Paradise Lost & Regained

"Smile"

Michael Anton (Claremont Institute) June 2012

The release last fall, after 44 years, of the Beach Boys' abandoned masterpiece Smile is a milestone of American popular culture. Rolling Stone has called it "the most famous unfinished album in rock & roll history." But Smile is also something much bigger. It is the pinnacle artistic achievement of a lost civilization, the middle-class, baby-boom, sun-soaked, clean-cut, work-hard-play-hard, bungalow-and-car culture of post-war Southern California. It was a paradise for the common man, one that produced legions of loyal and productive citizens, developed the modern aerospace industry, helped the West win the Cold War, and exported an attractive and fundamentally decent (if often vapid) vision of American life to every corner of the globe.

Western Migration

To understand Smile, you have to start by understanding the Wilsons, which requires understanding Hawthorne, California, circa 1961. In 1922, Murry Wilson arrived in Los Angeles at age five from Hutchinson, Kansas. His family was part of what journalist Carey McWilliams described in his classic 1946 study Southern California: An Island on the Land, as one of Los Angeles's frequent "quantum leaps, great surges of migration"—in this case the 1920s oil boom that flooded L.A. County with white low-church Protestant burghers and strivers (mostly the latter) from the Plains and the Midwest.

They came for the jobs but soon learned to appreciate the region's many other charms. McWilliams, who migrated west the same year as Wilson, was struck immediately by the landscape, "above all by the extraordinary greenness of the lawns and hillsides. It was the kind of green that seemed as though it might rub off on your hands; a theatrical green, a green that was not quite real." Of course, it wasn't quite real. At least, it wasn't natural. That green was the product of William Mulholland's "rape of the Owens Valley," the massive project to irrigate the bone-dry Los Angeles Basin later immortalized in Robert Towne's screenplay for Chinatown. L.A. in its natural state, as God intended, is the color of straw eleven months of the year.

And then there was the weather: mild, dry, predictable, and clear 329 days a year. Angelinos worshiped the sun with a fervor not seen since the Temple of Ra. Novelist Eugene Burdick—yet another member of L.A.'s class of '22—described that beneficent god thusly: "This is not the almost tropical sun of Hawaii or the alternately thin and blistering sun of Arkansas or the moderate bourgeois sun of France. This is a kind sun, a boon of nature, a sun designed for Utopia."

In a classic essay penned to explain to mystified (and horrified) eastern academics the election of Ronald Reagan as governor of California in 1966, political scientist James Q. Wilson contrasted the manufacturing middle-class standard of living for New Yorkers versus Southern Californians. The former lived mostly

in a walk-up flat in, say, the Yorkville section of Manhattan or not far off Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Given their income in 1930, life would have been crowded, noisy, cold, threatening—in short, urban. In Long Beach or Inglewood or Huntington Park or Bellflower [or Hawthorne!], by contrast, life was carried on in a detached house with a lawn in front and a car in the garage, part of a quiet neighborhood, with no crime (except kids racing noisy cars), no cold, no smells, no congestion.

He adds, just to rub it in, "[t]he monthly payments on that bungalow...would have been no more than the rent on the walk-up flat in Brooklyn or Yorkville."

Beach Themes

What was true in 1930 was exponentially truer in 1960. Indeed, historian Kevin Starr subtitled the seventh volume of his epic history of the state, which covers the postwar period, California in an Age of Abundance.

Plenty of jobs, plenty of space, plenty of sun, plenty of everything—that was the environment in which the Wilson brothers grew up. Three boys sharing one bedroom might not sound like abundance in the age of the McMansion but that was also an era in which a machinist without a college education, moonlighting as a musician, could comfortably if not lavishly raise a family on one income. It sounds idyllic, and for those who lived it, it was. Tom Wolfe made his career on noticing what was going on in Southern California before anyone else: "Suddenly classes of people whose styles of life had been practically invisible had the money to build monuments to their own styles. Among teen-agers, this took the form of custom cars, the Twist, the Jerk, the Monkey, the Shake, rock music generally, stretch pants, decal eyes...."

And the Beach Boys. Murry Wilson always wanted to be a songwriter. He scored a few minor successes on the side but never hit big. Success would come vicariously. The three sons whom he taught to play piano and guitar began by singing doo-wop songs (with a first cousin and a classmate) in impromptu sessions at Hawthorne High School and moved on to concerts at high schools and teen hangouts throughout the L.A. Basin. They were popular enough that in 1961 Murry was able to get the boys an audition in front of some music publishers, who unfortunately weren't interested in another cover band. Show us some original stuff, they said, and...maybe.

Middle brother Dennis was getting into the growing nascent SoCal surfing craze and was pushing big brother Brian, leader of the group, to incorporate beach themes into their music. Brian had been working on just such a tune but it was far from finished. That didn't stop Dennis from offering it up anyway. Now they were on the spot. One weekend, the parents took off for Mexico City and left the boys enough money to feed themselves. They took the cash, rented a bunch of instruments and equipment, and practiced for three solid days. They had a tape of an original song ready when mom and dad returned. "Surfin'"—a crude but catchy doo-wop with a bluesy bassline number—blanketed the Los Angeles airwaves and cracked the national top 100.

Rivalry

Murry assumed duties as manager of the band without asking, or explicitly gaining, anyone's permission. He was a tough taskmaster and stories of serious abuse emerged later—including smashing a 2x4 into Brian's head causing him to go deaf in his right ear. As Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain had already taught us, not everything happening under that beneficent sun was as pretty as the surroundings. But Murry was effective—at getting bookings, at forcing the boys to practice and write more songs, at placing their singles on the radio, and eventually at landing their career-making deal with Hollywood's Capitol Records. Brian took the lead in firing his father in 1964 but his filial affection never quite died. In liner notes written in 2011 for The Smile Sessions box set, Brian credits Murry's perfectionism for inspiring his own.

The band racked up a string of big hits in its early years—enduring classics from "California Girls" to "Surfin' USA" to "Fun, Fun, Fun"—that define their time and place. The British Invasion ended the Boys' dominance of the U.S. charts but as popular as the Beatles became stateside, the Beach Boys were doing just fine, thank you, in Old Blighty.

The rivalry between the two bands is the underappreciated spring that produced Smile. With at least two world-class songwriters, the Beatles had a definite edge. For deep thoughts and profound inspiration, the Boys had only Brian—but that would be enough, for a while.

Emotional problems began to take their toll in 1963 and the following year Brian stopped touring permanently to focus on studio work—two years before the Beatles' final concert at San Francisco's Candlestick Park. The Fab Four's first true studio album, Rubber Soul, represented a great leap forward not just for the lads from Liverpool but for pop music. Darker, more thematic, far more inventive than anything they or their peers had hitherto attempted, the album was not a mere collection of singles, with A songs and B-side fillers crammed together haphazardly, but an organic whole with a beginning, middle, and end. That, in any case, was the way Brian Wilson heard it—over and over and over. He determined to strike back.

