Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California by Matthew Specktor

Author:Matthew Specktor [Specktor, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Literary Figures, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781951142636
Google: J5YiEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2021-07-27T23:20:31.887953+00:00

Why Tuesday Weld? I spent a lot of time wondering, in those weeks after D and I started talking again, why he chose to come in waving his arms over this particular enthusiasm. Not that it mattered, such was our friendship, and such was D, so who cared what lit him up enough to call me out of the blue? I was happy just to have him back. He never said much about the places he’d been, the travails he’d suffered in the years—more than a decade—since I’d seen him last, and I didn’t press. But he seemed different, when we spoke on the phone: calmer, less manic. He spoke of his sobriety without proselytizing, and even as I gathered the last couple of years had been particularly brutal, I got the sense that he had come through. Our daughters were roughly the same age, and we talked a lot about our kids, about their steadying influence, and about how our marriages had come apart. (D blamed no one but himself.) Chastened by failure, saddened by his divorce, trundling along in the shadow of a successful father, utterly delighted by his daughter, and at odds with his day job, he reminded me of someone else, namely myself, and so whenever we talked, I would feel refreshed. I felt understood, and in some sense seen, if not exactly vindicated. D had arrived at a certain sanity, I thought, of the sort only a real maniac can possess, because there is a clarity of thought—or rather, a clarity of understanding—that comes from burning yourself down to the wick. I loved D more than I ever had even when we were younger, because he’d turned his former chaos into wisdom, balanced the scales, it seemed to me, on the whole game of success and failure.

Was this why Weld? Because (with the benefit of hindsight, at least) she seems to have balanced them too. On the Cavett Show, freshly sober (though she is careful not to define herself as alcoholic; “I could have been,” she says when asked if she has ever identified as such, “but I stopped”), she seems cool as a matador when invited to perform the crooked dance of publicity. She is at once guarded and open, defended without ever quite being defensive. If the game of fame involves being both naked and invulnerable—the “game” at least as defined by those who get to set the rules, the spectators—then Weld is playing it perfectly. If it involves, rather, feeling like a human being instead of a fatted calf, well, then, who knows, but it’s worth noting that Weld retains her poise, and more importantly her sharpness, all the way through the interview. When the next guest, Milton Berle, shows up and bloviates confidently, boringly, with all the entitlement of a male celebrity who’s used to being listened to, Weld interrupts him with an observation that seems telling. They are talking about Orson Welles, the question of whether the great director really enjoyed acting (having just done so alongside Weld in A Safe Place) or if he was merely slumming.

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