Iris Tree: Poet Adventuress

Iris Tree photographed by Man Ray

You preach to me of laws, you tie my limbs
With rights and wrongs and arguments of good,
You choke my songs and fill my mouth with hymns,
You stop my heart and turn it into wood.

...Age creeps upon your timid little faces
Beneath each black umbrella sly and slow,
Proud in the unimportance of your places
You sit in twilight prophesying woe

So dim and false and grey, take my compassion
I from my pageant golden as the day
Pity your littleness from all my passion
Leave you my sins to weep and whine away!

Thus begins Iris Tree's first book of poems, published in 1919.

The daughter of famed English actor and impressario Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Iris was a free thinker and sybarite from an early age. In 1912, at the age of 15, she went to Milan where her sister Viola was studying singing. From there, she wrote to a friend: "I am rather a success here; my hair is admired...I am trying to keep as pure as possible but it's rather difficult. I am in love with a beautiful Italian called Ludovici who gives me lessons in the language on a crimson sofa."  A few weeks later she wrote, "I am having a glorious time, living a somewhat bohemian life and eating bohemian spaghetti....I want to do so many things and of course I shall end by doing nothing. Women never do anything except spoil the lives of men - that is their only consolation."

Back in England at the Slade school the following year, she and her friend Nancy Cunard secretly rented a studio where they "gave clandestine feasts and talked through the night by the light of guttering candles, reading poetry aloud and smoking cigarettes." (The Rainbow Picnic, Daphne Fielding, 1974) "Forbidden playgrounds were investigated..They drank beer in public houses and wine at the Cafe Royal."

Tree by Augustus John

Iris wrote:

I was born in 1897
I have a fringe -
I have whiskers - 
I have a studio in 
Fritzroy Street...
I have had 28 
lovers, some more 
some less...
I drink absinthe.
I borrow money.
I have loved men
I have loved women...
I am a soul.
I am an artist.
I am wanton.
I am a hypocrite.

At 17 she met her lifelong friend, Welsh poet and "King of the Bohemians" Augustus John at one of Lady Ottoline Morell's Thursday gatherings.  In an unpublished essay, In Praise of Augustus John, she wrote, "At Ottoline's there were all kinds of dress-ups. Her rooms were scented with pomanders, pot-pourri and packed with genii in full cry....John's basso profundo muttering rare but penetrating sentences...At first meeting I experienced an immediate intimacy as if I was part of his landscape which has remained in my vision ever since. "

Tree traveled with her father to Hollywood in 1915 (as revealed by Oscar Levant in his book The Uninportance of Being Oscar). Levant called her "a charming and witty woman." When she met her first husband Curtis Moffat in New York in 1916, he "looked like a prentice wizard of magus out of a fairy story, especially in the black cloak he habitually wore at night when he took her out to explore the more raffish quarters of the city: the Bowery, Harlem, Greenwich Village and the dockside." (Fielding)

In his memoir Chiaroscuro (1952), John writes of taking hashish jam supplied by Princess Violette Murat at a dinner party at the Moffats' home in Hampstead:

Having helped myself to the first dose I had almost forgotten it when, catching the eye of Iris Tree across the dinner table, we were both simultaneously seized with uncontrollable laughter about nothing at all. This curious effect repeated itself from time to time throughout the evening.

Iris may have written of the event, or a similar one, in her poem:

Suddenly 
Shutting our lips upon a jest 
As we are sipping thoughts from little glasses, 
A gun bursts thunder and the echoing streets 
Quiver with startled terrors...

Much of Tree's poetry of the time deals with the horrors of WWI, juxtaposed against the wild and free bohemian life she was living, still railing against the bourgeoisie: 

You have never known
Delight of dying slowly,
Poisoned with raptures...
Nor felt your souls go blowing like balloons
Tossed by impulsive hands...
You have not felt the abandon
Of light love
Dragged by the hair across a slippery floor...

Contrary to her youthful assessment of women's worthlessness, Tree accomplished much in her life, as well as writing remarkable poetry and acting as muse and model to other artists.  She came to America to act in Max Reinhardt's play The Miracle in 1925, and there met her second husband, Friedrich Ledebur. The two roamed around California, gypsy style, with their son, then moved back to Europe where they were involved in the Chekhov Theatre Studio.

Around 1940 Tree relocated to California and rented a house in the Ojai Valley, the Shangri La where the movie Lost Horizon was filmed.  There she attended lectures by Krishnamurti, and along with him, Aldous Huxley and others, founded The Besant Hill School near Ojai.

Tree also established the Ojai theatre festival, where she played Lady Macbeth and "gave a magnificent performance, even though her stage fright was immeasurably increased by the presence in the audience of her friends Lillian Gish, Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo." She and other members of the Chekhov studio performed her play Second Wind.

French author Simone de Beauvoir wrote of meeting Tree in California in 1947 when her theatre company was preparing to perform Macbeth. "She was extremely beautiful, as I can see in a photograph taken by Man Ray. She traveled widely and always moved in artistic and literary circles," she wrote in America Day by Day. According to Beauvoir's biographer Deidre Bair,  Tree "enjoyed teasing that ‘the Mauvais Tempts [Bad Times] had arrived" with Beauvoir, who thought Tree was "fascinating, beautiful and intelligent, but she was not amused by her jest."

Tree's cameo appearance in La Dolce Vita

Tree owned an apricot ranch for a time, acquired a barn by the sea on an estate once owned by Robert Louis Stevenson, and once took up residence in an apartment built over the merry-go-round on the Santa Monica pier.  She appeared in the 1956 film version of Moby Dick in which Ledeber played Quequeg. She also appears in a cameo, reading poetry as herself, in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960).

The early 1960s found Tree living in Geneva with her son, where she hosted the Huxleys and followed Krisnamurti. Like Huxley, she lost many of her personal papers in California. "Another link between Iris and Aldous Huxley was that she too had taken mescalin," wrote Richard Morphet of the Tate Gallery. Her biographer Daphne Fielding describes encountering Tree in France where she tried a hallucinogenic mushroom said to produce "beatific visions in glorious Technicolor." Fielding claims Tree didn't really how to ingest them, but the chapter ends with someone suggesting she'd gone to the Pyrenees because, "Maybe it's good mushroom country."

