The Most Interesting Man in the World?

There was once a Dutchman named Robert Wolders. He was born in Rotterdam in September of 1936, to a man and a woman, although if you asked her, the woman did most of the work.

In 1965, Mr. Wolders became an actor, starred briefly in a TV show, but never achieved much success. By 1975, he decided to retire from acting and marry legendary Hollywood nutjob Merle Oberon.

Below are more than a few words about Merle Oberon, for your pleasure:

She was an exotic beauty born on the British side of Bombay to a British mechanical engineer working on the Indian Railways and her own (half) sister, Constance.

To hide this embarrassing bit of incestuous pedophilia, one of Merle's birth certificates listed her father's wife--a Eurasian from Ceylon with partial Maori heritage, who had Constance at age 14 with an Irish foreman of a tea plantation--as her mother and the story stuck.

Merle and her "mother" moved to England, where she dated a retired actor who passed her off to a studio in France when he realized her "mom" was dark-skinned and he was irretrievably racist. The "Sexy Extra All the Powerful Men Hit On at Craft Service" roles poured in and once famous director Alexander Korda got the hots and cast Merle as Ann Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), she was officially going places.

Alexander Korda, Merle Oberon, and Samuel "Thug" Goldwyn

Scarred for life in an automobile accident a mere four years later, skilled lighting technicians were at least able to hide Merle's disfigured face long enough for her to tear up the silver screen opposite Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights (1939).

By the following year, Merle's face "suffered even further damage...from a combination of cosmetic poisoning and an allergic reaction to sulfa drugs." Mr. Korda, now her husband, paid for several treatments at a skin clinic in Nueva York, but to no avail--without makeup she was hideous to behold.

So Mr. Korda decided to join the knighthood and make Merle a Lady, to give her something else to do with her time. Three years later, bored of being a Lady knight and day, Merle divorced her knight and married cinematographer Lucien Ballard, who then created a special light--the Obie--to obscure her facial scars on film.

That act of devotion fell short, however, and Merle married twice more--to Italian industrialist Bruno Pagliai (with whom she moved to Mexico and adopted two children) and the Most Interesting Man in the World, Mr. Robert Wolders--who is 25 years younger than her.

But only four years after Merle marries Robert Wolders, she dies at age 68.

What does the most interesting man in the world do when this happens? Why, he immediately becomes companion to Audrey Hepburn (7 years his senior), of course--ever the proper lady, she was waiting patiently for her turn on the Wolders, no doubt--and the two of them even hang out with the Reagmeister General:

Thirteen years later, in 1993, the honorable Audrey Hepburn dies on him, too, leaving Mr. Wolders all alone in frigid Switzerland. How does the most interesting man in the world cope with this tragedy?

He hops on a train to France, where he becomes the companion of another older woman, of course. Then-64-year-old screen legend Leslie Caron is a French dancer discovered by Gene Kelly in 1951 who went on to become a successful actress at MGM for decades and dance with every famous dancer whose name you have ever heard.

Alas, their torrid, Metamucil-tinged affair lasts only two years before the furnace goes kaput and Mr. Wolders moves on--for the first time?--without anybody dying.

Where does he go? Sadly, one can only speculate.

Here goes:

Immediately after french-kissing his goodbyes to dear Leslie, Mr. Wolders steals her 1964 Peugeot 404 convertible and drives all the way to Marseilles on the wrong side of the highway, chain-smoking a box of Cuban blunts given to him by Johnny Depp at his birthday party last year.

After six martinis and a few bottles of cheap cognac in the backroom of a rough-trade dockside saloon, Mr. Wolders gets himself into a card game and wakes up to find himself at-sea in a 45-foot sailboat named Skye.

Upon hearing several members of the crew refer to him as "Captain" (as in: "Captain, you have vomit in your beard."), Mr. Wolders commands his crew to pull into the nearest harbor for supplies and a bit of barbering.

 Ah, Portofino...

After a killer haircut and the trading of most of their food, medical supplies, and lifeboats for several dozen barrels of rum, six pounds of beef jerky, a prostitute, and two fishing poles, Mr. Wolders and his crew are able to outrun a couple police officers and set sail for anywhere else.

