Champ Clark has a new noir novel and a play about Marlon Brando’s son — and his own life is quite a story – Chicago Tribune
The life of Champ Clark, though far from finished and about to have a creative moment this summer, would make a terrific book. We were recently talking about his second crime noir novel, “Buh-Bye Cruel World,” which features a dead woman on its cover.
In a life marked by all manner of artistic pursuits, he is new to novel writing. He started when the pandemic came calling. “It was three hours or 1,000 words a day,” he said. “I was able to, pretty much, keep to that.”
His first crime noir novel was “Venetian Blonde,” which begins, “Frankie was a tall, long-limbed, flat-chested, red-haired native Alabaman with many admirers … all of whom she encouraged. Myself included. It was a long time before I realized that Frankie was as phony as the color of her hair.”
In “Buh-Bye” we again meet Drake Haynes, a slightly jaded former news reporter now relegated to being an advice columnist, “Mr. Drake,” for the Hollywood Daily Drum newspaper. He has a dangerous fondness for margaritas (with salt) and though world-weary, can still get excited by chasing a story, in this case, that of two missing teenagers with tangled histories.
Both books have been optioned for possible movies, not surprisingly because both are cinematic and were written in that movie-biz bastion of Santa Monica, where Clark has lived for 25 years.
This is where he moved from Chicago in 1994 for a reason that has motivated many. “I wanted to see if I could make it as an actor,” he said.
He had lived in Chicago since he was 16, arriving from the suburbs of New York City in the summer of 1969 with his parents and three sisters and settling in Kenilworth, that posh suburb befitting his father’s position as the chief of Time magazine’s Chicago bureau.
His father was also named Champ. It’s a family name, passed down with variations from his great grandfather, James Beauchamp Clark, who was Speaker of the House from 1911-19, and his grandfather, Bennett Champ Clark, who was a US senator from Missouri.
The current Champ Clark never aspired to politics but rather the creative life. “I was 10 years old when I saw ‘The Sound of Music’ on stage and said to myself, ‘I want to be one of those kids,'” he says.
“Living in Kenilworth and attending New Trier East did not start out happily for me,” he said. “The best I can say about those years is that I got cast as ‘Macbeth’ in the senior year play.”
He spent a semester at Ripon College in Wisconsin but was soon back, working as a dishwasher, Christmas tree salesman and in a bookstore. He studied dance with Shirley Mordine at Columbia College and performed a bit.
He taught an after-school program at the Sacred Heart School on Sheridan Road for nearly a decade. He developed “Be Who You Want to Be,” a filmmaking program for kids, and was an artist-in-residence for a time at the Art Institute.
To make a living he worked as a house cleaner, artists’ model, singing telegram deliverer, summer camp counselor, waiter and bartender. He worked for a summer with the Cirque du Soleil around the same time he started working in the offices of the People magazine bureau here, eventually becoming a reporter and writer.
Then he began to act on the stages of various local companies and joined for seven years the ensemble of Center Theater. He got some good reviews and some not so good. He fell in love with a woman in the publishing business named Monica Portalatin. They got married and in a couple of years decided to move to California.
“One month after we arrived, Monica became pregnant and that ended my acting ambitions because I had to get a real job,” he said.
He became a reporter and writer for People magazine’s Los Angeles bureau and enjoyed that position. “It gave me a real sense of this complicated city and the entertainment business,” he said. “This is a city of hopes and dreams and aspirations and a lot of them never work out. I realized that it was never going to be right for me. It’s a tough business, acting. I still have some regrets. Maybe if I had stayed in Chicago I might have made a career there, not so much theatrical stardom but perhaps a life of steady stage work.”
A daughter, Sarah, was born and he and his wife eventually divorced. In 2014 he was laid off by People and has been freelancing ever since.
He had already written a fine book, 2005’s “Shuffling to Ignominy,” the first biography of Black film actor Lincoln Perry, known by the stage name as Stepin Fetchit. It was favorably reviewed, the New Yorker calling it, “opinionated and absorbing.”
For many years he had been writing plays and this is where we come to his latest milestone.
The play is titled “Wild Son: The Testimony of Christian Brando.”
You surely remember the name Brando, as in Marlon, that mercurial and captivating star who died in 2004. Christian, born in Los Angeles in 1958, was one of Brando’s 11 kids and always was tabloid fodder, first in a nasty and public custody dispute between his father and mother, actress Anna Kashfi; as a kidnapping victim when he was 13 years old; and, most notoriously, for the 1990 killing of Dag Drollet, his younger half-sister Cheyenne’s boyfriend (and father to her unborn child) in the living room of Marlon’s Mulholland Drive estate.
The young man pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter. Cheyenne died by suicide and Christian served five years of a 10-year prison sentence. He later became involved with actor Robert Blake’s wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, who was murdered in 2001.
For some years, Clark had been on the “Brando beat” for People but most of his work focused on Marlon until he got an unexpected phone call from Christian in 2005.
They formed a friendship over many interview sessions in which Christian, “always with a beer in his hand,” detailed his rocky life, filled with dysfunction. He also shared stories of such stars as next door neighbor “Uncle Jack” Nicholson and high school classmate Michael Jackson.
Clark told me he found Christian to be “damaged, volatile and dangerous” but also told me he was “one of the sweetest lost souls I’d ever met.”
Christian died of pneumonia in 2008 when he was only 49 and the tapes of his interviews with Clark became not a book, as both men had initially discussed, but a play, with Clark directing.
It had its premiere at the Santa Monica Playhouse in 2019. Chicago’s Chaz Ebert called it “stunning,” elaborating by writing, “with a riveting performance by actor John Mese … I can’t recommend it highly enough.”
The playwright Beth Henley, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1981 “Crimes of the Heart” and with whom Clark had worked with in a pair of plays in his Chicago acting days, has it “a burning jewel. John Mese is mesmerizing. A rare theatrical experience where the magic shimmers.”
The one-man play has been selected for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the largest arts festival in the world. It will be performed there in August and Clark will be in Scotland for it.
There is no third novel in the works but he plans to continue his musical career. Yes, he is also a singer-songwriter with a substantial and engaging body of work. He has put out six albums. “Three under my name with me singing and three by ‘various artists’ singing my songs,” he said, “I’d never written a song until about nine years ago when I fell into an unrequited love, which is a great impetus for songwriting . I’ve since written about 100 songs, though none won over the object of my affection.”
“And I also play the accordion,” he said. “I have seven of them and am studying the banjo. If I were to add the bagpipes that would make a trifecta of the most hated musical instruments.”
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