At the end of her life Tree was forbidden to indulge in cigarettes, coffee and wine for medical reasons. "I feel a traitor," she said "abandoning Baccus the Mind-Shaker and Ganymede the Cup-Bearer." She died in England in 1968, her last words being, "It's here, it's here... Shining...Love...Love....Love."

Carol Burnett and Hawaii 4-2-0

Eighty-year-old comedy icon Carol Burnett plays a brain cancer patient who goes in search of medical marijuana on a new episode of CBS's Hawaii 5-0. 

Explaining to her nephew why she ended up in the slammer, Burnett's character says, "I needed some grass. How was I to know the guy was a narc?" She had to go to the street, she says, when "Those fascists at the dispensary wouldn’t take my card." [This is a problem for out-of-state medical marijuana users: their own state's cards aren't usually honored elsewhere.]

A subplot on the show had President Obama visiting the island for Thanksgiving; a joke about "the days of Strawberry Fields" followed.

Compounds in marijuana have been shown to kill brain tumor cells without negatively impacting the surrounding healthy cells.

Burnett joins other aging actresses (Polly Bergen on Desperate Housewives; Charlotte Ray on ER) celebrating the healing power of the holy herb on TV.

It might be Burnett's most controversial TV appearance since Friendly Fire, the 1979 drama in which she played a woman whose son is killed by friendly fire in the military.

It's interesting that she would take the role of a marijuana user, because she released a memoir earlier this year about her eldest daughter Carrie Hamilton, who's widely reported to have been addicted to marijuana, cocaine and quaaludes, starting in her teens.

Hamilton died of lung cancer in 2002, at the age of 38. Around 1978 she was a pot smoker, according to a 1979 People magazine story. A study in the American Journal of Public Health concluded, "In March 1978, 13 (21 per cent) of 61 marijuana samples from the southwestern United States were found to be contaminated with the herbicide paraquat, a pulmonary toxin, in concentrations from 3 to 2,264 parts per million. The source of the contamination was an aerial spraying program in Mexico, supported indirectly by United States funds." 

The CDC's website says, "If it is inhaled, paraquat could cause poisoning leading to lung damage. In the past, some marijuana in the United States has been found to contain paraquat." (No mention of the US Government's role in spraying paraquat.)

Friendly fire, indeed.

Burnett was deservedly awarded the Mark Twain Prize at a ceremony that aired tonight. (Twain was observed to be under the influence of hashish in 1865.)

Also tonight, Rhianna won the first-ever Icon award on the American Music Awards telecast.

Pot Smoker Adam Levine Named People Magazine's Sexiest Man of 2013

Musician and Victoria's-Secret-model dater Adam "Moves Like Jagger" Levine has been named People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive.

Levine told the Belfast Telegraph in 2012, "I've done drugs. I smoked a lot of pot when I was younger. There is a place in this world for a little weed every once in a while. I've written songs after smoking a joint and it was good. More often than not it's absolute garbage." He added, "Cocaine just shouldn't be. It's brought no good into the world. I'm not saying, you should do drugs. I hope that's clear."

In April, Levine was mentioned in a hostile-work-environment lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by an unnamed security guard who claimed that Universal Music Publishing Group’s Santa Monica location was "infiltrated with pervasive drug use where you could smell marijuana seeping from various offices and openly used in common areas, and lounges." The guard claimed that when she complained about the weed smoke coming from one of the studios, she was told that "it's Adam Levine. You know from Maroon 5 ... He can do whatever he wants." In an official statement to The Hollywood Reporter, UMPG described the allegations as "absurd."

Levine isn't the first pothead to be named Sexiest Man.

Matt Damon took the honor in 2007. Damon grew up in a community house with his child psychologist mother and his stepfather, and said on BBC's Johnny Vaughan Tonight, "The first time I smoked was at home with my mother and stepfather. They were like, 'If you are going to do this, we'd rather you did this with us.'" Damon, who recently did a fine job reading a speech on civil disobedience by his friend Howard Zinn, appeared in Oceans 12, filmed in part in an Amsterdam coffeehouse.

"Gorgeous" George Clooney, 2006's Sexiest Man, also appeared in the Oceans movies and was quoted in 1997 saying, "I loved acid when I was at college. It was an escape. I liked mushrooms. They were like easy acid...Blow would dress you up for a party, but never take you there."

Matthew McConaughey, who was in named 2005, was arrested for pot possession in 1999 after police responded to a noise complaint at his home in Austin, TX and found him playing the bongos, with a bong at his side. In the nude.

Two years after Pierce Bronson was named in 2001, The Star published photos of the Irish-born dreamboat that were secretly taken by a fellow customer at the Dementia head shop in Malibu, where he picked out a bong. 

According to the book Harrison Ford: Imperfect Hero by Garry Jenkins, 1998's Sexiest Man asked a British interviewer in the 1970s, "You want a toke of this all-American reefer?" and went on to say he was smoking a strain of pot from Humboldt County, California.

Brad Pitt has twice been honored, in 1995 and again in 2000. Lately Pitts has been finding his fun in fatherhood, but he's smoked pot on film and reportedly said in 2006, “If someone wants to do drugs…as long as he or she isn’t corrupting minors or driving under the influence or endangering others, shouldn’t a person have that right?”

Sad to note right now that John F. Kennedy Jr. was named in 1988. Kennedy's friend and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow told biographer Christopher Anderson that John had a "Bohemian streak" that included the occasional joint. "John was certainly not a pothead," Barlow said, "but he wanted to lead the life he wanted to lead." Don't we all, already.

UPDATE: Levine (pictured, with Gwen Stefai) gave a fistpump in support of marijuana legalization from the stage of the 2014 Emmys, where he was a presenter (and McConaughey was the butt of several pot jokes).

Was the Woman Who Smoked Pot with JFK Murdered by the CIA?

