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Poitier's Pen
Hollywood legend Sidney Poitier offers lessons from his storied life to his great-granddaughter -- and to the rest of us. By Kristin Baird Rattini
[dl] Books
Actor Sidney Poitier has played many roles in his lifetime, including knight commander of the British Empire, Bahamian ambassador to Japan, and Russian linguist. Don’t recall those movies, you say? Can’t find them on the Internet Movie Database? Perhaps that’s because they’re Poitier’s offscreen credits, a mere few of the myriad real-life achievements the 81-year-old star has garnered since he won his groundbreaking best-actor Oscar for Lilies of the Field in 1964 and became Hollywood’s leading African-American movie star.
Poitier added the title of best-selling author last year when Oprah Winfrey championed his 2000 memoir, The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography (HarperSanFrancisco, $15), helping to send it up to the top of the New York Times best-seller list. Poitier has put pen to paper once again with his new book, Life Beyond Measure (HarperOne, $25), which was released on April 29. This time, in his cherished role as Poppy, Poitier shares stories from his well-examined life in a series of letters to his great-granddaughter, Ayele.
You’ve already written your memoir. What inspired you to write your new book? It was Ayele’s birth. I was approaching my 81st birthday, and I thought, Here is this new life. As my moments tick away over the succeeding years or months, she will just be coming into her own as a life. I got to thinking, What is it that I am leaving her?
I decided I would write her letters. I would speak to her about not just my life but life itself. I decided I would tell her about my 81 years, and I would leave for her my life on the pages of a book. And I would ask her to come and visit me there from time to time.
Your great-granddaughter is growing up in significantly different times than the racially charged times you lived through after you first moved to the United States from the Bahamas and as your career progressed in the 1950s and ’60s. What would you most like her to understand about those times and how they affected you? Racism is not the theme of the book. I am telling her about my times but also about other things infinitely more important than what the frailties of the social order were.
Instead, I would like to make a small contribution to her becoming a person who is worldly in her understanding of the human family. We have a lot of work to do on ourselves, the human family -- not just the black or Hispanic people among the family, or the Europeans or Asians among the family. We are all family. And I want her to be encouraged to view it as such and to be of the kind of service that would enhance and help and nurture all that is good in human beings.
In a chapter titled “People of Courage,” you list individuals, such as Martin Luther King Jr., whose courage you admire. Do you consider yourself a person of courage? I have no reason to try to measure it, but I can tell you this: I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t to some extent a person of courage, because I was challenged by life in so many ways I can’t even begin to go into. I was on my own in America at the age of 15. I had just a little while in Miami, and then I went to New York, where I had no friends, no relatives, no money. And I survived. I brought with me very few tools. I didn’t have much of an education. I had no money. I didn’t know America was as America was. But I survived.
You’ve earned so many honors for your work: the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, an Oscar for best actor, and an honorary Oscar. What do you hope your legacy in Hollywood will be? I don’t worry about that. I am no longer a part of the filmmaking industry. I spent 50-odd years working in the film industry, and I had a most remarkable experience overall. I loved it because I was able to do the kind of work I’ve done. I respect many of the individuals I’ve worked with who brought about the circumstances out of which I was able to become a fairly well-known person and a fairly well-accepted and respected actor.
As a matter of fact, I found the motion-picture industry to be a very, very … liberal is a word bandied about. I found it to be quite liberal. There was a whole question of racism, and I don’t think anyone connected with the industry would have denied that it existed before me and for the persons who followed me. The actors who followed me are perfect examples of what we were denied and what the culture was denied. There was no room for participation on an equal level in the film industry when I came along. There has been great improvement in this country on certain levels. That is one.
The Best from the Best
Sir Sidney Poitier was too polite to single out which of his more than 40 films he’d leave in a time capsule for his great-granddaughter, so we’ve taken the liberty of suggesting a few that Ayele’s generation -- and yours -- shouldn’t miss.
 Blackboard Jungle, 1955 This gritty, urban-classroom drama not only ushered in the rock-and-roll era, it also introduced Poitier to the populace. His character, Gregory Miller, is an apathetic student and a musical prodigy who becomes a ray of hope and an unlikely ally to beleaguered teacher Richard Dadier, played by Glenn Ford.
Lilies of the Field, 1963 Poitier is itinerant worker Homer Smith, who builds a chapel for a group of nuns and realizes his work is taking on a higher purpose. Life imitated art -- the role earned Poitier an Oscar for best actor, the first ever for an African-American actor.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 1967 When Matt and Christina Drayton (played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) meet their daughter’s African- American fiancé, the discussion and awkward self-examination that follow are not just the family’s but the nation’s.
