Mark Dunn - Ibid - A Life

1. The grief slowly receded.The loss of Winny clearly haunted Jonathan for the rest of his life. His near-obsession with her death resulted in a number of strange attempts to either perpetuate her memory or, conversely, to force closure through some radical acknowledgment of her passing. According to Harvey Freeman in his article, “Jonathan Blashette; Inside the Man,” for Body Fresh Magazine, a trade publication put out by the Deodorant Council of America (July/August issue, 1972), Jonathan commissioned well-known portraitist Ely Wochna to do a painting of Winny, which Jonathan then hung in the study of his Greenwich Village brownstone and which remained there for the rest of his life. What made this commission odd is the fact that Jonathan requested that its artist return to his home every year upon the anniversary of Winny’s death to retouch the painting, subtly aging the face, neck and hands of its deceased subject, so that with the passage of years, the late Winny would, in effect, age along with her extant paramour Jonathan.

Freeman elaborates:

“Comparisons to Wilde’s Mr. Dorian Gray are without merit. Unlike the portrait of Mr. Gray, which was transmogrified by the unseemly acts of its owner, here was a painting physically modified by the painter himself, under specific instructions from its owner. Deprived of the permanence of youth — that blessed state customarily granted by the artist’s brush — denied the reward of immortality by a man who did not wish to age alone, Winny was required to grow old, to wrinkle, to sag, perhaps even to bruise and scar, should one presume that the head in its dotage might encounter sharp airborne objects, or perhaps duck too slowly beneath a drooping oak branch or spinning windmill sail, or swing carelessly toward an unacknowledged lamp post, thereby incurring cutaneous abrasion, although one suspects that it was never Jonathan’s intention to see the face of his beloved Winny vandalized by the years, but merely to have her grow old with grace and dignity, in quiet company with the man who loved her .

The painting disappeared from Jonathan’s home shortly after his death. One imagines that the family felt it simply too macabre to include in the public estate sale. Those who saw it last will attest to the artistry of its painter; its subject looking appropriate for the age she would have been, had she lived. Curiously, in her last “years” her head had acquired a simple red babushka. One wonders as to the reason for the suspected hair loss, but an explanation has never been given.”

An even more bizarre (and uncorroborated) attempt to address Jonathan’s grief over the death of Winny comes to us from Davison. According to his diary both he and Jonathan spent the fifth anniversary of Winny’s departure in the home of a spiritualist who made a good faith effort to communicate with the deceased through the “thick curtain of mortality.” She did not succeed. Although a connection was made, it was Harry Houdini who allegedly took the celestial call that night and who asked Jonathan to get a message to his wife, who he understood had been trying to reach him since his passage (per their pre-mortem agreement). The message was this: “Yes, there is an afterlife. Yes, I love you still. The secret of the Water Torture Cell: false rivets.”

2. Jonathan lost touch with Klempt after Winny’s death.Winny’s best friend Cordelia Klempt (charter member of the Bowery Hotel Round Table) gained some notoriety in her sunset years for defying the community of Desert Hills, Arizona, to which she retired in 1965, by xeroscaping her front lawn, much to the distress of her bermuda grass-loving sixty- and seventy-something neighbors. Cordelia’s response to the harassment and fines from the community board that followed was that she “lived in a &*%# desert and intended for her %#!* lawn to reflect that fact.” Despite being denounced and ostracized for wanting to ban water-greedy turf and deciduous plantings from her yard, she stayed put for another twenty years, and in the drought of 1970 had the pleasure of watching all her neighbor’s lawns go ugly-brown and brittle from stringent water restrictions. Still, she faced the likes of the following for much of her stay in the community. Desert Hills News, 27 September 1967.

“Do You See What I.C.?”

by

Community Columnist I.C. Lavington

Cordelia Klempt continues to thumb her nose at us all as she shoves yet another unsightly cactus into that abortion she calls her front yard. She persists in forcing all of us to stomach that unsightly abomination of an eyesore every time we drive down Yucca Crest or turn onto Dry Mesa Parkway. It is noticeable, I might add, from as far away as Saguaro Circle and Sagebrush Lane.

One is inclined to say to the aesthetically-retarded Miss Klempt — this is America, my dear stupid woman, not the Soviet Union. Here we uphold beauty in all its plush, dewy greenery, in its riot of floral color. Your yard of rocks and sand and thirsty, gnarled desert succulents mocks your neighbors, mocks your community, mocks this very nation for which blood was spilled (and is currently being spilled as we do battle with the vicious V.C. in that land of rice paddies and coolie hats) so that we might live in peace and prosperity among beauty and ample verdancy. Who are you to move to the desert and infect your property and our community with that selfsame desert? You are the most insidious form of Anti-American subversive.

Obviously, none of us endorses the placement of that burning cross in your front yard last weekend. But perhaps we can understand the anger that motivated it.

What is wrong with grass, Miss Klempt? And what is wrong with trying for once in your long rebellious life to fit in?

3. “I want you to meet a young friend of mine: Jasmine.”Much too young, it turned out. Jonathan came to realize that Davison’s first inning “Winny” home run had been a total fluke. A long series of matchmaking strike-outs followed. Eventually Jonathan had to ask his friend to stop fixing him up. Lanham, “Harlan Davison,” Entrepreneurial History , 13 (1990), 25–42.

4. Jonathan dated Jasmine for five weeks.The relationship was doomed from the start, and not only because Jonathan was rebounding badly from the death of Winny. Jasmine, a dead ringer for Clara Bow, was a typical young, indefatigable, devil-may-care flapper. She exhausted thirty-eight-year-old Jonathan, even as she divided her attention among all the other men whose names crowded her dance card. Here is an excerpt from the only existing letter from Jasmine to her soon-to-be-ex-beau (written on a sorority-sponsored road trip). Jasmine had only a few days earlier met one Reginald Grayson III, a Varsity-dragging John Held caricature, even down to the raccoon coat and Stutz Bearcat roadster. JBP, 2 May 1926.

“He’s a cakeater, Jonny, a real jazzbo but I’m no dumb Dora. I say,’You might be the big cheese in these parts but I’m stuck on my Jonny, see? My Jonny, he’s the bee’s knees, the real McCoy.’ That’s what I tell him. I make nice with Reggie, you understand, but if he gets the least bit fresh, I go all hardboiled, I’m not bunking you. I can hold my own with jellybeans like him, you better believe it.

He does have IT, though. Positively, gotta admit it. But so do you, my little snugglepup. Just a little more crags ‘round the edges, dat’s all. And I’d have it no other way. You are my sheik of Araby, and don’t you worry your turbaned head, my dear. Tres copacetic, things is. Sheba — yours for life.