Mary Pinchot Meyer

Even Secretary of State John Kerry has said he doesn't believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone on November 22, 1963. Two women who died shortly thereafter—Mary Meyer and Dorothy Kilgallen—may have been collateral damage.

And Marilyn Monroe's death may have had a Kennedy/Kilgallen component.

The book John F. Kennedy: A Biography by Michael O'Brien (St. Martin's Press, NYC 2006) describes briefly an affair JFK had with Mary Pinchot Meyer, the former wife of CIA agent Cord Meyer and sister of Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee's wife Tony. It says, "On the evening of July 16, 1962, according to [Washington Post executive] Jim Truitt, Kennedy and Mary Meyer smoked marijuana together." Truitt claimed he himself provided Mary with the pot.

O'Brien notes that during her affair with Kennedy, Meyer visited Timothy Leary, a fact confirmed in Robert Greenfield's comprehensive book, Timothy Leary: A Biography (2006, Harcourt), published on the 10th anniversary of Leary's death. Leary wrote in Flashbacks that Meyer told him she wanted to run an LSD session with a famous public figure, and after Meyer was found murdered, Leary theorized it was JFK and that she'd recorded the encounter in her diary.

Bradlee has confirmed that CIA agent James Angleton came to confiscate Mary's diary after she was shot in the head and heart while jogging in the park on October 12, 1964, two weeks after the publication of the Warren Commission Report. A young black man was arrested for the crime, and acquitted at trial for lack of evidence in July 1965. His defense attorney was Dovey Johnson Roundtree.

Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Kilgallen, 1960

A few months later, Dorothy Kilgallen, the "What's My Line?" panelist and journalist who some allege was the source of the rumor that "Puff, The Magic Dragon" is about marijuana, was mysteriously found dead in her bed (on November 8, 1965). Kilgallen was the only reporter to interview Jack Ruby, and she was telling people she would blow the lid off the assassination just before she died.

Days after a 1962 item in Kilgallen's gossip column had alluded to affairs between Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys, Marilyn was also found dead in a similar manner as Dorothy. Marc Shaw, author of The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, thinks Monroe's death was a practice run for Kilgallen's.

Candy Barr, the bodacious blonde Texas stripper who was imprisoned for marijuana possession in 1959, dated Ruby and had the same prosecutor and appellate lawyer (Melvin Belli) as Ruby. Around the time Monroe appeared in support of her husband Arthur Miller at the HUAC hearings, she reportedly smoked pot at a party in New Jersey.

Also died 50 years ago today: psychedelic pioneer Aldous Huxley, who asked for LSD in the end. Sheryl Crow sings about it in "Run Baby, Run."

2 Broke Girls, West Wing and Jocelyn Elders: Things I learned...

Jennifer Coolidge finds relief in cannabis cupcakes on 2 Broke Girls.

Growing up, I loved to read the Sydney J. Harris newspaper column, "Things I learned while looking up other things." I learn a lot of things that way myself.

Posting my story Gossip Girls Having Sex in the City on the NORML Women's Alliance Facebook page, I asked readers the question: In what other TV shows do women smoke pot together? I got answers about Nurse Jackie (a pill popper who once made an apple bong for a patient); ladies "toking it regularly" in the Showtime series Shameless; Gemma Teller (Katy Segal) "lighting up on the regular" on Sons of Anarchy; and Weeds, where Nancy occasionally does smoke (but seems to prefer wine).

I checked out an episode of Shameless, where Emily Rossum is sent to the salt mines to support the family her alcoholic dad won't. Not exactly empowering. I also saw the first episode of Sons of Anarchy where Gemma plots to employ her son in meth and gun running, and enables his girlfriend to OD on heroin. Not a role model, in my book.

I did get a tip that CBS's 2 Broke Girls had an episode with pot, and found a clip on YouTube (complete with Portuguese subtitles) from the show's "And the High Holidays" episode featuring the always-amusing Jennifer Coolidge munching marijuana cupcakes for her menstrual cramps. The perpetually perky Caroline (Beth Behrs) has some revelations about reality as a result of her own marijuana munching, which could have been interesting if the writing was better on this show. (As Tokin Woman Joan Rivers pointed out recently, TV writing is terrible of late.)

I decided to Google Kat Denning, the brunette star of 2 Broke Girls because she seems like a cool pothead type, whose character really lights up when it's discovered marijuana plants are growing in the girls' closet. Turns out the actress claims she doesn't drink or smoke, because she's already "an idiot" who doesn't need a stimulant to show her true feelings. (It's kind of nice she's so evolved; reminds me of Anais Nin's comments after taking LSD: Americans need it to open them up, but she already lives there.)

In the comments on the page with Denning's revelations, kemperboyd wrote, "Well that kills my weird fantasy of smoking a bowl with Denning, Allison Janney, Rashida Jones and a few other cool ladies, talking feminism and pop culture." iladelphian responded, "My mom smoked with Allison Janney in college."

So I got my Google on with Allison Janney + marijuana and came up instead with a page about a plot line in West Wing about a Surgeon General played by Mary Kay Place (who smoked pot with William Hurt in 1983's The Big Chill). The episode, which has Place's character almost getting fired for seeming to favor marijuana legalization, was doubtlessly based on the true story of Jocelyn Elders, Clinton's Surgeon General who was forced out of office after publicly promoting masterbation, condoms and reasonable drug laws.

Elders appeared at a press conference during the Drug Policy Alliance conference in Santa Monica in 1995. I was there, and had my hand up throughout, but wasn't called on to ask my question. The organizers announced the appearance was over but Elders stopped them, pointing at me and saying, "I want to take her question." I asked whether or not she supported Proposition 215, the medical marijuana initiative that was on the ballot the following November. She responded that she did, and a clip of her response was used in campaign ads for the proposition, which became the first medical marijuana law in the country.

During the event, Elders said while in office she went on a trip and when she returned, every piece of information about the drug war had been removed from her office. She lamented the antics of the "little boys" of Washington and said there was no one in that town we could turn to for an intelligent response.

