The Best American Poetry

Grace Kelly: Born to Be Aphrodite [by Stephanie Brown]

              Born on this day in 1929, Grace Patricia Kelly, iconic American star and Princess of Monaco, remains the ne plus ultra of the beautiful woman, exuding an effortless femininity, grace, charm, and self-confidence.  With her regal mien, she became a princess in real life by marrying Prince Rainer of the Principality of Monaco in 1956.  Her stuff-of-fantasy royal wedding foreshadowed Diana Spencer’s thirty years later.

             She exited Hollywood sans scandal, married well, and seemed to make no backward glances to that career or toward her ambitious lower-upper class Irish-Norwegian-American Catholic family from Philadelphia. She devoted herself to her life in Monaco as princess, mother of three children, charity maven, and fixture in the pages of Paris Match, until her violent death in an automobile accident at age 52. 

Princess Grace left Hollywood on a high note, getting out before she had a chance to see her career falter, avoiding the clichés of grim determination seen in steely stars like Joan Crawford or Bette Davis, the boring domesticity of other fifties stars such as June Allyson, or the tragic fate of a love goddess like Marilyn Monroe.  While Kelly won an Oscar for her portrayal as the wife in The Country Girl in 1954 (a controversial choice as she was up against Judy Garland for A Star is Born), her star rose higher in retrospect in tandem with Alfred Hitchcock’s.  She appeared in three of his films: Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief in 1955. 

Kelly ispresumed to have been Hitch's favorite actress, the archetypal “cool blonde” of his obsession. Donald Spotto (The Dark Side of Genius) reads Vertigo as a key to both Hitchcock’s personality and his obsession with Kelly; the actresses that he employed after her, such as Kim Novak in Vertigo, were rebound-romances for Hitchcock — he replaced her with lookalikes in an attempt to replace his beloved.

Hitchcock’s genius was to reveal the shadows in the iconic images of Cary Grant, James Stewart, and Grace Kelly. (She and Grant are a match of amoral schemers in To Catch a Thief.)  Often noted is his reveal of Grace Kelly’s sexuality from under the surface of her cool, proper, glamorous, and even slightly forbidding exterior in both Rear Window and To Catch a Thief.  Yet, as noted in many Hollywood tell-all books (such as Oleg Cassini’s), Kelly was noted for being a very sexual woman, reportedly having affairs with William Holden, Oleg Cassini, Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, and others. 

John Keats: Half in Death with Easeful Love

Poor Keats. A Scorpio with Virgo rising and, just to clinch the deal, his moon in Gemini. This is the equivalent of being dealt the Fool, the Lovers (inverted), and the Tower as the three culminating cards in an eleven-card Tarot reading. There is sadness in his life, illness, a consumptive cough. But he has a generous soul, he meets afflictions with renewed resolve, he is capable of great feats of self-discipline. Willing to work hours on meters and rhymes he is a born dreamer, who can shut his eyes and transport himself in a second to fairy lands forlorn, an enchantment of mist, an early Autumn of heirloom tomatoes and three varieties of peaches. Life is a struggle, but he prevails, and then dies young.

The fact that Keats's moon is in Gemini, that the nocturnal northeastern quadrant is predominant in his natal chart, and above all that Mercury is his ruling planet, supports the view of this poet as a divinely-ordained messenger of the gods trapped in the frail body of an undernourished London lad with his face pressed against the sweet shop window, as Yeats wrote. [Note: If you mix up the names Keats and Yeats, or pronounce one as if it were the other, the chances of your appreciating either are diminished by a seventh but not eliminated. The two names are separated by nearly five decades but linked by lyrical genius, with the prophetic mode ascendant in Yeats, while Keats -- brainy, anxious, and quick as befits a son of Mercury -- wins the laurels for sensuality and freshness: the palpable bubbles in the wine glass, the burst of a grape in the satyr's mouth, the humming of flies on the porch screen in August, keen fitful gusts of wind.]

Keats's Venus is, like his sun, in Scorpio. This is crucial. It means he is as passionate as he is sensitive and a gambler not by instinct or by social association but by his intransigent attachment to his ideals. Among Sinatra songs "All or Nothing At All" comes closest to expressing Keats's point of view. He is one who can be loved by many but who reserves his own love for one. Auden's poem "The More Loving One" depicts a conflict that Keats resolved each time he picked up his pen to write. He knew he was destined to be the more loving one in any partnership, and he would not have had it any other way.

Keats loved the four elements and presented their interaction with the cool exactness that Vermeer brought to the study of light.  Not surprisingly, the two share a birthday: the 31st of October. Neither of them enjoyed trick or treating, though Keats did have an impish nature as a youth, and he loved his junkets.

The position of Mercury in the third house has caused the greatest amount of comment among professional astrologists. The consensus view is that Keats resembled certain musical geniuses in his extraordinary talent, his humble origins, and his early death. Though he was less dashing than the noble Byron and less angelic of aspect than Shelley, all the women polled said they would welcome a relationship with Keats, especially if she is in England while he is in Italy writing long gorgeous letters to her about Shakespeare plays, the nature of inspiration, the smell of mortality, and what Adam felt like waking up in Eden. Emily Dickinson, tipsy on lovemaking with Byron, said she nevertheless preferred to spend the night with Keats, despite his well-known proclivity for premature ejaculation. In his poems (ED wrote) Keats proved that greatness descends on the novice only after he has opened himself up to the risk of failure or embarrassment.

If Shelley is the poet of the autumn wind, the wind that destroys and preserves, animating the leaves and the waves and the clouds in a fury of activity, Keats is the poet of autumnal ripeness. Consider his great ode to the "season of mist and mellow fruitfulness." The final stanza of "To Autumn" is as sensual in its handling of language and rhyme as in its vision of the fullness of the harvest-time:

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft 
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

The closing music shows that Keats took his own advice to Shelley ("load every rift with ore") to heart. A comparison of the two poets -- the one prospective, anticipatory, the other all righteous fire and visionary fury but also retrospective and melancholy -- is a fascinating study in comparative astrology. It has been said that the single most revealing piece of information you may have about a potential dating partner is whether he identifies himself more with Keats or with Shelley. 

The muse visited Keats often in the spring of 1819. First came "The Eve of St. Agnes," the lovers rushing away into the night; then "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," the lover seduced and abandoned. And then came the odes, the greatest odes that English has to offer: to Psyche, to a Nightingale, on a Grecian Urn, on Melancholy, to Indolence. No poet ever packed as much magnificence in a line or wrote stanzas of such melodious charm that a simple, naive statement of Platonic optimism, which in lesser hands would be anticlimactic or worse, should seem to penetrate the heart of the mystery: "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty."

-- DL

Alfred Hitchcock's Fate Was In His Stars

At 3:15 in the morning, in London, England, one hundred and ten years ago today, the great film director Alfred Hitchcock was born, a solid Leo with a macabre imagination (moon in Scorpio). When August 13 falls on a Friday, as in 1993 and 1999, you may expect bats to fly in through the slightest opening in the bathroom window, and the phone will ring at 11 PM and it will be someone you have never met, who asks you for a job and sounds drunk. Hitchcock was short (5'5) and stout and perhaps unaware that he shared his birthday with both Annie Oakley and Fidel Castro.

There is a tremendous amount of fire in his natal chart (see below): more than 50%. This accounts for his energy, drive, ambition. The water in his chart, topping 18%, indicates a man of subtlety and sensitivity. He has three times as much yang as yin in his personality, and no one should be surprised to learn that a man whose dominant planets are the sun, Venus, and Mars may luxuriate in bathtubs in the English manner and have an almost phobic distrust of showers, which comes through in such movies as "Vertigo" (in which Kim Novak does not drown in the Pacific Ocean) and "Pyscho" (in which Janet Leigh meets her bloody fate behind a torn shower curtain). Leo, Sagittarius, and Scorpio are the predominant signs of a man whose self-confidence can lead him to commit the sin of pride.

A picture of the master of suspense emerges from a study of Hitchcock's chart. He is a Roman Catholic; a lover of blondes (especially American blondes); and a prankster of the imagination who knows that a straight face is best for effects either comic or scary and that the best way to get an actor and an actress to understand their parts as quarreling lovers is to handcuff them together and lock them in a room overnight, as in "The 39 Steps." When he was a boy, Hitchcock's dad sent him to the local police constabulary with a note instructing the officer on duty to lock the boy in jail for a few hours. This experience had the desired effect on the lad, who worked out his guilt complex by dispatching heroes, heroines, and villains to their deaths from the top of a church tower, or from a moving train, or by an attack of killer birds, or in an out-of-control merry-go-around at an amusement park, or sometimes with a gun, a knife, or a pair of handy scissors. The leonine Hitchock had his sun and his Venus in Leo. This makes him a most logical man, a constant man, generous in his affections but domineering, and almost tyrannically loyal to his lovers and friends.

Given this man's stellar combination of assertive confidence and deep-seated guilt, it comes as no surprise to students of the great man's chart that (1) the great Hitchcock actors (male) tend to be old-fashioned types (James Stewart, Cary Grant) rather than the method-trained new breed; (2) in some (not all) of the best Hitchcock movies, the villain is either more interesting than the hero (Robert Walker versus Farley Granger in "Strangers on a Train") or at least exceptionally complicated in an attractive way (e.g., Joseph Cotten in "Shadow of a Doubt," James Mason in "North by Northwest," Ray Milland in "Dial M for Murder," the birds in "The Birds"); and (3) the perfect Hitchcock heroines are, in descending order of greatness, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Doris Day, and Janet Leigh. -- DL

Hamlet

Hamlet was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, on August 10, a Monday, at 8:11 AM. He wrote two novels and a book of poems, but it was as an actor and director that he gained the greatest recognition. He won two "best actor" Oscars, one for "best director," and a Grammy for his part in an ensemble performance of the best "best song" Oscars from 1936 until 1965. His career as a secret agent for the Americans in Vienna in the years immediately following World War II was disclosed only after his death in an affair of intrigue centering on the itinerary of Dimitrios Makropoulos, the most notorious terrorist of the era, whose plot to sabotage the Helsinki Olympics was foiled by Hamlet.

Hamlet was a Leo with Sagittarius rising and Saturn opposing his sun. His natal chart predicts a great career cut short. Except for his untimely death, he has the most enviable destiny of any princely male: handsome, brilliant, athletic, creative. Though prone to melancholic periods, and excessively self-conscious, he was impulsive but without the overweening arrogance and intensity of wrath that make Achilleus a less sympathetic example of the type. In the underground Achilleus told Odysseus that he would rather be an ordinary farm laborer on earth than king of all the dead, a remark that Hamlet would not have made without adding an ironic paradox or two. "O I could live in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space -- were it not that I have bad dreams": a pair of hyperboles terminating in litotes.

Hamlet's Venus in Gemini suggests a marked ambivalence in his love life. He looked very cool in a leather jacket and smoked as brilliantly as William Powell or Bette Davis. His moon is in Taurus, signifying a philosophical cast of mind and the tendency to go it alone rather than travel with an entourage. His Mercury in Aquarius conjunct the lightning bolt of Uranus makes it no surprise to learn that he is swift of foot and quick of mind. The emphatic placement of his Mars is in Leo, for he is on a mission. His Jupiter in Sagittarius indicates great intellectual curiosity despite Saturnine bouts of depression.

At Harvard Hamlet joined the fencing team (foil) and wrote dance criticism for the "Advocate." A Rhodes Fellowship took him to Oxford and he spent his "long vacs" in Paris, where he was among the first Americans to recognize the importance of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." In competition with his father's brother's son he wrote a sonnet cycle based on a remark Nijinsky made about the ease with which he stayed in the air while leaping. His production of "Ghosts" is still the ideal by which stagings of Ibsen are judged. A play he penned for the Mummers took the form of a debate between Brutus in "Julius Caesar" and Antony in "Antony and Cleopatra," with the Cleopatra scenes done in the nude. He is said to have had love affairs with Alma Mahler and the young Greer Garson.

Hamlet drank moderately, beer primarily, in the Blue Peacock, where he showed flashes of the wit and charm that made many a maiden overcome her inhibitions and spread her virtue. He liked lying in Ophelia's lap and discussing country matters. He was a very demanding guy, fickle, self-absorbed, a true prince. Nevertheless he impressed half the world with his martial energy, his calculated lunacy, and his jovial hospitality. The sight of Hamlet in fencing gear acted like an aphrodisiac, Ophelia confided.

Hamlet joined US Army Intelligence in 1945.

-- DL

Sir Larry

On this day in 1989, Sir Laurence Olivier breathed his last. The great actor was eighty-two when he shuffled off this mortal coil. He mastered accents and disguises. As a young man he played the romantic ("Wuthering Heights,""Hamlet," "Rebecca"). In middle age he brought Othello to life, and he had enough in the tank to play the good guy Nazi hunter in "The Boys from Brazil" and the sinister insidious Nazi doctor in "Marathon Man," which is the best movie about dentistry ever made, although in some ways it is unsatisfactory despite the excellence of the acting (Roy Scheider, Dustin Hoffman) for reasons worth consideration.

Laurence Olivier was born in Dorking on May 22, 1907, sneaking into Gemini but with as much Taurus trailing him as clouds trail the blessed babe in Wordsworth's "Immortality ode". Olivier was grandiloquent. The risk of overstatement was always at hand. Luckily it was not he but others who wrote the scripts. At the moment of his birth, Jupiter was approximately 180 seconds away from an exact conjunction with Neptune. The association with romantic characters of passion, melancholy, and excellent elocution  -- Hamlet, Heathcliff, and Mr Darcy come to mind -- is implicit.

The dialogue among the earth (Taurus, Capricorn) and air signs (Gemini) in his chart account for the temperament but also the ability to make the practical adjustments needed as middle age succeeds youth and makes way in turn for elder statesman status. Olivier shone in all three of lif'e periods of productive adulthood. There is more yin than yang in his chart and his bisexuality was well-known but no big deal. He was crazy about Danny Kaye.

The fact that his Venus is in Aries where Vivien Leighs Venus is in Libra may help to explain the legendary heat and intensity of their initial attraction in 1937. When she played Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone with the Wind" two years later, while he was lurking in the moors in "Wuthering heights," they were the most glamorous couple in Hollywood. She was magnificent but her nervous disposition coupled with two miscarriages (1945, 1955), a diagnosis of tuberculosis in her left lung (1944) and the natural decay of the aging process led her to extremes of depression. The marriage lasted twenty years. He was a gentleman but saw her loss of physical beauty as and accusation made by nature or the fates. That is why her role in "Ship of Fools," where she plays an aging women who travels with paid companions, so poignant.

After the divorce Olivier married actress Joan Plowright and spent his late eighteen years with this sensible and intelligent woman. No one remembers the name of his first wife, however. If you know to whom he was married (for ten full years) prior to Viv, you could win big. Hint: her name was Jill Esmond. But who was she?

Larry became Sir Laurence in 1948. Not until many years later did people learn that Olivier was a foreign agent operating in behalf of the British government to try to recruit the US into the war. This could have been foreseen if one had factored in the fact that Gemini was his rising sign -- and his moon was in Virgo! (Source: David Niven.)

Sir LO and Marlon Brando were the exact same height (5'10) but otherwise had little in common. (The same goes for Mick Jagger and Victor Hugo.) Other Geminis born on May 22 include Richard Wagner and Arthur Conan Doyle, which pretty much explains the dynamic of eccentric British empiricism and high German myth-making that encircle the Brunhilde of virginity with the three rings of masterly artistic flame over which the hero must cross in the dramatic depiction of Sir Larry's life.

Olivier won the best actor Oscar in 1948 and founded the National theatre in London in 1962.

-- DL

Not in Kansas Anymore

Today in 1922 Judy Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at 6 AM. A Gemini with her moon in Sagittarius, and her Mercury and Venus in Cancer (her rising sign), the great singer had the soul of a poet and the sensitivity of an eternal diva. If only there had been more Virgo in her chart, the girl who played Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz" might have had greater career endurance. The absence of earth signs doomed her to a nervous disposition and the likelihood of an early death.

Born Frances Ethel Gumm, Judy craved the approval of father figures, was easily bruised by criticism, sometimes affected a nonchalance but really cared very deeply about other people and wanted to be included in group activities. Her Saturn in Libra helps to explain her outstanding musical talent, and her will to succeed in motion pictures may be inferred from her midheaven in Pisces conjunct Uranus.

The death of Judy's father at age 13 stunned the young actress, who eventually broke off relations with her mother. The amphetamines helped in the short run. She had five husbands.

An old astrological adage: The stars favor the stars.  From the moment the young Garland sang to Clark Gable's photograph ("You Made Me Love You"), her astonishing rise to the heights of Hollywood glory was in the cards (Queen of hearts high) as was, alas, the inevitability of internal conflicts and demons postponed but not resolved by the habitual use of narcotics. As a teen she danced with Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr and sang "Over the Rainbow," which was named the greatest song of the twentieth century in a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001.

In Chinese astrology, she was born in the year of the dog. Her element is water. This is consistent with her destiny. Her relation to Minnesota mirrors that of Dorothy to Kansas except that there was no home to go back to.  The three farm hands in the dream were almost recognized when she awoke in Hollywood. She sang and danced with Gene Kelly and with Fred Astaire, and the saints of St. Louis marched in and sang "The Trolley Song" in unison on June 22, 1969, the day of her death. At Carnegie Hall in 1961, with composer Harold Arlen in the audience, she sang "Get Happy," "Stormy Weather," "The Man That Got Away," and "Come Rain or Come Shine" in 1961. Five Grammy awards! She was dead at 46.

Other folks of note born on this day include Saul Bellow, Hattie McDaniel, Gina Gershon, Frederick Loewe (who composed the music for "My fair Lady"), and Prince Philip of England.

If Judy and Frank Sinatra had been lovers, they would have scored very high in passion, high in intimacy, average in synergy, and below average in commitment.

-- DL

Midheaven in Taurus with Marlene Dietrich

Marlene Dietrich was born on December 27, 1901 in Berlin at 9:15 PM. That tells you a lot right there. She lived to a grand old age and died today in Paris in 1992. She had major affairs with Jean Gabin, Yul Brynner, Frank Sinatra, and Edward R. Murrow, and was bi-sexual. There is a rumor that she went down on Tallulah Bankhead at a party. In the dictionary of slang that Oxford University Press recently published, the phrase that most fascinated her was "cock holster," denoting the mouth in the act of oral sex though she could think of other apt uses for the phrase.

Marlene's natal chart reveals a lusty Capricorn with Virgo rising. Her Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are in Capricorn, which is significant. Her moon is in Leo and she has a bunch of Mercury, blonde Venus, and Saturn playing behind the scenes like the frolicking gods of Olympus. This is consistent with her talent for arousing attention, her desire for same, and her serious and melancholic edge that adds complexity to her poker-faced personality.

When your mid-heaven is in Taurus, the chances are that you will grow to a height of five feet six inches, if you're a woman, and that is exactly how tall Marlene was, and blonde, with a cigarette between forefinger and thumb, lush lipstick, and bedroom eyes. Her cards (The Chariot, The Moon, Knave of Swords, Nine of Wands) reinforce the impression of a woman of rare beauty and charm, with a husky singing voice of limited range but great effectiveness. In addition, one would predict that she would have a fluency in languages, an appetite for sex, shapely legs, and a cute lisp. The yin in her chart outweighs the yang by a healthy margin. But there is enough stellar ambiguity to make her the object of desire of males across the sexual spectrum. She is a role model for dominant women and an icon of veneration among the submissive. It is said there are two kinds of men. One kind favors Garbo, the other goes for Dietrich. But you had to live in the twentieth century to grasp all the implications.

The greatness achieved in the career of Marlene Dietrich indicates a fifth house dominant personality. As a young woman she starred as a sultry seductress, the cabaret singer who turns the starchy professor into a lovesick bum, in "Blue Angel." She is Circe mixed with Carmen, who demands a man who gets what he demands. Ein richtige Mann! She'll see what the boys in the back room will have. Blonde Venus. Amazing blonde women! Ich bin von Kopf bis Fus auf Liebe eingestellt. And she retained her sexual allure on the screen thirty or more years later in "Touch of Evil" and "Witness for the Prosecution." She read Orson Welles's palm and knew his future was a blank card. And she kept a straight face while telling him.

-- DL

Dostoevski predicts end of World War I!

Dostoevski's natal chart reveals him to be a Scorpio with Sagittarius rising. This is scary enough, but his moon is in Gemini, so watch out! Born on November 11, 1821, in Moscow, Dostoesvki suffered from epilelptic fits (see The Idiot) but did well in his examinations though he loathed mathematics. On this date (April 23) in 1849, Dostoevski was arrested for belonging to a group of crazy liberal loudmouth intellectuals. He was sent to Siberia. sentenced to be executed, and faced a firing squad in the freezing rain. But it turned out to be a mock execution and Dostoevski went back to his cell the shape and size of a coffin convinced that it is better and wiser to be a saintly fool in Siberia than to pimp in St. Petersburg. Released in 1854, he wrote "Crime and Punishment" in a hurry because he needed the money to cover his gambling debts. He was a compulsive gambler.

From analyzing Dostoevski's astrological profile, you can safely arrive at several conclusions. His favorite songs would have been "I Fall in Love Too Easily" (Sinatra version 1940s) and "He's a Rebel" (rock song from early 1960s). The prophetic nature of his writings, including "The Brothers Karamazov" and "Notes from Underground," doom him to be a Cassandra without honor in his native land. Yet his fame eclipses that of all other Russian authors with one exception. His chart predicts him to die in his sixtieth year, and this indeed he did on February 9, 1881.

Dostoevski's birth pattern -- a full house, with only one empty chamber -- is replicated exactly on the second day of August 1914. Had this fact been understood correctly, World War I might have been averted! The celestial mechanics of Saturn, Neptune, and Pluto intimate that Dostoevski would die on the same day as the end of the war, and indeed, the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, which would have been the novelist's ninety-seventh birthday. But it t would have come more than four years earlier if in the prison of his days the free man had learned to praise. The German minister smoked a Turkish cigarette in a jade holder. "Nothing ever happens in Brussels," he shrugged.

On that day, in graveyards in the Ukraine and Byelorussia, in Latvia and Estonia, school children in tatters stood shouting, "Hooray for the Karamazovs!"

For Dusty's natal chart, go here

-- DL

Graham Greene: A Libra with a Difference

Graham Greene was born in Berkhamsted, England, on October 2, 1904. He died eighteen years ago today -- on April 2, 1991. The day before he died I went into the Blue Fox book store on Aurora Street in Ithaca and bought "The End of the Affair." I had written a poem with that title and was curious to know what use Greene had made of it. I was reading the book on the day he died. Two thirds of the way through, the score was God 5, Adultery 2.

Greene's chart is that of an author who loves language as a fickle lover with money to burn loves the French Riviera.

The astrological configuration at the time of Greene's birth indicates an abundance of narrative talent. Melodramatic sentences came easily. "With an almost superhuman effort he battled back." A Libra with a difference, Greene balanced himself between rival impulses that led to the same bedroom. Scorpio was his rising sign. "The knife fell from his assailant's hand." Such a man has a respect for the occult and a gambling problem. Greene played Russian roulette as a boy and as an older man developed a system for winning at roulette in the casinos of Monte Carlo.

Consider:

With an almost superhuman effort, he fought off the stranger. Dawn crept up on them. He turned around. When the stranger bolted into the woods, he could have cried with relief. "Don't stop." He looked behind him. "You can stand up," he told himself. Had someone followed them? There were three other candles. "But --" he cried.

The fact that Greene's Jupiter is in Aries in the fifth house may account for Greene's zest for life, travel, and sex with women of various nationalities. The fact that Pluto was messing with his moon (and Neptune) in the eighth house suggests the morbidity of the confirmed Catholic, who faithfully sins and repents, sincerely, and then repeats the cycle, like the hero of a spy novel.

For a full reading of Greene's chart, click here.

-- DL