The crew becomes family as they drift around the Mediterranean with Mr. Wolders for the next 15+ years, mastering kung-fu, running guns for the Russians, trying to get invited to parties along the Riviera, counterfeiting their own Cuban cigars, making their own sushi, experimenting with mind-altering drugs...and subsisting solely on the bounty of nature, the naivete of strangers, and the small fortune Mr. Wolders inherited from his two famous dead lovers.

 

The crew was not terribly pleased to have their berths converted to rum storage,

but they eventually got over it and embraced the good life.

When his love of the finer things in life--coupled with his innate distaste for labor of any kind--catches up with him, Mr. Wolders sees no other choice but to adopt a fake Mexican accent and resume acting under an assumed identity in commercials for Dos Equis.

It's the closest he can get to not working while still getting paid, so that's alright with him.



Yes, at 74 years of age and still kicking, life has been good to Robert Wolders. I wonder if the next 74 will be so kind?

Developing...

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It's 11/11--Make a Wish!

Here, I'll start off and then you can just ignore this entry and get back to taking pictures of your cats:

I wish I had a huge, sturdy oceangoing vessel to travel the world aboard indefinitely, with enough room for a rotating supply of friends and family to join me for segments of the lifelong voyage, a competent and good-natured crew to do all the work of actually piloting/maintaining the ship, maybe a tennis court, and definitely a hot tub.

It would look something like this:

Or maybe like one of these:

But definitely not like this:

Paul Allen's floating pleasure palace. In the absence of friends,

he takes aboard any sycophant that can find a room not used to store bags of cash.

What would it be like to live on the ocean? Who knows, but I'm sure I would get used to it and my pleasure would be derived more from the places I would be able to go, the random beautiful things I would see along the way, lengthy trips ashore in foreign locales on a whim, the close company of loved ones, and the eternal adventure of always being on the move.

"Where we headed, boss?"

"Anywhere!"

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Just Deserts?

Yeah, yeah, yeah--impressive...but what's the food like on this one?

Breaker: A second Titanic nearly sunk recently--in the Caribbean, of all places.

Brass Tacks:

A sinking yacht called the Titanic avoided the fate of its tragic predecessor, thanks to an international rescue operation co-ordinated from a do-it-yourself store in Wales, it emerged today.

Three crew were rescued in the Caribbean after one of them dialled from memory the number of a friend in Aberystwyth who serves as a volunteer on the local lifeboat.

With their yacht listing badly, short of power and too far from the nearest island, Grenada, to use VHF radio, the crew members cheered when the 4,000-mile call from their satellite telephone got through.

It was only after heartfelt reassurances that he swung into action, co-ordinating the rescue from the store's kitchen section. He took down grid references for the 79-metre, 1,700-tonne yacht on a till receipt and phoned them through to Milford Haven coastguards.

The alert was passed to Falmouth, which deals with international emergencies, and within an hour a French spotter plane located the Titanic. A United States coastguard cutter arrived at the scene shortly afterwards and towed the damaged vessel to port.

The yacht, which was playfully renamed after its previous owners decided to transfer its old name to a new ship, had taken on two and a half metres depth of water in the engine room by the time rescuers arrived.

(courtesy The Guardian)

Now, this is hardly a tragedy of Titanic proportions (oh, SNAP!), but it bears mention simply because it will now serve as proof that somebody was stupid enough to name a ship after the biggest embarrassment to float the Seven Seas.

After all, it's not every day one comes across such a perfect example of idiocy and I think posterity can learn a great deal from this debacle, if they stop sexting each other for a second and tell their one of their robots to read this article aloud to them.

Are you there posterity? It's me, Margaret...

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Coolest Boat Ever?

I wonder what it looks like below deck...

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The Party Had to Stop Sometime, Florida...

All those romantics out there with dreams of one day owning a boat, or even just joyriding in one for an afternoon with a handful of strange, now is the time to be you. Just head out to the coast and scoop one up, yo!

