John Harter's Hard "Road Test"

Seventeen years ago this morning, my first daughter was born.  In that instant, I first truly and fully understood what it is to place someone else's existence ahead of my own.  Who knew it would be John Harter?

A few hours following baby's arrival shortly before 9:00am, I made a mad dash out to the Sibley Hospital parking lot to retrieve something from my Isuzu Trooper.

Crossing the lot, I saw a figure exit his own car with coffee in hand and head straight for me.  I recognized ABC 7's ace reporter John Harter, crack automobile reviewer in WJLA's 5pm block, whose "Road Test" reports I always enjoyed.  He was fearless: not afraid to take any new car and spin out at top speed.

It was sunny but bitter cold.  Harter ran with one hand clutching the collar of his sharp looking 3/4-length topcoat against the frozen air; his other hand held the cherished Starbucks latte.  At 20 paces ahead of me, Harter caught his toe on the pavement and bit the dust, the coffee flying out ahead of him and his face and (gloved) hands taking the brunt.

"Hey, you're John Harter!" I blurted as I scrambled to help him to his feet.  He brushed himself off, shouted "That's the end of that coffee!" and quickly pulling himself together, brushing the gravel off his pants and coat, and resumed flight.  "I just had a baby!" I yelled after him, and he shouted back over his shoulder "That's great!  Congratulations!" 

My baby is seventeen today, and recently acquired her "Operator's License."  She's a careful driver - no spin-outs allowed!  Harter covered a lot of pavement for WJLA, but on Christmas Eve morning in 1993,  the rubber met the road in a whole new way for Gentleman John.

Ted Kennedy: Hale Fellow, Well Met

"(D)" stands for Dapper & Debonair

I was handling a strategy project for the Washington Post Co., and working closely with Katherine (Weymouth) Scully, counsel to washingtonpost.com. It fell to the two of us and a junior business development colleague to entertain the principals of a Charleston, SC-based technology company during their visit to Washington DC, and we planned a delightful evening: drinks at the Capitol Grille, followed by a beautiful Turkish dinner at trendy Cities in Adams Morgan.

Then we'd be off on a mad dash to the Post’s printing plant in nearby Virginia in time for the 11:00pm switch-throwing that lurched the 6 HUGE, brand new Mitsubishi presses into gear producing the nightly print run. Just fascinating machinery! - the newest, biggest stuff on earth, driving the old hand-held inky newsprint product. Upon exiting Cities we were nearly struck by a limousine that disgorged a rollicking cavalcade, led by a white-haired circus-master.

Teddy: Rip. Snort. Hoot. Holler!

Here was Teddy, in full tux and with a boisterous clan of revelers - he was roaring, guffawing, and backslapping. "That's Senator Kennedy!" exclaimed our guest, running up to shake his hand. I got my two cents in: "Amherst MA constituent, Senator!" and his smile widened, his glow intensified. "That's the ticket! Good old Lord Jeff! And how's your fine University?"

The centrifuge was spinning and within 10 seconds our respective parties of 5 and 6 had passed through each other like Sharks and Jets in a choreographed rumble and were each on our way - they IN, we OUT.

In 2006 the Senator visited Amherst and broke ground on the new UMass Integrated Sciences Building.  After he passed away in 2009 and I read his autobiography, I gained a new and deep appreciation for this man whose policies I often disagreed with, but whose passions and commitment I greatly admire. Whose life was so very extraordinary and contributions so deep...

Kennedy/Porter 1980

... And whose love for a good time so legendary - and witnessed firsthand!

Larry King & the Bar Fly

The King is Retired - Long Live the King!

The King & (current) Queen Shawn

Spotted, as I ran through the bar at the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel, one February night in 1996: Larry King, the King of Talk.  I couldn't stop to chit-chat, nor could he: Larry was sweet-talking some tasty-looking young slip of a thing who wiggled about in a little black dress.

Shortly, bless her heart, Shawn Southwick would take him away from all that foolishness...

"Marriages came and went in quick succession: high-school sweetheart Freda Millar (1 year), Annette Kaye (briefly), Playboy bunny Alene Akins (2 years), Mary Sutphin (3 years), the bunny again (5 years), math teacher Sharon Lepore (7 years), businesswoman Julie Alexander (3 years) and singer/TV host Shawn Southwick (12 years and counting)."  [Thank you, Navamsa.com !]

It's Good To Be The King!

Gumby Calling - Art Clokey, R.I.P.

