Morris Arrari, 1949-2008
April 7, 2008
Morris Arrari passed away on Sunday afternoon, April 6, 2008 after a long battle with cancer. At the time of his death, he was in Maplewood New Jersey at the home of his dear friends Kathryn Bush Kimball and Andrew Kimball.
Morris is survived by his sister Denise, his nieces Thea and Amanda and many, many friends.
Memories and stories about Morris can be left on this blog as comments. His family welcomes anyone to share their memories of this extraordinary man.
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April 10, 2008 at 10:39 am
Last Saturday by the fireplace, Morris pointed at his scalp, shorn from the chemotherapy, looking like a skull cap, and joked he had received compliments on the new haircut. I think next I’ll try a 1950s ducktail like the Fonz, he said, or a loopy “banana wave” in the front. When Kathryn checked on him at 3 a.m. Sunday morning, she found him awake and climbed onto the bed beside him. “You always wanted to get me in bed,” he teased. By morning, he could only move his legs — which had swollen into heavy blocks — by grabbing his pajama cuffs and lifting. Looking down the bed at them, he observed, with his artist’s perspective: “I look like an oversized baby with fat feet.” Exactly, thought Kathryn with surprise, glancing at them. They breakfasted together on ice chips flavored with clementine juice. “Better than steak,” Morris opined to the hospice nurse, as she checked his blood pressure and could find nothing measurable.
“I think of him decrying,” one friend remembered, “yet another tacky gown on the Oscar carpet, griping about the bully in front of him in the Staples line or the uncouths at The Y, or cracking up telling dirty jokes . . . or the way he would grab your arm and go in his Dixie voice, “Mmmm, honey!” or the way he would marvel at the hard-knock waitresses at The Maple Leaf.” Morris was sweet & sour, a blend of tender and risky. He scorned the American habit of chomping popcorn at the movies, yet he adored Jerry Springer. He participated in the haute couture of Europe but also gloried in the meatloaf platter at his favorite American greasy diner. He was fascinated by Project Runway but disdainful of it at the same time. When he launched on a riff, there was NO holding him back. I found him one day relaxed on the living room sofa after a nap, oblivious to a hair arrangement that resembled angry fingers rushing upwards. After checking it out in a mirror, he dubbed it his Kim Il-Jong look. For a week, everything kitschy became Kim Il-Jong.
Although a Parisien for thirty years, he was also always a New Yorker too, combustible, aware, alive, with a personality that occupied space and left a footprint. At Columbia Presbyterian, hooked up for chemotherapy, he listened in steamy gloom to the patient in the next bed make four loud business calls involving altercations until finally interrupting with authority, he demanded: “Can you read the sign on the wall? That was your fourth phone call. I don’t want to listen to your business matters again.” There was no fifth call that day. The week before he had actually scared a cell phone user into hiding under a hospital blanket where she finished her conversation only in whispers, peeking out at Morris from down under like a turtle in its shell.
Last year, after paying his thousand dollar membership fee to a neighborhood gym with a no cell policy, Morris was outraged when on his first day a woman with a wide bottom and little visible commitment to the program took a call while her personal trainer calmly watched. Morris left his machine to complain, but the trainer glared and said his client had permission to talk to her brother who was hospitalized. A patient himself, Morris suggested icily that she consider visiting her brother, not phoning, and at any rate noted the gym had a foyer for phone calls. The muscle-bound trainer shrugged. Morris packed his bag, demanded his thousand dollar fee back, and passed through the foyer, where he noticed the trainer talking on a cell phone.
While a visiting instructor at Kent State, Morris created a furore when the local newspaper quoted him defending the use of slim figured models in the fashion show his master class was staging. For him, teaching design wasn’t about catering to political prejudice and it certainly wasn’t about clothing Walmart shoppers. He delighted in describing for friends the obese man who frequented the locker room at his Y, so fat he had to lay his underpants flat on the floor and step into them.
One loved the mix of familiar and exotic in Morris. His father was Jewish, his Mother was Greek Orthodox, Morris was neither and both. He loved the earnest young Mormon missionaries, he had no interest in their Church. He was familiar with the best restaurants in Paris or Tokyo; he was also patron of meatloaf platters in American diners. With an Italian friend he swapped tales of memorable cheese purchases in arcane shops in nooks of Florence and Paris and liked to recount overhearing one perplexed American tourist, confronted by the bounty of a cheese cart, groan: “Can’t I just get some vel-vee’-ter?”
Morris loved friends to praise his long eyelashes. When they grew even lusher from chemotherapy, he claimed he used them to sweep his floors or open a locked door and offered to share with admirers his beauty secret: chemotherapy. What I loved best were his eyes, which could be earnest or incensed or mischievous. As his body grew thin from illness, they seemed to dominate his expression and illuminate him. And always, his eyes truly saw other people.