All those bored businessmen and backwoods billies who spent their days wondering what it would be like to commit a relatively benign white-collar crime, who wondered whether they would be smart enough to get away with it, well done and thanks for helping the aforementioned dreamers out.

Sorry not all of you got away with it:

Too bad the law ain't so slam-dunk with the assholes who caused this Great Depression Redux in the first place...

Happy boating, dreamers!


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All Aboard the USS Koala!

Now that I'm thirty and approaching the end of days, I tend to look back on my life a bit more, reevaluate things, maybe even gain a little perspective. Sometimes it's intentional, when I try to dig up some memories, try to find some meaning, and sometimes it just hits me like a brick in the face.

Just the other day, in fact, I was doing dishes in the kitchen and I had to sit down to catch my breath after remembering those long-forgotten, furious two years I ran koalas in San Diego.

But let me begin at the beginning...

After college out east, I was a bit more full of myself than I should have been, had a bit of Francisco Pizarro in me, you might say. I was invincible and mirthfully flaunted every law your lawyer ever heard of, partly for kicks, partly as a philosophical undertaking. I was like a flame-fresh sword, full of menace, but not yet cooled.

I moved west because that's where cowboys belong. I needed to stretch my legs, bounce around, crow and prance.


After one particularly exhausting morning of displaying my finery, I thirstily swilled bourbon on a park bench along the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, scanning the scenery for opportunity, when I happened to overhear a tanned and fit young mother complain to her friend that the US government would not allow her to purchase a koala. Evidently her son was a fan of some Disney show and sort-of wanted a pet koala real bad and the United States Government denied this simple request.

I drained the bottle, chucked it through the window of The Gap, kneeled before said yuppy milf, and offered myself as hero, for I saw not only a lucrative reward, but also a delightful opportunity to once again scream 'fuck you' to the oppressive men running our country, who whimsically tell us what we can and can't do.

My flight landed in Sydney about two weeks after it left. Or so it felt. I think I watched four Keenan Ivory Wayans movies and slept half a lifetime. At some point, I even thought about acquiring a new hobby.

Once on foot, I made haste for the Cross and pounded the pavement, gathering information the only way I knew how--from hookers.


After a few dozen entertaining-but-dead-end leads, as I began to study the zoo perimeter for weaknesses, I finally found a loose-lipped dame that let slip I might be able to find a koala in a sanctuary on the outskirts of Sydney.

Evidently, the little minx went there on a school field trip once, a few years ago, and remembers seeing at least three koalas, but, sadly, could give me no useful information when I hinted I was curious about their security strategies.

In terms of area, Sydney is twice the size of Los Angeles, and the fringes are pretty wild, let me tell you--man meets Bush. The beautiful neighborhoods splattered on postcards are like so many diamonds floating in an unflushed toilet.

Looking around at the grody townscape, I was surprised the koalas hadn't taken over already.

It certainly wasn't out of weakness, as the first little shit I tried to abduct slashed my shoulder like a vindictive (and wildly inaccurate) lover with a carving knife. I tell women the scar came from a knife fight in Calcutta and the most sporting ones believe me.


After a spell of wound-nursing, plotting, and several stomachfuls of shiraz, my second foe dropped like an acorn after I blindsided it and its mother with a hefty log.

I disarmed the unconscious little devil with a wine cork on each claw, shoved a couple prescription sleeping pills down the victim's hatch, and threw it in a canvas sack denoted "Laundry for Mom," a high-school-graduation gag gift from my aunt finally put to good use.

On the way out the door, I checked the pulses of the crudely-tranquilized Koala Sanctuary staff, figured they would live, hijacked the security tapes, lit them on fire in the street, and hailed a gypsy cab to the airport.

I spent the next two hours, in traffic, deciding whether or not I would be able to kill my driver if I needed to, to cover my tracks.


At the Qantas counter, I proferred the beach blonde behind the ticket counter my fake passport and reservation number, then turned on the charm. Why not make time for a quickie pre-flight? Life is short, my man.

There seemed to be some unpleasant confusion, however, when I explained that I was trying to move my flight up a week, to get on the next one out, even though I'd only been there for a day and a half.

