OF P.A. 23 13--AS A TYRANT: Jake & Our Lord 24 15--LEIBER'S HEALTH 26 16--OTHER ANGLES 17--AFTERBIRTH NOTES MY ACQUAINTANCE: Cathy 7 INTERVIEW: Barbara Rose 8 T.A.D.O. PROJECT/HANDKE 9 LYRICS PROJECT I 10 PSEUDO STEPFATHER TRANSCRIPTS OF LAST TELEPHONE CONVERSATIONS INTERVIEW EXCERPTS unterlagen for the lyrics II project CASSETTE OF THE CONVERSATIONS SOURCES... INDEX..... LEIBER 7 ROLOFF Preface Courtesy of Orin S. Snyder, Esq. "It is an integral and material part of this Agreement that its terms shall be kept confidential by the undersigned. The undersigned are each prohibited from showing this Agreement to any third-party and from explaining or discussing the terms of this Agreement with any third-party without the written consent of all parties to this Agreement. The undersigned agree hat they shall not make any statement to any member of the press or broadcast or print media concerning this settlement or explaining or discussing the terms of this Agreement. The undersigned acknowledge that breach of this provision constitutes a material breach of this agreement. Any party aggrieved by a violation of this confidentiality agreement shall be entitled to all equitable and legal remedies as may be determined by a court of competent jurisdiction. Roloff agrees that he cannot and shall not write or contribute to, or otherwise disseminate, any books, article or other written material, whether published or unpublished about Leiber; nor can he cooperate with third parties about the writing and/or publication of any book, article or written material about Leiber. If Roloff violates this provision, Leiber shall be entitled to all equitable and legal remedies as may be determined by a court of competent jurisdiction. Any party aggrieved by a violation of this confidentiality agreement shall be entitled to all equitable legal remedies as may be determined by a court of competent jurisdiction." LEIBER 8 ROLOFF Introduction It all happened so fast: there I was at the age of four in my stroller, I had just completed playing a four-handed rendition of THREE BLIND LICE on our stand-up whore-house piano with my beloved mother when the doorbell chimed its invariable Polonaise. Mom indicated to me that I should stroll to the front door and see who it was that was chiming so impatiently. Always the obedient and obliging baby, this is what I then did. I laboriously strolled the stroller to the door, opened it, and what did I see! One blue eye and one brown cow's eye staring back at me. First I just stared at the oddity for what must have seemed hours to my Mom, but being eye-struck, and doubly so, I remained quite unaware of the passage of time until my mother shouted: "Michael, why don't you let your friend in." How she could assume that the oddity I was staring at was my friend or would be my friend continues to be beyond me after all these years. Put it down to her sixth sense. It was her sixth sense after all that told us that there were spider webs in the upright. I let Baby Brown and Blue Eyes in his color-coded wicker stroller stroll into our splendid living room, popped another downer for my incipient ulcer, as Baby Brown & Blue Eyes said: "I hear you play the piano." "How did you know?" asked my mother and she and I did a quick rendition of Three Blind Lice for my friend to be and he seemed re-assured on that score. Then he pulled the score of THREE BLIND LICE off the music stand and, pointing to it, said: "I need someone who can do that." "Do what I said? Compose." "I write the words, you write the notes." I said: "What kind of words do your write?." "Blues type words." "I'm your baby." My mother said: "He's your baby all right." My life hasn't been the same since. Now and then Baby Blue and Brown eyes still pulls me back into the sandbox. "Notes for things like this," said Baby Blue and Brown eyes, and pulled a few sheets with words scribbled on them out of his shirt. I looked at the words scribbled there. They had something to do with dogs and cats being tossed out and let in. Calamine lotion. "It's a blues," said Baby Blue and Brown Eyes "I don't do blues," I said. "What do you do," said Baby Blue and Brown Eyes. "I do Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Gershwin, soft, ameliorated, innocuous stuff like that. Broadway music with a little bit of style." "That's all right," said Baby Blue and Brown Eyes, "My mom like's shit like that too. If you ask me, Irving Berlin is the greatest." "He certainly made more money than anybody else in the racket ever did," said my beloved Mom. And that settled that. We'd be the smorgasbord boys, the smorgasbord boys from Minsk. I look at what Michael Roloff has come up with on Baby Blue and Brown eyes, and it's part of the story, the down part of the story, and some of the up part of the story, and in a way I'm sorry that I always took those downers, they made me so passive, but who would have pulled me out of the slough of downers if not Mr. Up. It's all true all right. Michael Roloff has a good eye for warts. What a shame. Michael Stroller LEIBER 9 ROLOFF I-A la Goldman... Before suffering a deadly, airborne heart-attack in Spring 94, Albert Goldman -- the keen, occasionally outrageous biographer of popular idols John Lennon, Lennny Bruce & Elvis Presly -- considered treating his public to a book about the rock and roll fuck and fall legend Jerry Leiber. Or, rather, as Albert put it to me: he had always wanted to do a book about "a cat like that"... where it remains to be specified exactly what kind of cat we are talking about... coon cat... calico cat... swamp cat... anyhow two cats who at least early in their lives had lived the life of white niggers. If Albert had delved a little more deeply into the background of either he would have discovered that one cat might never have... for even now, the second ROCKER, dear Mike Stoller, his face now skewing your eyes as you regard him sags down on one side while the other seems to want to slip heavenward, had never really signed on to this project, it was all very much Jerry Leiber pushing for its realization that kept it alive. And Leiber.... well, black didn't go that deep either... maybe Ukrainian... that's what interested Albert, the semi toughs.....the first in the line of yet another line.. If one wanted to write about two cats like that, yes... it's always interesting to see the general cultural conflicts and also the specific personal conflicts... intersect! Since I've known Leiber so many years it's hard to remember exactly when I first set eyes on him. His was a face I started seeing around Elaine's probably as soon as Frank Conroy took me there the moment I returned from Europe at the end of 1964... Or perhaps it wasn't until 1970 at about the time that we [all] were leaving our first wives... a general event not uninfluenced by congregating at Mama's romper room... but it wasn't until JL and I found ourselves sitting at the Big Table, the "Stammtisch," the institution for the regulars, that we exchanged our actual first words, which I don't remember either .. who remembers all that gassing around, the conversations.... well, some yes of course, but incidents, faces, people more than the disconnected gobbledygook of a lot of male bantam roosters of insecure sexuality who played under the heavy wings of its exploitative mother hen or were amused by Donald Ward, the delightful gay son of an Irish New York cop.... what a funny hellhole, what an introduction to New York it was after all if you didn't know that side of it... Elaine's boys: what a rogue's gallery once you take a hard look at them one by one... George Plimpton, Buzz Farber, Bob Brown... etc. My first favorable impressions of Leiber being about the same as they are now: On first sight he struck you a little RUNTY... and its implications unfortunately have become clear over the years. What litter did that cat come from? But he had a sense of humor about himself even when crowing competitively, there seemed a serious side as well, the way he used words was playful -- three qualities for which I am a sucker, though Paul Desmond played with words, sang his lines the way he played the sax, and that was unbeatable... Also compared to a lot of folks there, Leiber actually knew how to listen, well, occasionally he did: was he polite, had he learned "listening" the way you can in analysis... listening with x-ray eyes? .. Leiber, an aging cat now, 62 years young and well retarded to somewhere between ages 14 and 17, the face pushing 75 +, a venerable millionaire member of that dubious institution, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame... A cat who had been a hep cat once upon the long ago Fifties... the once dynamo, our fun-fun-fun Chico-tyrant feature, Jerry "Killerboy" Leiber who still has that famous pair of twin- colored eyes, one true blue, the other trust-me-retriever- brown -- a schizzy quality that arrested Stoller in his allegedly phlegmatic, drugged stomach-ulcer tracks on the threshold of the Stoller family home upon the first beholding yo these many years ago in 1950 when JL came to see someone who "could put notes on paper -- "Hey Michael, why don't you let your friend in!" Stoller's mother said, and American popular music has never been quite the same since Stoller allowed crazy cat to cross that threshold, and by and large the music was the better the funkier for it... before it started changing, rather early on really, in the direction of STYLE... back to the violins, Ganse schmaltz, the corruption purveyed by the whores from tin pan alley... and transfigured by the likes of Gershwin, Kern and Porter, the days of the youths quickly accommodating the assimilado aspirations of their parents... and, later, even injected with yearnings for bloody HIGH ART too! Leiber, as compared to Stoller [or Stoller's smart wife Corky] couldn't have been keener in pushing HIS agent -- MY agent you should hear Leiber shout on the telephone like some two-bit arrivee -- to find a publisher for Albert's project: that kind of attention, the indirect accolade, the direct expression of importance, that a book by Albert implied kept the project very much on the front burner of a mind that otherwise shunts no end of projects and just about everything else except what is immediate non-tedious fun.. shunts it aside... Every scrap is instantly tossed out, memos faxing in from the home-office Leiber Stoller Music go unread, the surface discontinuity characteristic of Leiber for decades is augmented by the enabling act of the most stylish of designer drugs, Lithium, the chemical salt which performs truly devilish miracles to your system with protracted use... It's providers, hired by the biggest drug pushers of them all, chortle mightily during their Grand Round Lectures as they describe its and its surrogates' effects... The chemical dump inside JL, the fundamental colic brought on by all that brandy needed to keep him braying over the years and further exacerbated by a goodly intake of legalized prescription drugs -- old baby Tom's stomach is a veritable chemical dump site, Elizabeth New Jersey is pastoral by compare to what stews here, for though New Joysey may smell like rotten eggs the halitosis stenching forth from Leiber's maw, true wonder that any of the 19 year olds can love past such a stench barrier... shunts everything aside but yet knows how to take care of the companies dry goods store. For Albert, however, shortly before he died, the project had been put very much on the backburner: Mere song writers rarely acquire the fame or notoriety that the performers of their songs do: At the time of his death Albert was working on a biography of van Morrison, and the kinds of fees he commanded for biographies of stars like Lennon, Presley, Lenny Bruce were unobtainable for our pair of song writers. More likely subjects were Prince, Michael Jackson, Bette Middler, the eternal Mick... Not that Leiber couldn't have paid Albert the semi-lordly advance to which success had accustomed him. But there are limits to the extent to which Leiber is willing to pay for self-stylization... financing an Albert exceeds Leiber's ideology of buying the looks his vanity desires. Building yourself a million dollar mausoleum DURING your life-time is one thing, hiring an Albert is another...and paying him: that's too direct, let's give JL a little credit, direct and crude as he can be, his pride is fundamentally subtler than that. Besides, when it is is a question of exerting your tyrannical will or being rinky dink, rinky-dink will always win the day... and tyrannically so... read on. Considering Albert's "shit detector," and though he might have told Leiber: "I love you, what do you got to fear!?" why would Jerry Leiber want someone like Albert Goldman to write this biography, rather than have the kind of "written with" hack who co-authored Jerry Wechsler's autobiography, do a credible