Of former Health and Human Services chief Donna Shalala, who stood with Janet Reno and Barry McCaffrey to threaten doctors recommending medical marijuana after Prop. 215 passed, Elders said later, "She studied political science. That's the kind of science she practices." Shalala admitted to Diane Sawyer that she smoked pot in college, but now believes, “Marijuana is illegal, dangerous, unhealthy and wrong. It’s a one-way ticket to dead-end hopes and dreams.” Except in her own case, it seems.

The US has been largely without a Surgeon General of late (but has plenty of political scientists making medical decisions for the nation). Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who turned Obama down for the post, has now successfully advanced the cause of medical marijuana: his show on the use of CBD-rich marijuana for childhood epilepsy has resulted in FDA approval for an imported plant tincture to help children in need.

Miley Tokes, Gaga Chokes : All in 24 Hours!

How can a girl get attention these days in the media meatgrinder Penthouse once depicted on its cover? When a young woman has to resort to licking and riding construction equipment in the nude so that we'll listen to her song, it's our society that's really reached a new low.

You can't blame Miley Cyrus for needing to compete with the hired nude girls in Robin Thicke's idiotic "Blurred Lines" video, and you gotta admit she came in like a wrecking, twerking ball to take Thicke out, even casting a female dwarf as him in her performance last night at the European MTV awards in Amsterdam.

To cap it off, after winning "Best Video" for "Wrecking Ball," Cyrus pulled a joint out of a Chanel bag and lit it onstage -- and no one was talking about anything else. (TMZ has the unedited and edited-for-the-US nonsmoking version.)

Cyrus's blunt move out doobed Lady Gaga, who smoked onstage last fall at her concert in Amsterdam, saying, "It has totally changed my life and I've really cut down on drinking. It has been a totally spiritual experience for me with my music.”

But just when we were celebrating the reality that women could come out of the cannabis closet without repurcussions to their careers or personal lives, Gaga labeled herself as addicted to pot, grabbing back headlines she hasn't enjoyed exiting her egg.

How to get attention, ladies? Like Joni Mitchell did, or Grace Slick, or Chrissie Hynde: With talent and hard work. Let's stop watching our music on YouTube and open our ears and hearts to the sound again. We've got a lot more to fix than the pot laws.

UPDATE 12/7/2013 - Gaga's views on marijuana are getting as hard to keep up with as her fashion statements. She now says smoking pot makes her feel 17 again. What could be wrong with that? 

Gossip Girls Having Sex in the City (sans Pot, for the most part)

Oh, what I do for research.

I've just watched nearly every episode of Gossip Girl looking for marijuana and have come up nearly empty. I got hooked by the first episode where bad boy Chuck shares a joint with his buddy Nate. (The girls are apparently off gossiping, missing out on the fun.) The plot sickens when Chuck nearly date rapes an underage girl at a party, but his character is later redeemed when he finds his love for the scheming, goody-two-shoes Blair (who would truly benefit from chilling out with a phatty).

In a later episode, Serena (Blake Lively) is seen coming out of a Venice pot club, bag in hand, also with Nate (pictured). But rather than smoking it herself, turns out she's been tricked into procuring it for someone on the movie set she's working on, almost leading to the project's demise. Although all the Gossip Girl characters drink, Lively's been quoted saying she neither drinks nor does drugs, and her character is always trying to clean up her act.

Nate (played by Chace Crawford, who's been popped for pot) is joked about throughout as the stoner of the group, and in Season Four he turns on Raina Thorpe (played by Tika Sumpter, left), the only black Gossip Girl (I guess pot is deemed OK for ethnic groups).

In the Season Four crescendo, Serena's mother Lily is heading to prison (or what turns out to be an ankle bracelet worn in her penthouse) for sending an innocent man to the big house. Her sister Carol, offering support, promises to visit her inside and bring her some pot brownies.

In another episode, Blair's mother hosts an Arabian-themed party, complete with hookahs, to which her daughter turns up her pretty little nose. Blair is played by the multitalented Leighton Meester, who was born in prison while her mother was serving a 10-year sentence for smuggling marijuana from Jamaica.

It makes me think that writers and producers take seriously Hollywood's requirement that marijuana must have negative consequences to be included in the plot. The standard was revealed when the Meryl Streep movie "It's Complicated" got slapped with an "R" rating in 2009 because her character smokes pot and nothing terrible happens to her. Reportedly Streep also smoked medicinal pot in One True Thing, a film in which she plays a cancer patient who takes her own life with an overdose of morphine (I guess that consequence was bad enough for the censors).

Marijuana showed up in a couple of episodes in Sex in the City (1998-2004), notably one called "The Post-It Note Always Sticks Twice" (Season 6, Episode 7) wherein Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is broken up with by her boyfriend via a post-it note. To cheer her up, Samantha procures a joint and the two smoke it on the street.

Soon a cop comes by and begins arresting Carrie, but her friends talk him out of it when the post-it is offered as evidence of the bad day she's had. Giggling and jokes about bogarting that (banana) split ensue (pictured), and Parker actually does a good job acting like a stoner. In the following episode she decides "it was time to leave fear behind and have some fun," so she tries the trapeze.

Carrie smokes cigarettes on the show, tries to quit for a boyfriend, and goes back to the man she can share cancer sticks with. The show has been cited as a reason young women are drinking so much, and Kristin Davis, who played the good girl Charlotte on the series has said she's a recovering alcoholic. Nothing other than an occasional, amusingly presented hangover is ever shown as a negative consequence of alcohol, and I'm guessing the Carrie Gets Lung Cancer From Her Nicotine Habit episode won't be a sequel either. (NORML's Paul Armentano just re-debunked links to cannabis smoking and cancer.)

Samantha (played by Kim Cattrall), the naughtiest girl on the series, is the one who gets breast cancer on the show. In the second Sex in the City movie (2010), Samantha smokes a hookah in Abu Dhabi and encounters some very bad consequences indeed when the girls are all deported after she has sex on the beach. Parker's been making noises about a third installment; let's hope no one will have to get sick in that one to enjoy the safer substance.

A High-Living Princess: Violette Murat

UPDATE 10/15: Murat is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.

