Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom

Here are my best-admired and loved people of the 20th century:


LET ONE HUNDRED FLOWERS BLOOM*

Let one hundred flowers bloom:

One for Albert Einstein, the most intelligent brain of the Twentieth Century and for his theory of relativity

One each for the Beatles, who with their revolutionary rock music enraptured and captured the world….their new hairstyle was almost as radical as their music

One for Anais Nin, the Cuban-American diarist, who love life was the fieriest

One for D. H. Lawrence who broke the bonds of propriety, portraying sexual intercourse poetically, not pornographically and for his penetration into the world of pre-Mexico in THE PLUMED SERPENT

One for Henry Miller, the Priapus of literature, for going even further than Lawrence did

One for Chagall, the supreme colorist of his age, who painted lovers floating in the sky, bouquets of flowers, cocks crowing, donkey heads begarlanded, all symbols of love ageless were his lovers, forever young and free!

One for James Joyce and his portrayal of Dublin in one day

One for Nizar Quabbani from Damascus who did not shun...... subjects of women and politics in the Middle Eastern sun....... Say I Love You is poetry very well done

One for Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA saying-- nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps perpetuate love

One for Richard Bach, writer of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Illusions and One

One for Boris Pasternak and his immortal Lara and DR. ZHIVAGO

One for Margaret Mitchell, the chronicler of the Old South

One for her movie Gone With The Wind directed by Victor Fleming who also brought us The Wizard of Oz

One for Laurance Harvey's star performance in Room at the Top

One for Elvis who shook up America on the Ed Sullivan Show with his wiggily hips and rock music flips

One for Federico Fellini for La Dolce Vita

One for “old blue eyes” Frank Sinatra who I met in Las Vegas

One for Richard Burton for his portrayals of Mark Antony, Hamlet….
……….and King Arthur in Camelot which I saw in New York

One for James Dean for just being sexy and Marlon Brando too

One for Bruce Chatwin and his talk with the aborigines in THE SONGLINES

One for the Bolshoi’s rendition of Spartacus

One for Buddy Bolden………..and his invention of jazz in New Orleans……….may his Dixieland music live forever in the French Quarter………..and around the world

One for Frank Lloyd Wright whose architecture I admire

One for Antonin Gaudi—I wish his sinuous curves and organic flow….
……..would have captured the 20th century………..rather than Wright’s
Functionalism

One for Stephen Hawking, a supreme physicist

One for James Watson, father of the Human Genome Project, and Francis Frick, co-discoverers of the DNA double helix

One for Bill Gates who forever transformed the world we live in with his pc software………………..and our emails……….a nerd who became the richest man in the world

One for Walt Disney and his Disney World

One for Gandhi who freed India

One for Rachmaninoff and his Russian concertos

One each for the trio of Najinsky, Nureyev, and Barishnikov
transforming ballet with their incredible leaps and new interpretations of old renditions

One each for Arnold Palmer and Tiger Woods, the alpha and omega of golfing

One for Joe Namath and Johnny Unitas, Super Bowl quarterbacks

One for Shaquille O'Neil of LSU and one for Pete Maravitch from the LSU who performed miracles on the basketball court…….and with the New Orleans Jazz

One for Mark Spitz and his five medals in swimming for the Olympics..
……………and his sexy poster

One for Dr. Christian Barnard who performed the first heart transplant

One each for Dr. Sabin and Dr. Salk who saved the world from the
mid-century plague of polio

One for Diego Rivera and his Nude with Calla Lilies

One for Frida Kahlo and her unconquerable spirit

One for Fats Domino and his Rhythm and Blues

One for Willie Nelson and his country-flavored songs

One for Henry Moore and his sculpture with holes……..making negative
Space as charged as the positive kind

One each for Gabriele d’Annunzio for THE FLAME AND William Styron
For SET THIS HOUSE ON FIRE

One for Mario Vargas Llosa for his DEATH IN THE ANDES about Peru

One for Francisco Goldman’s THE LONG NIGHT OF WHITE CHICKENS
About Guatemala

One for Salmon Rushdie for his great satiric writing in THE SATANIC VERSES and THE MOOR'S SIGH and THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET and MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN

One for Ernest Gaines for his A LESSON BEFORE DYING

One for Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, saying--One small step for man--one giant leap for mankind

One for John Glenn, who went into space twice, at age 40 and again at age 77

One for Winston Churchill who led the free world against the forces of Nazism

One for Dwight Eisenhower who planned D-Day and the liberation of Europe

One for John Fitzgerald Kennedy whose inaugural speech contained the immortal lines--Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country

One for Woodrow Wilson who came up with idea of a League of Nations which later became the United Nations…. striving for world peace

One for Madonna who revolutionized sexual mores with her songs and costumes

One for Bob Dylan, the popular poet

One for Maria Callas and Leontine Price and Barbara Sills for their incomparable human voices

One for Diana, everybody’s Princess

One for Brigit Bardot and And God Created Woman

One for Camille Saint-Saens for the creation of his opera SAMSON AND DELILAH

One each for the greatest composers of Italian opera—Puccini and Verdi

One for Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged

One for Jean Aurel and her Clan of the Cave Bear

One for Isadora for just being herself

One for Anna Ahkmatova and Tsvetaeva—those two tragic Russian poetesses

One for Tim Severin and Thor Heyerdahl, explorers of the past

One for Tennessee Williams and his STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

One for John Steinbeck and William Faulkner

One for Carson McCullough and her unforgettable THE THORNBIRDS

One for Elizabeth Taylor for her beauty and spirit

One for John Huston and John Ford for their magnificent movies
Plus Elia Kazan

One for Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart for Casablanca

One for George Lucas for Star Wars

One for Mary Leakey and her work on our ancestors

One for Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onasis for an extraordinary life

One for Mose Allyson

One for Gustav Klimt for the beauty he created,

One each for Dali’s clocks, Munch’s Scream, Andrew Wyeth and Christina’s World and Monet for his Waterlilies



*Mao Tse Tung