but safe memoir... a kind of grand and final interview... why was he so intent on having such a book written at all? Must you not be mad to have someone like Albert do that kind of book? If you take a close look at Albert's work you would hope that he wouldn't write 'bout you dead or alive... Albert was psychoanalytically speaking a savvy cat [comparative to the crudities prevailing in popular biography]; his multi- interview method got into your bedrooms, your bank accounts, your drug cabinets: Leiber's drug cabinet, his medical records, the record of a cock that in the age of AIDS is as loose as a dirtiest pussy-chowing tongue... Albert could find out your fetishes... in Presley's case 14 year old pubescents with white panties and some pussy-hair showing through... To have an Albert Goldman write your biography is to invite a fairly formidable detective and academically trained intelligence go to work on you. MUCH as Goldman still seemed to have loved Presley even at the miserable end of our overdrugged pathetic overgrown little boy's predictably gruesome demise, the discoveries and analyses he made along the way, would give pause to any living subject... unless that subject was overweening in the self- estimate of his or her importance [which sometimes not so secretly is the case with Leiber during one of his upswings] or the infinite desire for the TRAPPINGS of something that could actually have been earned if we had gone on working... hadn't' dropped out of so many things, hadn't stopped over at tin-pan alley too long, missed the connection then, already in the 60s, jerked so many talented people around, wasted their time, either secretly or not that secretly have them at our petty tyrant's beck and call... Because JL thinks he's so SLY! That's why! JL's been outfoxing himself for years now. Or because we never read any of Albert's books through to the end, but are impressed by their Rep. Wizened and hobbled -- by fat deposits more than catfights [He's still ready to fight, even his five year old son -- lovable old baby Tom is] he has a few scratches, licks and snarls and a lot of braying left in him... though the snarling and braying, unless it be someone much slighter, a good thing it's via telephone these days; with telephone in hand scruffy can rant and roar and cry and holler with the best of them and be as funny and lovable as ever and if need be pump up himself up into astonishing rubber-lionesque grandiosity... especially between 6 & 7 in the afternoon once the bullshot hits the chemical dump in the otherwise empty rotgut... from one of the eight or so telephones in his million dollar Frank Lloyd Wright/Greene & Greene Mausoleum, stylized into rich yellowish-brown light by $ 25 a throw Osram light fixtures concealed behind some real & some copied Wright art deco stained glass... An attenuated commodity all the way... Suffused by the sound of the same ever-revolving Debussy CDs... la mer de mort de style... No, Leiber did not entirely waste his time in the New York art world, as stylizer's go he belongs to the subtle sort, the fine books are half-concealed... behind built-in glass cabinets; this is not Dwight D. Eisenhower's library; not the faux antique library. Sotto voce the house speaks of restrained wealth, intimates a long lineage, "style is definitely back in style" as his fine, also self- derisive?, song has it; and when Old Tom, say 'cause of a fever cause of the degenerating immune system, is in a "feeling too good today blues" mood he still has it in him to laugh at the Frank Stella design that he drove his workman crazy putting it on the third floor patio so his boots can do the walking all over Frank whose ex because she was an ex "Star" once turned him on... Yes, and then it is hard not to love the old Jerry Cat for a sense of humor that in true generosity includes himself. Yes, the ostentation is knowingly turned down, enriched; within the screaming colors, the hand-me down modernism of Venice beach the Mausoleum attracts especial attention to itself... also, because from the outside, the mansion is strictly "Addams family values"... And if you're a ga-ga pony tail you'll have an easy time getting a ride through... while we are most definitely "shuffling off to Buffalo"... hobbling after ponytails all the way... while he's either cooking or "crawling on the floor of the kitchen like a reptile" having fun fun fun. Yes, what would Albert have had to say about that? To 38 years of shrinkage having ballooned the primary grandiose self to gigantic proportions. Had he staid there for a few weeks... What would Albert have said to the horror of horrors I was made only too keenly aware: JL may feed you, may stuff lobster tid-bits in our mouth the moment you enter, give you a care package on the way home like the world's best Jewish mother, but maw Leiber keeps track of every sandwich she ever bought you, with a memory as shot as the most wasp-eaten of apples, through which you can glimpse visions of no end of nothingness, the taxi meter never stops running when it comes to the price of food... what a discovery that was. It was quite something to stay in the same house with Jerry Leiber not that long ago, to spend some quality time, both in the straight and in the derisive sense of the word, with someone of whom I was fonder as of scarcely anyone for self-deceiving reasons. If you want to get to know Mr. and Mrs. Lion, visit their den. It becomes gruesomely clear why there is the need for so much preposthumous embalming going on... read on... find out... why none of the shows have worked out. Why Barbara Rose says: "Stay with him he's got no friends," why so many friends do drop out of his lie, why some of them at the mere mention of his name, fall silent, instantly turn to another subject? Why there is there scarcely one lyric to be proud of in the past ten years, unless you be proud of the feyest homophobic verses man has ever written for a show about::: dear Oscar Wilde! Why is there this immense disappointment in Leiber the person amongst so many folk... Why why why why why.... the answers are at my fingertips... But don't let them ruin the music for you. There's a bio aspect to most of the songs, too. You've just get to get the right drift on them... Find the spin, the configuration... And the fact that Lithium 6 is also a component of the atomic bomb is the least of the reasons why the angry old baby tom is known as Jerry McNasty in the neighborhood. JL who once believed in psycho- analysis, though he neither thought its implications through for himself, now believes in "salts", in dosages... When I mentioned to Leiber that all of Albert's subjects were dead -- it was the kind of answer that endears Leiber to you and to Albert -- he replied that he'd oblige for a fee! -- The joke conveyed back to Albert, it broke Albert up... Yes, gallows humor, goodly doses of sardonicism is about all the pleasure you have left at a certain stage of a certain kind of mug's game... But it's Leiber's kind of humor... his kind of word play.... that, say, makes him, a thousand times preferable as to the, as he put it instantly, "terminally" boring David Halberstam... Albert and I, who it turned out, had no end of friends and acquaintances in common were becoming fast friends... "I love you , what do you go to fear!" were Albert's words to the occasionally still lovable superannuated 62 year old wreck, "I love you what do you got to worry about..." A writer always worries most about his book, a good writer may be a cunt, a lizard, a snake, a swine, his ethics are those of the word. There lies a writer's sole superiority. No doubt Albert could have said "I love you" also to Presley, and in fact despite it all, if you look at the last page of the Presley book, Albert did love Presley, even in his gruesome death throes... However: love me and take me apart into my component parts, fine-line every fault and trace it... show what a mean prick, what a low-life I really am... what a dirty low-down skunky lightweight wrestler... Just as little as a nigger can turn white can a white man from the white lower middle class background turn really black... How to retain the pleasures of the lower class while living upper class, it sure is a problem, but money goes a ways towards solving it like every other... Stoller, from what little I have observed, and from the everything that Leiber told me, had really nothing to fear from Albert's examining eye -- unless Albert were to say that this cat cut out a lot sooner, or might never have become half a cat at all were it not for Leiber's pernicious influence... Well perhaps Stoller had actually taken the trouble to read a book such as Albert's biography of Elvis Presley, or perhaps his wife Corky had.... Albert was no embalmer... rather the opposite... he could paint your truth in its most garish colors... JL might be fortunate to be spared the kind of detailed sniffing and analytic probing that Albert was capable off... On the other, though my knowledge of the music biz and of its innumerable kinks, is minuscule compared to Albert's, in matters of the analytic, good daily work for a ten year period can do wonders... apply your mind, the best clock can be taken apart, the most difficult safe will crack... Leiber, though complicated in some ways... is really a pretty simple, a very "primary" case, the hipness doesn't go very deep. "Only in America" -- at heart Leiber has bought into a tabloid fantasy, into the nightmare dream, he believes his own press releases and is as jealous of Bob Dylan now as he was 25 years ago, he grants him only one good song. So after the death of friend Albert in the making unusually late in life, I wondered what Albert would actually have written....WHAT would he have made of spending some "quality time" with JL at intimate quarters at The Mausoleum and finding out that "Yakety Yak" and "Charlie Brown" aren't just records from forty-some years ago, but that the 99 ways of tying up Leiber's German shepherd Zoe, that each and everyone of them is wrong, the terrible fix that puts you in... but that in no short time it is also the life at age 60+ in the 2 million dollar Mausoleum ....it's the Vougeria Hillbillies all over... Albert could wail: take a look at his descriptions of Southern songfest, etc. in the Presley book... how he got INTO the description of what some of the singers did, he could have done justice to Gunther of the Coasters, to King Curtiz' chicken-scratch sax playing ... He could have done justice to the enjoyable aspect, the gas that the great early Leiber Stoller miniproductions: what an "up" they still are.... Though Albert told me from Miami once he'd listened to all the records again that he had a different take on them than he used to, I didn't ask him what that take was. I thought there would be time.... well there wasn't and I can't speculate... there wasn't disappointment in his voice, just the words "different take"....and we didn't discuss to what the take was different, just to the early stuff, to all of it? Had he heard all the "covering" that was going on? Who knows... unless he was making notes. My own response to the Coaster's material, listening to all of it again this past Spring, was as positive as ever, but reading Albert on Presley and the degree to which Presley was educated musically by radio helped me appreciate the degree to which the young JL had picked up what played on the black stations in LA... JL "covered" material as he puts it, and not only in the animal-husbandry sense of the word... covering doesn't just meant duplicate, however well or badly, new wine into old form, the extraction of the essence of a blues song with an added melody, such as Kansas City, but it also means to fuck, to fuck over... as in: I took my female goat Amy/Chicquita to be covered by billygoat Jerry Leiber, and boy did he ever cover them! It means "freshened" too.... As JL told me, early on at home he was already composing lyrics, long before he had the confidence to look for a Stoller.... and enjoyed the admiration that his productions elicited there, perhaps not just from his mother but also from his sisters....He knew it would rivet attention to him... just as his story telling can now... teller of tall tales though he may be... pumping himself up into the tale. One can say about these early joyous productions what Albert said about the early Presly: that he was best when young, in his earliest playful recordings...as soon as Leiber started taking himself seriously... it's when he doesn't take himself seriously, such as thinking that Mae West's rendition of Santa Claus is Coming up my Chimney Tonight" that he's unbeatable. Leiber, as compared to a lot of would be hipsters who read Normal Mailer's white nigger, did lead fairly briefly a life among a lot of black performers, and if I am to believe him, not so much among jazz players, who