Princess Violette Murat, c. 1928-30
Photograph by Berenice Abbott 

In his memoir Chiaroscuro (1952), Welch painter and "King of the Bohemians" Augustus John described a 1920s dinner party at the home of photographer Curtis Moffatt, "a bit of a sybarite" who married poet Iris Tree:

When he lived in Hampstead, Curtis used to give small parties at which sardines and wine were consumed -- and sometimes hashish. I had already tried smoking this celebrated drug without the slightest result. It was Princess Murat who converted me. She contributed several pots of the substance in the form of a compôte or jam. A teaspoonful was taken at intervals. Having helped myself to the first dose I had almost forgotten it when, catching the eye of Iris Tree across the dinner table, we were both simultaneously seized with uncontrollable laughter about nothing at all. 

 ...The crises of laughter continued with some of us till dawn, with further repercussions as I made my way home with Violette Murat, who had only been slightly amused by the night's proceedings. 

Violette Murat, who turned John onto hashish, was a Bonaparte princess who may have been a lover of Marie Laurencin. The book Cote D'Azur - Inventing The French Riviera includes the following insight into the lifestyles of the rich and famous in the 1920s: “Princess Violette Murat, friends say, not only bought her opium in Toulon, but also rented a submarine in order to smoke it in peace."

Murat is described at another famous dinner party in 1922, where VIP Marcel Proust met James Joyce and Stravinsky: "Princesse Violette Murat flounced out of the party, looking daggers at [Proust] as he arrived. Gossip about her meanness was rife, and she was mortally offended by rumours that one of Proust’s particularly parsimonious characters was based on her. With her strange lack of physical proportions, he once said of her 'She looks more like a truffle than a violet.'"

The Napoleonic family is large and convoluted; everyone has five names, with repetitious family names like Eugene. I've uncovered conflicting information about Murat but I think she is Violette (aka Cecile) Ney D'Elchingen, born September 9, 1878. Granddaughter of Napoleon's marshall Michael Ney, she was the wife of (Eugene) Joachim Murat (1875-1906), a descendant of the Joachim Murat (1767-1815) who married Caroline Bonaparte, Napoleon's sister. Violette died in Paris on July 19, 1936.

Along with VIP Tallulah Bankhead, Murat was part of the Harlem renaissance in the 1920s. Berenice Abbott, who photographed (Eugene?) Murat (shown), wrote of her, “A very high liver. Oh, all kinds of wonderful tales are told about her….She…knew how to make an art out of living and that’s something stupendous. Anything she did became a vibrant, extraordinary event. I can remember seeing her go into a ten-cent store and buy the place out and have a fling doing it.”

NOTES: The 100th anniversary of the publication of Swann's Way, Proust's first volume in A la recherche du temps perdu (aka "In Search of Lost Time") November 14, 2013, will be celebrated the world over.

Born on November 13, 1913 in Paris, Princess Laure Louise Napoléone Eugénie Caroline Murat was a cousin of Violette Murat. In 1939, she married Fernand Auberjonois, a journalist who worked as a foreign correspondent for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade as well as NBC and Voice of America. The couple's son, actor Rene Auberjonois, is best known as Father Mulcahy in the movie M*A*S*H.

UPDATE 3/15 - Just discovered: Tucked in the corner of La Grand Odalisque by Ingres (1814)—a painting commissioned by Violette's grandmother and Napoleon's sister Caroline Bonaparte Murat—is what looks like a hash or opium pipe, along with what looks like an incense burner (complete with smoke). The fan the girl holds looks rather like a hookah mouthpiece.

The painting was “widely criticized” when it appeared, supposedly for the elongation of the girl’s figure (which almost looks like a grand pipe itself, with a big-ass bowl).  

Sinead's Wild Ride Looking for Marijuana

Sinead O'Connor has been in the news after penning an open letter to Miley Cyrus, after hearing that Cyrus cited O'Connor's video for "Nothing Compares 2U" (pictured left) as an influence for her wrecking ball video.

The Irish songstress warned the younger singer that the music industry "will prostitute you for all you are worth, and cleverly make you think its what YOU wanted.. and when you end up in rehab as a result of being prostituted, ‘they’ will be sunning themselves on their yachts in Antigua, which they bought by selling your body and you will find yourself very alone."

Cyrus, BTW, was spotted smoking a blunt at a Halloween party, where presumably she was the only young woman not wearing a Miley Cyrus twerking get up.

O'Connor once said that dealing marijuana was one of the most honest professions a person can have. Now it seems the lack of a legitimate dealer has lead to the quick break up of her latest marriage, to drug counselor Barry Herridge, after only 16 days.

On her blog, she blamed the late-2011 split on taking her husband on what she described as "a bit of a wild ride" looking for marijuana on her wedding night, as she does not drink. After the street dealer she found handed her a bag of crack instead, her hubby freaked out.

O'Connor recently said she hides her pot smoking from her younger children by smoking it in the garden, and that she worried her older child would get arrested for pot, "which is what happened."

Travels with Maggie, Tooley, Squiggy and Micky

I finally viewed the 1972 adaptation of the Graham Greene novel Travels with My Aunt, starring Maggie Smith, now known as the dowager duchess from Downton Abbey.

The story begins with a young paramour of the mysterious Aunt Augusta (Smith) hiding his pot stash in an urn of ashes following a cremation. A madcap voyage ensues, during which Augusta and her nephew, the staid bank manager Henry, encounter a young woman named Tooley on the Orient Express.

Tooley is played by Cindy Williams, the year before she appeared in American Graffiti. Tooley offers Henry some cigarettes that turn out to be pot, and the experience opens his mind and heart.

Williams is super in the role, from a time when, like in Graffiti, a new realism was seen in cinema. She went on to be paired with Penny Marshall as a writing partner, leading to a guest shot on "Happy Days" and their spin-off "Laverne and Shirley" (1976-1983). The show has a 1981 "lost episode" titled "I Do, I Do" in which the girls get stoned on pot brownies.

David Lander, who played Squiggy on "Laverne and Shirley," was an MS sufferer and advocate for medical marijuana who said he and his partner Michael McKean (Lenny) created their characters for the show while high. Lander told producer Garry Marshall that instead of patrolling the halls during the show he ought to put marijuana in the budget.

