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As I sit down to write this, I have the radio on in the background -- no music plays, but I am tap tap tapping away regardless. An invisible voice tells me that Caroline Knapp, the author of Drinking: A Love Story, died yesterday at 42 from lung cancer. What is it with so many cool dead people dying so young? And of lung cancer, not what I need to hear as I sit puffing on my Marlboro Light after quitting for five months. Addictions are forever scheming, smarmy devotees, which is why it's so hard to say goodbye to them. Although I've given up the booze and chemicals, I still am leery of the abstemious individual who's never known what it's like to soak in oblivion. I would never have been leery of Mabel Normand, except she might have pinched from my stash had we hung together. Normand was swinging even before Chick, her prime lasting over a decade, from 1914-1928. She was born on November 9th, 1892. I would bet her mother didn't experience the same type of childbirth I did on that same day a century later. But I have a feeling both our babies were pistols, born with fiery laughter in their eyes from the minute they left that dark, suffocating channel. Normand left home at the age of 14 to become a model for ads. She worked with several artists, and this enhanced her longing to become an artist herself. Soon after working her way into the media circuit, she hooked up with film personalities like Mack Sennett and Sam Goldwyn and should I say the rest is just trite history? No, because nothing was trite about Normand. Encouraged to move into silent films, she hesitated for several months before moving on to become the greatest slapstick comedienne ever. She really wanted to paint. "The men I worked with helped me, and while of course I've never done anything with it, I learned enough about painting to do vignettes in my own books and to do water colors on the programs and guest cards for my friends when they give parties," she stated during an interview. And party she did, with the best of them: Pickford, Chaplin, Arbuckle, the Gish sisters, Valentino, among many others. It was actually after a party she had one night in her home that she decided to marry one of her leading men, Lew Cody. Cody asked Normand to marry him, and she said that they needed to do it right away if they were going to do it at all. So, the queen of spontaneity jumped in the car with Cody and two friends for witnesses, drove several hours to Ventura County, awoke the county judge and had the ceremony in his living room while his family peered through the keyhole. Normand had never thought seriously of marrying anyone up to this point, even though many, including Chaplin, Sennett and Goldwyn wanted her as a life-long partner. Cody won her heart with his constant friendship and spontaneous sense of humor. Normand, known as the female Charlie Chaplin, but without a doubt much cooler, made 11 films with Chaplin. It was after Chaplin worked with Normand that he decided he wanted to make a career in films. He felt compelled to work with Normand. Everyone she worked with fell in love with her charm, talent, and gusto for life. Passion can bring out the worst and best in people. In Normand's case, it brought out the best. Once, while breaking for lunch, a prop man tried to make a pass at Normand. She picked up a blueberry pie and threw it in his face; henceforth the genesis of the pie-in-the-face humor. Normand used this spontaneous reaction in many films, and she was the first of the slapsticks to take it in the face, so to speak. Part of what made Normand so funny was that she was willing to do just about anything, never using a double for any of her stunts. For a while she used the name Muriel Fortesque, because she was forced to keep her anonymity as a screen performer. This was short-lived, as Normand couldn't and wouldn't be forced into anything, especially anonymity. After watching several of Normand's films, I am left with this feeling: she was too smart, too witty and too spontaneous to have been openly admired for all her talent. Because she hated convention and conformity, she was known towards the end of her career as an "outlaw at heart," by those who loved her, and a scandalous vixen by those who she outshone. In spite of the fact she was known in Hollywood as being incredibly kind and generous, the ink tried to defame her by claiming she was a cocaine addict and a heathen. They even wrote about her abortion with Sam Goldwyn. Come on, why wouldn't any woman in her right mind abort a Goldwyn fetus? Also, she treaded dark waters when her friend, William Taylor, was mysteriously murdered. Normand was the last person to have seen him alive. The tabloids tried to make a case of her involvement with foul play. Any person with the well-earned cinematic chutzpah of Mabel Normand would tread shadowed waters before their time was up -- our envious society sees to that. One remark Normand made to Alla Nazimova during a visit was "I have often been alone, felt alone, when surrounded by the thickest crowds." Even the fearless suffer from social envy. So scandals were created, unkind words were spoken, and movies moved in the same direction. The silent screen became chatty. Normand sought out voice lessons from Nazimova, as she felt uncomfortable with her voice. She had been silent for so long, she was convinced that her throaty tones wouldn't be accepted. This was the beginning of the end for Normand. Nazimova and Normand met on several occasions at Nazimova's home with the intent on working toward conformity with Normand's voice, but instead they decided to have bitch sessions and confided in each other, building a lasting friendship until Normand's death in 1930. Part of Normand's throaty tone was connected to her chronic pneumonia, which later lead to tuberculosis and eventually killed her. Her decaying lungs may have been drug related, maybe nicotine, a vice she could have been in control of but dammit, there's that addiction stuff again, our spontaneous long-time vernaculars. Our devotees... ...And there's that lung stuff again. Mabel's lungs gave out; Caroline Knapp's lungs did the same. Stevie Nicks' raspy-throated tones began to sound more and more like munchkin sounds after her too many snootfuls of cocaine, although her lungs appear to still be in tact. Nevertheless, these women either found or lost their voice, their backdrop to visibility, through verbiage or silence. Don't you think that some "dead" folks are really just hovering around, dying to get the last word in? Normand died at 37. No way did she say everything that needed to be said before her last curtain call. So people write her biography, Stevie Nicks writes and sings a song about her, I write this little ditty...for what? I guess to get our version of her last words in, our version of a cool dead person who died way before her time. So Caroline Knapp, rest in peace with Mabel, with Chick and Chuck, Taylor, Tommy and Theodora and the queen of filth, Ms. Massey. I read your drunk-alogue and related through every chapter, as I'm sure Mabel would have. You're another woman who broke the silence in a world of addictive spontaneity. The radio is still yapping and my foot is still tapping; the invisible never silenced, the silenced never invisible.
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