He established human ties with his nurses, who were never just functionaries, who always had names, whether they emptied his vomit basin or injected red blood cells through his external shunt; and yet he could be withering with the dietician who stumbled into his scorn by asking how he found the hospital food. Waiting to be wheeled into surgery, he bantered with the shy pudgy morning nurse about her home town, with charm and genuine interest. He turned to the full-figured black nurse’s aide to ask the name of her perfume. No idea, she stammered; I splash it on mornings running out the door. The conversation would always continue from there, warm, personal.
At Columbia Presbyterian, to keep the cell calls and chatter out, he would listen to his iPod during chemotherapy. When the large-bodied attending nurse stopped by to check his infusion, he asked her, with a spark of mischief: You like rhythm and blues, don’t you? then he watched with delight as she inserted his ear plugs, heard Aretha Franklin’s R-E-S-P-E-C-T, and suddenly, awash in the beat, eyes clenched shut, began a finger-snapping floor-rattling half karaoke there in the cancer ward to a captive audience of patients tethered to IVs, and the entire room experienced a rare moment of delight.
When he happened upon an article in the Times that mentioned that his barber Claudio, also known as “Claudio the Barber” and doing business in a tiny shop on 116th Street in Spanish Harlem, had been indicted by the FBI in a sting involving “mobster pals” in the Genovese crime family, he rushed uptown for a trim. Claudio pampered him likka his own son, gave him a close haircut that’s gunna keepa him cool in the heat, dabbed him with an aftershave tart enough to shake loose a smile from the godfather himself, even offered advice on the cancer: Ya gotta eat, Morris. Ya gotta keepa uppa da appetite. But not a word about the FBI so Morris didn’t ask.
Morris loved Tillie our cat for nuzzling his feet after he fell ill. He loved fires, their mysterious comings and goings. Harold Arlen was his greatest songwriter. Patty Griffin he loved from the first time he heard her on a movie soundtrack. He loved old movies, art, anything of beauty. He treasured the physicality of his cell phone and his iPod, always in mint condition. Deborah Barlow’s paintings, he loved. His baby nephew Louis. He treasured dear friends, from Brooklyn, from sweetbriar, from Paris. He loved the ocean and loved equally the fish diner near the ocean. He loved fixing tossed salads for friends. He was impresario of conversation, anecdote, dialects. His attachment to family ran deeper than consciousness, earlier than memory. He cared profoundly for his sister Denise, for her two daughters Amanda and Thea. He worried about his sister’s job, about her heart-breaks, her finances. Last Sunday, he held on to life in a semi-conscious state for hours, until Denise and his nieces arrived from Long Island to stand with him as he left this life, traveling out of mystery and back again into mystery.
He hated the cancer which sapped him, he felt, of his physical charms and vitality. It stole from him the familiar boulevards and cafes of Paris, closed down the beaches in Greece and Spain, halted those summer days that stretched forever and hinted of endlessness. He mourned the years of life he would miss. Gone, the days of exuberant desire, the expansive ambitions, the satisfactions of material success. In their place, the colder reward of hard won patience and understanding.
He passed Maplewood nights in our rear bedroom. Out its second-story window, he could almost hear the click of squirrels hurrying up the great trunk of the oak tree, brushing past twig or single leaf. At twilight came the deep touch of living things back into earth, tangible with beauty. As the cancer progressed, Morris said, I don’t want to die in the hospital. He left there Friday and died here in this house, with Denise and Amanda and Thea and Kathryn around him, on Sunday.
Morris said once he would choose to return to earth — should that be our destiny — as a bird, high above hospital rooms, stomas, the gracelessness of ordinary manners — his artist’s eye quickened by the earth’s spiny geology, its interlocking clays and ores, its patterned waterways, the play of shadow across the landscape – observed this time from a distance.
“I was listening,” he wrote a half year ago, “ to a beautiful song by Patty Griffin about kites while on the train from Long Island. It was about the dreams of childhood. I had spent the day with my sister, nieces, and baby Louis who was passed around from one loving pair of arms to another. I said to myself, how wonderful for this little boy to be so loved and caressed. I fell asleep at some point, dozed off from the rocking of the train. When I woke, there seated in front of me was a visibly perturbed man staring fixedly at me, babbling and laughing to himself, sucking a finger, fidgety. The song, the baby, this man . . . I wondered sadly, wistfully what happens to either warp or construct our lives? how fragile we are.”
