Trickster in a Box on the West Coast: Let's Get this Thing Free!

At this moment I’m right outside of fame, right outside the industry, the press, somewhat purposefully so. It’s been a lifetime of intensity of thought. It culminates in this moment with what we are all able to bring together. As a child I was all right with that intensity, the encapsulation in an odd isolation because I knew it had a purpose. I did the hard work, the hard thinking, the planning. For most those potentialities should come to fruition then in your twenties, when you’re ready to take on the world. My existence didn’t open up then in Beingness, creativity, and love. It stayed tightly encapsulated for further, deeper into teaching, writing, and literature, and after discovering that the motivations of others did not participate in my vision of the potential, I finally moved to an isolated ranch by myself out in Southwest Texas. We’re now in the Saturn Return of that cause and I now know what inwardly and outwardly it is worth. It’s quite priceless. There’s an immense difference now. I’m in a space not conformed or dictated or defined. In that, it’s a pure, free space. I have found that outside of fear, that’s where brilliance, humor, and fun can be. It is like the place where I have my home, somewhat purposefully so, in an undefined New Mexico, beloved by author Willa Cather. I own myself and my home. This gorgeous, natural physical terrain in nature is where I have physically come into my own Being. It is also the place and state of carefully learning how to love and take care from that center of Being, and the very necessary InterBeing of expanding “beyond forms,” and in all forms, and from that then to seeing this moment of happening on this gorgeous cusp. It is exciting for all of us, and a very long time coming, from working intensely at a greater cause. From this, now Los Angeles and being close to John Mayer . . . romance in the air, perusing the harvest offerings at a natural market, a croque-monsieur from the Monsieur Marceau deli and a De Soi Très Rosé, inconspicuous rides through the historic yet pulsating streets, love and perseverance . . . and taking it all in so that I can tell you. It is all meant to open tremendous things. And when we look back, it will all be vividly clear and the future wide open.

In 1924, the year after Warner Brother Pictures began in Los Angeles in 1923, the Warner brothers acquired the rights to Willa Cather’s novel A Lost Lady (which was published also the year before, 1923) which they made into a silent film starring Irene Rich. That film is now on the The National Film Preservation Board’s list of Lost U.S. Silent Feature Films. But there it was, Willa’s work as one of the first movies ever produced in Hollywoodland, even the year Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was founded, an auspicious coming as Cather once put it herself: “Here you can scarcely understand what it means [ . . . ] the beginning of momentous things,”right at the beginning of the “creative” machines putting embodiments to the lights and screens, stories come to life, and yet within a system. Okay, I’m mixing in what she wrote of New Mexico and the Southwest, but it is the whole that is our story, leading there to Los Angeles.

There is no trace of that silent film left except production notes and news articles reporting its production and premieres on the West and East coasts, and in the great, vast in-between in the open prairies of place at Willa’s Red Cloud, Nebraska. That Willa’s work would unassumingly but naturally, dynamically go on to become one of the biggest and most resonating in the history of movies, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, with the unassumingly biggest female star, Audrey Hepburn, looks like an unlikelihood of the intention of that studio system. This coming about was in fact not a likelihood, but an act of destiny in the sense that spirit and character are destiny, even of a work of art, even more so when a dynamic spirit is forced inside a box, especially on a coast. It’s as natural as Robert Frost put it, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” and how it proceeds to take it down, naturally. It opens the real movement beyond the magic of movie-making and what we can look at now to open it all the way up. What does it open in this moment? Now discernible acts by daring-heart artists from Willa Cather herself to Audrey Hepburn taking on the task to Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran, to name a few among so many unimaginably more of the same spirit, that break open the creative and industry, even breaking past the closed press who are intent on repeating the past and having not yet been willing to open themselves, past boundaries into what is world-altering.

