Into the Pines Kitchen contains 200 recipes from 100 contributors, including Pines notables Scott Bromley, Gilbert Parker, and Hal Rubinstein. As a nod to bygone days, the book also features a posthumous contribution from John Whyte, one of the Pines' founders. The book includes original photography of the island from Pines artists William Karam, Mark Lonsbury, and Barbara Sahlman. •More About this Book»
"Drag Queens Can Cook-Recipes to Sync Your Lips Around" is a new cookbook, being sold for a tax deductible $25, created by doctors and life partners Rick Byrd, PhD, and Patrick Fratellone, MD, as a benefit for the Elmer A. Lindsay Memorial Medical Center, the Cherry Grove Doctor's Fund. •Read More»
One of my dearest friends, Glen Boles, was 95 years old when he died in Cherry Grove, on July 24, in his favorite bedroom overlooking the ocean, his partner Roland on one side and his beloved dog, Cleo, on the other. I can imagine Glen opening his eyes as his final breath drew, listening to the crashing waves, and being at peace, with himself and the world, as he made the greatest transformation that we'll all make some day. It's exactly as he would have wanted it, and it's precisely how I think he planned it, as architect of his life, until the very end.
When I first met Glen, I felt an immediate resonance with him. I've always preferred the company of people older than me. Growing up, I'd rather hang out with my grandmother, play rummy, and drink iced tea, than play basketball with the neighborhood kids. I still find that true, because older people are seasoned, some spicy, some sweet or maybe a bit sour, and I know they have secrets to life that I want to hear.
When Glen found out that I played piano, he invited me to his apartment to play duets. He lived in the same penthouse on the Upper West Side for 71 years, a one-of-a-kind palace, encapsulated in time, with original volumes of Faulkner, Joyce, Hemingway layering the expanse of bookshelves that commanded the living rooms walls; a working marble-mantled fireplace; artwork hung on walls in a unified tapestry colors; and in the corner of it all, an ebony Steinway.
We sat down on the piano bench and I looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows, across the New York City skyline, and could only think that I was on top of the world, in the clouds. We began with a Haydn symphony, transposed for four hands, and in that moment, during the second movement adagio, I thought, "This is perfect."
Glen was a staunch character and an exemplar of a philosophy of individualism and self-determination. Many of our conversations over the years were stimulating discussions on how to grab life by the drawers and live it fully. Besides my mom, I know no other person who had such an inimitable, indomitable spirit and joie de vivre as Glen.
When I say that Glen was the architect of his life, I'm talking about Glen being the active designer of what he wanted to accomplish in his life. My belief is that he decided what he was going to accomplish on this physical plane before incarnating, that choices were made at the soul level, when he was nebulous, in the ethers. This sounds like fantasy to most, I'm sure, but for me, the fantastical, the fairy tales, the myths that are allegory for truth are much more interesting than reality. Glen would completely disagree with me and argue and stomp his feet that no, he did it here, on earth, not before, but in the now.
The reason he found joy in everything, every day-and I mean every day-was that he believed that when he died, that was it, done, over, that there is no soul, no spirit that continues past death, and that nothing preceded his life. There was only the Now. He believed that once his body died, so did his consciousness, and for him this was a liberating realization, which enabled him to live an unabashedly individualistic life that was dependent on nobody else's decisions but his own and only on what he wanted to do. Since he had only one opportunity to live one existence, he was going to do anything and everything to be the architect of the grand design that was Glen Boles.
His outlook was one that precluded the possibility for compromise in regards to the larger decisions of love and work and engagement with the mystery of life. Glen did as he wanted, and in that, I find solace in the loss that I feel because it was not a life wasted. On the contrary, it was the truest form of a life lived to the nth degree.
I'm sad, not for Glen, but for myself. Death brings on its own definitive selfishness in the living. I'm sad that I won't see him at the piano in his house in Cherry Grove anymore, sitting at the table in the breakfast nook, sipping coffee and eating buttered and jellied toast, offering me a cup of coffee, asking me emphatically, "So tell me, what's going on with you," looking out the window, marveling at the birds and at the fish in the pond below, with all the wonder of a child seeing the miracle of life for the first time.