interested Stoller, but among the Saturday night crowd pleasers, delta ditch... Many of the early lyrics were written for black performers even before the Coasters were transformed at his hand... But the hey days of Leiber did not last long beyond his leaving LA. and probably ended pretty much with the famous car ride down Laurel Canyon... where the allegedly young-one of his two black whores got killed... and which sent the Jerry-cat into a tailspin that landed him in analysis for 38 years which dire experience nor analysis in fact keep him from making the same error over and over again. A real change begins to occur with the work for The Drifters, fine as many of the lyrics are, already finer on paper on many occasions than the music which begins to compromise with the "soft" "white" commercial sound of the fifties, violins, harmonies, the shit is drifting back in, and Phil Spector only continued the progression, much as I love Mountain High River Deep and its metaphysical aspirations... Wow! ...And this comes from someone who was seduced into that kind of music by Little Richard Long Tall Sally I Saw Her Walking Down the Alley at the Blue Comet diner on Lancaster Pike, the mainline diner for Haverfordites and Bryn Mawr girls 35 years ago... Seduced: anyhow, such fun... And for Little Richard rock and roll and sex and religion are still ONE! ... Seduced, tantalized perhaps earlier on. A.F.N. radio back in the late forties in Bremen gave a hint of rocking my way out of the confining classics... No wonder I think of the marvelous lunacy of Thelonius Monk as America's Mozart.. even atonality begins to swing in Little Rooty Tooty... absurdity becomes bearable, becomes just another part of life. From The Drifters it was but a short step to the Dixie Cups and the pure commerce of Tin Pan alley, where it should never be forgotten how much expertise, savvy and craftsmanship goes into American commerce for it to sell to the resistant yet receptive always hungry sheep on which commerce grazes the same old grass repackaged as the new, any Time Magazine cover used to tell you the story of the compromise that is involved in becoming a successful cog in that creaky machine known as "the economy"... which exists for whose sake or we for its. But even the vilest commercial products of that period had the Leiber Stoller touch of doing it one cut better, one cut less cynically... still: the lyrics last, a lot of the productions don't, records like the collaborations with Dino & Lamborghini... and with Elkie Brooks, both of the 60s, are drenched in the corrupt Sinatra style... and not even Sinatra at his arrangers' best... I didn't appreciate until not that long ago how much time JL had spent at Luchow's with the tin-pan alley crowd... Not that I lack appreciation for all those wonderful hucksters... who provide the horrendous public with what its ears desire, and always leave the ears hungry enough to want to buy more. By the late Sixties already there is the inception of "style" with perhaps Leiber's best song, "Is that All There Is"... inspired as it is by a Thomas Mann short story... inextricable as it has become with Peggy Lee's rendition... Allegedly written after the International Wrestling Match fiasco, [1] it led to the last great album that the two-some over-produced, the MIRRORS album for Peggy Lee who'd allegedly hit the road with ALL THERE IS and didn't return to record the two sides until five years later... But there it already is: the best oboist, the best this and the best that... polished to death... the Mausoleum Style that haunts JL's Venice Beach Mausoleum has set then... a kind of dreadful hollowness echoes through all that style... "let's keep on dancing" even then, and Leiber took Goldie dancing not all that long ago and said, "might as well drop dead on the dance floor"... That's how much he cares about himself, don't stick around people who don't care for themselves, they'll do you in... A far cry from the funk of the Coasters... who would have predicted that???? On the one hand the death-mask style on the other the cheap ideology of fun fun and let's keep on dancing while we don't give a damn and treat no end of artists to being treated like shit.. And as they say, there hasn't been much since.... for twenty years now we've been trying to shoe-horn songs from those days --Leiber re-cycling himself -- into various productions out of which we've dropped out of [see "the Leiber Projects" anon... that these songs haven't belonged in.... But mostly the work becomes that of tending the "back list" as it would be called in publishing... LEIBER 10 ROLOFF LA. 1986-91 When Leiber showed up on the West Coast in 1986, I must have seen him a dozen or so times... First he was living in one of Gil Garfield's apartments in West Hollywood....Stayed over one night, in the morning he offered me one of his pills, I was rather frightened of any kind of pill at that point with all the shit doctors had prescribed, who knows what it was, it put me to sleep, I recall the look of one- upmanship that overcame Leiber when he noticed that I was groggy on waking... I also noticed that the only book there was his rhyming dictionary... I arranged for Tom Noonan to rent the place for a few months... Leiber broke the agreement they had, threw him out after half that time, a change of mind... the usual Leiber story... his total arbitrariness, his callousness...His excuse: Noonan was only paying half price! Leiber was dating a woman who had a fine home in Bel Air, he knew her from New Orleans... once he started fucking her callously and unlovingly she told him that that was not what she wanted... Leiber is callous in just about every regard, especially towards women... She obviously was not someone who would leave him, but that is not really what Leiber is after who claims that being a Don Juan is something new with him... I didn't really see too much of Leiber during those years, the occasional phone calls, once he called to apologize for dicking me around for six months in the his or L & S Music's attempt to acquire Urizen Books as a tax shelter... I accepted the apology and said "All those things would then not have happened." I was not referring to Rachel with the "all".... but to my on the one hand cowardice in dealing with one of the Urizen partners, and MY slyness and grandiosity in thinking I could carry someone like that and run Urizen as an eminence grise. During one visit back to NY in 1986, to close up my loft and move to the West Coast for good, we had dinner at Elaine's and I walked JL back down to 57th Street, and it was like walking an 80 year old man that mile or so... something or other, however, seems to have rejuvenated him since then, and it ain't the lithium I don't think. However, I recall a labor day when Leiber called and asked me belatedly to dinner, and I had to fight myself for two hours through the traffic to get to Venice, and within half an hour Leiber had disappeared in the bedroom, leaving me together with the same equally puzzled painter whom I met being chased up and down hanging pictures in the Mausoleum this spring.... Then there were three or four incidents towards the end of 1990, including Thanksgiving and New Years that convinced me to keep my distance from my man. Friedkin had dropped Leiber and the famous infamously dragged-out movie of JL's early life... As usual, Leiber had wasted his time. In 1979 I once got snookered into staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel on that project and Warner Brothers never did pay the bill... The nearly as infamous, bloated "Ballet" had not gone well in the workshop in NY... allegedly because the director walked out... he should have never walked in of course, only a friend would... These matters upset JL and of course for good reason not that he has the power to reflect on the reasons why these things go wrong, or if he did, have the incentive to draw the consequences... Oh yes, JL was also suffering from the aftereffects of having been slammed by a load of drywall that the cat hadn't listened to not to look behind while Jed's apartment was being built...The belly was billowing from the lack of exercise and it wasn't the breeze....Leiber still doesn't listen to warnings;, say, about not wasting my time. I am just another different drywall. But there were those four instances... on three of them I came to town, not that small a matter for someone who lives 35 miles up the coast and whose every hour is precious to him for his work... During the most grievous of three of the instances, which sort of have the air of "broken dates" about them!, I was at Hal's with my agent Ken Rosen and about to go to Le Chinois where JL wanted to take me for my birthday, which happens to coincide with Jake's! There JL waltzed in with with a black painter friend of his, I am informed that the dinner is off, something came up! Also, interestingly -- coming from someone who claims never to tell stories about me -- I was introduced to this black painter, who instantly gave me his business card! -- as the very someone about whom JL had just been telling the infamous Michael and Rachel story... that is Leiber's "I am touting Michael to Barbara" version of it, where he keeps forgetting that I didn't need to be touted to Barbara whom I had known for 6 years and was nearly in business with... and of course it bothered me that my time was once again totally disregarded, that the story was skewed, that Leiber was stewed to the gills... and that I was being introduced to someone who knew Barbara Rose! who still owes me $ 10,000! On the matter of Leiber's never saying anything negative about me or other folks, that is simply not the case. By and large Leiber has nothing but negative and frequently nasty stories to tell about no end of mutual acquaintances, even about his partner of 40 some years standing... and at their expense... especially when he is irritable or in a foul mood... and he gossips and raconteurs with the best of them, and he passes stories on as soon as they are told to him absolutely obsessively at times, so I know that I am not spared, that I don't enjoy favored nation status in that respect! Let Leiber pay you no false compliments... No man hath worn as many gossipy skirts as Jerry Leiber! Hals was the third of those instances.... and this despite spending Thanksgiving together at Nadja's whose family seemed extremely nice despite all the unpleasant things Leiber was saying about them....and especially about Nadja.... the main thing being then that she had dated the producer of the Gongshow... the underlying homosexuality of such a statement seems to pass Leiber by entirely....Also at Hal's, this evening, I was treated to the happy boast that Leiber had once been controlled by Morris Levy, through Golden I suppose, now that I've found out a bit more about this story. Leiber is happy, too, as long as the criminal who controls him is a FAMOUS CRIMINAL!... One evening Leiber suddenly showered me with some new and some old clothes... at his place....he had been fussing with my clothes as only an old spinster might.... It was the weirdest.... Another evening, I was so upset I shouted at him in the corner of his apartment to tell me what was going on, but Leiber was like a bank vault... I had seen him like that once before: Cathy had laid into him like that once at Elaine's.... Elaine, who witnessed that, said: "It's more complicated than that." I don't know. Anyhow: on the one hand wonderful hospitality, some very good talks, and then some very odd behavior that seemed anything but friendly... Fairly horrified if not nauseated at Leiber's dislike of Nadja [especially for having dated at the age of 17 Mr. Gongshow], yet noticing that Thanksgiving an X-mas were spent in her company at Linney Canal, where JL had bought himself a house to ensconce her and his son Jake, I was getting it: the homosexuality mingled with the starfucking and abysmal sense of runty inferiority of it all, the cruelty of it.... With all the complaints and dislike of Nadja that Leiber expressed to me, I was a little puzzled about what was going on... Nadja seemed about as nice a woman as I'd seen Leiber with... if not an educated intellectual, if no "Stella", Nadja was sharp... and unable to find out from Leiber himself what was going on, I made the perhaps unpardonable mistake of calling Nadja. Still, I was then shocked at the disappointment with Leiber that the perfectly intelligent Nadja expressed and how accurate, much less colored by sentiment, her assessment of my man was than my own. She had him right on every count, but was still puzzled at his occasional generosity, whose genuine instincts I would say there is absolutely no doubting at instances. [Which do not include the publicity generosity of establishing scholarship funds for the deprived music loving ghetto bunnies]. Hearing mutual