It's A Small World

Although we did not attend church on Sundays, as a child I received spiritual direction of another sort....

In those days, cartoons primarily played on Saturdays... with Davey & Goliath and Gumby among the few oddball offerings that found their way onto the Sunday morning TV schedule.

These two powerhouse stop-motion hallucinations came from Clokey Productions, from the brain of Art Clokey.

Good moral values courtesy of the Lutherans - & Clokey

Later, following college, I was house-sharing with a couple of college classmates and learned that one's father had been a big wheel in the Lutheran church.  A reverend (among other things, including being a Naturist btw) he was also the commissioning executive for the Lutherans' TV entry - Davey & Goliath.  Somehow in 1982, through Jon I got motivated to look up the CA telephone number for Clokey Productions, and to place a call.

At work I had access to a small Phillips "Pocket Memo" micro-cassette dictation machine (and to long-distance calling!), and I surreptitiously taped our halting, bizarre conversation, later playing it for another friend who declared it the lamest thing he had ever heard.  Art sounded old and confused, and I was pathetic and needling.  But I'd gotten him to speak at length with me of his mentor Slavko Vorkapic', a Serbian master filmmaker (I thought the name was funny-sounding, and actually had Art repeat it over and over).  At sign-off, he encouraged me to visit him sometime in California, but sometime never came.

Clokey's: A Contemplative Life

Art Clokey lived an amazing life, which is amply documented in Tim Hittle's tender film Gumby Dharma.  He was orphaned following his father's death and his mother's abandonment at age 8, and raised by a Pomona College music professor who gave him his first film camera.

Art became a serious student of film animation under Vorkapic, dean of USC Film School.

The 60's were his heyday with hundreds of Gumby episodes springing from his rolling pin.

Clokey / Zappa tete-a-tete, "1967" [I think '70]

Gumby was the product of an inventive, seeking and expanding 1960's mind.  Though he ably presented the lessons of traditionalist spirituality that define Davey & Goliath, he personally needed more, and he made radical changes in the late sixties - becoming a self-professed "hippie," leaving his marriage, and pursuing eastern mysticism with Sathya Sai Baba.

A period of intellectual experimentation followed, with the 1970's bringing many years of intense personal loss and hardship before a revival of interest (film repertory shows, TV syndication, merchandising, and Eddie Murphey's "Gumby Dammit!" sketches) brought the clay boy and his creator rightly back to the fore.  And ultimately he reconciled with, and forgave, the estranged mother who had given him up for adoption.

Sic Transit Gumby

Art Clokey died on January 9, 2010 at age 88, and this nice obituary includes links to some of his work and the Gumby 1960's show intro.  Enjoy.

Later in life, Art looked more and more like Jacques Tati, I think, and every bit as sympathetic and appealing but a bit sad. He was a good soul.

"Goodnight, Dick!" - My Malibu Sunset with Dick Martin

Dan Rowan (L.) and Dick Martin (R.)

Sock It To Me: My first visit to sunny California was pure magic.

Bound for the 1983 Western Cable Show conference in San Diego, I flew out a few days early and was met at LAX by my friend Chris, then an aspiring actor working as a P.A. to Steven J. Cannell Productions.

Don't get me started, but Chris' enviable job was to look after Connie Sellecca's needs on the set of Hotel.  We drove to Malibu, spotted "Old Reliable," the birds-of-paradise-carrying stalker camped at the bottom of ON-J's driveway, and continued until....

Billy & Connie

...with the sun dropping toward the sea, we stopped for a drink at the Trancas Grill, an 80's hot-spot of "The Colony," before proceeding to the Malibu bungalow on Broad Beach Road that Chris was house-sitting for William Katt (Sissy Spacek's co-star in Carrie, more recently in the Cannell-produced Greatest American Hero).  Billy was then on location in Africa to shoot Baby, a Disney dinosaur pic, and we had the run of his beachfront home.

Dropped bag on futon, grabbed a couple of cold beers, and walked right out the sliding glass doors to cross 50 yards of sand toward the waves and setting sun.

Halfway there, I became aware of a figure moving in parallel, 20 feet to my left.  "It's Dick Martin," whispered Chris.  Sure enough, carrying a large, clinking tumbler was Goodnight Dick, of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In.  He looked over at me with a big smile, cocked an eyebrow, gestured to the pinkening horizon and said "Not bad, eh?"

"It's beautiful! I've never seen the sun set into the Pacific before!" I gushed like the first-timer tourist I truly was.