The result was the harmonic and melodic masterpiece Pet Sounds, certainly the Beach Boys'—and arguably any American band's—first successful "concept album." With the nearly-forgotten 1965 single "The Little Girl I Once Knew"—a song John Lennon called "fantastic" and "all Brian Wilson"—Brian had already begun to stretch his wings beyond the bubble gum pop that made him rich and famous. Pet Sounds was a continuation of, and departure from, all that came before. There are no surfin' or cruisin' lyrics, but one paean after another to the perils and pains of young love. The rest of the Boys returned from an Asian tour to find the album written and ready to record; they were nonplussed by Brian's new direction. Superficially, the sounds are the same—five high male voices slipping in and out of falsetto—but there is more harmonic interest, more instrumental variety, or—when the moment requires—no instruments at all. Every track flows inexorably from the prior one and as such the album had no stand-out hit, though Paul McCartney proclaimed "God Only Knows" the "greatest song ever written" and Pet Sounds "a total, classic record." Legendary Beatles producer George Martin would later say of the Fab Four's most famous album that "Without Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper wouldn't have happened.... Pepper was an attempt to equal Pet Sounds."

A Strange Time

Before Pet Sounds was even finished, Brian dragooned the Boys into attempting their most ambitious project yet. More than even Pet Sounds, Smile was from the beginning a virtual Brian Wilson solo project with the other Boys serving essentially as back-up singers and session musicians. The entire concept and all the compositions were Brian's.

Except for the lyrics. Brian's most artistically ambitious collaborations to date had been with Tony Asher, who penned most of the words for Pet Sounds and also for the single "Good Vibrations." Brian described the latter as a "pocket symphony" in three movements. It took 90 hours in the studio to record and was, at the time, the most expensively produced song in history—indeed it cost more than most albums—and became the Beach Boys' first million-seller.

But for the new project Brian wanted something even more different. He turned to a little-known Southern poet, musician, singer, and former child actor named Van Dyke Parks. As a young man, Parks wandered the country like a troubadour, scratching out a subsistence strumming chords on a guitar while intoning Beat-inspired poetry in smoky coffee houses. The problem was, by the mid-1960s, the Beats were so over. So, at age 21, Parks arrived in Hollywood determined to make it ... as something or other.

It was a strange time in California. The shiny surface looked more or less the same as it had for 20 years: buzz cuts, button downs, tail fins, palm trees, and plenty of prosperity. But things were changing. Up north, young wastrels from all over the country—differing from Parks only in being more overtly unkempt—were flooding into the broken-down, half-abandoned, dirt-cheap old Victorians in the Haight-Ashbury. The Black Panther party was founded in Oakland that fall. The Summer of Love (1967) was a year away. Down south, the Sunset Strip was hopping like it hadn't since Mickey Cohen was shipped to Alcatraz—the honky-tonks and gambling dens replaced by hip nightclubs like the Whisky a Go Go, where the Doors were the house band and during breaks the tunes were spun by a mini-skirted D.J. in a cage hanging from the ceiling. Statewide, the old order was reasserting itself in the form of Ronald Reagan, whose promise to "clean up the mess in Berkeley" would help him ride the Hawthorne vote to a historic demolition of incumbent Governor Pat Brown. The Beach Boys embodied both the new and the old, and also the transition.

Teenage Symphony to God

At the time of their auspicious meeting, Brian Wilson was 24 and already a huge international star. Van Dyke Parks was a year younger and basically a nobody. He lived above a garage at La Brea and Melrose, in a single room without plumbing, and had to use the pay toilet at the nearest gas station, which was his only reason for going as he had no car. Wilson by contrast lived in a Beverly Hills mansion. "Mansion" may have been an accurate description structually, but inside the decor was more Little Rascals than Architectural Digest. One gained access via a tree house out front, there was a massive tent in the dining room, and the living room was made into a home studio—replete with a grand piano nestled in seven tons of sand so Brian could feel the beach between his toes as he composed.

His initial investment in Parks amounted to one used car, $5,000 in cash, and $2,000 worth of Afghani hash, which they smoked together in Brian's indoor sandbox as Brian wrote the music and Parks the words. In a 1966 interview, Brian famously described Smile as a "teenage symphony to God." All other attempts at brief description fail; that one is actually not bad. The album is certainly as complex as any symphony—Wilson claims Rhapsody in Blue as a great influence—yet the teen appeal is evident in the music's youthful sense of slapstick. At times, it plays almost like the soundtrack to a Saturday morning cartoon. And Wilson's heartfelt if nebulous spiritualism suffuses every track from the opening "Our Prayer"—a contrapuntal, a cappella hymn written not for the cathedral but for the Manhattan Beach pier—to the encore "You're Welcome," which is structured monophonically, like a Gregorian chant.

Instead of a series of discreet songs of more or less the same length, the longer tracks on Smile are interspersed with snippets, instrumental bridges, and goofy, near-throwaway vocals—techniques the Beatles would not utilize (and even then not fully) until three years later with their last album, Abbey Road. Brian was also experimenting technologically with tricks well ahead of their time and that contemporary audio equipment could scarcely handle. He borrowed from the movies the technique of cutting and splicing tape, something hardly ever done in music before "Good Vibrations" and usually only to cover up mistakes. Brian elevated "modular recording" to an art form, allowing the music to turn on a dime in ways impossible to achieve if the songs had to be played straight through in one take. Sgt. Pepper—with its array of jump cuts, sound effects and multi-track overlays that could only be accomplished in a studio—has gone down in rock history as the first album to blast away the boundaries of traditional stage pop in ways that made it absolutely unperformable in a live act. Smile, which was written and recorded earlier, was even more sonically inventive. Had it been released on schedule, undoubtedly Wilson's masterpiece would have earned that honor.

That's not to suggest that the genius of Smile is merely in the inventive use of gimmicks. There is real musical greatness here, and lots of it. "Heroes and Villains," the lynchpin of the album, is a psychedelic epic that either introduces or recapitulates themes that unify the whole work. "Surf's Up," the album's best song, so impressed Leonard Bernstein that he included, in his December 1966 CBS television special, a lengthy segment of Brian alone at the piano playing the tune. The voiceover was rhapsodic:

There is a new song, too complex to get all of first time around. It could come only out of the ferment that characterizes today's pop music scene. Brian Wilson, leader of the famous Beach Boys, and one of today's most important musicians, sings his own "Surf's Up." Poetic, beautiful even in its obscurity, "Surf's Up" is one aspect of new things happening in pop music today. As such, it is a symbol of the change many of these young musicians see in our future.

Rebellion and Loss

As to the lyrics, that's where the trouble really hit. Parks's idiosyncratic and whimsical words fit the overall tone perfectly even if they don't always—or often—make sense. The overarching theme is America, a deliberate reaction or response to pop music's then-reigning British Invasion. The lyrics cover the nation geographically from Plymouth Rock to Hawaii, and historically from the Pilgrims through the Chicago fire, the Wild West, the railroads, and the Gilded Age. Snippets of standards from the Great American Songbook are woven in throughout, as are various pop culture jingles and theme songs. The words don't so much tell a story as set a mood, one that is often just plain silly. "I'm gonna be 'round my vegetables / I'm gonna chow down my vegetables" isn't exactly "Fall in love—you won't regret it / That's the best work of all—if you can get it."