dislike from both parties, being full of good advice as I still was at the time I mentioned, thinking I could solve two stones with one bird I offered: why not get yourself another guy.... Wrong move. I heard it at once at the way I stopped Nadja short. Happening to call Leiber in NY a few weeks later, he told me how pissed he was, but then said not to beat a dead horse...I said I would write: now I know that Leiber does not read letters, neither letters, nor memos, nor faxes, I realize that of course he did not read my letter of apology: "My man, never again, let me not step into that mare's nest. It's all yours. Please forgive." But Leiber is the kind of fellow who likes to have things on folks and that he doesn't forget, he'll bring it up, like a wrestler who knows every nasty hold and every weak point in his opponent, JL has no compunctions about any of these holds, there's something to be said for being brought up in a ghetto....... Of course all matters in writing are consigned to the wastebasket, he does not want to litter the transfiguring dead-set mind... and of course every horse is beaten over and over, not one nag has been forgotten or forgiven, each and every stallion gets whipped all over, every mare gets fucked twice and each yearling chased around the corral... until it drops... The memory may be shot but not his negative memory as it were. .."Hey sorry my man, never gain, forgive me for intruding, the path of good intentions is paved with disasters, let me stop being a paving stone..." Well yes, Nadja had taken the advice to the point of being a little cool to him on the telephone a few times, and then had confessed why. Leiber said: "I am incredibly close to her." How can you be close to someone about whom you say all those horrible things? --Oh my Gawd! And now recently I heard "entrapment", emasculation, she is compromised.... A la la.... And no doubt he's still very close....Well, he spends a lot of dinners there, son Jake is a product of his loose cannon days of the late 80... Oh yes, during our last face to face conversation when that incident suddenly popped up again out of Leiber's unforgiving heart, my telling Nadja that he'd waltzed in drunk into Hal's meant that I came within a hair's breadth of being hauled as a witness to some trial... More Leiber phantasmagoria, now of a paranoid kind. But anyhow, these events of late 1990 led me to conclude it would be a good thing to keep my distance from JL who, after all, even now, can be terribly good company. And it's tough not being fond of the old bugger....He is one of a kind.... After sending him a wild cucumber during a trip to Big Sur -- no act of kindness if you've ever put tongue to a wild California cucumber -- and bowing out from a rock and roll ASCAP function for L & S, I called him to alert him of my trip to Mexico....I sent him the various sections of my screenplay BOOGIE [a.k.a. "Graduation Party"] that features eight versions of his and Stoller's "The Last Man in New York Who Can Really Boogie," and called Mike Stoller, to alert him to the existence of the script and that my then agent/producer Ken Rosen might be in touch with him during my absence.... I didn't trust Leiber's memory even then... Stoller, as in some other respects, was in a state of total denial about JL's memory. LEIBER 11 ROLOFF RE-ENCONTER IN THE MAUSOLEUM But what a pleasure on returning to Venice three years later, and to seeing JL again initially calmer, and suddenly he came through for me: he put me up in the Venice Beach House for five days, we had five nights of really first rate conversation, a lot of it dealing with psychoanalysis, on which subject, it turned out Leiber really knew a fair amount, though I think what he expects from it is what he thought he was getting with lithium: a magic pill... the fact that it involved work, well analysis is not only fun... perhaps you must love understanding more than anything else to get out of it what you can and bear the pain of it.... MAUSOLEUM The MAUSOLEUM is of course the SHOWIEST example of GRANDIOSE STYLIZATION... exquisite & dead....it's like the Peggy Lee MIRRORS album.... and the fact that Leiber drove the workman crazy putting a Frank Stella design on the top floor patio roof -- these boots are meant for walking, they'll walk all over you -- of course I forgive him when he laughs at himself for doing something crazy like that [but such laughs about himself have become rarer, and I mean an unselfdeprecatory laugh... ] and it is truly dreadful to behold how precious these matters are to him... and how ghastly when he loses his sense of humor about himself... What is being memorialized in the MAUSOLEUM? each Saturday morning we buy a couple of hundred dollars worth of wonderful flowers... the MAUSOLEUM becomes a little ghoulish with the same Debussy CDs playing over and over again... I'm reminded of Faulkner's A ROSE FOR EMILY... hard to find a warm livable spot in it, the third floor office and patio would seem to be it... if only the deck furniture wouldn't all have to be exactly the same green! But the Mausoleum can't stylize the smell of rot coming out of JL's mouth... a true wonder that any of the 19 year olds can love past such a stench barrier...The corruption, the hypocrisy of all of it. It can't be stylized away, anyone who knows about the obsession with such subtle style knows the rot goes deep. JL's fine Latino employees hate JL's Mausoleum, they smell that it's cold and dead. "Only one guest room," they, the family bound, say. Yes, I called JL from Rosen's and we met that day and I went shopping with him, he told me all [?], anyhow a lot about the tough time Barbara Rose was having, She had sued her Italian financier of the art magazine for $ 150,000 expenses at the same time that she was buying him out! The infinitely amazing Barbara Rose! And as a consequence lost the magazine as well as her art collection that she had given as security to the bank for the loan to buy out the financier.... that he was paying her $ 1,000 a month. Meanwhile, knowing Barbara and her ilk, and how she hates to pay and claims never to have any money, I expressed my doubts about the truth of those expenses she was trying to dump on her financier at the same time that she was buying him out.....anyhow: madness and pettiness rule the roost, and the simplest understanding of what might constitute a realistic self-interest needs to be tossed out the window... It was a nice hour or so at Gerbers and talking... JL seemed calmer than he had been when last I'd seen him about three years before....and I was too after most of three years spent on country time in Mexico... he seemed less of a loose cannon.... He asked me why I was so self-absorbed, I tried explaining it to him... the Tao of country time, the voyages of self-analysis, that I was not so much absorbed in myself but in a variety of projects that I could only get done living like that and with that kind of devotion... These are things that are beyond him though he will at instant's notice boast that he too is a country boy because he went on a hayride once ... We went to the Mausoleum.... he had shown me around already.... I had joked that all I wanted was the top floor, which was loft-like, or rather one half of that floor is like a loft, the other is the patio... I knew that was one place in the joint where I could work... It was quiet, removed from the boardwalk which Leiber likes to watch for passing pony tail while he is sitting at his small 18 century desk.... actually inviting some of the gawkers in for a tour... The top floor had a great view of the ocean.... Little did I know that I actually would inhabit it in a few months for two weeks, one week sans Leiber, then a week with him.... Leiber asked me whether I had anyone to talk to at my idyll in Baja California Sur, I said no not the way we can talk....and descried Mulege to him, I must have described Mulege to him about ten times, it never seemed to register... nor did he read Part One of my Baja book...But then I began to notice a pattern, whenever he asked those questions again, it meant that he didn't want me around any more... This day, the first time this happened, he was going into the downstairs's bathroom to toss down some pills.... I called him a few times. We started seeing each other again. I adapted two plays from the German while at Rosen's, got the second half a screenplay finally drafted... One evening we went for a nice long walk along the boardwalk and made up, I forgave the "loose cannon" days during which my time had been wasted and whatever else there was to forgive and get on with it, Leiber allowed how maybe there was something wrong with the "belly" , he said the only troublesome thing about my affair with Rachel had been how upset Barbara had been by it! Her tit had come swinging out of her bra when she heard about it on the phone... weird that of all the details of the saga that one should stick... but perhaps not... JL is not known as "booby" Leiber for nothing.... So much for resentment! I had put them all into the past until he managed to rekindle them with the switch on the lyric project & the outburst of his resentments at Hal's the night he'd A FIGHT WITH HIS FIVE YEAR OLD SON! One evening JL said he was going to be hard on me: always let someone be, you can pick up some of the best things from what your enemy says about... Leiber still bats a solid 500 in his observations... but what's good in baseball....If JL only knew how to be hard on himself.... But was it possible after all to have one really close friend??? However, it then turned out, all these talks, and anything that might flow from them, is instantly forgotten... besides: four or five nights without some young women around... Leiber was getting antsy... But wasn't I amazed on finally hearing the Mailer Fight story from 30OO years ago that a certain Frank Conroy had started it, a cunt according to Leiber who has such an aversion to Conroy he can't really pick up his books.....I get to hear the most marvelously told story about the now deceased Buzz Farber and his bullfighting photo adventure in Spain, a long detailed story about Farber & Mailer & Terry Southern at Elaines.... but somehow or other there is no mention of Conroy having been instrumental in any of this... well, maybe he made some nasty gestures or comments like "go at it guys"... and not derisively either, but nasty as he could be then... THAT IS WHAT IS REMEMBERED, the slightest of possible slights to our lord's self.. LEIBER 12 ROLOFF A DAY IN THE LIFE It's quite something to spend some "quality time" with JL at intimate quarters and finding out that "Yakety Yak" and "Charlie Brown" aren't just records from forty-some years ago but that in no short time it is also the life in the 2 million dollar Mausoleum ....it's the Vougeria Hillbillies all over...where the daily routine goes something like this. Depending on how badly we caroused the night before... we rise looking ashen or spry... THE MORNING The little tyrant descends from the master bedroom around 9 in the morning... mornings are the worst periods perhaps because we have gone without medication for some 8 to nine hours or we haven't since our nite's are of a light sleep and restless... or because the dreams have brought up the dream beasts from the deep and they have not been repressed yet... Anyhow, we are most irritable then... After a Maria breakfast or during it we hit the the telephone... There are heroes of labor, heroes of sport, and then there are the heroes of the telephone: it is the perfect medium for a JL to brag, to show off, to laugh, and roar and tell funny stories to tell jokes, to appreciate jokes, for verbal foreplay and pastplay.... to cry perhaps... to spew venom at those who have slighted our lord in some way...not paid proper deference....You become witness to a lot of it..... Darling Maria, the maid,will have coffee ready - - shortly upon my visit to the upstairs quarter Leiber bought himself a coffee maker so he could have one at the ready there too, nothing like learning from a guest who knows how to turn a dead space into a living loft within days... Yes, Maria will make eggs and the dog will get the yolk... JL is upset if there's as much as a crease in the Times. Yet scarcely any of it is read, one glance is all sometimes and it is tossed into the garbage.. as a matter of fact, everything is tossed.... nothing stays for long.... By lunchtime the phone business becomes wearying....and shortly after lunch time we become restless, we are sliding into the mother Leiber mode... and we have to go shopping.... this can take many forms, but shopping for food is certainly the favorite mode...."Shopping for Clothes" needs to have a new set of lyrics... But maybe "herring bone you'll never own" actually does the trick.... By 3 or 4 in the afternoon, if not well before, we are