Time no longer apportions Morris into years or decades, or stages of life. Everything he ever was, everything he will be, exists now, always. He is charmer, flirt, artist, quick ear, sure eye, genius. He is forever the eleven year old brother pushing aside the false family friend whom he alone precociously intuited meant ill asking his little sister Denise into a private stateroom on a trans-Atlantic crossing. He forever sits beside our living room fire with a glass of wine and the most expressive earnest eyes, while uptown in room 140 at Columbia Presbyterian the cancer patient feels life ebb with each glucose and morphine drip, the yellow skin and eyes, shaven skull, frail starved body looking much like his father sixty-three years before making his way across Europe home to Salonica, the once accommodating city that now no longer wanted its displaced Jews from the camps. All these selves of our dear friend are forever outside time and history.
June 17, 2008 at 8:20 am
Και όμως μετά από χρόνια πήρα τηλέφωνο να μιλήσω με τον θείο μου. Δεν απάντησε. Ηταν ο τηλεφωνητής. Αφησα μήνυμα. Πάλι δεν απάντησε. Στην έπαρση της στιγμής να δέιξω σε μία φίλη μου τον θείο μου, μπήκα στο sight του. Τρόμαξα. Ο Μωυσής δεν υπήρχε στην ζωή. Ο δικός μου Μωϋσής, που στην Ολυμπιάδα της Χαλκιδικής μου μάθαινα να κολυμπώ, μου μάθαινε να αγαπώ τους Ρώσους λογοτέχνες. Ετσι κι αλλιώς για πολλά χρόνια τον θυμάμαι ως τον καλό μου θείο που έχει χρόνια να ρθει στην Ελλάδα, στην Θεσσαλονίκη. Εγώ θα τον περιμένω να ρθει.
July 29, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Morris and I were dear friends in Paris. I met him when he was still doing costume couture jewery for the great house of Lanvin. I had just opened up Kell’s Corner on the rue de Grenelle . The year was 1974. We became instant friends, I got so excited when I went to his Apt. for the first time and discovered he was my watercolorist fashion illustrator IDOL!!!! Water colors were my favorite and the fact that someone captured fashion in that wonderful flurry of color and movement … turned me so on!!!! Needless to say we became the best of friends. I’d pose for him ( my feet ,that is) for his illustrations, help him string beads…. cook for him…. and all. He was my fan buyer until that day he showed them to Hubert de Givenchy and I got the leftovers! But I was content to get that because at that point Morris’s fashion design career had taken off and I would rarely see him, but every time he’d go to Spain… I ;d get a call ” Hi Hun, Is this my little Southern Belle?” Lets go get some Fried chicken ….cause you’re cookin it see you at your house!!!!
He prided himself on his figure, so fit , healthy… swimming was his thing
back then. When I moved back to USA in 1987 I heard from Morris occasionally, promising me he’d come to NOLA for fried chicken. But he was busy re-inventing himself in this competitive world of fashion.
It broke my heart when I saw him a year ago and learned he had colon cancer. My husband was battling brain cancer but we have been blessed with remission. That trip, I introduced him to my 16 yr old daughter. He
was doing just fine and teaching at Parsons. He gave Delia the grand tour.
We had the afternoon together, Morris fawning over my daughter, impressed with her knowledge of designers and fashion. Had Morris not gone into fashion, he could have had his own comic talk show… everything that he said made you smile or laugh til you pee-ed in your pants… then he would say” there she blows” and laugh even more with you.
I would have written this sooner, but I only just learned that Morris had past away. I had my fears when I called his home to tell him we were coming up to NY to visit NYU with Delia before dropping her off at a 5 wk summer program at Wesleyan University in CT. But His phone had been disconnected. His cell phone however was still working and is still working. I had hoped that he was in Paris and had just turned off the house phone. But then , today just to check, I passed by Parsons and inquired… Hence the lateness of this condolence and my rambling on.
Denise and family, If you ever come to NOLA, please look me up. we are in the book under Dorian Bennett. I’d love to share more of the parisian Morris I knew and adored so-ooo much. I will miss him .
Kell
March 19, 2010 at 12:11 am
I haven’t heard from certain friends for awhile so I decided to see if I could find them on the internet. Awhile back a letter to Morris Arrari had been returned as “undeliverable” My friend, Morris Arrari, was the first name I googled in an effort to re-connect.
I began reading this memorial and the recollections all sounded very familiar. Throughout my reading a part of me continued to be in disbelief; however, that disbelief faded when I saw the posted drawings of Morris Arrari. His drawings confirmed that I was reading the memorial of my dear, valued friend.
As stated, my letters to Morris had been returned by the post, I thought it was an error on my part with the zip code or a number written incorrectly. It was neither. His friends that have written previously said it all so well. Their writings opened a floodgate of wonderful memories. Im not sure where to begin; however, I will begin where my friendship with Morris began….
