Having lunch today with the grand-daughter of a woman I worked for sixty years ago. Much of our conversation - no doubt - will be about her grandmother. That woman, my employer, was a wealthy medium/publisher/foundation president who gave me my first job as an editor right out of college when jobs were hard to find. She explained that although I had no experience in the work she liked my aura. Mrs. G as she was called was allegedly the inspiration for Auntie Mame (Patrick Dennis had worked at the magazine before me) and for Madam Arcardi (sp?) because Noel Coward knew her. It was a remarkable place to work - an office full of nuts and bolts shaking around loosely every day - while believers in the paranormal from Gloria Swanson to Aldous Huxley were often there - with scientists experimenting with LSD - then mescalin - together with my employers 16th century spirit guide Lurgham Sahib - and it gave me my lifelong love for the eccentric, the unconventional, and the outright crazy (yes, there is a very good crazy, although in recent years crazy has gotten a bad rep from sociopaths and psychopaths and politicians like Sarah Palin). My employer knew I was not a believer - that I was born with a skeptics rattle in my hand - but she took to me none-the-less and after awhile she decided rightly that I was not happy editing and gave me a foundation grant to spend a year in London to study the ghosts in Shakespeare. A wonderful year for me and my wife not to mention Shakespeares ghosts. And her grand-daughter has her same Irish blue eyes, intelligence, and gift of irreverent laughter. I left that world as soon as I started to make a modest living writing for television, but I look back at it with affection. Never had an office job after that first one - other than a gig with Disney working on the American paviliaon, but glad that I did time working with others because unless you have spent time in an office you have no insight into the world of politics, the acts of spite and generosity that most people have to face on a daily basis. I am thinking about writing about that woman in my book Absent Friends but I fear that some people are just too odd to be credible to a reader. Why there was the time when.....and another time when ...and the time when the experimental white mice were set free and scampered all over the office terrifying some and....you get the gist of it. Great, ridiculous memories of a lost time before computers and the bottom line drove the world.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 11:18:05 +0000
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