Gratitude Monday: The Tiger of San Pedro

I learned this weekend that the world has become considerably more pedestrian: I received word from a friend in LA that my friend John Farrell has died. Over the weekend I’ve been remembering him, and reveling in gratitude for our friendship.

I met John the summer before my junior year of college, at a gathering of an LA-based scion society of the Baker Street Irregulars—people who enjoy the stories of Sherlock Holmes. I was seated at a table with John, his younger brother Eddie and others who riffed off of one another like beatniks at a poetry slam. In a room populated by persons with greater or lesser grasps on reality (think a Trekkie convention, without the Vulcan ears or Klingon foreheads), John stood out.

Well, he did in any room. He was 6’3” and hovering on one side or the other of 300 lbs. Plus, he had a distinctive beard and moustache and dressed like an Irish squire—plenty of Harris tweeds. And he never went anywhere without a hat and a walking stick.

[John at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire and May Market]

John didn’t need a prestigious education—Harbor College and Long Beach State—because he was one of the most well-read people I’ve ever met. He was smart, observant and possessed of a formidable vocabulary. He told a great story, but also knew how to shut up and listen. He was not above embellishing a tale for effect, but he did not sling bullshit.

He was passionate about literature of all kinds, and well-known in Sherlockian circles for his scholarship. He was invested in the Baker Street Irregulars (a rare honor) with the title of The Tiger of San Pedro (taken from “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge”), which was an homage to his home town of San Pedro.

He also loved music and theatre. John took me to my first Gilbert and Sullivan performance, The Pirates of Penzance at the LA Music Center, and then to other productions indoors and out. He also gave me D’Oyly Carte recordings, which I’d probably never have found on my own. (I grew up in a house that wasn't big on the arts.)

(I once took a voice class, in which we had to prepare a song to perform for our fellow students. I asked my friend Margaret to come in to accompany me, and John turned the music for her while I sang “Poor wand’ring one”. I think he was tickled that I’d chosen that piece, and was very happy to have been invited to hear my one performance.)

I was working for the Pasadena Star-News for part of the time I knew John, and through that connection he started writing theatre and music reviews. They didn’t pay him, but he got reviewers’ seats (good ones) for the performances, which otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to afford. Frankly, this was work he was born to do: write about the arts.

He was utterly committed to writing accurate and thoughtful reviews, and to getting them into the next day’s edition. The incumbent reviewer, a guy named Thompson (whose actual job was in advertising or circulation, I forget which), would attend a performance, but not write the review until the next day, so it didn’t appear until two days after the show. John thought that was a disservice to the public. He’d sit through the performance, then go to the paper’s city room (no Internet then) and write at speed to make the midnight deadline. He considered it the duty of a reviewer to deliver the goods on time.

Which was kind of funny, when you consider that the single quality that drove me the farthest and fastest up the walls was his feckless, vague Irish notion of time. For John, “I’ll be there at 0930” meant “at some point during the daylight hours I’ll attempt to get myself sorted sufficient so that we can get going.”

In fairness, though, if there was an actual curtain time, we always made it.

(Thompson was hugely unhappy to discover that he was losing the free tickets to important performances. But not so unhappy as to commit to filing reviews for the next day.)

Through the Star-News, John (and sometimes I) attended events including Joan Sutherland and Beverly Sills in Die Fledermaus in San Diego (Sherrill Milnes showed up to serenade us after the performance), Charlton Heston playing Sherlock Holmes in The Crucifer of Blood (at the Ahmanson in LA) and a whole string of performances at the Hollywood Bowl. (With the reviewers’ seats in the box section came free preferred parking, too, which was just like flying first class.)

John would put together the most wonderful picnics for those nights; he never stooped to slapping anything together or picking something up, he meticulously planned those meals. I still occasionally make a variation on his modified shrimp cocktail on avocados. In fact, that recipe is the only reason I have dill weed in my kitchen.

It was great when he was reviewing Sunday matinee performances at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium; we’d combine the concert with brunch at the Pasadena Hilton.

The concert I remember was Saint-Saëns’s Organ Concerto. Not because I happen to think that that piece makes you sit through a whole lot of meh to get to about 12 bars of spectacular (which I do), but because it turned out that we were seated next to a urologist I knew professionally, who was with a woman not his wife. (The wife was active in civic groups, so I’d conversed with her several times as she brought notices to the newsroom.) I didn’t know any conversation gambits that didn’t involve the two things about him that I was familiar with.

The Hilton staff must have groaned every time they saw “Farrell” on a brunch booking. We’d get there at 1000 when they opened, and drink a glass of bubbly before our first trip to the buffet. What they made on all those people who came in, drank half a glass of wine and basically had the $2.99 Denny’s eggs-bacon-and-toast breakfast for $10, they lost on us. We’d have to leave around noon to make curtain at the Civic. Otherwise, I imagine we’d still be there, drinking bubbly and eating melon, custom-made omelets and pastries.