Yet despite their incomprehensibility, the lyrics for Smile remain fresh because of the music's optimism and exuberant innocence. That beneficent Southern California sun shines through in every word. Though penned in the mid '60s, there is scarcely a trace of the America-bashing then sweeping the intellectual and artistic classes. The Boys—and especially Brian—certainly succumbed to the carnal temptations of the time. But they never bought into the dystopic New Left vision of "AmeriKKKa." In 1983, President Reagan's buffoonish Secretary of the Interior James Watt canceled a planned Beach Boys concert in Washington, claiming that the Boys drew "the wrong element." Both the president and the vice president publicly demurred; Watt was forced to relent. President and Mrs. Reagan warmly received the Boys at the White House. They later performed—gratis—before more than half a million fans on the National Mall. Front man Mike Love described singing on the Fourth of July in the heart of the nation's capital as the greatest moment of his life.

But back in 1966, Love objected to Brian's abandonment of the "fast cars, cute girls, and sunny beaches" formula for Pet Sounds—a commercial disappointment though a critical favorite whose reputation has only risen. He rebelled over Smile. During a recording session for "Cabin Essence," whose lyrics are esoteric even for Parks, Love lost it. He unloaded on Parks, demanding that he explain what the hell the words meant. Parks instead walked out—and soon withdrew from the project.

It all fell apart quickly after that. Brian's drug use intensified. The pressure to best the Beatles ate away at him. One night in February 1967, while driving home, he heard "Strawberry Fields Forever" on the radio. He was so overwhelmed he had to pull over. Lavishly produced, the song was a harbinger of what was to come from the Fab Four. Brian heard it as a challenge he could not meet, a sign that he had already lost.

He was wrong, but the damage was (almost) done. The last blow came when The Beach Boys released "Heroes and Villains" as a single. Brian hoped that it would top "Good Vibrations" (it's a much more sophisticated composition) and reestablish the Boys as the Beatles' creative peer. It peaked at #12 on the Billboard charts and then sank fast. Brian spiraled into a serious depression from which it would take decades to recover fully.

Smile was officially shelved in May 1967. To meet their obligations to Capitol Records, the Boys slapped together the most polished tracks and banged out some filler. The result was Smiley Smile, an album youngest brother Carl aptly described as "a bunt instead of a grand slam." It bombed.

The Beach Boys churned out a lot of mediocre, and some almost good, work over the following half-decade. The 1974 release Endless Summer—a compilation of pre-Pet Sounds "fast cars, cute girls, and sunny beaches" classics—not only sold millions, it established the band as the one of the first Boomer nostalgia "oldies" acts, less than 15 years after their debut. From that moment on, they would never lack for bookings, even if creatively they were all but finished.

It would be only a mild exaggeration to say that Brian lost three decades of his life to mental illness and drugs—illicit and prescribed. It's no exaggeration at all to say that the failure of Smile was the reason why. "As the years passed, Smile became this legendary thing, this giant weight on my shoulders, around my neck. It just choked me to death," Brian wrote. In the midst of all that haze and pain, he made a few desultory attempts at creative and even performing comebacks, with the Beach Boys and solo. They all went nowhere, or close.

What Might Have Been

The fog in Brian's brain was fully cleared by around 2000. In 2003 he reconnected with Parks and the two of them set about exorcising the Smile demon. First, they finished the writing, ensured that each song was a completed whole, and put together a coherent track order. Then Brian assembled a new band. No other Beach Boys—his brothers Dennis and Carl had died years before—were included. Various disputes over the intervening years had soured his relationships with his former band mates—and the wound of Mike's Love intense opposition to the original project hadn't healed.

Smile was premiered live in London on February 20, 2004—with Paul McCartney and George Martin front row, center. The 45-minute concert garnered a 10-minute standing ovation. Later that year Brian recorded the work, which was released to exuberant critical praise and solid sales.

But the demon wasn't fully gone. Capitol Records began gingerly approaching the four surviving Beach Boys in the run-up to the 50th anniversary of their first hit to see if they could be cajoled into doing anything together. Brian demurred but floated the idea of putting out the Smile recording sessions and packaging them into something close to how a finished version might have sounded in 1967. It was a project long intensely desired by the fans (and the record company) but one that was impossible without Brian's full cooperation and attention. After 44 years, he finally gave both.

The 2004 release is better than good. As a composition, Smile has few if any peers in pop. But the original sessions are magic. One should not presume to explain magic, so I won't, except to say that Brian's voice circa 1966 is positively angelic compared to the smoke-and-booze-cured version of 2004. And it doesn't hurt that of the six voices harmonizing on those old tapes, four are related by blood. The similarity of the tones at once enhances the harmony and highlights the subtle differences.

The tragedy is what might have been. Brian Wilson was one of those rare composers whose work only got better and deeper as he matured. In this, it's fair to compare him not just to the Beatles—"Surf's Up" is at least as far beyond "Surfin'" as side 2 of Abbey Road is from "Love Me Do"—but also to Beethoven and Verdi. Every song and every album was better than the one that came before. Until he imploded. We'll never know what else might have emerged from his fertile, functioning brain.

Brian himself has mused, "Probably nothing I've ever done has topped the music I made with Van Dyke, my old crew in the studio and the voices of my youth—me and The Beach Boys."

Not probably. But that's okay. It's enough.

Michael Anton is a writer living in New York.

Ernest Borgnine, Oscar-Winning Actor, Dies at 95

By ANITA GATES NY Times

Ernest Borgnine, the rough-hewn actor who seemed destined for tough-guy characters but won an Academy Award for embodying the gentlest of souls, a lonely Bronx butcher, in the 1955 film “Marty,“ died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 95.

His death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, was announced by Harry Flynn, his longtime spokesman.

Mr. Borgnine, who later starred on “McHale’s Navy” on television, made his first memorable impression in films at age 37, appearing in “From Here to Eternity” (1953) as Fatso Judson, the sadistic stockade sergeant who beats Frank Sinatra’s character, Private Maggio, to death. But Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote “Marty” as a television play, and Delbert Mann, who directed it (it starred Rod Steiger), saw something beyond brutality in Mr. Borgnine and offered him the title role when it was made into a feature film.

The 1950s had emerged as the decade of the common man, with Willy Loman of “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway and the likes of the bus driver Ralph Kramden (“The Honeymooners”) and the factory worker Chester Riley (“The Life of Riley”) on television. Mr. Borgnine’s Marty Pilletti, a 34-year-old blue-collar bachelor who still lives with his mother, fit right in, showing the tender side of the average, unglamorous guy next door.

Marty’s awakening, as he unexpectedly falls in love, was described by Bosley Crowther in The New York Times as “a beautiful blend of the crude and the strangely gentle and sensitive in a monosyllabic man.”

Mr. Borgnine received the Oscar for best actor for “Marty.” For the same performance he also received a Golden Globe and awards from the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

Mr. Borgnine won even wider fame as the star of the ABC sitcom “McHale’s Navy” (1962-66), originating the role of an irreverent con man of a PT boat skipper. (The cast also included a young Tim Conway.) He wrote in his autobiography, “Ernie” (Citadel Press, 2008), that he had turned down the role because he refused to do a television series but changed his mind when a boy came to his door selling candy and said, although he knew who James Arness of “Gunsmoke” and Richard Boone of “Have Gun, Will Travel” were, he had never heard of Ernest Borgnine.