I never, ever heard Glen say he regretted any decision in his life, and this is why it seems to me that it was all planned. Not that there was a fate for him, but that he was in the flow of his life, living his purpose and intentions without remorse because it was exactly as he wanted it to be.
A brief history of Glen's glorious life: not many of his friends know, but Glen's real name was Francis Glen Laroy Boles. His older brother was Elwood Zelberti Bunny Bert Boles - apparently Glen's mom had a gift for name giving. He was born last into a family of nine children, lived in Hollywood, and shined shoes on Sunset Boulevard at the age of four. He had to contribute to the family income, and he did so with fervor. In an interview I conducted with Glen several years ago, he said, "I started being my own boss, I was in business, and I made good money getting close and shining their shoes and I loved doing it. They looked at me and we hit it off. I charmed them." When he arrived home, he dropped his nickels into the family kitty.
Glen loved his mother and put her on a well-deserved pedestal. He said, "My mother encouraged me no matter what, to learn and to be a constantly growing person. She was hardworking and was an itinerant worker. If peaches were ripe, we'd go out and I'd sit there and help her do the peaches. The fuzz of the peaches would get under my chin and I'd scratch it until it was raw." She was also a scrupulous businesswoman, buying up land and property at a time when most women were consigned by society to washing clothes. She bought a farm and Glen's brothers and father worked it until their fingers bled. From this woman, Glen learned an indelible lesson that never left him: nobody's going to do it for you.
Glen began acting in Hollywood films as a child and continued until his mid-twenties. One of my favorite moments with him was when he invited me to dinner one night. Afterwards, we retired to the living room and watched "The Road to Ruin," a 1934 exploitation film about teenage drinking and sex, in which Glen acted. My favorite line of his occurs when he's in a car, spots a girl, and says, "Boy, I could go for her in a big way." We laughed because of the irony-Glen was gay, but he was acting straight, something that eventually led to his farewell to Tinsel Town. I don't use the word surreal lightly, but it truly was one of those surreal moments, sitting there, watching a twenty-one year old Glen, blonde, stunningly beautiful, and then turning my head and seeing the ninety-four year old man before me, as if I'd been in a time machine.
Dissatisfied with Hollywood's intolerance of gay actors, Glen walked out on his Warner Brothers contract. He and his boyfriend bought an old jalopy and drove across the country, settling in New York City. Determined to continue acting, he landed roles on Broadway, including the original production of Moss Hart's "You Can't Take It With You." He and Moss became lovers for a time and then Glen met Herbert Wise, uncle of Bennett Cerf, founder of Random House. The two men took up residence in the penthouse in the Normandy Building on West 86th Street, the place where Glen lived the rest of his life. Shipping off to Brazil during World War II, he worked as a code breaker, intercepting German communications, and then returned to New York to pursue a psychology degree at Columbia University, studying under the auspices of the famed anthropologist Margaret Meade, attaining a PhD, and dedicating his life to psychoanalysis.
I once asked him, "Glen, who's the most famous person you ever treated. Just give me one person" He demurred and then said, "Okay, I'll give you one, but that's it. Bette Davis. She was a royal bitch and I couldn't do anything with her. She was hopeless, so I stopped seeing her." And he never did give me anyone else, although he said that he treated many directors and actors, helping them accept themselves and embrace the homosexuality. I only wish that I had asked for two names.
Being gay was only one small part of who Glen was, but it was something that he adamantly believed was innate and part of our DNA. He often shook his head and was vehement in extolling the virtues of the gay culture. He told me, "This is a nation of freedom. Freedom to be gay is like being free to be black or white. If you look at history, gays have contributed so much to music, drama, to all sorts of art, and not one scandal do you hear about them killing anyone, going to war, or doing anything out of line."
Glen's life's philosophy was a potent one. Not believing in an afterlife seemed to liberate him from the constraints of uncertainty about his own life. There was no recourse for him except to seize each day and suck the marrow from it, going to bed at night hopefully to awaken the next day to chew on another bone. But that night before he died, the night when he had dinner with friends, drank wine, played the piano, and lay his head down on his pillow, was his last.