The sitcom lives: "Today Show" co-anchors Savannah Guthrie and Natalie Morales dressed as Laverne and Shirley on Halloween (way classier than "Good Morning America's" Lara Spencer as Miley Cyrus on a wrecking ball).

Sixties TV icons The Monkees were also pot fans. A "Behind the Music" episode reveals that Peter Tork, considered the best musician in the band, was busted for $3 worth of hash he had on him when crossing the US/Mexican border and did three months in jail for the "crime" in 1972.  Meanwhile drummer Micky Dolenz was admittedly partying hearty, talking about being stoned and demonstrating what he meant by that (see left). 

The Day That Hollyweed Happened

Douglas Finegood thought the Hollywood sign should say "Hollyween" for Halloween, but that project was never realized. The man who first altered the iconic sign to say "Hollyweed" on January 1, 1976 died of multiple melonoma at the age of 52 in 2007.

An art student at CalState Northridge, Finegood conceived of the worthy, weedy project as part of an assignment about working with scale. He got an "A".

"For a long time, he had this idea that if you just changed the two O's you could change the whole meaning of the sign," his wife Bonnie told the LA Times. He chose to make the alteration to celebrate California's law decriminalizing marijuana, which took effect on the morning Algelinos awoke to the altered reality.

Finegood made a scale model, enlisted three friends to help and spent about $50 on materials. Using only stones and rope, they hung sheets as if they were hoisting sails. The image was seen around the world and clinched Finegood's relationship with his future wife when she appreciated his effort.

Objecting to being called "vandals" in a 1983 letter to the Times, Finegood and his comrades wrote, "An artist's role throughout history has been to create representations of the culture he exists in. By hanging four relatively small pieces of fabric on the landmark, we were able to change people's perception of the Hollywood Sign."

According to the Times, Finegood obscured consonants to coin "Holywood" for Easter later in 1976 and "Ollywood" to protest the hero worship of Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North during the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987. In his final round of wordplay, Finegood made a political statement against the Persian Gulf War by draping plastic sheeting over the 50-foot-high letters to form "Oil War" in 1990. But park rangers and police yanked down the plastic before sunrise, and almost no one saw Finegood's final work.

After the sign had been altered by others several more times, city officials beefed up security with a fence, alarms and eventually installed a closed-circuit surveillance system. As superagent Sue Mengers said of Hollywood in the '70s versus today, "We used to have fun."

Finegood's other concept, camouflaging the sign for April Fool's Day to make it seem as if it had vanished, also never happened.

Read more about Hollywood and marijuana.

UPDATE 2017: Another "vandal" brought back the Hollyweed sign on 1/1/2017 to celebrate the passage of Prop. 64 in California, legalizing marijuana for adult recreational use. 

Parkinsons Quiets Linda Ronstadt's Voice, Not Her Spirit

UPDATE 10/19 - A wonderful documentary, "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice" is currently in theaters.

Linda Ronstadt has been making the talk show rounds talking about her new "musical memoir" Simple Dreams and revealing that she can no longer sing due to Parkinson's disease.

To Diane Sawyer's insipid question about her illness, "Do you ever get angry?" Ronstadt, who has always had a social consciousness and dated the once-and-future Governor Jerry Brown, answered, "Yes, especially when I think about our immigration policy."

Uncomfortable with her Queen of Rock status, Ronstadt sang country harmonies with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton, appeared in Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance, and recorded an album of jazz standards and another of Mexican music she learned as a child. Her biography is mostly about the music, but some cultural references slip in.

On drugs, she writes that alcohol made her ill, and cocaine caused a bloody nose and was said to interfere with hearing: she eschews both. She admits to trying marijuana "several times" and not objecting to others using it, but adds in the words of a friend, "When I smoke pot, it makes me want to hide under the bed with a box of graham crackers and not share."

Ronstadt seems to have sanitized her own drug history, according to New York Daily News and compared against her 1975 interview with Ben Fong-Torres of Rolling Stone. After all, she did record Lowell George's "Willin'"

As uncovered by CelebStoner, Ronstadt told the Daily News in 2013, "People who smoke pot are generally peaceful. I think it should be legal. I think all drugs should be legal, just like alcohol. You take the money out of it, and suddenly there's not going to be a big drug trade because all of a sudden the drugs will be cheap. The whole idea of the drug cartels and the violence surrounding them will be gone. We can tax it and it will be a huge tax revenue, and I think it will be easier to educate people. There will be less HIV from infected needles, less hepatitis C; all that stuff could be controlled for the better."

On dating Brown, she writes, "Jerry Brown and I had a lot of fun for a number of years. He was smart and funny, not interested in drinking or drugs, and lived his life carefully, with a great deal of discipline...Also, he considered professionally many issues that I considered passionately: issues like the safety of nuclear power plants, agricultural soil erosion, water politics, and farm workers' rights."

Perhaps it's time to add medical marijuana rights to her list, because studies have shown that cannabinoids can aid Parkinson's. Massachusetts' new medical marijuana law, for one, specifically allows the use of cannabis for Parkinson's.

After a long, hectic and fruitful career, it might be time for Linda to stay home and heal with some graham crackers and cannabis.

UPDATE 7/14 - Ronstadt has been awarded the National Medal of the Arts by President Obama, who admitted he had a crush on her back in the day. She entered in a wheelchair but rose to accept her award.

UPDATE 12/16 - A star-studded tribute and benefit was held in LA.

7/19 - Ronstadt has been named a 2019 Kennedy Center Honoree. It ought to be a great show, December 15 on CBS.

Michael J. Fox Parkinson’s Foundation Urges Congress To Pass Three Marijuana Research Bills

Through Resa's Eyes: Nietzsche, Wagner and Hashish

Resa von Schirnhofer, fifth from left, the only female in her class. 

“I would only believe in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity—through him all things fall. Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

A Facebook friend reminds me that this week is the birthday of Friedrich Nietzsche. Of all the writers in the book Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of His Contemporaries it was a younger woman named Resa von Schirnhofer who had something to say on the subject of Nietzsche and hashish.