To Sir, with Love, 1967 Poitier is at the head of the class as Mark Thackeray, an idealistic teacher who inspires a group of rough-and tumble, working-class students in London’s East End. The theme has since been repeated in dozens of copycat films.
In the Heat of the Night, 1967 Poitier plays Philadelphia homicide detective Virgil Tibbs, who works with the white police chief (played by Rod Steiger) of a small Mississippi town on a murder case. Their partnership is uneasy at first, but it eventually grows into mutual respect and friendship.
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[dl] Music
The New Old 97’s
Though mega-mainstream success eludes this alt-country band, it has survived 15 years, solo projects, and the demise of most of its contemporaries. By Bob Mehr
 Ask the Old 97’s Murry Hammond how his band has lasted for 15 years, enduring a roller-coaster ride of career ups and downs, and he’ll give you a simple answer: “We’ve never thought the band was more important than our friendships.” Over the course of a half-dozen studio albums, the formerly Dallas-based group -- which includes bassist/vocalist Hammond, front man Rhett Miller, guitarist Ken Bethea, and drummer Philip Peeples -- has earned a reputation of creating an engaging and unique alchemy of country and pop music. Just as importantly, the four have discovered the formula for staying together, while most of their ’90s contemporaries have split apart. Consider just this decade. After releasing 2001’s Satellite Rides, the band’s last album for Elektra records, the group endured a long period of uncertainty as Miller went off to pursue a solo career. Three years passed before the band returned to the studio to record 2004’s Drag It Up for New West Records. Since then, Miller has released another solo record -- one that has earned him praise and profiles in both Esquire and Vanity Fair. Hammond, too, has just put out a solo debut. Given these outside projects and the ego boosts they bring -- not to mention the fact that some of the bandmates now live on opposite coasts -- you might think the Old 97’s would be old news.
They’re not. Instead, the band is back in top form with its latest album, Blame It on Gravity. Produced by friend and longtime Texas associate Salim Nourallah, the record is a pitch-perfect collection of tracks featuring Miller’s lovelorn lyrics and Hammond’s heartbreaking harmonies, not to mention Bethea’s spiky riffs and Peeples’s dogged train beat. No doubt this will come as good news to the Old 97’s more recent fans, many of whom discovered the group through its scene-stealing turn in the 2006 movie The Break-Up, starring Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston.
Speaking from their respective current homes in upstate New York and Southern California, Miller and Hammond talked about the group’s major-label years, the challenges of keeping a veteran band vibrant, and why their brand of musical misery still sounds so good.
The interesting thing is that almost all your alt-country peers from the mid-’90s -- Whiskeytown, Wilco, Son Volt -- have broken up or have totally different lineups. But the four of you are still together and still making music all these years later. How?
MILLER: For us, it is a point of pride that we’ve survived. All we ever really cared about was having a career. That was the right goal, the right thing to strive for. For example, I wouldn’t trade places with our labelmates at the time, Third Eye Blind. They were massively successful. But what happens is you have that one hit, but after that, because of your ubiquity or because of the compromises you make musically or in regard to your image, you’re a joke. Or if you’re not a joke, you’re on a list of the K-tel “hits of the ’90s.” And at best, maybe the lead singer or songwriter in a band like that can become a producer or an A&R guy or go into publishing. But we get to still do this -- we still get to play and have fun. We’ve flown enough under the radar that we’re not a joke and we’re not worn out. We didn’t fly Icarus so close to the sun that we had to fall.
HAMMOND: Part of that comes from having a really great audience too. The one thing that’s consistent with our audience is that they’re all real music fans. I mean, you don’t really even find a band like us to begin with unless your record collection is probably a little bit bigger than your neighbor’s.
 Your new album feels like a classic Old 97’s record. Was there a trick to getting the group’s chemistry back?
MILLER: A lot of making a record is a response to what you’ve already done. Our last album, Drag It Up, was a rough record because so much of it was about the band coming back together and finding a way to work together after my having ventured off into solo land. And I let the reins go on that record a little bit. The problem with that is the dynamic of any band, and specifically of our band and what makes our band good, is that tension. All of us have our likes and dislikes and radars and preferences and unique talents. And if you sit back too much, you lose a big chunk of what drives the band.
HAMMOND: Definitely, the last record was medicinal. The idea was to really strip everything back and just be more concerned with immersing ourselves in the most basic elements of being a band again. The thing about us is that we’re an absolute textbook case of a band that’s defined by our limitations. There’s so much that we can’t do, which defines so much of what we can do. And we specialize in that. We get it, and we make that work for us.