Over a career that lasted more than six decades the burly, big-voiced Mr. Borgnine was never able to escape typecasting completely, at least in films. Although he did another Chayefsky screenplay, starring with Bette Davis as a working-class father of the bride in “The Catered Affair” (1956), and even appeared in a musical, “The Best Things in Life Are Free” (1956), playing a Broadway showman, the vast majority of the characters he played were villains.

Military roles continued to beckon. One of his best known was as Lee Marvin’s commanding officer in “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), about hardened prisoners on a World War II commando mission. He also starred in three television-movie sequels.

But he worked in virtually every genre. Filmmakers cast him as a gangster, even in satirical movies like “Spike of Bensonhurst” (1988). He was in westerns like Sam Peckinpah’s blood-soaked classic “The Wild Bunch” (1969) and crime dramas like “Bad Day at Black Rock” (1955).

He played gruff police officers, like his character in the disaster blockbuster “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972), and bosses from hell, as in the horror movie “Willard” (1971). Twice he played a manager of gladiators, in “Demetrius and the Gladiators” (1954) and in the 1984 mini-series “The Last Days of Pompeii.”

Mr. Borgnine’s menacing features seemed to disappear when he flashed his trademark gaptoothed smile, and later in life he began to find good-guy roles, like the helpful taxi driver in “Escape From New York” (1981) and the title role in “A Grandpa for Christmas,” a 2007 television movie.

“McHale’s Navy” and the 1964 film inspired by it were his most notable forays into comedy, but in 1999 he began doing the voice of a recurring character, the elderly ex-superhero Mermaidman, in the animated series “SpongeBob SquarePants.” He continued to play that role until last year.

He began his career on the stage but unlike many actors who had done the same, Mr. Borgnine professed to have no burning desire to return there. “Once you create a character for the stage, you become like a machine,” he told The Washington Post in 1969. In films, he said, “you’re always creating something new.”

Ermes Effron Borgnino was born on Jan. 24, 1917, in Hamden, Conn., near New Haven. His father was a railroad brakeman. His mother was said to be the daughter of a count, Paolo Boselli, an adviser to King Victor Emmanuel of Italy.

The boy spent several years of his childhood in Italy, where his mother returned during a long separation from her husband. But they returned to Connecticut, and he graduated from high school there.

He joined the Navy at 18 and served for 10 years. During World War II he was a gunner’s mate. After the war he considered factory jobs, but his mother suggested that he try acting. Her reasoning, he reported, was, “You’ve always liked making a damned fool of yourself.”

He studied at the Randall School of Drama in Hartford, then moved to Virginia, where he became a member of the Barter Theater in Abingdon and worked his way up from painting scenery to playing the Gentleman Caller in “The Glass Menagerie.”

In the late 1940s he headed for New York, where by 1952 he was appearing on Broadway as a bodyguard in the comic fantasy “Mrs. McThing,” starring Helen Hayes. He had already made his movie debut playing a Chinese shopkeeper in the 1951 adventure “China Corsair.”

Mr. Borgnine never retired from acting. In the 1980s he starred in another television series, the adventure drama “Airwolf,” playing a helicopter pilot. He took a supporting role as a bubbly doorman in the 1990s sitcom “The Single Guy.” His last film appearance was in “The Man Who Shook the Hand of Vicente Fernandez,” not yet released, in which he plays an elderly man who becomes a celebrity to Latino employees at the nursing home where he lives. On television, he was in the series finale of “ER” in 2009 and appeared in a cable film, “Love’s Christmas Journey,” last year.

His other films included “The Vikings” (1958); “Ice Station Zebra” (1968); “Hoover” (2000), in which he played J. Edgar Hoover; and “Gattaca” (1997).

Mr. Borgnine, who lived in Beverly Hills, was married five times. In 1949 he married Rhoda Kemins, whom he had met when they were both in the Navy. They had a daughter but divorced in 1958. On New Year’s Eve 1959 he and the Mexican-born actress Katy Jurado were married; they divorced in 1962.

His third marriage was his most notorious because of its brevity. He and the Broadway musical star Ethel Merman married in late June 1964 but split up in early August. Mr. Borgnine later contended that Ms. Merman left because she was upset that on an international honeymoon trip he was recognized and she wasn’t.

In 1965 he married Donna Rancourt; they had two children before divorcing in 1972. In 1973 he married for the fifth and last time, to Tova Traesnaes, who under the name Tova Borgnine became a cosmetics entrepreneur.

She survives him, as do his children, Christofer, Nancee and Sharon Borgnine; a stepson, David Johnson; six grandchildren; and his sister, Evelyn Verlardi.

Asked about his acting methods in 1973, Mr. Borgnine told The New York Times: “No Stanislavsky. I don’t chart out the life histories of the people I play. If I did, I’d be in trouble. I work with my heart and my head, and naturally emotions follow.”

Sometimes he prayed, he said, or just reflected on character-appropriate thoughts. “If none of that works,” he added, “I think to myself of the money I’m making.”

He Takes the Village

By REBECCA FLINT MARX NY Times

BEN SHAOUL doesn’t understand why people hate him.       

But hate him they do. It gets under his skin.

“I’m a regular guy, I have feelings,” the young real estate developer complained over lunch in late April. “Is it hurtful when people write things that are bad? Yeah, it’s hurtful.”

He was sitting with his publicist at the Norwood Club, the members-only establishment he owns on West 14th Street, discussing his work over grilled chicken and greens. His phone vibrated intermittently by his elbow.

While the city isn’t lacking in controversial landlords, Mr. Shaoul, 35, who is president of Magnum Real Estate Group, has distinguished himself as “the face of the hyper-luxurification of the East Village,” as the writer behind the local blog E V Grieve said. A cursory look at Mr. Shaoul’s track record over the last year or so might shed some light on why he has attracted such attention.

Last September, he booted the much-loved Bean coffee shop from its First Avenue home to rent the space to Starbucks.

Two months later, he bought the Cabrini Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, a residence for low-income seniors on East Fifth Street, for $25.5 million with the stated intention of converting it to market-rate apartments.

In December, he purchased the former Educational Alliance building on East 10th Street and, hours before the Landmarks Preservation Commission voted to landmark the building and its block, secured permits to build a rooftop addition that incensed critics already unhappy about his other rooftop additions in the neighborhood.

And in April, the Fire Department had to use a cherry-picker to rescue a tenant from one of Mr. Shaoul’s buildings after a construction crew removed part of the staircase during renovations.

“He’s front and center in all of these things,” said the writer who calls himself E V Grieve, who has pseudonymously chronicled development in the neighborhood since 2007. “Ben is the latest to get in on the East Village gold rush. He didn’t cause it, but he’s taking advantage of it.”

When Mr. Shaoul started buying real estate a little over a decade ago, the gentrification of the East Village had arguably already passed the point of no return. Tensions simmered there as early as 1988, when a riot in Tompkins Square Park spilled over to the Christodora House, a former immigrant settlement newly converted into luxury condominiums. Rioters smashed windows and yelled, “Die, yuppie scum” — possibly coining the phrase.

But even as restaurants and boutiques flourished and rising rents elbowed artists and musicians to Brooklyn, the neighborhood’s physical landscape remained relatively unaltered by the wave of money washing over it. It was not until the mid-2000s that swaths of the Bowery were rendered unrecognizable by developments like the massive Avalon Chrystie apartment complex, which opened in 2005 and brought in Whole Foods in 2007.