"If one wants to rid oneself of an unbearable pressure, one needs hashish. Well then, I needed Wagner," Neitzsche wrote. This quote, truncated to remove the Wagner reference, is everywhere Googlable. But it took Resa to make the connection, and put it in the context of the time.

"He touched upon his favorite theme, this time grieving deeply, with tears in his eyes, lamenting the irreplaceable loss of his former friendship with Wagner," Resa wrote. Nietzsche wrote of Wagner, "He has supplied the precious varnish wherewith to hide the dull ugliness of our civilisation. He has given to souls despairing over the materialism of this world, to souls despairing of themselves, and longing to be rid of themselves, the indispensable hashish and morphia wherewith to deaden their inner discords." This use of the word hashish is similar to that of George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans) in The Lifted Veil (1859):  "She intoxicated me with the sense that I was necessary to her… A half-repressed word, a moment's unexpected silence, even an easy fit of petulance on our account, will serve us as hashish for a long while.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Resa spent a holiday with Nietzsche in Sils-Maria at the time he wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra [aka Zoroaster]. Here the author "told me about his bouts of raging headaches and the various medications he had tried against them. In Rapallo and in other places of the Riviera di Levante, where he had spent his times of worst health, he had written for himself all kinds of prescriptions signed Dr. Nietzsche, which had been prepared and filled without question or hesitation. Unfortunately I took no notes and the only one I remember is chloral hydrate. But since Nietzsche, as he expressly told me, had been surprised never to be asked whether he was a medical doctor authorized to prescribe this kind of medication, I conclude that some dubious medicines must have been among them. At any rate, he claimed to know his own sickness better than any doctor and to understand better which medications were to be used.

"Nietzsche never spoke of having used hashish, nor can I remember ever hearing the word hashish from his lips, but no doubt in his intensive reading of contemporary French authors—among them Baudelaire—he was already familiar with hashish in the summer of 1884 as a new drug that had recently appeared in Europe. Hashish smoking is mentioned as early as 1882 in The Joyful Science, though only as an Oriental habit of self-intoxication.

"When I came to Paris at the end of October 1884 all kinds of things were told to me about hashish use; I read an article about the physiological and psychological differences between opium intoxication and hashish intoxication and I heard celebrities from the ranks of high society mentioned as having tried to dream the hashish dream, etc. In my notebook from that time can be read: 'Hashish, or dawamesk is a distillate of cannabis indica, mixed with a fatty substance, with honey and pistachios to give it the consistency of a paste or jelly.' [Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal.] I was also told there were very tasty hashish candies. I felt a desire to try its effect myself—just once, out of psychological curiosity—but I resisted the attraction of this sweet poison."

Once during an illness, Nietzsche "described to me how, when he closed his eyes, he saw an abundance of fantastic flowers, winding and intertwining, constantly growing and changing forms in exotic luxuriance, sprouting one out of the other." He asked if she thought it was "a symptom of incipient madness." According to Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography by Julian Young: "Not until later did it occur to her that the hallucinations could be the result of chloral hydrate and other drugs, possibly including hashish, that he had obtained in Rapallo, mostly by the simple expedient of signing the prescription 'Dr. Nietzsche', his credentials never once having been questioned. He also mentioned that he had been drinking English (Irish?) stout and pale ale." On one occasion, Nietzsche poured Resa some Vermouth di Torino, leading to "a sparkling mood and full of humorous inspirations." (Young)

Resa von Schirnhofer

Resa von Schirnhofer (1855-1948) was born in Austria and came to Zurich in 1882 as a pioneering female doctoral student. When Nietzsche asked Resa why she intended to get a doctorate, "I explained that I set little importance on the title for myself, but in the interest of women’s rights I did not want to leave the university without having gotten the degree.” In letters to Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth she writes that "she never married because she would have imposed two requirements: great love from her partner and the provision of affluent circumstances....as it is usually impossible to have both of these in bourgeois marriage, she soon resigned herself to not marrying at all.”

Originally of affluent circumstances, she lost most of her resources by investing in government bonds during the first world war, forcing her to earn a living by giving piano and language lessons. Her recollections of her time with Nietzsche were discovered in her papers after her death.

Here is her description of Nietzsche: “A soft voice full of gentleness and melody and his very calm way of speaking caused a pause in the first moment….When a smile lit up his face, bronzed by so many sojourns outdoors in the south, it took on a touchingly childlike expression that called for sympathy. His look generally seemed to be turned inward, like the one we see on statues of Greek gods, or seeking out of the depths something he had almost ceased to hope for; but his eyes were always those of a man who has suffered much and, although he has remained a victor, stands sadly over the abysses of life. Unforgettable eyes, shining with the freedom of the victor, accusing and grieving because the meaning and beauty of the earth had turned into nonsense and ugliness.”

Describing an interaction, "I told him how, when I was a five-year-old child in the country, my mother and I, pursued by an enraged bull, had barely escaped to the first house of the village. An interesting conversation followed about the wave-effect, often through an entire life, of a nervous shock received in childhood."  She reports that Nietzsche was visibly moved as he bade her farewell, saying “with tears in his eyes: I hoped you would stay longer. When will I hear you refreshing laughter again?” The fool may have rejected her for lack of comeliness, telling someone at the time his ideal woman would be beautiful and stupid.

An Old Fashioned Ladies' Pot Party in "9 to 5"

I just re-viewed 9 to 5 (1980), the classic film with Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton, and had to write about it.

First, I was struck by the scene with Tomlin as Violet with her teenage son, when she's stressing about getting a promotion at her job from her sexist boss. It goes like this:

"Mom, you've got to relax. I'm gonna roll you a joint."

"Josh, you know how I feel about that. Besides your grandmother would pitch a fit if she even hears you mention the word marijuana." 

"She doesn't understand moderation. You're the one who keeps saying harm springs from excess. I'm talking about one joint." 

Wise messages about moderation coming from the younger generation, as taught (properly) by an elder.