most definitely worn out from the frazzle, the frenzy.... of actually not having gotten anything done! ... A million dollars a year clean does not buy quiet, as much effort as is put into keeping the world at bay, at transfiguring at remaining impervious, insulated: Everything from lithium, to the stylized house -- the yakety yak life sprouts forth -- we are beginning to think of dinner, to prepare for it and the guests... If we began the day as a colicky tyrant, the afternoon is for shopping, for six or seven different kinds of olive oil....for the most special of the special... and I appreciate all that and enjoyed many of the trips... but it sure as hell is no way of getting any work done...I've been living on 12,000 a year or less for the past ten years and I'm not surprised any longer why the medieval monks were so productive. By six we are beginning to cook and have our first drink for which we've been hankering since the morning.... so that once we have downed those one or two or sometimes three bullshots [also on top of anti-biotics!] which taste nothing of the vodka -- and delicious they are too -- on an empty stomach ... we are ready to cook, and literally, not metaphorically: if Leiber loved music and shows as much as he does cooking, if he were as good at that as preparing a cabbage borscht, a beef bourginion, American popular culture would probably be enriched to a degree it could not consume for generations... Instead we cook for a grab bag of young things, preferably ignorant of the dire past and present, for whom we can "perform" tyrant fashion, like little Hitler at the table talk of the Fuehrer... sometimes these stories are fine, at other times, they are at the expense of no end of old friends, including his partner of many years standing, who -- on the basis of these stories -- you would assume would have been dropped as a partner many years... sometimes a good deal of self-deprecation goes on too... but it, too, really is an inverted from of self-flattery... Sometimes we "crash" already during these dinner parties and go to sleep in this royal-sized leather monster well before midnight..... a few pages for a book never to be completed which will lie by the bedside for many a month... The light sleep is frequently interrupted by a urethra that is irritated by the enlarged prostrate, which may easily be a symptom of ten year's lithium... As already mentioned, Saturday mornings is flower buying time, the afternoon, if we're around, is devoted to Jake... Around 7 PM we "walk the dog" [Zoe] and chat up the pony tails... We try to stay away from the office as much as possible, and we receive awfully few dinner party return engagements from that rabble of guests... That overgrown boy Moishe, sweet befuddled Moishe, is a frequent companion....a lot of folks of course beg off... When I mention that my time matters, as does my mind- set, he finds it bizarre: everyone else's time is not wasted as he wastes his...especially not mine, who has all these books to finish, and who got blindsided last year: no respect for other folks time means no respect for them, but it merely reveals how little he sometimes thinks of his own work, and I know only too well what that signifies.... I go for a walk in nature when that happens to me.... the humors the medieval folks called it, and the word liverish is still in the vocabulary... The way he deals with other people's time, and has over the years, and his own, is nearly deliriously psychotic, since time is being... First the seduction of people into the participation... then the destructive handling of being... Freud felt that even a psychotic's delirium had significance if only one could see the sections that the super-ego had so arbitrarily and brutally excised... JL complained that everyone in LA. is so stupid: I make it a point to introduce him to three highly accomplished trustworthy friends... Jim Krusoe of the St. Monica Review who can be interested in publishing some of the lyrics as poetry; Peter Loewenberg, a fine analyst and historian -- JL instantly thinks that Peter will help him with his lithium/ alcohol dosage [it sounded as though his NY doctors were cutting him off!]; and Sam Kaplan, the design critic for the LA. Times... It's a nice afternoon, everyone sits around the splendid dining table... suddenly I notice what a little boy JL is when he doesn't have his crowd of teenagers around him.... He's quite unable to answer Sam who asks him why he built a Mausoleum like that "I don't know." -- My ass he doesn't! LEIBER 13 ROLOFF LEIBER 14 ROLOFF HOUSE-NIGGERS When I first re-contacted JL & saw a whole lot of him at the Mausoleum I also met Ken Buchanan who was then the office factotum there... But then Ken suddenly wasn't there any more... Sweet Ken is represented to me as being ineffective, a mother's boy. Not my experience of him at all if you treat him nicely, not to the yakety-yak world where there's no way of doing it right... That is, if you don't need to get your jollies by treating him like an "employee". Ken begged office duty it appears, he explained that he felt treated like a "house nigger" -- well, counter-phobic mother's boy Leiber treats everyone like a house-nigger, depending on who it is... either within minutes of entry, or hours, but invariably, within days. {Aside the fact, that Leiber can't stand anyone for long in his proximity; gets tired, bored, irritated, a kind of allergy to himself; yet can't stand being alone for long either. Even with Ken no longer there, Leiber is fuming, livid, talking about the "short leash" Ken is on... JL is invariably at the trigger stage... POR EJAMPLO: The painter curator friend from Santa Cruz, upon arriving, is near instantly chased up and down the stairs to rehang the art... and then the pseudo-Picasso, a nice set of jagged lines & plane and colors, is hung all wrong where the vacuous classical "three pointillist eggs" used to hang, now the pseudo-Picasso is weighed down by a directly overhead vertical beam: but you SEE the pseudo Picasso as you ascend the stairs... The BREATHLESS house guest is then, in the afternoon, locked out for the night - no, there's no extra key! My ass there isn't! Take a powder after a 300 mile drive -- 'cause Jerrycat is taking Nadja out for dinner and home for a drink, and it wouldn't LOOK RIGHT to have another woman there, "even though I'm not sleeping with Nadja" [well no, we did so only once in our life, and what an expensive fuck it turned out to be!]... And horror of horrors, the curator moved her stuff into the guest room... and I joke "You just got me and my shit moved out and she moves in with hers!" The curator brought more than a toothbrush... the absolutely perfect guest doesn't even bring a toothbrush to the Mausoleum/madhouse! After a few days I of course became a factotum too, not that this bothered me too much, the quake-tossed television set needs a repair service, the channel surfer switch... light fixtures in the event of future earth quakes... the new Mausoleum requires continuing attention from various contractors, the afterthought of a third floor propped onto the first two like that extra act to the "Ballet" too creates problems...[a crawl-space there is so narrow only a man as skinny as a polecat will be able to squeeze between the balcony and the walls] and I don't really mind but notice these things being unloaded on me.... Certain moves however then do catch your attention, are a little unusual: "Michael, why don't you come upstairs and show Karen" [the pretty replacement factotum] how to run the fax machine" -- but then our lord already knows better; "Could you come upstairs and tell Karen and me how much more filing space I need." But he already knows: it's just to demonstrate to Karen that I [and Moishe in this instance] are at the lord's beck and call... The small becks and calls and the large becks and call of the primary lordly system at work, acting out... pettily as it were. Since I don't like feeling too obligated I make it a point to replace a lot of the food I ate during the week I lived in the Jerry-less Mausoleum with Maria and Talia's German shepherd bitch Zoe.... Surprisingly, this is not appreciated; nor is the selection of California wine I buy... and being poor I know how to buy good wines at half the price at Trader Joe... the price on the bottle is what matters since ONLY THE BEST will do & THE BEST HAS A PRICE... In no time it is pointed out to me that our lord [who was not rich but never poor as a child but had to watch his pennies] actually keeps track of just about every sandwich and cup of soup he provides you, and if he's in the complete Mother Leiber mode you can't leave without a care package goody... An ineradicable rinky-dink quality, dreadfully, embarrassingly, is beginning horribly to be admitted to my consciousness, and such a quality I would doubt is congenital... You are told that staying at the Mausoleums worth the price of a $ 350.00 a day Hotel... One day you are told to wash your coffee cup, the next day as you are washing it, you're told not to, the maid will do it... the theoretical solution to this conundrum: there is none except not to be there. You can always go listen to Yakety-Yak or Charlie Brown! -- I begin to appreciate why Oliver absented himself for eight years entirely from the five ring circus at Mrs. Leiber's deli. -- Meanwhile, maids tittle-tattle and all the news of the amazing goings on at the Mausoleum travel freely to Linney Canal... The only person Leiber fools for long is himself. The maid says: he doesn't get along with anyone. Well, it's obvious why. Still: domage. ..I let it happen, I watch, I register, I remember... find rhyme and reason for it in time, notice the pattern... put two and two or whatever together. The gardener is driven crazy getting the exact color match for he deck furniture... The workmen are, knowingly, driven crazy to get the exact pattern for the Frank Stella pattern on the deck.... LEIBER 15 ROLOFF THE STORY OF ZOE & JERRY & "GOLDY". The dogbite story is instructive. Even Leiber's bitch will get him in trouble; or, rather, Leiber will find a way of getting himself into trouble even over his perro. JL is the man who NEVER but NEVER walks Zoe at midnight. And though I was told to do so, it was then resented. As it was resented when I followed instructions to tie the dog up on the outside, or take the dog in. There are times no one can do anything but nothing right for JL. And then people are being malicious to him! However, wasn't it grand of JL to point out that I was not to blame for the fact that Zoe chewed up the corner of one of the $ 1.000 dining table chairs. I forgot to express my immense gratitude for being so generously spared responsibility for that misdemeanor! On the other hand, I really AM GUILTY, indirectly, for that mishap... While I was sitting Nadja's place I happened to walk by the Mausoleum one evening and there was Zoe, totally wet in the runway! Drenched, the poor thing by the watering system! And I explained to the quake-bound couple whom the at times utterly SPONTANEOUSLY generous good-hearted lovable Leiber had allowed to stay there during his absence that they should dry the dog and keep her inside the kitchen for the night whereupon Zoe chewed off the corner of that night barrier... Leiber of course spoils the hell out of the dog, spoiling is loving, and you have to love Leiber for spoiling his dog, gets little extra goodies in the food...the eggyolk for her coat etc. etc. Let's get to the "dog walking." JL only takes Zoe out when some of Zoe's friends are out playing, the 7:00 p.m. part of the "daily routine." These friends of course have owners and at least half these owners have pretty pony tails, no dearth of those along the Venice beach walk... Leiber, after some 7 years on the Venice boardwalk, is of course notorious for his yen for fresh young pony tail... Some of the pony tails, but especially their young studs, resent our 60-something 75-year-old- looking I'm just folks Hall of Famer hitting on their women; they have picked up, just as I did, on his frequently uncontained but ever-present and frequently instantaneously primary system resentment of their youth, health, whatever, none of which money will buy... the resentful multi- millionaire... The neighborhood will come up and ask: "who's your nasty friend?" "He has the colic now and then" becomes the formula reply. So what friend would Zoe need to be walked for at night? Zoe's friend is called "Goldy," and of course "Goldy" walks herself... sure! Goldy is the mascot of Gold's Gym, just kidding. Next to the Leiber Green & Wright Debussy Mausoleum lives a Belgian shepherd, whom JL describes as a "trash" [what a surprise! how "trashy" JL himself is then!]