Mr. Shaoul made his inauspicious East Village debut in 2006, the same year the 21-story Cooper Square Hotel broke ground and the legendary rock club CBGB closed.

In March of that year, he bought out members of an artists’ squat on St. Marks Place in order to turn the building into rental apartments. A neighborhood photographer snapped Mr. Shaoul, accompanied by sledgehammer- and crowbar-wielding construction workers, as he confronted some of the squatters. At some point the police were called in; the photographs soon circulated around the neighborhood.

The episode led the real estate blog Curbed to dub Mr. Shaoul “Sledgehammer Shaoul” and — although he was not actually holding a sledgehammer in any of the photos — the name and image have stuck. His reputation was reinforced as he renovated more buildings: rent-stabilized tenants in his buildings reported threats of eviction, and he racked up Department of Housing Preservation and Development complaints and violations for the interruption of heat and hot water, blocked fire escapes, broken locks and other issues related to construction and maintenance.

Mr. Shaoul characterized such problems as inevitable results of old buildings requiring renovation. “No court has ever found we harassed or wrongfully evicted a tenant,” he said in an e-mail, adding, “No court or city agency has ever found us guilty of any unsafe construction practices.”

Also in 2006, Mr. Shaoul received more unflattering attention for renovations he was doing to buildings at 515 East Fifth Street and 514-516 East Sixth Street. Mr. Shaoul put rooftop additions on both buildings, provoking an outcry from tenants and local politicians who said the construction violated the Multiple Dwelling Law. In 2010, the Board of Standards and Appeals ruled that the East Sixth Street building’s seventh story must be torn down. (Mr. Shaoul said that both buildings’ additions had been approved by the Department of Buildings, and that the seventh-story addition on East Sixth Street was being removed.)

In his short but impressive career, Mr. Shaoul has fixed up dozens of crumbling tenements and built new developments from Chelsea to the South Street Seaport, including the A Building on East 13th Street, a 97-unit development that brought rooftop pool parties and private cabanas to the East Village: one-bedroom apartments there are priced in the neighborhood of $1 million and rent for around $4,000 a month. One result is that Mr. Shaoul’s name has become a byword for aggressive development in the East Village. A few months ago, posters bearing his photo were pasted up around the neighborhood. They read, in part, “I pledge to rape the East Village of every last vestige of creativity,” and concluded: “You gotta problem wit dat?”

BORN in Queens and raised in a tight-knit Persian Jewish community in Great Neck, N.Y., Mr. Shaoul dropped out of community college at the age of 19 to get into the real estate business.

After a summer internship with the Ohebshalom family, a Persian Jewish real estate dynasty from Great Neck, Mr. Shaoul renovated and began managing apartments in a building owned by his father, who had an antiques business.

“I liked doing it,” he said. “I’d go to open houses and see other landlords’ products and thought: This isn’t all that great, and they’re charging all this money for rent. We should make this a bit nicer.”

Using his father’s savings and a mortgage on the property he had renovated, Mr. Shaoul bought his first building in 1999, a tenement at 219 Mott Street.

Almost from the beginning of his career, conflicts with his tenants caught the public’s eye. Mr. Shaoul’s name first hit the papers in 2001, after he bought a nearby Elizabeth Street tenement. While renovating the building, he sued several of its rent-regulated Latino and Chinese tenants, accusing them of running rooming houses out of their apartments. Other tenants said that he had harassed them in an effort to make them leave and that he turned off the building’s gas for four months. Mr. Shaoul also sued the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence for $20 million for “severe emotional distress” after it organized protests against him, and in turn, a dozen tenants brought three suits of their own against him in housing court. The suits were eventually settled after Mr. Shaoul made repairs and restored the gas.

“I was very, very young,” Mr. Shaoul said recently. “I wish we had not filed a lawsuit against them. I wish we had handled things differently. The tenants were in the wrong for the situation they created for themselves. That being said, they were living there.”

Mr. Shaoul declined to reveal how many properties he owns throughout the city, but an East Village tenant’s association estimated he has some 40 in that neighborhood alone, scattered from East Second to East 13th Street and Second Avenue to Avenue C. The buildings include a portfolio of 17 buildings that he purchased as part of a group of investors in 2007. His signature condominium development is in Chelsea, the glossy, glass-skinned Yves on West 18th Street. He also owns properties in TriBeCa, the West Village, Harlem, the Financial District and on the Upper East Side — neighborhoods, he said, “where I would want to be.”

Rental properties provide financing for many of his projects, he said. “You basically take buildings that haven’t been touched in a long time and you revamp them and you hope to get higher rents,” Mr. Shaoul added, describing his modus operandi.

“He’s doing what all the other ones do,” said Brandon Kielbasa, an organizer at the Cooper Square Committee, an organization that advocates for tenants, who has worked with some of Mr. Shaoul’s renters. The goal, Mr. Kielbasa explained, was to turn rent-regulated units into market-rate units. Mr. Shaoul, he added, is “clearly an aggressive player: a landlord with the agenda he seems to have doesn’t want anybody telling him what he can charge for these units.”

For his part, Mr. Shaoul insists that he is “just moving with the market” and has “no problem” with rent-stabilized tenants. “We don’t harass people,” he said. “I don’t benefit from harassing somebody.”

It is true that judgments against Mr. Shaoul tend to focus on construction problems. In 2004, for example, the Department of Buildings issued a vacate order for 638 East 11th Street when construction caused a foundation wall to crack and separate from an exterior wall. In 2006, Mr. Shaoul was issued a stop-work order for construction at 120 St. Marks Place, where excavation was being done without permits. In 2011, residents of the A Building brought a lawsuit, still in litigation, against Mr. Shaoul and a business partner for numerous construction defects. And following the staircase episode at 435 East 12th Street, the Buildings Department discovered no permits had been filed for the job and issued a stop-work order.

But there has been no shortage of complaints that have not led to such formal actions. “I’ve been dealing with these issues and this developer my whole term in office,” said Rosie Mendez, a City Council member who has represented the East Village and Lower East Side since 2006. “He is, for lack of a better word, a chronic bad actor.” One memorable complaint, she recalled, came from a long-term tenant in one of Mr. Shaoul’s properties who reported that the Fire Department was using the building for evacuation exercises because they had been told it was vacant.

EIGHT rent-stabilized tenants from 120 and 118 East Fourth Street gathered at the Bowery Whole Foods one evening in May to discuss their experiences with the developer, who purchased their buildings in late 2010. The tenants, several of whom requested anonymity because they feared reprisals, portrayed Mr. Shaoul as an aggressive and unresponsive landlord. They recalled not learning who owned their buildings for months, lost rent checks, eviction notices, heat and hot water turned off with little notice, scant communication from the management company, a menacing property manager and intense construction that lasted well over a year. “It’s not personal,” one tenant said. “We don’t exist. We’re like bugs.”

“Even after our attempts to communicate with Ben, he is oblivious to what we’ve been going through,” said Anthony Donovan, a tenant at 120 East Fourth Street for 22 years. “We understand construction when needed. We don’t understand the discourteous communication, the lies, the unsafe conditions for workers and tenants.”