Tomlin's character takes the joint, and proffers it to her colleagues played by Fonda and Parton, telling them, "We could have ourselves an old fashioned ladies' pot party." Fonda plays an innocent, recent divorcée who pronounces it "really good pot" after the gigglefest that follows.

It's a scene that harkens back to Easy Rider (1969) in which her brother Peter turns on the innocent Jack Nicholson. It took women a little longer to get there, but we did. The ladies bond over the experience, and soon concoct a wild way to bring justice and equality to their workplace. In a later scene, Fonda announces to her ex-husband that she smokes marijuana as part of her awakening. As an extra treat, VIP Sterling Hayden is featured as the company CEO who sweeps in to help give the ladies' dastardly boss (Dabney Coleman) what he deserves.

The film was viewed on Valentines Day 1981 by Ronald and Nancy "Just Say No" Reagan, after Ronnie wrote in his diary, "Funny—but one scene made me mad. A truly funny scene if the 3 gals had played getting drunk but no they had to get stoned on pot. It was an endorsement of Pot smoking for any young person who sees the picture." I guess he missed the moderation discussion with Violet and her son. And, the characters getting drunk would have been just fine with him.

Decades later, the movie was just about the only example a recent New York Magazine article could find of women smoking pot together on film, in a world where only "every once in a while you’ll get a Meet the Fockers–style mockable hippie-mom type."

9-5 was written and directed by Colin Higgins, who also wrote Harold and Maude (1971), in which an 80-year-old woman turns a young man onto pot (and life).

UPDATE: Tomlin sports a "Violet" tattoo in the movie "Grandma" (2015), where she plays a pot-smoking woman with much more punch that her TV character on "Grace & Frankie." Fonda shines as a hippie activist/pot peddler (also named Grace) who wisely and carefully instructs her grandkids on the use of a hookah in "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding" (2011).  

In 2023, the two spoke with Stephen Colbert about doing peyote together, as they did on the first episode of "Grace & Frankie." The two were promoting their film "Moving On," written and directed by Paul Weitz, who worked with Tomlin on "Grandma." Now in their 80s, the pair also co-starred last year in "80 for Brady" with Rita Moreno and Sally Field. 

It's nice to see Tomlin, at 85, starring in feature films; when she made "Grandma" she hadn't starred in a movie since she made "Big Business" in 1988 with Bette Midler, except for the 1991 film version of her one-woman play, "The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe."  It seems the public is finally ready for Lily's shamanhood (it's about time). 

Marie Laurençin: Pot Party Painter

UPDATE 10/15: Laurençin is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.
 

Les Invités (The Guests) 1908

"Everybody called Gertrude Stein Gertrude, everybody called Picasso Pablo and Fernande Fernande and everybody called Guillame Apollinaire Guillame and Max Jacob Max, but everybody called Marie Laurençin Marie Laurençin," wrote Gertrude Stein.

Stein purchased Laurençin's Les Invités, the painter's first sale. The painting is a record of an infamous 1908 dinner party where hashish pills were taken at Azon's restaurant in Paris. Laurençin's self portrait is upper left, with knowing eyes, flanked by Picasso and Apollinaire. Fernande Oliver, Picasso's mistress, is bottom right.

The following year, Laurençin painted Un Réunion a la Campagne (A Reunion in the Country), where she is depicted reclining as a hostess would, along with the three from Les Invités and others. Thus Laurençin is possibly the first person to paint a pot party (or two). In the first portrait she is the most fully realized image, and is bringing a flower: was she the instigator for the hashish taking? She may have been a lover of Princess Violette Murat, who could have supplied her.

Marie Laurencin, Diana a la Chasse (Diana of the Hunt) 1908

An illegitimate child, Marie Laurençin was born in Paris in 1883 to a Creole mother who worked as a seamstress. She began her career as a porcelain painter at the Sèvres factory, studied with the flower painter Madeleine Lemaire, and attended the Académie Humbert where she met George Braque. Through Braque, she soon became part of the avant garde artist set in Paris. Source.

The paintings reproduced in Elizabeth Louise Kahn's excellent 2003 biography of Laurençin demonstrate amply her unique and prodigious talent.  In 1907 Laurençin exhibited her paintings at the Salon des Indépendants and was introduced to Apollinaire. The two artists began an affair that lasted until 1913, and she has also been linked with Picasso and with other women. Rodin said called her "a woman who is neither futurist nor cubist. She knows what gracefulness is; it is serpentine." Picasso purchased her painting La Songeuse (1911) and had it all his life.

Max Ernst painted her portrait, as did Cocteau and Rousseau. She kept company with Mary Cassatt and Susanne Valadon. In 1912, Laurençin and two other women (Charlotte Mare and Gaby Villon) fought off angry viewers of the controversial Cubist House with their umbrellas.

Les Chansons de Bilitis 1904 (print)

In Stella Gibbons's wonderful 1932 book Cold Comfort Farm, the heroine advises a protegée not to share her poetry with society people. "Nor must you talk about Marie Laurençin to people who hunt. They will merely think she is your new mare."

Laurençin was named chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1937 and in 1983, the Marie Laurençin Museum in Nagano-Ken, Japan was inaugurated to celebrate the centenary of her birth. A Japanese influence can be seen in this print (left). Marie Laurençin's 130th birthday is October 31st of this year.

Perhaps Laurençin was also familiar with Alice B. Toklas-style brownies: she was a regular at Gertrude Stein's salon on rue de Fleurus, and remained in contact with Toklas for the rest of her life. "I see Marie Laurençin quite often," Toklas wrote in a 1949 letter. "She wants me to translate for her some of the poems of Emily Dickinson so that she may do some illustrations—most certainly her dish of tea." Sadly, Toklas never did the translations.

In a letter Toklas wrote in 1950 discussing the Cone collection, which had just opened at the Baltimore Museum of Art, she suggests her correspondent look for "a very early Marie Laurençin" and describes Les Invités. Apparently the painting had been sold to the Cone sisters; Claribel Cone met Stein when the two attended Johns Hopkins medical school and the Steins introduced the Cones to the Parisian art scene.