There was a point when it seemed your band was poised for mainstream success. It didn’t quite get to that level, though. How do you view that experience now?
MILLER: When we signed to Elektra, that business model was so entrenched that to sign to a major label was it. That was what you worked toward, because after that, the major labels did all the work. Of course, we quickly found out that wasn’t the case. But at the time, we thought the world was our oyster and there was every chance that we’d turn into a legitimate band that people would play on the radio. And we did turn into a legitimate band. But the idea of us getting played on the radio does seem a little like, “What stations were going to play us?” I remember radio-station program directors telling us, “Our direct competition is 97 on the dial, so we can’t possibly play a band called the Old 97’s.”
Today, you’re all in your 30s and happily married with families. But you’re still writing and singing drunken, lovelorn songs. Does that ever feel strange?
MILLER: Well, the misery never goes away. It finds different forms, but it’s still there. I find myself writing about similar things from back then. I can’t really abandon that voice. It preceded my time drinking, and it still exists now that I’m not staying out until four in the morning every single night. It is just kind of part of who I am. It’s a melancholy, outsider thing. When I think about it, all the art I like is very similar. The Smiths and even early Elvis Costello, which was bitter and angry and drunken and weird -- that’s just always been my favorite stuff.
HAMMOND: We think people should be happy and there is peace to be had and home is better than the road, all that, but there are always things that will be stuck in my craw. And Rhett’s got that too. The day we start singing about how happy we are, it’s not going to be a record you’ll want to listen to. It sure won’t be the 97’s.
Two New CDs We’re Pretty Sure Will Rock and/or Roll
DEF LEPPARD
SONGS FROM THE SPARKLE LOUNGE
In stores may 6
Songs from the You Will Not Find Lilo Hanging Out There: The Sparkle Lounge sounds like the name of a West Hollywood hot spot, sure. But in actuality, it was the band’s own name for an area they would set up backstage at concerts to work on new material. Gunter Glieben Glauten Globen, Y’all: So what does a hard-rock British band do on its first album of new material in five years? Why, it goes country, of course. Def Leppard teams with Tim McGraw on one of the album’s tracks.
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE
NARROW STAIRS
In stores may 13
Marissa Cooper Is Dead: These soft rockers out of Washington State helped bring The O.C.’s Seth Cohen and Summer Roberts together. In turn, The O.C. got Death Cab widespread notice and no doubt boosted sales of the band’s last studio album, the Grammy-nominated Plans. But that was 2005. The only O.C. on TV these days is a reality show about 40-something suburbanites. And we assume their favorite singer is Neil Sedaka. So you’re on your own, Death Cab.
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[dl] Books
Evan, Now
Sex and the City’s best man, Evan Handler, dishes on Harry and Charlotte Goldenblatt, overcoming cancer, and phony press releases. By Allison Winn Scotch
 Evan Handler could use a hearty bowl of Charlotte York Goldenblatt’s homemade matzo-ball soup. His Italian in-laws, who are visiting him and his family at their Los Angeles–area home, have brought a cold with them, and he has caught it. Still, that’s not going to keep him down. After all, a cold is nothing compared to Handler’s five-year battle with acute myeloid leukemia , which, by his own admission, he was lucky to survive.
Handler wrote about that fight, which began when he was just 24, in his first memoir, Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors, in 1996. Now, at 47, and after spending two seasons on Sex and the City as Charlotte’s divorce lawyer turned husband, he’s returning to the subject of himself in a second memoir, It’s Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive, due out on May 1. The new book chronicles his life after recovery from the disease and even shares a few tidbits about that oh-so-tiny movie you might have heard of that’s being released later this month, Sex and the City. In the film, Handler revisits his role as Harry Goldenblatt, everyone’s favorite shark lawyer by day and softie husband by night. Here, Handler fills us in on movie rumors and tells us why, in It’s Only Temporary, he wrote his life story out of chronological order.
So, Sex and the City. Is anyone looking forward to that? I don’t go anywhere in the world without people stopping me and saying, “I can’t wait for the movie.” There just seems to be a wild appetite for more. In New York, our shoots were like a freak show -- people were 200 deep. And people were even writing about a fictional hiccuping condition.