“I can’t begin to express how awful of an experience this has been,” said a tenant in another building, who has lived in his apartment for 20 years, in a separate interview. At one point, he said, the management company listed his apartment for rent. “I’m a civilized person and have a real professional job, so I can’t go out and pop Ben Shaoul one.”

Market-rate and commercial tenants tend to speak more highly of Mr. Shaoul. “I like Ben,” said one commercial tenant, who asked not to be identified lest he alienate his customers. “He’s a good guy.” But, he later added, “he’s definitely a businessman first.”

AS he took a reporter on a tour of four of his luxury properties at the end of May, Mr. Shaoul grew agitated at the mention of his tenants’ complaints. “It’s not fair, it’s absolutely not fair at all,” he said in the back of a black Range Rover headed down the West Side Highway. “If I was building buildings that were falling down, I’d say, ‘You know what, you’re right.’ And if I was making improvements that were only specific to certain tenants. But I’m not. I’m improving the building for everybody.”

“Why are my tenants complaining about my improvements?” he added. “Like, how about a pat on the back for doing that work? Instead, we get resistance the whole way through.” He said that, despite the numerous complaints — over noise, dust, permitting, the hours of construction — from renters in 118 and 120 East Fourth Street, he had never received a Department of Buildings violation for either building. “Logically, what does that tell you?” he said, adding, “They don’t like change.”

Mr. Shaoul’s brashness is, some of his associates said, one of his defining characteristics. “He’s very, very strong; very, very knowledgeable; very, very smart; and can sometimes be impatient,” said Leonard Steinberg, a managing director of Douglas Elliman and the agent marketing the Arman, Mr. Shaoul’s eight-story, eight-unit condominium under construction on far west Canal Street.

He and other business partners spoke of Mr. Shaoul’s attention to detail. And walking through 254 Front Street, Mr. Shaoul’s newest development, his pride in his work was obvious. The newly completed 40-unit luxury rental building is located in the South Street Seaport’s historic district. Mr. Shaoul pointed out the mahogany windows, white oak floors, subway-tiled bathrooms and well-appointed gym. Standing on the balcony of the $20,000-a-month penthouse (units start at $2,500 a month), he admired the view of the Brooklyn Bridge. “I would live here in a second,” he said.

Like other real estate developers, Mr. Shaoul both suffered and benefited from the financial crisis. He admitted that he had overleveraged some properties. He lost control of a Chelsea development site after he defaulted on loans and Brooklyn Federal Savings Bank won a $27.98 million judgment. But at the bottom of the market, Mr. Shaoul was also able to buy 254 Front Street, a development originally slated to be a condominium, and build a rental property instead.

Mr. Shaoul’s excitement about his luxury buildings throughout the city, as well as his love of new construction, is palpable. “I’d like to prove people wrong with my developments,” he said. That people accuse him of mismanaging the more humble tenements that build the foundation for these projects vexes him. “Why is everyone so hung up on the East Village?” he asked during the tour. Later, he added: “How about saying to me, ‘Ben, wow, your building is really beautiful, let’s focus on how well-built it is?’ ”

Mr. Shaoul is quick to say that he and other landlords are themselves casualties in the battles over gentrification. Standing across Canal Street from the Arman, where apartments are priced from $4 million to $9 million, he explained that landlords get a chronic bad rap “because it’s somebody’s home, and a landlord wants to make a profit so runs it as if it’s a business.” Rent stabilization, he added, results in “a tenant who feels like he has rights above and beyond anyone else.”

As Mr. Shaoul walked back to his car, he stopped to wave at his almost-2-year-old twins, who stood behind the vast window of the apartment Mr. Shaoul and his family are occupying while he renovates their West Village townhouse; their view is of the Arman, which he visits daily.

Later, as the Range Rover bounced along the South Street Seaport’s cobbled streets, Mr. Shaoul paused again to reflect on his circumstances. “When you’re working hard at something and you’re giving your all and someone comes along and essentially calls you a liar, you’re going to feel hurt over that,” he said. “I’m not saying I’m perfect or my staff is perfect. We’ve made mistakes in the past. No one’s perfect.”

Andy Griffith: Before Mayberry, A Movie Monster

By Bill Barol at 5:03 pm Tuesday, Jul 3

Boing Boing recently presented a series of essays about movies that have had a profound effect on our invited essayists. We are extending the series for several additional days. See all the essays in the Mind Blowing Movies series. -- Mark

Andy Griffith: Before Mayberry, A Movie Monster, by Bill Barol

[Video Link] If for any reason you doubt the power of television, consider the long career of Andy Griffith, who died this week at 86. Griffith had one TV role that was merely successful and one that was almost archetypical. That’s a pretty good run for any actor. But TV didn’t just give to Griffith. It also took away, and it’s here that the medium shows its muscle in a really astounding way. Griffith’s long TV career effectively effaced a film debut that, fifty years later, is so vivid and visceral that it startles with every viewing. The facts that Griffith played a bad guy in his first film role, and that both the performance and the movie, Elia Kazan’s 1957 A Face In The Crowd, are largely overlooked today -- these are testaments to TV’s power to swamp any cultural phenomena that have the poor judgment to get in its way.

Hang on, there’s more. What’s doubly delicious about this is, A Face In The Crowd is a cautionary tale about the power of -- Anyone? Anyone? Yes: Television. Griffith, who came from nightclubs and the stage and had no resume as a dramatic actor in 1957, plays Lonesome Rhodes, a drifter who stumbles into national prominence thanks to the demagogic power of the then-young medium. A grifter and a charmer, Rhodes is sleeping off a hangover in a rural jail when a local radio producer (Patricia Neal, doing that hard-but-vulnerable thing she did so well) sticks a microphone in his face. He has no ambition to be a radio star or anything else, but once he grasps that a guy with a friendly demeanor can wield mass media like a club, and he grasps it very quickly indeed, there’s no stopping him. Rhodes shoots like a star from tiny Pickett, Arkansas to Memphis to New York, from radio to TV, from a singer and storyteller to “a force... a force,” he says with megalomaniac intensity. And from there it’s just a quick hop to politics, with a presidential candidate sucking around for his magic touch, and a madman’s dreams of power behind the throne.

It all unravels, of course, because that’s what happens in cautionary tales. But until it does Rhodes is a villain of Shakespearean scope and depth, and Griffith -- this is TV’s Andy Griffith, remember -- Griffith tears into the part with both hands. When Griffith as Rhodes laughs -- “I put my whole self into everything I do,” he tells the Neal character early on, equal parts seduction and threat -- the sound explodes off the screen like gunfire, and Griffith’s eyes widen and shine, and sweat dots his forehead like stars, and the tendons stand out in his neck. Understand: Rhodes is a monster, all appetite and ambition, and Griffith makes every second of his rise and fall queasily believable. That doesn't just apply to the operatic moments, though. There’s a great scene early on where Rhodes uses the power of his radio pulpit to turn the populace against the local sheriff, and Neal asks him how it feels to “say anything that comes into your head and have it sway people.” At first Rhodes is too busy enjoying the moment to grasp what she’s saying -- “I guess I can,” he says offhandedly, tears of laughter streaming down his face -- but then the weight of the insight settles on him and the laughter stops and his eyes go cool and appraising. “I guess I can,” he says again, and this time it’s all business. You can practically see the connections being mapped in his hustler’s brain. Later, leaving Arkansas to go to Memphis for his first TV job, Kazan has Griffith stand in the steps of a departing train, and as he turns away from the cheering crowds who’ve come to see him off and sets his gaze down the track toward his future, his face is a mask of hunger and calculation.

