Natasha Richardson

The first professional work I ever did as a writer was way back in 1980 for the then-young and politically active L.A. Weekly. The 2,000-word op-ed was purchased by the Weekly but never ran due to mundane issues relating to poor timing.

The article, CBS, PLO, JDL focused on the controversy stirred up by Jewish Defense League spokesman Irv Rubin over the CBS television network’s upcoming TV movie, Playing For Time (The ever-controversial Rubin would not ascend to the role of leader of the JDL until 1985 when Rabbi Meir Kahan moved to Israel to form the Koch Party, eventually outlawed by the Israeli government as “racist.”)

Rubin, and others in the field of Jewish activism, was incensed by Vanessa Redgrave’s starring role as a Jewish prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp because the actress was, at the time, a very vocal supporter of the PLO. The film, from an Arthur Miller screenplay based on the autobiography The Musicians of Auschwitz by Fania Fenelon, went on to cop Emmy awards for best television movie, best actress (Redgrave), best supporting actress (Jane Alexander), and a deserving win for Miller’s screenplay, despite calls by Rubin for a mass boycott of the CBS television network and its sponsors.

I interviewed Irv Rubin twice for my article. He was polite and articulate and intelligent but a real True Believer, a man so absorbed by his cause that it became the very core of his being, the center of his existence. And yet Redgrave, as I pointed out in my piece, was an actress known for such total immersion in her art that her work almost cancelled out her public politics. One has nothing to do with the other, I insisted (“I give myself to my roles as to a lover,” the Oscar-winner once observed in an interview). Ms. Redgrave, naturally, agreed with me during a brief telephone conference arranged by a CBS exec in Los Angeles, who couldn’t decide if he wanted the controversy to go away or whether it was good for business and ratings.

That was 29 years ago. Over the years Rubin was suspected of committing various acts of terrorism and in 2002 he died in jail in L.A. while awaiting trials for conspiring to bomb a Los Angeles mosque and a U.S. Congressman’s office. Redgrave went on to garner more awards and accolades, of course, and continues to be politically active and outspoken.

There’s really no point to this stroll down Memory Lane except for the fact that it was jarred loose from the cobwebs of my data bank by the news of the perhaps-tragic skiing accident that befell Redgrave’s daughter, the remarkably talented Natasha Richardson, on Monday. I say “perhaps-tragic” because the family has imposed something of a media blackout, but according to unnamed family sources who spoke to People magazine and the New York Daily News, the condition of Richardson, 45, in a New York hospital is “dire” and that “the family has all but given hope that she will recover from a severe head injury.”

For Ms. Redgrave, I would imagine this ordeal makes her dust-up with Rubin look like a schoolyard spat (which is essentially what it was) and if the rumors bear bitter fruit … well, let’s just hope that better news emerges from the other end of the family’s much-needed silence at this moment.

That is all.