Paris, France the fall of 1979, while walking to my home. I took a shortcut through the Champ de Mars. while walking under the shadow of the Tour Eiffel, I was headed toward my small apt on Avenue de la Bourdannais in the 7th arrondissment of Paris. As I neared the Rue St. Dominique a conversation began with a fellow pedestrian and within minutes I discovered he was an American (or I should say a “New Yorker with Greek ancestry) living and working in the Paris fashion industry. I didn’t need to ask, he would later inform me, that he could tell from my walk and my costuming on this cold fall evening that I was an American in Paris. Within minutes I learned he had an encyclopedic memory along with a competitive nature. While walking, we challenged each other to naming the most “Motown” artist of the 1960’s. Morris won and and the gleam in his eye left me know that he was very proud of his accomplishment. He not only knew the names of the artist, but their hit songs, along with the words. To this day one song brings a smile to my face; it brought him to life. The song is Aretha Franklin’s, ” R-E-S-P-E-C-T”.
My friendship continued to grow throughout my time in Paris. Morris, as a friend, supported and appreciated my struggles as an artist studying mime in Paris. He would enjoy listening to my stories as a student of mime with Marcel Marceau and Ettienne Decroux. He encouraged me to follow my dream and many times he helped me to remain focused and clarify what that dream was. These conversations were not always easy.
As an artist Morris was always at work observing the world around him. He would talk of colors he observed in the market outside of his Rue St. Dominique loft. Throughout his home were small objects that he would find at flea markets, in stores, or though his travels. He saw beauty in objects that others may discard. Morris would take inanimate objects and give them new life in his drawings. He also found beauty, and provided guidance and support, to individuals that he sensed had talent as artists and also may have felt discarded. I was fortunate to be one of those people that Morris always found time for and always supported. Morris’ success in his art never made him forget his struggles and his beginnings as an artist. Morris was a successful in the world of high fashion:: however, he was first and foremost an “artist”.
During conversations he would share stories about learning his craft, his days in New York, his move to Paris. He would share stories of his travels and work with Lanvin, Dior, etc.;however, he would shine when he spoke of his friends and family, both were one to Morris. His friends were his family and his family were his friends. He had great value for both.
Most that knew Morris’ loft at rue St. Dominique may agree that its’ decor was functional. It was, like Morris, direct, unpretentious, unassuming, “to the point”. At his loft Morris would leave notes for his house cleaner, most of the time she would be maneuvering around his sketches. His directions to her would usually include making fresh rice pudding. On occasion, I would stop by and we would share some of that amazing rice pudding. Morris would remind me that he didn’t have much time, he was on his way to his advanced dance class. Morris was proud that he was in the advanced class and that the teacher would recognize him during class. We would discuss dance but I never needed to ask why a successful illustrator of fashion was taking dance. It is easy to see the influence of dance in Morris’ artwork; his art moves off of the page and goes beyond the confines of the paper. Morris’ artistic eye was always at work. As time passed Morris mounted a show of his own work in Paris. Friends were invited and it was an honor and a pleasure to support the realization of his dream in the manner that he had always done for me and many others.
Morris moved from Rue St. Dominique to his place in the 13th. It was a big move for him, but he was excited. He was moving toward a bigger,better and more exciting time in his life. I would miss him in the 7th but as time would have it I also moved to a different quartier of Paris and our friendship continued. We would visit each other, and keep in contact by phone. Every now and then we would still share a small bowl of rice pudding. His profession took him out of town as did mine. Morris’ friendship and support guided me from a starving artist to accomplishing a “one man show, onto choreographing national operas, work with well known directors, etc and my friend Morris was there to encourage, listen, or see it directly.
Prior to my leaving Paris in 1987 I informed my dear friend that I had been diagnosed with a life threatening illness. He, as always was caring and supportive. Since my departure I visited him upon my return. During that time we visited a new flea market that he had just discovered. After my departure we kept in touch with an occasional letter and or phone call.
The years pass quickly and the life scenarios that I imagined in my youth have changed with time. The direction that my life’s scenarios have taken me are not always what I had imagined. I had hoped to carry these valued friendships into my older years so that we could continue to share our life’s stories;however, I am saddened that the realty of this seems to be changing.
In hearing of Morris’ passing I am reminded again that my life scenario has changed once again. Although I will miss the presence of Morris Arrari, I am forever grateful for Morris Arrari being in my life. His presence made it so much richer.
My dear friend, Morris, Thank you for your kind support, your caring guidance, and your love.
God, thank you for bringing the friendship of Morris Arrari into my life.