Blind Item #8 - Dead Poets Society - A Dancing Boy Blind

The one about strange and sinister goings on in the production of a certain near tv series based on the works of a permanent A list novelist is coming (release is next week, I believe), but here's another one:

On the 21st day of the first month in the year of our Lord, 2008 (as he might say), I and many others lost an important mentor, teacher, and spiritual adviser. He was also a writer, and friend of many in the old elite, penning memoirs about more than one of those friendships. (His obit was published in the west coast paper of record sixteen days later.)

What he didn't and couldn't say in one of those memoirs, largely because of the widow, but also because propriety didn't allow it, is what or rather who inspired one of the several most famous English language literary works of the last century. It was a poem, pioneering in form, with enough allusions to keep scholars busy for decades, and probably longer. It was also what the author's life had become, in his view, after the loss of this one person.

The person in question? A boy, who his friend - my teacher - guesses was probably sixteen at the time they first met. It's unclear when the physical part began (probably two years later, when he had finished school), but not what happened next: he enlisted, as so many of his fellows had, and was killed in a gas attack on the western front before his twentieth birthday.

By the time the friend met him, he was still pious, but drinking too much, and wandering, in that state, to a certain part of the capital city. The young men he picked up sometimes stole from him, sometimes pitied him, but rarely recognized him (it's not like most of them read books).

How do I know?

After I turned eighteen, I was invited to lunch at the famous LA chili establishment, where I met the friend's secret husband for the first time - an old Hollywood man named Maurice. After several drinks, followed by several more, he told me this story, and others (to come)... I immediately ordered a phone (do you remember when you could order a phone at restaurants?), and dialed my soon-to-be college roommate, with whom I'd been coincidentally arguing about this very subject for several weeks by letter. It was at least half-like that scene in the most famous movie by the accused but apparently not so disgraced director his backers won't give him money - the part where they're waiting in line - but for real.