There are good actors in A Face In The Crowd -- Neal, Walter Matthau as a well-meaning good guy, and the underrated Tony Franciosa as a conniving office boy-turned-theatrical agent. (Franciosa has a hilarious moment when Rhodes improvises a commercial jingle for some prospective national sponsors, and the office boy/agent wings some backing doo wops to help close the deal.) But for all the starpower the film has, and that includes Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg working at the tops of their very considerable games, it’s Griffith’s film to make or break. And in much the same way that Rhodes seized his opportunity when it happened along, Griffith did too. In every frame his Rhodes is violently alive, for good or (much more often) for ill. Griffith never again duplicated the jet-propelled power of that first performance, and within three years he was a TV star, and he stayed one until Tuesday, when he died. Ask any ten people who know him from either of his long-running TV successes if he ever played a heavy and eight of them will look at you like you’re nuts. But the other two? The other two will nod in appreciation of what Griffith did 55 years ago, before a new medium set his nice-guy image in stone and wiped away the memory of Lonesome Rhodes’ grinning, voracious face.

City College of San Francisco on brink of Closure
Accreditation panel's verdict gives the state's largest school 8 months to make its case to avoid shutdown
Nanette Asimov Chronicle Staff
Updated 11:57 p.m., Tuesday, July 3, 2012

City College could be the state's largest to ever be forced to close after losing accreditation.

The poorly run City College of San Francisco has eight months to prove it should stay in business, yet must "make preparations for closure," evaluators ordered Tuesday.

The stunning verdict by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges could result in the closure of California's largest college and a fixture of higher education in one of the nation's wealthiest cities. It has 90,000 students.

Only accredited colleges can receive public funding under state law. But City College's failure to fix serious, long-standing problems of leadership and fiscal planning means that the accrediting commission could vote as early as next June to yank the school's all-important certification, said Barbara Beno, commission president.

That perilous judgment was conveyed Tuesday in a letter to Pamila Fisher, interim chancellor of City College, as the commission released its comprehensive review of the school. The college now has the burden of proof to "show cause" for why it should retain accreditation.

"Since the loss of accreditation would likely cause City College of San Francisco to close, during the 'show cause' period the College must make preparations for closure according to the Commission's Policy on Closing an Institution," Beno wrote Fisher.

In addition to proving why it should stay in business, City College must submit a "Closure Report" by March 15.

Only one California college has shut down in recent years because it lost accreditation, Beno said. Compton College, near Los Angeles, closed in 2005. But City College was warned in 2006 that it had eight major problems that could place its status in jeopardy. Now there are 14, all of which must be addressed by March 15 for the college to remain accredited.

Summary of findings

In her letter, Beno summarized the findings of the 66-page report, citing "leadership weaknesses at all levels," "failure to react to ongoing reduced funding," and spending all but 8 percent of its budget on salaries and benefits. The Chronicle, which had obtained a copy of the report, wrote about the findings on Saturday.

Beno said Tuesday that the reduced funding at City College isn't the reason for its precarious position. Other colleges have also lost millions of dollars in state funding, she said. Yet only two of California's 112 community colleges - College of the Redwoods in Eureka and Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo - are, like City College, on the brink. "It's choices," Beno said. "Regardless of how much money they have, safeguards apparently weren't put in place. The situation is very grave."

Leadership lacking

It is unclear how small the vast City College would have to become to live within its reduced means. It has nine campuses and from 100 to 200 "instructional sites." More than 90,000 students are enrolled, intending to transfer to a four-year university, learn a vocation or just take an interesting course. Nearly 2,700 people work at City College, including just 39 administrators - a level considered far too low by the accrediting commission.

In her two-page response to the commission, Interim Chancellor Fisher did not promise to keep City College's doors open. Nor did she make such a promise in response to questions from The Chronicle, saying only: "City College is fully aware of the seriousness of the situation."

But Fisher acknowledged in her letter that "clear, difficult choices must be made, immediately, and at a number of levels."

"The ultimate responsibility rests with the trustees, administration, faculty and staff to reinvent City College so that it can continue to achieve its important mission, but in a more cost-effective and efficient way."

Fisher became chancellor May 1 when Chancellor Don Griffin resigned to undergo surgery for a brain tumor.

Since then, she said, the college has approved a $187 million budget for 2012-13 that is $8 million less than the previous budget. It includes savings from union givebacks, furloughs, a freeze on purchasing and the elimination of 700 classes for fall and spring.

$79 parcel tax

The trustees also voted to place a $79 per parcel tax on the November ballot to benefit the college, and will bring in the state's Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team to help create a multiyear financial plan.

Next week, Fisher said, she will appoint an accreditation response team to develop "an immediate plan of action" to address the 14 major problems the college must solve to stay in business.

Action plan deadline

The first deadline, Oct. 15, is when City College must submit its action plan to the accrediting commission. Commission representatives will then visit the school to monitor progress.

City College Trustee Steve Ngo said he was taken aback by the severity of the commission's action.

"City College must survive," he said. "We will work our way out of this."

At the same time, he urged everyone who loves City College to recognize the value of the institution that churns out thousands of educated students and licensed professionals each year.

"I think they're in danger of losing a treasured institution," he said. "The work we do has to do with the strength of the city."

English instructor Alisa Messer, president of the American Federation of Teachers local that represents the college's faculty, agreed.

"The last thing anyone wants is for the college to close," she said. "We'll all work very hard to make sure it doesn't. Closure would be unthinkable."

‌

Read the report

To see the accreditation report, go to: sfg.ly/O2FVAa

Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco staff writer. E-mail: nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NanetteAsimov.

Macaulay Culkin’s Life After Fame

The Daily Beast 

The ‘Home Alone’ star has all but vanished, except for a monthly party that he DJs in Manhattan. Ramin Setoodeh went and found a roomful of adults in Jurassic Park costumes.

by Ramin Setoodeh  | June 19, 2012    

It’s one of those early June nights typical for a New York summer—the air feels breezy, but it’s not cold. Two pretty girls cling to their spot on the sidewalk in front of the velvet rope of a club downtown.

One has a black pixie haircut that must have been labored over for hours in a salon, or it could be a wig. She resembles Zooey Deschanel. The other is a statuesque blonde, who whispers to me that they traveled all the way from Rhode Island to visit this West Village dive bar. They are college-age, possibly over 21.

“Are you here to see Mac?” Pixie asks me suspiciously. I nod, and the two girls relax. They don’t know him, but they read online about the flamboyant parties that he throws. Pixie seems to have a crush on him. She looks hurt when the bouncer says Mac dislikes brunettes, until it dawns on her that he’s only joking, and a small smile flashes across her face.

A few minutes later, the bouncer hands me a paper hat featuring an orange T-Rex about to swallow a smaller blue dinosaur. I put it on, with the understanding that I’m about to attend a birthday party. Nobody will tell me whose. We descend a flight of stairs, and scan the underground bar for our host.