As soon as I saw a supervisor moving toward me I knew I had one choice: run. And so I ran. I ran like hell.

I got all the way to the wrong side of town, on some sketchy stretch of harbor, my contraband koala conscious and ornery, and found myself out of road. Never one for a shoot-out, I realized I was going to have to get wet.

As if a sign from the Lord above, the bottomless bass vibrations from a friendly horn-toot on a US Naval Battleship--pulling out of Sydney Harbor after a photo-op with the HMS Warramunga--practically made my decision for me.

I swam out to the departing ship with gusto, clutching the koala bag with white knuckles, a green gleam in my eyes, and climbed aboard unseen.


During the next seven days spent on my hands and knees inside an emergency lifeboat, I not only found out my captive koala--whom I quickly, endearingly referred to as Wino, since he was covered in wine corks, never got his sea legs, and slept 23 hours a day--was a male, but also trained him to sneak out and steal food.

It sounds like a simple survival solution, but the skill came in the planning of the affair, so that the only hour in the day Wino would be awake would also happen to be the most ideal moment for theft. The boat was only yay big and full of cagey men with keen eyes--it was a delicate game.

By the time I swam ashore in north San Diego, hitchhiked south, and waved goodbye to my adorable merchandise at a Subway Sandwich Shop on the Mexican side of town, I decided I would never fly again--too dangerous. It was to be the sea for me from now on--courtesy of the US Navy.

I also decided that I would do it all over again if another client were to emerge. $10,000 cash for a good old-fashioned harmless adventure? Shit, I'd kidnap a baby for a nickel more!

The clients trickled in at first, but it wasn't long before I was drowning in them. It got so I knew a long stretch of the Pacific Ocean like the back of my momma's hand. Koala protection agencies eventually pooled their funds and set a group of rag-tag bounty hunters on my trail.

But I was good. Too good. And I was having fun.


Cocktail parties on the lawns of harborside Sydney estates, Don Giovanni at the Opera House, awkward dates with Nicole Kidman, textbook fornication with drunken international supermodels that bought the Hollywood producer line, surfing and binge-drinking with the beach crowd in San Diego, sobering up aboard a US naval vessel, or series of vessels depending on their routes...I led an adrenaline-fueled social life that even a young Jack Nicholson would be proud of.

But all things must pass. If it wasn't pure hubris that got me in the end, it was the champagne and shrimp cocktails.

As a result not so much of my gratuitous koala-trafficking, but more of a sticky visa-violation situation in which my initial fake identity eventually became embroiled, I had the law after me. By this time the alias was as historic as my innocence, but there was one major problem--they had my picture, and there was no disguising this blindingly handsome mug.

I floated back Stateside and tried to get out of the racket, to conquer my addiction to the rush, and was successful for a bit. I lived anonymously, a walking ghost who slept under the pier at night and wandered the beach all day, staring at young women and masturbating in the shadows. I grew hungry.

My friends in San Diego, the few people I trusted enough to let-in on my double life, play shuffleboard with, surf with, turned out to be not-so-good. Once the word got out that I was a marked man, I was yesterday's taco to those two-bit turncoats.

With nowhere else to turn, I agreed to do one more rounder for a desperate and generous client, and promised myself I would use the proceeds to open up a little shop somewhere, somewhere quiet.


I wasn't Down Under very long before I discovered the vaunted Australian Customs officials were trying to make an example out of me.

As I walked out of the Sydney Public Library downtown, cackling with jittery joy at the thought of some howdydodat opening The DaVinci Code to find one of my well-placed malnourished turds, I fell headfirst into a spider's web even I couldn't escape.

After a brief stint in Guantanamo, I turned state's evidence and snitched on not only a fictional koala-poaching mastermind (sorry, Bruce!) but also on every single one of my clients.

The poorest ones did a stretch in minimum-security; most of them got away with a slap on the wrists and an audit.

After all these years in Witness Protection, waiting tables in Bozeman, skiing 120 days a year, living the dream, I'd completely forgotten about all that craziness til now.

Huh. Weird how the mind works sometimes...

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