Mass celebrity mortality
What a brutal month September was for funerals — I’ve only just finished weeping! All of my close personal friends are dying!
The scariest part is that all of my close personal friends who died in September happen to be in this one photograph that was taken at a party in Manhattan around about 1977. Is that spooky, or what? I’m going to have to start checking my other group photos to see who else is doomed!
We were at someone’s arty loft and Patrick Swayze was showing me how to “throw a pot” on the ceramics wheel. The word “pot” caught the attention of Niels Bohr, who’d shown up for the party in sepia tone, of all things.
He was in town from Copenhagen, where everybody smokes pot. He determined that we had the wrong kind of pot, but sat down anyway and started nattering on about quantum spinning wheels or something, and a crowd gathered round.
Mary Travers from Peter, Paul and Mary was there. She provided the music. And so was Keith Floyd, the celebrity chef, who cooked us some very boozy venison.
Keith Waterhouse, the guy who wrote “Billy Liar”, offered to buy the house a round of drinks if we could help him come up with an idea for another play, but most people were more interested in helping Larry Gelbart write the next episode of “M*A*S*H”.
Jim Carroll was staring at the potting wheel going round and round and suggested having Hawkeye and Trapper John accidentally discover that Colonel Potter is a secret drug addict.
Henry Gibson, who was still very much in “Laugh-In” mode at the time, said that was way too dark, even for “M*A*S*H”, and wanted to do something with a flower theme instead. So he and Jim Carroll got into a poetry pissing contest. I forget who won, but I went home with a nice vase I’d made and put flowers in it.
And then afterward, every time I looked at it on the mantel I kept thinking of the song “If I Had a Hammer”. Spooky, or what?