"Ah-hmmm!" he intoned, with a leer. Stage pause. "Ah-hmmm! Happens here every night like this!" was Dick's giddy response.  You bet your sweet bippy....

The Carrie Nations - Dolly Read (center)

April, '68

I love the Dick Martin love story, first because of its Liz & Dick quality - he married ('71), divorced ('75), and later ('78) re-married the same woman for life - and second because this wife was the incomparable, supremely beautiful Dolly Read, British actress and Playboy Playmate unknown to me on that day but whose crowning achievement I'd later see in the 1990's and love to this day: she's Kelly MacNamara in Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

All For Love: native Michigander Dick Martin loved the ocean, and when he died in May, 2008 Dolly scattered his ashes in the Pacific.

Addendum: About this time (People, 1983) Dick and Laugh-In co-star Goldie Hawn used to run into each other on Malibu Beach

Charles Nelson Reilly, the Belle of Amherst

Today is Emily Dickinson's birthday; she would be turning 180 years old.

How I love each morning as I drive to work to see the stately Dickinson Homestead, and the window behind which Emily privately wrote her poems.

Thanks to Emily, the late Charles Nelson Reilly lit his pipe in my parents' living room one autumn evening in 1980.  Reilly and Julie Harris were in town for the Emily Dickinson Sesquicentennial - her 150th birthday.

"Hoodoo" on S&M Krofft's Lidsville

Somers' foil, Rayburn's bain on Match Game

CNR and Emily Dickinson?  The campy character had clowned around on TV sit-coms, kids' shows, game shows & commercials, in film and on stage, yet he emerged as a serious stage director whose crowning achievement I think - among many - was to direct Ms. Harris in The Belle Of Amherst.

Enchanting actress, dapper director: Julie Harris & Charles Nelson Reilly convey the world and art of Emily Dickinson in The Belle Of Amherst

Having established this high-water mark in 1976, the pair were naturals for the first-ever convocation of the Emily Dickinson International Society when it formed in 1980.  My father was the organizer and keynote speaker for this 3-day extravaganza, and hosted a raucous opening night gathering in our Amherst home.  Alas, I wish I'd been there, but I was an enterprising college grad making his way in the world and had to read James Atlas' coverage of the proceedings on page 1 of the New York Times.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Playdates with Tama Janowitz

Tama Janowitz + Thomas A. Porter = Tom A. Janowitz

After I became a nursery school student, I had to deal with extroversions of every imaginable shape and size.  So she was an obstreperous child - are you surprised?  80's lit. brat-pack & NYC art/scene darling Tama Janowitz spent pre-school days in the classroom with yours truly, wreaking general havoc (her family was also at my home the weekend of JFK's funeral)

During the 60's, Tama's mum Phyllis was a grad student in my dad's U. Mass. English Department, and her dad Julian a psychiatrist - about the only one in town, in those days (now Amherst requires dozens of professionals to keep people from the tipping point).

My prime memory of Tama is from a July 4, 1964 cookout.  Julian had dug a huge pit in the driveway to roast a gigantic pig.  It should have been the center of attention.  But the performing daughter entertained one and all, peaked on the attention, collapsed in a tantrum and was carried off.

Twenty-two years later, as Slaves of New York hit big and Tama became toast of New York with her Warhol, Sid Vicious and Indochine credentials, my mother reminded me that we'd been 'mates and played at each other's houses.  "You must look up Tama Janowitz, next time you're in New York!" she urged. While it certainly seemed like the thing to do, I've never crossed paths with Tama in adult life... but Julian's still in the area, and going strong.

Elizabeth, er - Eleanor Clift: Be My Valentine!

McLaughlin Group's Eleanor Clift

Battling Pundit Interruptrices:

At a table for eight (with wife at other elbow), I sat to the left of hard-left apologist* Eleanor Clift while attending a lovely Washington luncheon on Valentine's Day, 2000.  The event was held for the benefit of some cause or another, and featured Steve and Cokie Roberts talking about their lovey-dovey joint biography, "From This Day Forward."

Agronsky & Co.'s Elizabeth Drew

Like an idiot, I confused Ms. Clift (sister-in-law of the late Monty) with Elizabeth Drew, and I addressed her as "Elizabeth" all throughout the lunch.

My Valentine Eleanor was too polite to correct me!

* Of the strident Clift it is said that:

During the Clinton Administration, she was jokingly referred to as Eleanor "Rodham" Clift or Eleanor "Rodham Clifton," because of her fierce defense of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Clinton. (Wikipedia)