Deborah Kerr

Deborah Kerr accepting her honorary Oscar in 1994. She was nominated for an Oscar six times but never won - which goes to show that the Oscars are like the Nobels - worthless gewgaws for acceptable mediocrities. At the age of 73, she was finally given an honorary Oscar but goddesses like her don't need silly awards.

And, yes, eventhough she was born a simple Scottish lass with bright red hair, she was a goddess - as many of the old movie stars were and none of the modern ones are. Can you imagine thinking of Cameron Diaz or Angelina Jolie as a goddess? No, neither can I. They're Hollywoood sluts as most of their contemporaries are. I look at modern movie stars and don't think "goddess." I think "whore."

Deborah Kerr died yesterday at the age of 86. Saying goodbye to this wonderful woman is a lot like saying goodbye to my childhood. I grew up worshiping her on the silver screen. She was a majestic lady who, despite her cool aloof manner, was so beautiful that she aroused the caveman in a wild-eyed boy who wanted to hunt her and possess her.

She was not a faux teenage Lolita like the bleach blonde Marilyn Monroe bimbos of Hollywood. She was a real adult woman, a Mother Kali whom one could kneel to and adore. An almost unattainable lady who has to be wooed and won is a lot more seductive and desirable than an easily and cheaply available slut.

Okay, that's over the top but that's the way that I felt when I was a kid sitting in a darkened theater waiting for Deborah Kerr to appear on the screen. Movies in those far off days were magical; larger than life. Nowadays we need movies with "special effects" to move us because the actors are not majestic and the screenplays are stuck in the mud; heavy-footed, pedestrian and ploddingly boring.

Not all the old actors of my childhood could act. Deborah Kerr could and she took roles that few Hollywood actresses could even think about. Maybe people only remember her in "From Here to Eternity" or "The King and I" but she tackled much more difficult roles starting with the 1947 British hit movie, "Black Narcissus," that led her to a career in Hollywood all the way to the 1964 film of Tennessee Williams' "Night of the Iguana".


Thank you, Deborah Kerr, for giving me so much wholesome joy in my youth. (The only other Hollywood diva who comes close to you is Doris Day and, at 83, her days are numbered too.)

Joubert Park - then and now

In one of his comments on my blog USpace left a link to a blog called The Death of Johannesburg. He warned me that it may be depressing and it sure is.

Johannesburg used to be the jewel of Africa with world-class opera and ballet companies and Eloff Street had so many high-end department stores that it was compared with New York's Fifth Avenue. When my mother took us shopping on Eloff Street, she wore a hat and gloves.

Right in the center of the city was a lovely green oasis, Joubert Park (which was named after one of my ancestors.) Like New York's Central Park, it was surrounded by expensive high-rise apartments overlooking the park. My aunt Leone lived in one of those apartments for decades and I used to love going to the park whenever I visited her.

In 1983, Chas and I went to South Africa. I had not been there for 5 years and was surprised at how much it had changed while I had been living in the US. Some changes were pleasing: there was no longer racial segregation in any public spaces or buildings and people mixed comfortably and freely. Some changes were not so pleasing: there was no longer racial segregation in any public spaces or buildings and, as a result, many public spaces or buildings had been trashed by the less civilized segments of society.

Soon after we arrived in South Africa, I took Chas for a walk through Joubert Park. Where once there had been office-workers and shop-clerks having brown-bag lunches and families having picnics on the lawn and "ladies who do lunch" sipping tea with gloved fingers beneath tidy umbrellas, there was now a rabble of dirty surly "street people" (mostly black men) sitting amidst a sea of trash, broken bottles and other carelessly discarded rubbish.

Chas, having been raised in a small upscale town in Connecticut, had never before been outnumbered by blacks and became nervous. Me, having been raised in Africa and being used to being outnumbered, did not notice his discomfort at first. When I did, I took another look at our surroundings and saw that we could be beaten and robbed at any minute by some particularly vicious-looking thugs who were studying us the way predators size up their prey. That was my first glimpse of South Africa's future.

And this was all ten years before apartheid was dismantled. Within the next few years the elegant apartment buildings were being abandoned by their owners because illegal immigrants (mostly from Nigeria) were invading and squatting in all the vacant apartments surrounding Joubert Park and neighboring Hillbrow.

Aunt Leone, like her neighbors eventually had to walk away from her apartment when squatters started lighting fires to cook because they had no electricity owing to not paying their bills. Several apartment buildings went up in flames and have never been repaired.

One photo essay on The Death of Johannesburg describes Joubert Park:

Joubert Park was one of the first open spaces for Johannesburg's inner city, proclaimed in 1906 but planned in 1887 and named after Boer War hero, Commandant-General PJ Joubert. It used to be a place where the city council put up Christmas lights, where choirs would sing Christmas carols . . . nowadays it's just a slum with squatters living there.

Here are some pictures from the blog showing Joubert Park the way it used to look before the 80s and how it looks now.