As world and Americana folklorist and Grateful Dead friend Joseph Campbell wrote, “So that’s what destiny is: simply the fulfillment of the potentialities of the energies in your own system.” He also showed what happened when systems closed in on those destinies, demonstrating how crucial it was for the dynamism to stay undeterred, that the ‘Trickster’ was a crucial character, “the over-thrower of systems, a figure that represents this power of the dynamic of the total psyche to overthrow programs. This is the negative aspect”: breaking back open those systems that have enclosed and limited, enforcing the boundaries that shut life off, and once they are closed, they have to be broken back open again because the dynamism of life is being suffocated. For the best world-opening artists with indomitable spirit, that can’t be closed. That would be closing off their very breath, their inspired words and actions that open pathways for others.

And when this is opened, something else is also opened—that is to say, it has a different reality, it plays by different cosmic rules, what was being shut in, the Beingness that doesn’t operate from fear or backwards in repeating what it has heard or in reactivity, but towards its larger dynamic where it must expand (as big as the cosmos, as that is its size and environment, its kin), and has a different outcome than just box-office. It operates differently because it is different and its effects are different, and seeing that we know what we are in for, what tremendous awaits. Ahhh, the hopes and possibilities expanded beyond the stages and screens, as Audrey showed in her illimitable Being! Audrey, too, was looking at the whole structure. She was determined to give her life to making a change. Her sons Sean and Luca, beautiful Beings in themselves, have carried that on, showing what truly meant most to her, setting things right, trying to open what is wrong, and showing how to do that in grace, thought, and action. In this moment of huge mass media, there is no better time than to let Audrey break it open. What beauty, what destiny!

And as one goes further into this examination of how this happens and what is opened it can be seen that from this dynamism, too, ‘place’ is also destiny, just like character and spirit, in wildly unexpected ways as Eudora Welty shows about how place can reveal a depth of clarity and reality, a defining groundedness and unforeseen validity to the story, as she discusses in her essay “Place in Fiction” in On Writing. Her insight into this gives a deepening view of the reality of our own story and place here, and now specifically California, from one coast to the arrival of a new one, a realization in consciousness, a realization meant to be made real and proven on the proving grounds, the highest attainments, the furthest reaches of “entertainment.”

Even for us Eudora shows how Place delivers such a deepening of what initially moved the artists to act. Katy Perry’s indomitable spirit from California of course was evident first most vividly in her Teenage Dream (2010). In 2010 this spirit of Place started to show itself when John Mayer decided to go finish Born and Raised, started in Greenwich Village in NYC, in Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles, which also led to the spirit of recording Paradise Valley, including taking that freedom of place with Katy Perry, certainly a “Queen of California.” I was writing screenplays on my own at the time, still in the middle of Place, but the miracles happening. John’s shift itself was an opening in spirit and freedom and expression and personhood reclaimed in a beauty of peaceful and energetic ocean surfs rolling in, to not be contained. When it gets boxed, the spirit moves deeper and further, into expression that is then able to move everything. That insurmountable spirit carries in John’s work still. It then shows the spirit and character of the persons who made it. And isn’t that what we need to see, the spirit of the nature of the thing we have not seen? That will make all the difference.

That’s true fortuitousness alive in a work of art. And showing the spirit, along with the truth revealed in place, shows us to see further now in what is possible of spirit from these very necessary ‘tricksters,’ as there with the Merry Pranksters. It is perhaps the coast itself that tells us how “further” we had to go until we got there to freedom of Being and to give it form, the highest of imagination, that Being allowed to be in a Body, and allowed that soul’s expression in its art, in its life. I know that is why John went. He wouldn’t be stopped for the blindness, the smallness, the reduction of his hard-won existence. He had paid the price and he wasn’t stopping for anything less.