. "Trash," too, is out being walked at the same midnight hour next to the "Addams Family" values Mausoleum and Zoe and Goldie meet "Trash's" owner who tells JL to play ball with "Trash" -- and JL, naive as he is, is in part, also, the "obedient" JL: that's one of the fatalities that goes with being possessed by the ghost of a tyrannical and picky mother; yet one other aspect of the aboriginal event that produced the death of the young girl: Leiber can be bullied - - perhaps not for long, but half an hour, one moment can be enough...[As compared to being pussy-whipped by some very special pussies, but that's another story] After being bullied twice to go on playing with the relentless "Trash", JL, -- again as is his want and habit -- begins to object: "Hey, call your dog off!" and raises his small tyrannical arm and the ill-trained "Trash" strikes JL's thigh full force. All of this is witnessed by "Goldy" who would soon be working for Leiber and Stoller Music. Then, belittling the injury but sans "Goldy," our aging lord behooves himself to bed, but wakes up in pain and with a goodly bruise -- which I saw, the skin may have been broken a little too. I offer to drive JL to a hospital, but no... Nadja, one of the legion of mothers in waiting for the injury and accident- prone lord is already doing so. I mention to JL that "Trash" may of course have been consuming and playing with all kind of vermin; and as is JL's wont, upon his return from the hospital to be properly attended, he informs me that "Trash:" may of course have been playing with all kinds of vermin, and I get a dumbfounded look when I inform JL that I just told him so a few hours ago: no one hearing JL say that "Trash" might have been playing with all kind of vermin would ever guess that this had not been an original inference of JL's -- his statement is delivered with such real, genuine, authentic visceral authority, such force, it comes so much from JL's heart, which is how so many are deceived, convinced by JL -- for even as he, in this instance "covers" a tiny piece of information, he has covered much larger tracks of knowledge... and frequently through SHEER DICTATORIAL ASSERTION... which of course is fine if he knows the field he's talking about; say, the blues, pop music until about 1965. As we know: "Goldie" has a job with L & S music, Goldie is going to be her master's vice, there was a little heart drawn next to her name on the desk-sized calendar on JL's upstairs desk on the date that "Goldie" would start working for L & S.: how cute, how touching, it's just like junior highschool; JL, the killerboy, may be hobbled, but the junior highschool sweetheart heart can still go sweet on no end of "Goldies"... JL is a walking sucker for another paternity suit, he and Goldy go out to dinner at 72 Market, I return from shopping at Trader Joe's -- if the wallet with all the credit cards isn't lying on the kitchen table. I call JL at Market Street & he's true blue: "Are you all right!" I am touched by such concern, the fundamental soundness of part of him, it could not be sounder. Zoe and I walk the wallet over to 72 Market; JL & I go shopping for 17 kinds of olive oil, JL leaves the credit card behind: I joke: "And there wasn't even a pretty girl walking across the way." The saleswoman laughs!.. All "Goldys" of this world, however, are at at high risk from someone as promiscuous as the aging foulbreathed Hounddog... What, then, are the other consequences of taking Zoe on a midnight walk with Goldie? A very important conference call with St. Martins' Press is not made, it takes the wind out of those sails; I spend the afternoon buying $ 75.00 worth of "natural: medicine for Leiber recommended by a painter friend Mark Schlesinger, another four hours of my life is shot, another day of his. So it goes. And of course it goes on like that for some days. Oh yes: "Goldie" broadcasts the good news of the lyrics book being accepted all over the boardwalk... and I am congratulated by all the other dogs, confounded... now, aren't we being a little premature??? At the same time that we're not living up to the agreement with me. LEIBER 16 ROLOFF JL & WOMEN Obviously JL is born of woman, though looking at him these days you might think river or muskrat, otter... but as a young-man, which he still tries to be, he looked uppity o.k... and he seems to have known all the holds of a the bantam weight wrestler who'd been through the ghetto wars... But there is the fatality of being born into a hen- house, of losing your father at an early age... At the very least the emotional and physical attachment to the mother was incestuous and has been and still is being lived and acted out.. and not just in little ways... a little incest may be good and inevitable but incest on a grand scale can have grandstand consequences... besides, the wages of incest are subtle... Within the Leiber henhouse, JL was pecked at by an older sister, not just pecked at, beaten up, until one day JL turned matters around.... the discovery that he could beat up the hen, something he's been doing off and on all his life...when they become too obstreperous...some of them even like it... After moving out of mom's house in late adolescence -- JL was so pissed at his mother remarrying that he literally pissed from the roof past her bedroom window! -- there came that stream of young black chicks, one of whom was killed in a car accident when another black chick told JL to drive faster... the inception of psycho-analysis... the beginning of the early end of living a wonderful delta ditch life and also of writing delta ditch music.. With Gaby Rogers JL was marrying "high class"...If one is to believe the matters JL insisted on in his screenplay on his life in NY, Gaby was a fag hag... However, being with JL seemed to have made her wander the streets... to what extent the chemistry between them produced those semi- somnabulistic altered states of mind is impossible for me to ascertain...However, Gaby seemed to have picked some rather odd men subsequently too....She would not seem to have been that strong woman that Leiber needs in his life, and Barbara Rose and Nadja certainly are, and that also constitute's "Goldy's" attraction... However, Leiber divorcing Gaby because his analyst feared that JL would kill her in his embarrassment-induced furies, the way he was shaking her head like a ragdoll's... what kind of analyst? ... Does she know how incurable JL is/was... and considered this the feasible pragmatic compromise... The smelly Rose was so attractive for her having been married to Frank Stella, not that she lacks other attractions... it's just that she's a hustler on a rather low life scale....but she certainly was the incest type.... Having myself lived with JL for a total of 12 days makes me anything but surprised that JL drove her batty... After the Rose rid herself of him, JL, in the usual reversion to the previous love, regressed to Gaby for a while, but then there ensued [since the inception of Lithium approximately 10 years ago] the pursuit of an endless series of 19 year olds who then are sent to school, far away to school!, once JL tires of their inevitable childishness... or vice versa... Inbetween these comparatively stable relationships with three young things there is an endless series of older and younger women.... one of whom, the nicest of the women I've seen him with, is the level-headed Nadja, Jake's mother... The way JL goes for young girls you'd think he was a 19 year old himself...though an Arthur Rubinstein they have not turned him into...-- and of course within the grammar of the unconscious each woman is property of. JL. At heart JL is a Nabob who sticks his cock into no end of floozy's in the age of aids... During those many walks and drives JL must have mentioned a dozen times that he didn't trust women any more and that was why he was such a Don Juan... and I invariably evaded into the enigmatic analytic sphinx position: "You didn't used to be like that." -- In some ways I knew better, there were instances where JL would pick up young girls at Elaines, one evening he even proposed a foursome with two young things who'd sort of sat down on our laps at the big table - young girls did start to be more forward, to put it mildly, in those days...and so if one writes about sexuality and narcissism... you will always be describing aspects of a cauldron.. One day I brought over what I knew was his incest type, Gail Fokelsman...what an addict Leiber is... couldn't wait to start "cooking" with her... All danger was ignored... how they went for each other... I knew Leiber would go for her, but I hadn't really known how materialistic and venal Gail was.... Nadja would seem to have it right, incredibly dependent as Leiber is on the company of women, to the extent that there are moments that he is one of the girls, he doesn't much like them... he keeps doing them harm, though he also keeps his harem together.... Leiber ultimately gets along much better with women than men... and he has only two male friends left, the flaming faggot Gil Garfield and the wonderful father surrogate Lester Sills... On the other hand, though Leiber mopes a times about being lonely and then fills up his life and time with no end of people and dinners that he doesn't care about.... perhaps he really doesn't give a damn either that he has no friends, not giving a fuck, not really caring by and large would seem to be the chief explanation for a lot of things... LEIBER 17 ROLOFF THE LEIBER MEMORY WHY IT FUNCTIONS THE WAY IT DOES, OR RATHER WHY IT DON'T FUNCTION SO GOOD NO MORE... What's amazing is that it functions at all, if erratically. And actually you ought to be surprised as hell that JL remembers anything but the "Goldys" of the world... but sometimes he makes a real big effort..... The effects of Lithium, or of that drugstore of irritants and deposits in the veins, the gut and in the brain, of their long term effect... the distortions, the concoctions, the phantasmagoria are manifold... of the whole damn chemical dump inside JL. I called a few friends, and just about every friend has a friend who takes lithium and if some of the effects aren't the same... I have a hunch that my home away from home the UCLA Bio-Med Library will give me the answer: indeed, that very month there is a piece in the Lithium Review, the journal of the lithium pushers: "Does lithium affect memory,", the customary abstract, here at the beginning of the piece, wafflingly purports that it doesn't, anyway, not directly, but read on & you find out that "indirectly" it then does in about 25 different ways, and you find out all the other deleterious effects of that designer drug.... No wonder Leiber doesn't remember things that one tells him ten times over and that he won't remember, that he doesn't remember the simplest things he himself says... it takes a while to get used to it, no there is no getting used to it, especially for someone who came out of analysis with "mnemic hypertrophy" [a questionable effect I know -- you are willing to remember, and remembering "everything" obligingly "covers" the one thing that simply is too painful to remember, etc.] I am someone who can't conceive of such a loss of memory from one day to the next, it's the truly inconceivable factor that cannot be factored in, it isn't just the chaos of life, but creates an EXTRA DIMENSIONAL CHAOS... you are at the mercy of the madhouse... It's worse than a true junky's somnolent forgetfulness... and this coming from someone who still has his moments of genius... Among non-directly non-drug-related reasons for the ill- functioning memory there's the instantaneous compulsion to eject anything regarded as superfluous, anything that might penetrate the impervious fortress, any form of dirt: either it is stowed away, but chiefly it is "tossed out", spat out... this applies literally to any piece of paper that might turn up, the newspaper within a few glances, and, metaphorically, to stray pieces of information that are not slyly appropriated as being of practical use to Mother Goose... altogether, a very "primary" complex of denial mechanisms is at work and is not merely reinforced by anality, especially it is influenced by the shame factor, however exacerbated by the Letter-A factor, the fear of coming out looking like a slob, the other-directedness of it all by that outward projected archaic EYE IN THE SKY...but allegedly pride is also a motive, no I don't doubt it...JL ultimately still thinks of himself as "hot shit" .... the pride in being a know-nothing would seem to be a perverse variant of that ... the "normal" course of remembering and forgetting is thoroughly disrupted... the result, not that unpredictably, is HAVOC! Whatever penetrates doesn't stay there for long. Memo's go unread, memos memorializing agreements, plans of action... dates..."I don't hang my tits into this the way Stoller does" he'll say regarding business matters, and of course I laugh... at the image... Once the maid leaves, you come on