WALKING WITH WIM

I just bought a copy of Wim Wenders’ book Once. It’s essentially a book of photographs, though some of them have quite lengthy captions, and sometimes the photographs look like illustrations of the text, and there are one or are pieces of text that have no photograph at all.  The words are laid out so they look like poetry.   I don’t know why he laid them out so they looked like poetry; but hey Wim, you’re the boss.

One of the pieces describes driving to Barstow with Dennis Hopper to visit Nicholas Ray, who was there acting in Hair: the movie was released in 1979. Wenders’ text runs:

Dennis knew Nick from a long time ago,

when Nick had given him a small part

in “Rebel Without a Cause.”

Dennis became friends with James Dean…

During that night in Barstow

The conversation inevitably turned to James Dean

And Nick declared to us:

“I taught him how to walk.”

I find that history hasn’t been kind to Rebel Without a Cause. I have trouble suspending my disbelief.  Dean is supposed to be some crazy mixed up kid but he looks, and indeed walks, like a guy in his twenties, which of course he was when he made the film.

Be that as it may, Dean obviously looked great when he walked and he knew it.   There’s the iconic picture of him walking in Times Square in 1955 (below), by Dennis Stock:

And there’s this one too, by Roy Schatt, taken on 68th Street, in 1954. 

Rain or shine, the cigarette remains a cool walking accessory.

WALKING THE GEORGE AND RAY WAY

Well here’s a sort of interesting thing.  I opened George Orwell’s 1984, more or less at random and found this curious reference to walking.  Winston Smith “had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his varicose ulcer was throbbing. This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your attendances at the Centre was carefully checked. In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous.”

I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised that this reads like a direct inspiration for Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Pedestrian,” written just a few years after Orwell’s novel, but I’d never been so consciously aware of it till now.  Perhaps everybody else already was.

Orwell continues, “On impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then north again, losing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in which direction he was going.”  

Bradbury’s pedestrian is often assumed to be walking in Los Angeles, though the text doesn't actually specify.  "Sometimes he would walk for hours and miles and return only at midnight to his house. And on his way he would see the cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows."

I haven't been able to find a photograph of Orwell walking, though I imagine he was part of the generation of Englishmen who did a lot of walking.  I once met a very, very old man in Suffolk who had gone beagling with Orwell, a rather specialized form of walking, admittedly. 

But Orwell did write this, in The Observer in April 1945: “To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation. For one has to remember that it is not only Germany that has been blitzed. The same desolation extends, at any rate in considerable patches, all the way from Brussels to Stalingrad.”

I haven't been able to find a photograph of Ray Bradbury walking either, and I know he did use a wheelchair toward the end of his life, but walkers in LA can visit both Ray Bradbury Square in downtown, and see his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  To experience Orwell's vision you only need walk down any street with a security camera.

STARLETTES AND CRITTERS

Want to see some pictures of women walking with animals?  Well it could do no harm, could it?  This first one is of Kelly Madison and I’m pretty sure they’re her own dogs.

I once sat next to her and her husband at a dinner.  It turns out they live in Corona, California, where parts of the 1954 version of The War of the Worlds was shot.  Good walking territory apparently.

And OK, I’m a bit late for Thanksgiving but here’s a turkey being taken for a walk (or at least for a photo op) by Lucy Marlow, who appeared most famously in the 1954 version of A Star is Born.  I’m guessing she wasn’t the owner of the turkey.

And here’s Lana Wood, born Svetlana Nikolaevna Zakharenko, and perhaps best known as the sister of Natalie, but also known in some quarters for her role as Plenty O’Toole in the 1971 Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever.  The picture is from Italian Playboy, and as with Lucy Marlow, I'm guessing there isn't a deep and lasting relationship between model and beast. That smile does look a little nervous, but why wouldn’t it be?

The story goes that when Natalie Wood was trying to get parts as a child actress her mother told her how important it was to be able to cry on cue.  She told Natalie to think of the time her dog had been hit by a truck while out walking.  It worked very well apparently.  Here she is in happier days: