Shadow Launch

Welcome to Shadow of Greatness, where I hope to share my thoughts on being part of something bigger, whether it's a relationship, a community, or the universe.

Mine will be the stories of a boon companion to all of the above, but for my first blog, I think I'll start closer to home.

As I sit, surrounded by papers, books, USB drives, floppy disks, computer software, external devices, audio tapes, and generations of recording devices, I can't help but think I am in the shadow of greatness.

(Seriously, were any of these to topple, they might pin me to the ground.)

They are the outward manifestations of my husband, Lee Server, whose biographies of Robert Mitchum and Ava Gardner have taken the two of us all over the U.S., Europe, Australia, and Mexico, in search of their particular brand of star dust.

One of the first trips was for the Mitchum book in May of 1998. We were in Los Angeles, on a layover to Hawaii, when Lee contacted Edward Dmytryk. Dmytryk, considered the Father of Film Noir, lived in Encino on a street of alpine proportions and in a house that jutted over a canyon. The view was breathtaking but a little scary.

The interview, which was contracted to take 15 minutes because of Dymtryk's health (he would die on July 1, 1999, at the age of 90), ultimately spanned the entire afternoon, as Lee, Edward, and Edward's wife, the former Jean Porter, reminisced about Mitchum, the movies, the art of film noir lighting, location shooting, and everything but the Black List - the infamous commie-hunting time when Dmytryk was jailed as one of the Hollywood Ten. (At least, that's how I remember it.)

Lastly, the three began discussing Lo sbarco di Anzio (1968), a WWII film shot on location in Italy, where the army extras were given rubber rifles that wobbled in the hot sun (and in the dailies). Porter remembered she had given a party to buck up the cast, beleaguered as they were by weather and other ills associated with location work.

At one point, Porter, who had also starred with Mitchum in the Dmytryk-directed Till the End of Time (1946), reached up and pulled a framed poem off the wall. It turned out to be one that Mitchum had written to her on the set of the film, typed out on the thin smudgy paper I remembered pre-computer era as "corrasible bond."

Finally, we bid adieu when our hosts were just this side of exhaustion. Driving back to LAX as the sunset was pinkening the marble of the newly built Getty Museum up on a hill, we were relaxed and happy. Lee counted the interview a major step taken toward the book. It was - the first of many.