Leiber foraging in the cupboards... looking for places that she has left undone... it's hysterical in both senses of that word... Perhaps Leiber really does wear a Scarlet Letter.... A further major determinant would seem to be the wish to transfigure, to be someone who he has aspirations to be, e.g. grand, and the merest inkling that he might not be who he would like to be, the slightest slight to the grandiose self-image releases no end of furies... thus all that ... LEIBER 18 ROLOFF STYLIZATION,all that STYLE... that covers up the bile... and all the other things that need covering up... Add to all this that bull shot between 6 and 7 in the evening on a stomach empty save for its chemical slosh... and we are flying... add the wine of the evening... perhaps the nightcap.... add the simple wages of age... and stress.... not too surprising that the perforated hernia will disgorge the acid in an upward direction, both literally and metaphorically... So Leiber's memory by and large is a negative one: he is a reservoir for negative stories, downstories, tearing down stories of old acquaintances... about nearly every early and old acquaintance, including his old partners "What personality?" The negative, unfavorable appears to register differently... Still, there are moments when this is contradicted: say when someone asks about "Elaines" , and he'll revert to his naive boasting how great the writers were that hung out there, Mailer Styron etc. whom, otherwise, he has nothing good to say about.... but the fact that they are publicly acclaimed or notorious names.... Memory, POR EJAMPLO: The Venice Beach House where JL put me up so generously for five days when I had a row with my agent, the drug addled Ken Rosen, makes the mistake and subsequently wants to charge me for two London calls made two months before I even staid there... I tell Leiber five times since he bring this up five times, and more likely than not even now he's got that event skewed wrong in his mind...A memory so devoid will find itself going in the simplest of circles over and over again... Now and then the positive will spurt out too, just as impulsively... GRANDIOSITY, STYLIZATIONS & TRANSFIGURATIONS... Hard to say when I first caught glimpses of it. Perhaps it was when Leiber said, sometime in the late eighties: "I'm going to produce films with Bette Middler." -- I could see her as his incest 'type', the rest was obviously fantasy. "Don't tell anyone!" -- Whom was I going to tell? The coyotes in the St. Monica Mountain preserve! They're still howling! There followed the famous collaborations with Scorcese & Friedkin, always well publicized at least by ours truly, the one and only Jerrycat! "Scorcese... we're doing something together..." No wonder once you look at the screenplay... it's story line... that Scorcese wouldn't pay another penny... The whole notion that every part of your life is a MOVIE is grandiose to begin with... permissible, inevitable, in dreams.... actually this connects with Leiber confiding to me, one of those times I had come futilely to town and we encountered at Hal's, "I was controlled by Morris Levy!" Weird how pride can work perversely, too. Just as long as the criminal is famous! FRIEDKIN...HE'S HOT: Watch out whenever Leiber is touting someone! He'll find a way of ruining it... He's on the tear- down attack! I heard myself presented that way and all that flattery does is put me on guard, particularly that kind of flattery and coming from that person... "Great publisher, great editor..." at the New Year's party at the Mausoleum, and subsequently, too. Or was it when Leiber denied having once said that Serra was a "great" sculptor... I didn't insist, I let him off the hook... This is on the same level with: "I shook his hand," re Heiner Mueller, Peter Handke, Samuel Beckett... I don't know: better to face those archaic grand admirations... and also the envy and competitiveness that go with the attendant inferiority COMPLEX... Leiber knew that at one time, but the complex and its attendant archaisms have not passed... The second glimpse most definitely was Leiber's famous "Belly" as I call 'The Ballet" -- though he asked for an opinion for it in 1990, he didn't really want to hear the slightest criticism; written under the influence of a lot of hootch and running for approval and inspiration next door to one of these girls who indulge our lord by thinking him the cutest thing that ever was her toy grandpa, the 'ballet' ballooned into the 'belly' in the same fashion that the Mausoleum acquired a third storey, as an afterthought, a kind of final grandiose fillip... but whereas you can do a third story on a house if you've got the bread, and doing so, ultimately, creates comparatively few architectural and building problems, just a few peculiar tight spots and roofing quirks and extra sinkage and strain all around, a third act on a "belly" when we've never written "bellies" before, and try to use it as a vehicle for songs from this and that old smorgasbord... the concoction of songs from over a 25 year period stuffed and shoe-horned into the "belly"... it comes out as a bloody fruity whale pudding... well, that lack of a concept only proves that LAZINESS is yet one further motive for STYLIZATION... though if you compare the effort over the years, and expense that has gone into style to what might have been devoted to substance... it's not a tough call.. Surprisingly, reading the "belly" text again, I realized that about half of it is a usable vehicle... and one of the demos of the shoe-horn-songs had some really interesting, arresting new music... Admission to the ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME rather than a prideful and calm self-assurance about good work done, or some of the songs themselves, if not in the present then the past... has swollen our lord's head... with APPROVAL coming from the OUTSIDE & ON HIGH. This is on par with screaming MY agent like some would-be author....All this is in stark contrast with Leiber's sense of realism, his humor, his wit... but the grandiosity seems to be winning the day... A madder hatter by the year... THE TRANSFIGURATION OF THE SELF... OF THE PAST...do not stop with Leiber and the clan itself...I, too, am transfigured into someone invariably clean and smart in my past incarnation.... whereas I know that i was pretty much at least half a walking zombie until I even had to be told in analysis that I was waking up -- it was as though starting to come out of a near life-long narcosis; yes I too am transfigured in my past reincarnation as invariably clean and polite; perhaps because I was Leiber's unobjecting creature -- One of the greatest moment of surprise came when Leiber told me early one evening that HE had left Barbara Rose. Gentlemen who leave women leave them at least a house! LEIBER THE GENTLEMAN, THE TORY! Perhaps that's the only way that fact can be made acceptable to the transfiguring grandiose self. Yet, a] I visited Leiber for several weeks running as he was heaving upon the leaving and held him in my arms, at about the same time that I suffered the same consequence... the questionable quality of feeling "stronger" when you are helping... and then I was asked if I couldn't baby sit him another weekend... I even would have but I happened to be writing the one screenplay for which I was actually getting paid... Leiber later told me that the duplicitous Rose had told him she was leaving him while he was in the clinic either right before or right after his triple bypass operation... why one would go on heaving for someone like that that, well it turns out it isn't because her name is Rose... by inference of the fact that what he holds deeply against Nadja -- the fact that she when she was young had an affair with the producer of something as lowdown and loathsome as the Gongshow -- it would seem that a Stella, however, really does ring our lord's gong. That aspect of Leiber is so nauseatingly, wretchedly loathsomely cruel.... but it is certainly on the level with the archaic... no doubt, that was the biggest turn-on about the duplicitous pseudo- Stella... more so than the insult of being left! Further, self-pride is taken in the fact that we allegedly don't TATTLE-TALE... First of all, JL has no end of ugly stories to tell, to everyone, even about his partner of 40 some years... He is one of the biggest male gossip I have ever known, and not only to me, you'd think that his skirts weren't just metaphorical... Lo and behold the evening that our lord confronted me with the question whether he had ever tattle-taled on me. I simply had to lie! Either that or have nothing further to do with him. Yet he was someone with whom, in many respects, I had been more open and truthful to than my analyst, since after all, in my transference to Leiber he had been in analysis all those many years, and it turns out at least took some real knowledge of it away with him -- if unapplied, knowledge of the subject; Leiber was also a kind of father grandfather figure, for his sense of humor, his story telling and wit.... No end of extreme confidences were passed on to him and passed on to other people as recently as Paul Sylbert's visit with him.... What do you say to someone like that who makes such claim with total conviction? The same apparently fundamentally necessary assertion with which he needs to state everything... Well, the reference is really to himself: he doesn't want you talking 'bout him to anyone... it might give the game away...etc..... Yet you become loaded down with our talkative lords confusing confessions... You spend some real time with him and he rattles on contradictorily.... And of course I once did call Nadja [see LA. section]...And though this was forgiven with the words "Let's not beat a dead horse" in a telephone conversation a short time afterwards, our lord from Kiev, who I think sometimes has a little too much Ukranian blood flowing in his veins, has the further fantasy, make-believe of the treasured self-image of being a FORGIVING LORD WHO HOLDS NO GRUDGES: this is something that occurs both in real life and on the telephone, and perhaps he really could if he didn't forget that he had forgiven, if he could forgive anyone: who knows he might be able to forgive himself! -- So much for wordplay. JL'S SELF-IMAGE You'd think that someone with JL's kind of past -- vehicular homicide, broken marriages, an illegitimate child, alcoholism, a triple-by pass heart operation, a perforated stomach hernia, a fat deposit in on thigh that hobbles him to snail's pace, a face that looks ravaged by alcohol and hard living, the intake of lithium, tagament and all the other goodies, no end of shows that he has dropped out of -- might have some qualms about his self-image. Not so. He's perfect. He's never done a bad thing in his life. You ask him, that's what he'll say. No wonder he can be the loudest Tory hypocrite at a party. That herring' bone you'll never own... to ring no changes on that fine sad Coaster's song... Our lord's hipness doesn't go very deep... It's more like a MASK...a style... JL's condescension is the obverse of the assumption of his lordship.... E.G. to the Peter Handke play on which we worked twenty years ago: "That little play"....Well, Leiber might of course have become part of the Yale Drama school with it... I have a Dramatization Rights agreement with Verlag der Autoren, with JL signature on it, on the adaptation of Handke's THEY ARE DYING OUT. After three months of Sundays work on it with Carl, JL suddenly dropped out. According to JL, as of February at Hal's, Mike Stoller is to blame: Mike Stoller didn't sign this, JL did, Mike is JL's creature. JL's not supposed to sign things without having JL's house in order. The song The Case of MJ allegedly* derives from this work, no credit for Mr. Handke... this is called covering, including the "animal husbandry" sense of the word... The condescension towards Handke is the same as towards me, after all we won an Obie together in 1972, Handke's plays are done by the greatest European theaters and with he greatest actors... Leiber has had my version of WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES for years.... I keep giving it to him... it keeps getting stuffed in a file of my own....well, that's something at least! It's only gotten done at the National in London.... but as I recall L & S's "Only in America" never got out of Camden Town back in the 70s... I give him Handke's THE HOUR THAT WE DIDN'T KNOW EACH OTHER, the strongest play-ballet without words ever written, he won't look at it... [* Though the song might equally derive from wife # 1's JL- enraging walking about like a sleep-walker -- maybe it was just JL driving her nuts? -- and have been shoe-horned in: anyway, it fit T.A.D.O. perfectly!] Why do we not care for Handke.... because "no one is talking about Handke," at least no one