Glen was raised as a Seventh Day Adventist. He said, "I believed as a young kid that God was watching over me, and would take care of me and everything would be fine, until I was 10 years old. I'd spent years loving motion pictures. I'd sneak in or pay five cents and saw every movie in Los Angeles. I was in church one day and the preacher was giving a sermon on the sin of being in a movie house. I was shocked. I'd never heard anyone talk against movies before. He was going after the chief thing I loved in life. He said that when you go to the movies, your good angel stays outside the movie house and cries, until you come back out again with the bad angel that went in with you. I stood up to the horror of the congregation and yelled, 'What about a good movie like "The Life of Christ?' And he said, 'Ah, that's the way they get you.' I ran out of the church down two blocks and didn't' stop - I was breathless, thinking, when is God going to strike me dead? I was exhausted. He didn't strike me dead, so I thought I had to be right! That was the end of religion for me."
Glen and I had many discussions about God, church, and religion. He didn't believe in God, but when Glen said he believed in creativity, I asked, "Could that be your God? Creativity?" For him, creativity was the driving force in the universe and he reveled in and supported all the creative arts-music, dance, literature, and the visual arts. In these creations and expression of humanity, he found solace in a world that he admitted was often cold and callous, devoid of compassion. He deplored the war in Iraq, grappled with the despair of our society's hell bent environmental path of destruction, but reveled in a seashell on the shores of Cherry Grove that he said held the wonders of the survival and creation.
His favorite toast before a meal was: "To the survivors!" He relished that toast and would declare it wholeheartedly. Glen held dear to his heart the redemptive power of the survival inclination of every species on earth.
I can't say it better than Glen, and that's why I quote him here: "If you go back in your own life, it's incontestable that you are a survivor. Your line survived. How far can you go back in your own head to the beginning of time on earth? You're the line of the survivors. We're all connected. DNA is the common denominator of life-it's the creative power-it created life to be creative-remember the variety of all the seashells on the beach today? We're not only connected as human beings, but we're connected with the birds and everything in the universe. It's the real definition of God. What is God? God is this creative energy that came from God knows where. Wonderful explorers like the physicist Hawking have posed this whole thing of the beginning of life, and it makes sense that creativity, this force that has survived, created all these species. You can't attach to it a motive - you can only say it's creativity and it expresses itself in music like Bach and Beethoven; in art like Monet and Rodin. When we play duets, we're at one with Haydn and with ourselves and everything in the universe. It doesn't matter how or where it began-we know it's here and that's the important thing."
While we didn't always agree on what I would call the Source of Being, God for some, we did have a conversation once in which I asked him if energy could be created or destroyed. "No, it can't," he said. Then I asked him if he was made of energy and he said yes. I proffered, "So if you're made of energy and energy can neither be created or destroyed...." You could see where my argument was going, and so did Glen. "But consciousness dies," he said.
I struggled with that, and still do because of my own fears. I don't want my consciousness to die with me. To me, our consciousness is connected to every atom in our being, something science has yet to prove, but while I tend to turn towards theology, Glen leaned heavily on biology. For him, that worked. For both of us, the mystery was satisfying enough.
Walt Whitman wrote, "You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself." I try to take things in, meditate on them, and filter out the things that don't work for me and keep those that do, combining them with other views and thoughts. I like to meld them and find a balance that develops into my personal philosophy. I've taken bits and pieces of Glen's words, thoughts, and understanding of his long life. I've taken them to heart and what is left is the big picture of Glen Boles, and that picture is much larger than his own life. It is the mystery of the cosmos. And in that, I find my own source of comfort in the sadness of the loss, but the glory of his transfiguration.
I end with the words of Glen, something I think he would want you all to read: "It is my philosophy-I would call it Creativity. Why do I honor creativity so much? Because it's the most honorable thing there is. It's my God. This is where God is."
To read more of Tim Steffen's work, please visit www.timothysteffen.com
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