In 1924 when the silent film of her A Lost Lady was made, Willa Cather was getting ready to publish The Professor’s House with “Tom Outland’s Story” in 1925—a different physical path to the feminine coming from the subversive, trickster path of her friend Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (which George Axelrod would also pick back up to open what Willa was seeing), and when she was about to make purposeful her moving away from what the men writers were doing (what they could not see in her work and would be showing in those next coming years taking her ideas but constricted). At that moment she was also headed back to visit a place she loved, New Mexico, the adobe like the body, like my adobe home and place of contemplation and simple flesh, where she would photograph herself in 1925 in front of the cathedral in Santa Fe and in pictures with her young nieces there, demonstrating the path and legacy she meant in that moment: the delivery of this adventure and shift of culture to the feminine, these young girls where Huckleberry Finn had been headed to true treasure, to changing things, but turned around, and Willa thus signaling the different structure of America that she could see, and what she particularly saw was determined even more naturally by Place—the indomitable, illimitable of the Southwest. Later she wanted to go back to write there in solitude, but her fame made it impossible. I got to write her cause from here, outside city life, in more like a sacred Garden, a scared grove, just as she would have chosen in anonymity and vision. No one has known me, even though my love and my friends are the most famous on the planet. But it had to be woven, it had to be written. I had to concentrate to see what had happened in a very long past of the path and art needing to usurp its detractors because it leads to life itself. And that was meant to be in New Mexico where Willa had intuited it and felt it in Place too. I kept to myself from Los Angeles as I was not a part of the system. My content I think was inspired, but it found its path through the artists at work. I had to stay in my center.

And so it was also in that very moment when Willa saw her story A Lost Lady on the silent screen. She would have been paying close attention to the impact of the artistic form of the silent movie with what she was also considering in that moment, how it would articulate what she was now seeing in bringing about in expression of the feminine into the expression of the very real embodiment. It didn’t strike her as effective, powerful, or real as her and her writing and at that time she was not compelled away from her task to go to California. There was a continent she saw she could show how it could come alive. Five years later in a letter dated 29 November 1929 she was in talks to give Warner Bros. the rights to provide sound for the movie with a “talkie” but her impression of what would happen was already evident with what she knew would be lacking. She wrote,

“My hesitation about letting Warner Brothers have the sound rights of "A Lost Lady" has been due partly to the fact that they offered me a very low price and partly to the fact that I do not want my name attached to dialogue written by some person whose name and ability I do not know. Of course, if they would agree to make no further use of my name than to say at the beginning of the film “Adapted from the novel of that name by Willa Cather,” I believe I would feel no further hesitation in the matter and would let them have it at the price they offer.”

The artist speaking would make a vast difference, from her to someone else, and she didn’t care to write for the movie herself—it must not have struck her as a powerful delivery or form, and she would distance herself from any words they wrote as they wouldn’t be privy to what her vision was. Already at that point she wanted distanced from what they would do with her work.

Her vision was on a definite track. In a speech in 1921 Willa had told the audience, “The proper person seeks full expression of the essential qualities of his being” and “The individualist travels a rugged road. Perhaps it is best so. The imitator of others may travel a safe and easier road, but he is not entitled to wear the crown jewels.” Writing about listening to Willa’s speech a journalist wrote, “Her passion is to express herself, to reveal, as she sees it, human life with its joys and sorrows, its frailties and beauty, its needs, its aspirations, its rights that dignify it, honestly and with candor. It is this essential integrity of mind and soul that has made it possible for Willa Cather to do work worthwhile, work that will live.” He ended with, “And her voice, at once brave and tender in its sympathy, is like a refreshing breeze from its illimitable spaces, carrying invigoration for every human life where cowardice and can’t and hypocrisy have wrought their soul-destroying work.” Willa didn’t see that happening in movies, in the systems of Hollywoodland.

So what would occur that it would become necessary for her works to break through the movie system and express what she had intended, which would be not just a movie, but a spirit, an embodiment, a realness and realization of this continent of Place? Oddly, what she was facing in the mid-to late-1920s in her words being made into lesser by the male writers would lead to the very making of Breakfast at Tiffany’s by the very act again, Truman Capote trying the same thing with her ideas and falling short of the vision. But in the years leading up to this Willa saw how ineffectual and stymied movies could be, and when they turned her work into a folding of a female to the system, she shut the whole prospects down and refused Hollywood any further.