Mac is short for Macaulay, as in Macaulay Culkin, who at the age of 10 landed the starring role in Home Alone, the most successful movie of 1990. He was so cuddly that he became the biggest child actor Hollywood had ever seen, receiving up to $8 million per film. Some of his follow-up performances weren’t as memorable, unless you were close to his age, like I was, and obsessed with My Girl, Getting Even With Dad, Richie Rich, and The Good Son (which I couldn’t see, because it was rated R). Then puberty hit and Culkin came crashing back to Earth, as most child actors do. His parents bickered over the control of his estate in a nasty, public divorce. In 2004, Culkin, virtually unrecognizable, was arrested for possession of marijuana and various pills while driving through Oklahoma with his friend, Brett Tabisel.

 

Take a look back at Culkin's star-making role in 'Home Alone.'

Culkin tried to return to acting as an adult, including the independent film Party Monster and a guest appearance on Will & Grace. His last feature was 2007’s straight-to-video Sex and Breakfast, which IMDb describes as “young couples experiment with anonymous group sex.” Since then, Culkin’s main job has been staying out of the public’s eye. Last year, he quietly started a new job as a New York DJ at Le Poisson Rouge, a club managed by Tabisel, also a former child actor.

A publicist for the event said that I could attend, but that I couldn’t interview or photograph Culkin under any circumstances. Tabisel and all of Culkin’s friends also declined my request for an interview.

blog.lepoissonrouge.com

The 20-somethings at the bar told me each of Culkin’s parties come with its own theme, usually tangentially related to adolescence. He had a prom where he crowned his own king and queen. After the paparazzi snapped a shot of him in February, looking scraggly and gaunt on a New York street, he hosted a canned- food drive to mock the tabloids that wondered whether he had been starving himself. Tonight’s dinosaur birthday party is like a piece of performance art: a former child actor’s reinterpretation of childhood. Its actual meaning is harder to understand.

There are dinosaurs everywhere: dinosaur posters, dinosaur toys, dinosaur balloons and whistles. I stuff a green dinosaur bookmark into my pocket. Some of the guests actually arrive in full dress, including a man wearing a teetering cardboard dino head. Natalie Suarez, 25, fashioned her green hoodie to look like a Dilophosaurus, the poison-spitting dinosaur from Jurassic Park. Two TV screens play Jurassic Park 3, the campy sequel that wasn’t directed by Steven Spielberg. At the bar, you can order $5 ptero-daiquiri shots—a sign advertises them with a cartoon pterodactyl and a “Rawwr!!!”

After ordering a drink, I move in the same direction as most of the other patrons, toward a foldout table with an empty chair. I sit down, in front of small jars of paint, manned by a shy 20-something. Toby describes himself as an artist who usually doesn’t paint faces, but Mac asked him to. “What kind of dinosaur do you want?” he asks me. I ask him what kinds of dinosaurs he draws. I ponder the selection (pterodactyl, triceratops, etc) before settling on a T-Rex. He dips his brush into the green paint and giggles, saying that my stubble makes this harder. When he’s done, he looks frustrated. “I’m sorry,” he says. “You might need to wash it off.”

My search for the DJ booth leads nowhere. That’s because there is no DJ. One of the Rhode Island girls explains that Culkin doesn’t really DJ at these parties. “He plays his iPod—it’s an iPod party,” she says. The music sounds like generic 90s grunge, with an occasional Madonna, Aerosmith, or Beastie Boys song thrown in.

Hovering near the unmanned iPod resting on the side bar, stands a short, pallid blond man. Here is our Gatsby, except he is more like Willy Wonka. Even in a crowded, packed room, Culkin is impossible to miss. In the dim light, he sometimes looks like an adolescent and sometimes like an old man. But never, from any distance or light, does he look his real age of 31.

Most of his friends are stationed at a giant table in the back of the bar, a cross between the Last Supper and a toddler’s birthday party. There’s a paper tablecloth and dinosaur action figures scattered around two delicious birthday cakes. Culkin’s younger brother Kieran, who played a rebellious teenager in Igby Goes Down, is there, as is his other brother, Shane, who is not an actor.

When Culkin finally speaks at around midnight, his voice is high-pitched and androgynous. “Hi everybody, welcome to the dinosaur party! Thank you for all coming, it’s been a blast.” He awards a girl named Carolyn with a ribbon for her stegosaurus bodysuit. He plays with a pair of chattering teeth and then reveals that it’s actually Shane’s birthday. The crowd roars. He thanks everyone for coming “from the bottom of my heart.”

Macaulay Culkin pictured in April 2010 (PatrickMcMullan.com / Sipa)

Corey Michaels, one of his guests, spent the afternoon before the party at Toys ’R Us, where he bought 20 plastic dinosaurs that he glued onto his T-shirt. When Culkin sees the shirt at the bar, their eyes lock. “He said, ‘I love it, I give it an A plus’” Michaels, a 26-year-old singer from Miami, remembers. He believes Culkin’s voice might have been part of the performance. “I think he went into a party-monster space in his head. I think that’s the whole point.”

“He’s always warm,” says Suarez, who has attended several of his parties and says Culkin often makes small talk with the guests. “I wouldn’t say in a flirtatious way, just in a receptive way. He’s always asking people how they found out about the party.”

If Culkin seems a little distant in person, it’s may be because his life hasn’t been easy, despite the millions that he earned before he got a driver’s license. After he became famous, his father, Kit, divorced his mother, Patricia, and tried to claim ownership over Culkin’s multimillion-dollar fortune. The case went to the Manhattan Supreme Court, and Culkin became estranged from his father. In 1998, his mother’s house burned down in a fire. Ten years after that, his sister Dakota was killed in a L.A. pedestrian accident. But despite all this tragedy, most of us still remember Culkin as the cute kid from Home Alone.

Culkin never self-destructed before our eyes, but what’s unclear is his current state of mind. I couldn’t tell whether his dinosaur party was ironic. Since we’ve all trapped him as a child, perhaps he wants his guests to be there with him. If playing the DVD of Jurassic Park 3 was meant as a playful wink to Hollywood for not casting him in the third Home Alone movie, then good for him—if not, then I would tell him the first movie is definitely the best one. I couldn’t tell whether he is bitter and angry, or whether he needs some friends and this is the safest way for him to hang out in public.

Throughout the night, a small group of people kept accompanying Culkin into a back room and they’d return reeking of pot smoke. I tried to follow them, but the bouncer wouldn’t let me. Some of the guests insisted that Culkin had an entire apartment upstairs, though no one actually saw it. When I finally snuck by, I ended up in an empty space, a fully stocked, abandoned second bar, like an alternate universe. It was dead silent. I couldn’t even hear Culkin’s iPod music. Where did everybody go? Standing in the dark, I felt lost, like the time I wandered off by myself on a second-grade field trip to the history museum. Maybe it was all the alcohol or the dinosaurs, but I had the sudden urge to call my mother.

Another bouncer found me crouched in a corner and escorted me back to the bar. Culkin was long gone. The party was over, with a room full of exhausted Mac fans, their faces smudged in paint.

The next day, I called the club to ask them about the event. Dustin Nelson, the marketing director for Le Poisson Rouge, said that he’d been getting emails all day about the party. It wasn’t Shane’s birthday, he tells me. “It was no one’s birthday,” he said. “It was a birthday party for dinosaurs. It’s totally nonsensical.”

 

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