Right -- your hiccups. Reportedly, they shut down filming, but that, of course, turned out to have been a false report. Speaking of making things up, I know that the movie producers have been doing their best spin control and even putting out fake spoilers to deter overzealous fans. You know, I think that when the press is so hungry to write anything, it’s easy to keep them writing stuff. So if actors are seen wearing clothes as if they’re going to a wedding, then you put out a press release saying, “We’re dressing people up for a wedding to mislead people,” and then the press will write that you are dressing people up for a wedding to mislead people. The Sex and the City people have a way of manipulating the press to their advantage.
In regard to the film, was there still a lot of story to be told with Harry and Charlotte? There are lots and lots of Harry and Charlotte stories to be told, but this movie doesn’t tell them. In the movie, Harry and Charlotte are held up as a perfect, happy couple and left there. I mean, hey, they are a couple who just had their first three years of parenthood, so there are plenty of stories that could have been told, but that’s just not what the movie concentrates on. The truth is that I’m just a cog in the wheel. It was a project that was fun to be a part of, but it was not mine to sculpt or do that way. I’m not so invested in it.
One thing you’re clearly invested in is your new book, It’s Only Temporary. Why return to a memoir for the second time? I didn’t write for a while after the first book, Time on Fire, was published. Then, when I decided to write again, I started writing on a related subject -- not about illness, but about a guy who was many years past an illness. Yet his life was still informed by the same issues: Is he making the most of his life? And how haunted is he still by those experiences? That got me writing again, so I decided to stop passing judgment on whether I found something new to write about and accept that some artists draw the same patch of land over and over again. Picasso painted a lot of pictures of guitars.
Did you find as you were writing, or by the end, that it was cathartic or revelatory? This book has been more cathartic than the first because it’s been about sorting through my own issues, as opposed to sorting through my issues with other people. This is a book about a guy, who after years and years of muddling through and not being able to increase the velocity of growing up, finds his way to genuine real contentment and joy and gratitude. This one is more of a journey, even though it’s a bit unconventional in how it’s written.
You mean in how it bounces back and forth in time? Yeah. I became really interested in seeing whether you could successfully write a book that reveals somebody in the same way that you get to know someone, which is through the individual stories they tell you, even though you get the details out of order. When you’ve heard 20 of their stories, you realize, “Oh, I kind of know that person; I know their life story,” even though they didn’t tell you, “This is where I grew up, this is where I went to high school, and this is where I went to college.”
 I know that you’re also an advocate for leukemia awareness. How do you give back to that community? When I was sick, I was looking for examples of people who had gone through what I’d gone through and gotten well, and I really didn’t find any. Now that I’m many years past it, with a wife and a baby and a good life, I think it’s good to exist as an example. It’s an easy thing to be open about my history and let people take whatever inspiration they can in that way. I don’t tend to write the traditionally Hallmark-card inspiration stuff. My stuff is about someone who wrestles openly and honestly with issues and finds his way to a good, happy place. I think that’s a really hard-earned happiness. So I’m happy for the amount that that can inspire people.
Four Friends, Six Seasons, Countless Shoes
We raise our cosmos to these, our picks for the best episodes of Sex and the City.
The Episode: “Ex and the City,” Season Two
Plotlines: Carrie and the other girls explore the question, “Can you ever be friends with an ex?” and Big announces that he’s engaged to Natasha.
Empowerment Moment: The foursome relives the final scene from The Way We Were.
Best Lines: Big, to Carrie: “I don’t get it.” Carrie, to Big: “And you never did.”
The Episode: “Running with Scissors,” Season Three
Plotlines: Carrie and Big continue their doomed affair, and Natasha takes a spill down the stairs.
Empowerment Moments: Samantha discloses her, ah, history without apology while taking an HIV test, and Miranda tells off a sexually harassing talking sandwich.
Best Line: Carrie: “We’re so over, we need a new word for over.”
The Episode: “Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little,”Season Six
Plotlines: Carrie upsets her then-boyfriend Berger when she tells him New York women do not wear scrunchies in their hair.
Empowerment Moment: Miranda passes on her life-changing knowledge during her lunch break, hoping to save other women from future heartache.
Best Line: Berger, to Miranda, about what it means when a guy doesn’t call back: “There are no mixed messages with men. He’s just not that into you.”
The Episode: “An American Girl in Paris(Part Deux),” Season Six
Plotlines: In the series finale, Carrie gets her man, Miranda nurtures Steve’s mother, Samantha lets Smith in, and Charlotte finally gets the baby she’s been dreaming of.
Empowerment Moment: Carrie finds her “Carrie” necklace hiding in the lining of her purse -- and in doing so, she finds her true self.
Best Line: Carrie: “The most exciting, challenging, and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself. And if you find someone to love the you you love, well, that’s just fabulous.”
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