It was after the 1934 version of A Lost Lady was made by Warner Bros., that Willa was finished with what the movies could accomplish and its poor impact on audiences. In her letters in the following years she makes clear her now, given what we know, very humorous low opinion of movies. She was refusing for her work to be haphazardly captured by what the studio creators couldn’t see, and thus thwarted from what she saw was possible in the feminine and the change of structure. The movie “system” wasn’t doing it. And so when Hollywood failed to see into what she was doing, the Trickster did not want in the box, but the path was coming, opening, when a greedy crime for fame would be committed of her works years later and Truman Capote thought no one would notice. He fought maniacally for no one to look past him.

We can see that Willa was acutely aware of how art forms would deliver, and at that moment a misrepresented image given a personage and final form delivered to a mass audience that was not accomplishing the delivery of upturning the structure, but as she saw it, dumbing it down, was hardly something she would want done with her life when it’s very purpose was extraordinarily genius and she knew it. Willa knew what she and the work was worth. She knew she could upturn the structure in a different way and had to, and had to follow that out. It meant too much. The 1934 version with Barbara Stanwyck kept the structures firmly in place, glamorized, up in lights—the exact opposite of what Willa intended of that story, a story about a woman who marries the very structure of “conquering” the Southwest—and loses herself in the process to its twisted nature. The movie makes Marian Forrester all too happy to give herself sacrificially to that structure, not showing what was lost of her, the important part. And so Willa stopped the system and carried on with her alive, inspired creativity, living it, making it real, and writing it for a realization to come. From what we know of Trickster work, though—what she could not say openly, we could have guessed that the work would find the way, given the spirit with which it was written. This makes the later answer of Audrey Hepburn taking the role because of her own spirit even more clearly destined. Willa loved the real thing.
And so in 1960, after Willa had forbidden movies to be made of her works when she passed in 1947, George Axelrod, himself a New York literati, knew what Truman Capote had done with Willa’s work in conglomerating lifted parts of her works into his dark novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Axelrod being the trickster that he was, his humor came to play—to break back open a closed system that was being dominated by Truman’s extreme narcissism, the system keeping the system in place and celebrating, essentially, the demise of the possibilities Willa, herself the genius, saw. In NYC Truman was being celebrated as the glamorous literati up in lights, his inane dialogue all about himself instead of what Willa’s works could open, but Axelrod knew the potentiality of the magic and his power was with movies, and now in this very different way: genius and humor. It wasn’t the old system, but because it was also limited, it require the genius and humor in the writing to reclaim it and give it new presence, but it also required a very real spirit who could carry it off: the very real Audrey Hepburn. She deeply believed in righting wrongs and he could set that regal down-to-earth essence of Roman Holiday spirit free to do the work, or play. He could re-empower the works, this time right through and past the Hollywood system.

Looking generally at the details (as I’ve written before of the line-by-line analysis of Truman’s plagiarism of Willa’s complete works) Truman’s novella opens with a mashup of Willa’s My Ántonia and Jim Burden speaking of having known her, Eden Bower moving into the apartment building of the artist whom she will come to have a relationship with in “Coming, Aphrodite!” and proceeds into the disappearance of Holly just as Marian Forrester’s disappears and her whereabouts not known in A Lost Lady. As for the characters, even Mag Wildwood originates from Willa’s “Flavia and Her Artists”—and her throwing of a party, which is reintroduced into the movie version, Axelrod demonstrating his awareness of the original texts and weaving them back in in masterful humor. This is just the beginning of the intellectual property crimes that would make it necessary to take the works back to the movies, to make a big-screen public statement in all its wild glory to outdo the crime that was committed by a narcissist criminal intent on keeping the spotlight on his dark self and the public not seeing into what is a tremendous vision by Willa that was never opened. Not by design but by the spirit in which Willa’s works were written, the works would have to return to Los Angeles for their reckoning. That reckoning would have to go back to the coast of where creativity, not able to be stopped, must eventually in realization take the step into the body of the real—in all of us.
George Axelrod didn’t even need to know what Willa had shown in overturning the structure in her own trickster way, but he knew enough in what he had to do to get the spritely Audrey Hepburn to carry it off. Audrey Hepburn’s eternal spirit, too, would cause it to carry further than any screen could imagine, and her spirit of that has never stopped.

When I started publishing on this topic writer Janet Manley wrote a piece on it for Literary Hub. I think in her research into what I was doing she rightly got a bit overwhelmed that I had not limited the story to Truman plagiarizing Willa, nor just to Axelrod and Audrey in a phenomenal charade to set it back on its right path which they continued together in Paris When It Sizzles, an immense story in itself, and that the cultural phenomenon since 2010 and new crimes include so much more of the industry of artists (such as Kim Kardashian proving a lie, venom, and deceitfulness) and into this moment who have experienced the necessity of breaking past enclosures of little insight and narcissism, participating even to help make it seem world-dominating, to give it the full show it greedily demanded of fame, as Truman did, up in lights, all across the globe, while it wielded itself all dressed up in self-sanctified, contrived scarf glory knowing that right behind the veneer was its own massive lies and plagiarism and manipulation of publicity. Just feed it a new contrivance. It feeds on the unreal. It didn’t know how to see it.

The true sprite of the thing can never be thwarted, even of Willa not believing in the possibilities of the movies to bring about the real. Audrey was just five years old when Willa had to shut the movies down. They still had a world war to go through.

I understood when the press said, “Whaaattt?”

Add to that that John and I, loving each other, never traded on being seen together in public, the easy, cheap, harmful, limiting, childish publicity crime that was first used as a lie and subterfuge against the broader topic of humanity and this planet, and that instead filling the headlines with empty deception just for itself. It was the exact picture of what Willa had described of capitalism eating the spirit, the system erasing the land and the humanity, and this from an inheritance directly from capitalism itself—an exact financial investment invading music with plagiarism and no real words, the dialogue taken and lessened. It was the lesser needing to keep the greater of the human spirit closed for dollars and the power of fame and to be as big as big can possibly be in world domination. The trickster spirit loves that, though, because it always makes it go further than humanly possible to break open a new world.

Because the very nature of what John and I and all the others had begun is that there was never a stopping point, no point for John to give up his brilliance in music nor his gorgeous spirit, not a point to not go further in seeing what I saw in Willa’s works that was miraculous, what was happening, never a point for Katy not to take a stand showing she was there all along and knew what was happening, and for the younger generations of artists to know that fame is limited, but changing the world is what we are here for, and in that, the story could never be handed off to anyone. There was never a stopping point for anyone but to see it completely through to fruition—just as Willa had envisioned, it breaking lose the things she saw but could not say. We had no choice but to live it, to create it, to wait for the tide to roll in.
What Truman did forced Willa’s works back to Hollywood and now an immense world-changing story of what she accomplished and saw in tremendous possibility, grounded in the very real—and provable by love and spirit of Place. And so in my finally coming to Los Angeles because I long to be close to John, it had to importantly be done not as easy publicity, which certainly in putting my hand inside John’s would do in public, just wanting so much to be held and loved, but as the arrival as a very real person who has written it all down.

Just as Willa had thought her work had to head back to the very real instead of Hollywood messing it up at that time, but that the time would come, I never dreamed that when I had worked on a screenplay in my 20s of a sequel to Breakfast at Tiffany’s and spent years on drafts thinking about how to further the storyline of love and the feminine indomitable spirit and art past the closing credits that would open so much more, I did not know that to find out, we all would have to live it.

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