he knows beside me, -- though of course occasionally he's glad that he shook his hand, just like Heiner Mueller's about whom people ARE talking, or at last WERE talking! The aggression in all of this is obvious, it fits in with everything else, and Leiber may extol you for a while but the condescension and aggression invariably return, is quick on the draw is one way of putting it, nothing especially concealed about it... "You're not doing anything with your time, as little as I am." is how it can be expressed too. Well, no. I did not waste my time at Bio-Med or with my coyotes in the St. Monica Mt. Preserve.... I'd done enough of it, and lots of it with Leiber.... with the whole kit and kaboodle as a matter of fact....Trouble is, Leiber feels that way about anyone he collaborates with, Leiber doesn't care, least of all in some dreadful way about himself... though there are then the occasional moments of regret at some of the matters he has dropped out of. For more of this, see THE LEIBER PROJECTS. LEIBER 19 ROLOFF THE LYRICS PROJECT II Well yes, it all started with that early morning call to me while I was staying with Lisa. A gungho Leiber, and I was ready to go at once too. Before there had been an odd moment when I entered the Mausoleum one day and it was Jed's voice on the phone asking JL, what do you want with him?, and JL answered: "There's something I want from him." The references were to me, and of course something like that puts you on the alert. My guess is that JL must have had the lyrics project in mind... Some years back it suddenly was very important to him if there wasn't at least a set of the Urizen galleys around somewhere... We agree to talk about it. Our date is for the morning of February 17.... the morning of the 1994 LA. Earthquake it turns out!... Nonetheless, after recovering from the shock -- for me, caught in a house, boltlocked from the inside, there was no escape, and JL from a big TV set dropping at the foot of his bed -- we nonetheless sit down to talk, and I make JL the following proposition: for a loan of 2,500 I will spend four weeks, four thousand dollars of my time, on the project, the four thousand dollars I'd otherwise be making translating; one major point for me is to get a hunk of money at once, to have my teeth fixed, I came back north & find myself unpaid for work in some instances a year old... I had forgotten what it was like...or rather, the country has become even meaner in the meanwhile, which was why I needed a surcease from it in the fall of 1990. I notice that upon making the proposition, JL goes into a kind of hunkering down position which, heretofore, I had never noticed in him before; but I had noticed it among some ratsos from the ghettos during my years in NY.... money has never changed hands, time yes, but not money; Leiber explains, convincingly, that he's had bad experiences lending money; I mention that I'll repay him in the form of buying him $ 2,500 worth of wonderful books, since I allegedly am one of his sources for information on the best of literature, though, these days I'm better on analysts who write interestingly. The upshot is, he will pay me 2,500 dollars upfront... there is no mention of once the contract with a publisher is signed... it never occurs to me that with Leiber you ought to sign an agreement... I didn't remember at the time that we once had a signed agreement on the Handke project on which he walked out... I actually end up staying with JL for the next five days, and I am the perfect guest because I didn't even bring a tooth brush! And it's always good to have been in the lion's den to see what Mrs. Lion really does: here. a guest may only bring a tiny toilet kit! I don't go back to Wavecrest for five days I am so spooked by the 4:30 quake in what could have been my coffin, I find myself listing, the quake occurred in a dream, it shook loose some of the worst childhood traumas and dreams which had coincided then. But it is a nice five days with JL... I don't recall anything untoward at the moment. And towards the end of it I start to house-sit for Nadja in the Venice canals so that Nadja and Jake can flee to Utah... there are no end of aftershocks of varying severity... A sheaf of lyrics arrives from the L & S office, I start collating it with a sheaf at JL's Mausoleum office, with Mike Stoller's Bibliography from the long ago Baby, That was Rock and Roll book, and its update...I start calling my contacts... Viking/Penguin, St. Martin's Press, our mutual friends the Seaver's.... everything starts to cook, the old magic comes back... JL creates a nice interface with Lisa, Ken, Randy Poe and the rest of the L & S office... I happen to stop by my friend Elja Katz while picking my stuff up at Lisa Lehmann's & Elja gets a call from a friend at Governors Wilson's office who says the Governor received the news from Cal-Tech that a major earthquake is expected within the next 24 hours... The first person I transmit the information to is JL.... who quickly arranges for an end of the earth dinner... at which he is rather amazingly nasty to me, the only two other guests who could be rounded up at such short notice are Wendy & Moishe who comment on the nastiness... but the reason for it does not become clear until the last face to face conversation we happen to have, three months later... From this February 24 conversation though I recall Leiber asking me what I had said to Wendy after she'd commented on how nasty he was, and I said: "We have a rich complicated 25 year relationship." I wanted to let him off the hook, the asshole. Then I asked him if he knew why I used to sleepwalk, something I had told him years ago and which had disturbed and frightened our counter- phobic moral chicken. Leiber flees to NY the next morning, though we have this alleged agreement I haven't received the money yet... what am I to do, dun a friend whom on that level I hadn't the least reason to mistrust? I stay at Nadja's house for two weeks working near exclusively in assembling & sorting the lyrics, far more than I ever saw, and listening to the various CD's and tapes... get the first rough out to the publishers... keep finding gaps...I memorialize our agreement in the form of a memorandum and it is fedexed from the L & S office to NY.... the memo includes mention of the fact that Sheed, with whom I am in touch, will cost at least 2,000 for the introduction...not that it would occur to me that JL doesn't read matters fedexed to him from his office!.. The rough 100 lyric selection gets fedexed to Sheed, I also get involved in the Goldman project, Leiber wants Goldman to write a book about him [see Opening]....and I feed Albert information, records, tapes, lyrics...and get to know him a bit. Emma Sweeny ["MY AGENT"] gets copies of all the correspondence.. While already several weeks into to project we come to talk about money during a conversation to NY... Leiber says: Let me send you $ 500... I'm astounded. And say: look, I need a hunk, this trickling in of small sums, it's killing me, I can't move... Leiber says: I'll send you a thousand... I think: all right: that means 1,500 when I'm done in a couple of weeks, and I agree. At some point Nadja, now returned from Utah and her and Jake's adventures there, asks: "Jerry is paying you, isn't he?"-- which alerts me to the possibility that maybe Jerry doesn't like to pay... I said yes, he is. No end of wonderful totally upbeat conversations to NY, also regarding Albert who and I are creating a fast phone friendship, turns out we share oodles of other friends, even some old lovers... Leiber says I should get a point in the royalties of the project and throws in another $ 1,000 if we get the kind of good advance we expect from St. Martin's. "Oh, are we going to have fun. There is so much to talk about." I move from Nadja's to the Mausoleum and make the top floor inhabitable. I sleep on the floor, good for a kink in my lower back...am in my routine, up with the birds, to bed never later than midnight.... Maria watches Spanish television upstairs while I play with the lyrics..... Zoe runs herself in shape chasing nightbirds on the beach... I get to know the 7 o'clock crowd on the boardwalk... Leiber returns... it's nearly four weeks after the earthquake...no end of things aren't perfect any more, I dragged the tape deck downstairs... too many of my the Pacific coast traveler's things are in the house.... the sofa upstairs has my smell on it... the dog has dug up some Japanese grass where I was told to tie it up.... my food in the refrigerator, since I made it a point to eat as little of JL's things as possible, is all wrong.. I can't keep the Sunday paper longer than the day... and all this is alleged to be maliciously directed against JL personally... I stay at the house another week, feel anything but welcome or comfortable... Late at night I hear him on the phone going "Booby, Booby"... I have heard that before, 15 years ago... It's bound to be to Talia, the newest 19 year old that's been shipped off to lawschool..... One night I actually get Leiber to sit down and go over the list of 500 songs... he picks 130, about 50 more than we want, his judgement, which I notice has a hard time differentiating any more [as compared to 15 years ago] between what's a good text on paper and a successful record... picks some truly dreadful songs like "Only in America": ... but as he says, "he's easy" when it comes to excluding them... The question is are we going to keep the old "chronological" presentation? No, JL wants to try something different, during one magic moment on the roof I hit him with the idea of the four main categories for verse: lyric, dramatic, narrative, and comic... and explain the origin of the word "lyre" and Leiber explains that he's always been a "liar" as of course every poet is... and I am very happy for the funky word play. Now and then there are some fine moments: he's actually happy for a day when the "complete lyrics" comes to exist in four white ring folders.... but only for one day, then they're stuffed away in a drawer [say like the Tabla drums] and he doesn't even remember where they are stuffed... He jokes why within the alphabetical listings they aren't even more finely arranged, I joke back that it's not he bible of rock and roll... But those seven days are also the days when Leiber, when something is eating him, suddenly explains to me the cost of every sandwich....When I hear that he thinks the 50 songs in the L & S Songbook are also the 50 best lyrics... that he doesn't need me or the project, that any factotum at the office could put it together... Actually, those are moments one should simply slug him. The morning I come to the house to work with him, also we have to make a call together, it's around 9:30 AM, and ask for the rest of the money.. "It isn't fun any more.".. Rage.... then I explain our original agreement.... He says: "Oh, I didn't' realize that." We have a nice chat with Emma Sweeny, he think's he's cleared up the air... well, at least she's not saying "the publishers will be delighted" any more, perhaps I won't be sabotaged on that end because her main interest is a big score with JL's Albert project if only she can find a publisher for it... Emma is at ease with St. Martins who apparently short-counted Albert on his royalties... and who've got some funny discounting practices. Leiber comes upstairs where I am on the phone, and slips me a further $ 500, and says "I don't want you to suffer. I'll get the rest to you." I say: thank you, and pat his hand: and say: "Hey man, we ought to be able to live with each other's quirks." Still, it's not what we agreed to! The project, in part because I can't get Leiber to sit down, is now taking six weeks instead of four; the other problem is that Leiber wants to try every which way of categorizing them including the 15 zillion different kinds of music categories... I realize we're going to end up exactly where we left off in 1979... There are the dinners [invariably including the sweet overaged young-man hippie Morris/Moishe Sherman from Bensonhurst who realized JL's Greene & Greene/ F.L. Wright Mausoleum dream for him], there's the shopping, there's the going out with dreary girls whom JL has picked up, I wait around whole afternoons, for days for hours on end... The old magic is disappearing, the waste of time starts in again, this way and that way, the waste of time, I've been through this before...Hard to believe the guy ever produced records at a record pace at one time....And he hates it when he sees me working on my own things. Staying at the Rose Inn I mention on the phone that I'd just as soon have the remaining thousand now, and he can forget about the one percent and the extra thousand he suddenly threw into the pot from NY if we get an advance on the order that St. Martin pays...
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