As you may have gathered, John had quite a capacity for liquor. His most frequent order was a brandy and soda; entirely in keeping with that squirearchy persona. In the summer it might be gin and tonic, and he introduced me to the Pimms’ Cup. We shared the love of champagne. At one Sherlockian event he provided the only occasion where I’ve seen a jeroboam of Cordon Rouge on the hoof, and where I contributed substantially to its demise.

According to the obits, over the years John built a solid reputation around LA as a passionate supporter of the arts, respected for his honest reviews of operas, classical music and plays. I get the impression that he probably wasn’t making a living at it—he wasn’t a staff writer, but contributed to a number of publications—which saddens me; someone that knowledgeable, articulate and diligent should have been properly compensated.

This is what I mean by diligent: I don’t know why, but John apparently did not own a car. He traveled to concerts and shows by bus. If you have any experience with the public transportation system in LA County—and the distances involved—this should boggle your mind.

When I knew him he drove an MG A; you know—the English sports car that actually had wooden floorboards. Anyone who’s ever had one knows that MGs, Austins and Triumphs are not reliable transportation. This one was no exception, and John rarely had the money to maintain it properly, so every outing involving it was a complete crap shoot.

We once set out for a day in Oxnard (about 70 miles away), only to get a blowout on the Ventura Freeway while still in the San Fernando Valley. That was when I discovered that he didn’t have a spare tire. Well. For an hour or two we sat in a bar next to the service station where they were mounting a new tire, me drinking a margarita and he a G&T. I had a few things to say about the fecklessness of not having a spare…on an MG, and finished off with, “And furthermore, you drink that nasty stuff.”

The bartender couldn’t help but overhear, and she said that I should open my mind, because all gins weren’t the same. She personally liked Boodles. I think I tried Tanqueray, Boodles and Bombay. I still didn’t (and don’t) like it, but at least I learned something.

(We didn’t make it to Oxnard that day, but we did another time. John was never particularly bothered about that kind of thing.)

John was sui generis, but he was not a poseur—I’ve known plenty of those. He wasn’t doing any of it—the moustache and beard, the clothes, the intellectualism—to impress anyone. All of that was just what he was. He was completely aware that, with his size, he didn’t meet 1980s standards of appearance. On one level that might have bothered him, but on another I think he just didn't much care that he didn't fit into others' expectations.

One rather amazing thing about John: he never made derogatory remarks about the 99.3% of the world who did not possess his intellectual wattage. (Well, maybe politicians, but I don't recall any specific example.) And I never once heard him make an ad hominem attack on anyone. One time there was a snafu at the Hollywood Bowl about the preferred parking; the attendant was adamant that the name Farrell was not on the list. John was frustrated but he did not say one snappy thing to the guy with the clipboard. I thought about that this weekend as I reviewed my several calls with Comcast since Thursday.

He showed up to more than one dress-up party in an outfit he’d bought from a Hollywood costume house: pink knee breeches, waistcoat and embroidered jacket worn by one of the characters in The Kissing Bandit. It takes a special kind of man of any size to do that.

[John at a party with someone who came as a kind of low-rent Evita]

(Actually, he was once driving home from a Sherlockian event in downtown LA to which he’d worn this, and his car broke down on the Harbor Freeway. Can you imagine the Highway Patrol pulling up and finding this guy in this outfit behind the wheel? And discovering that he was sober? Well, this is LA, so it probably happens all the time.)

He did what he wanted to do—write about the arts—even though it came with a price tag that included lack of financial security. I think that’s integrity, and dedication. You had to take him the way he came.

This was not always easy to do. I’d lose patience with him because I couldn’t count on him to show up on time, or trust that the car was mechanically sound, or that he wouldn’t overindulge on the drink. There was one party where he drank so much mescal that he became essentially legless. Four of us couldn’t get him into the back seat of the car, so we called his father, who brought a pickup truck, which thankfully we could manage. John spent the rest of the night in the back of the truck. He was apologetic the next morning, but as you might imagine, I was pissed off.

As far as I know, he never screwed up a writing assignment—he was always on time, alert, taking notes and filing the review on deadline.

He was always working—in the month before his death in May, I counted more than ten reviews for just one publication (the Long Beach Press-Telegram), and he wrote for many. In fact, the friend with whom he was staying at the time found him dead at his computer, where he’d been in the midst of writing. I believe he’d have pronounced that as good a way of going as any.

Back in the 80s, one of the performances we went to was some 20^th Century opera that had (I think) socialist themes and a bunch of pineapples that featured in the closing act. For the life of me cannot think what that opera was. Sadly, the only person I could have called to ask, “what 20^th Century opera that no one’s ever heard of was staged at the Chandler Pavilion in the 1980s? It ended with a bunch of very symbolic pineapples?” was John.

He’d have known the opera, the composer, relevant historical background, other well-known productions and how he’d reviewed this one. That was what he lived for.

John Farrell died on 7 May 2015, at a friend’s home in Sherman Oaks, California. He was 63. I’m one of the scores of people whose lives he enriched, and I’m deeply grateful for that.

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