Appreciations: Ray Bradbury’s Tale of Irish Halloween Terror, ‘Banshee’

“It was one of those nights, crossing Ireland, motoring through the sleeping towns from Dublin, where you came upon mist and encountered fog that blew away in rain to become a blowing silence. All the country was still and cold and waiting. It was a night for strange encounters at empty crossroads with great filaments of ghost spiderweb and no spider in a hundred miles. Gates creaked far across meadows, where windows rattled with brittle moonlight.

“It was, as they said, banshee weather. I sensed, I knew this as my taxi hummed through a final gate and I arrived at Courtown House, so far from Dublin that if it died in the night, no one would know.”—American novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), “Banshee,” originally published in Gallery, September 1984 issue, reprinted in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (2003)

I suspect that my readers will want to explore the rest of this story, based simply on this ominous opening by Ray Bradbury. But I came to the tale by a different route: from watching a few years ago a nearly 40-year-old adaptation on the cable TV series Ray Bradbury Theater.

As I noted in this blog post from August 2020, it struck me that the plot of the story—a meeting over a potential project between a meek screenwriter and a veteran Hollywood director—reenacted, in a fictional setting, the rocky collaboration between Bradbury and Hollywood legend John Huston over the 1956 adventure movie Moby-Dick. 

While preparing a recent talk on Huston, his daughter Anjelica and father Walter, I was struck anew by how this tale of Hibernian horror provided unexpected insights into his complex personality.

Bradbury came from America in 1953 to meet with Huston—first in London, then Dublin, and finally the Georgian manor outside the Irish capital that the director was renting.

Late in life, Huston complained that his reputation for sadistic dealings with film personnel stemmed from a single figure: Freud leading man Montgomery Clift, who, in this telling, had presumed on his host’s tolerance by engaging in a late-night encounter with another male guest at his Irish home.

Huston was gilding the lily, however. At least two other people who worked with him accused him of the same misbehavior, albeit under different circumstances.

Irish novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Edna O’Brien declined to speak to Huston biographer Jeffrey Meyers in significant detail about their work adapting A.E. Ellis’ novel The Rack. 

But a few years later, in her 2014 memoir Country Girl, she was more open, accusing Huston of insulting her screenplay as “half-baked rubbish” after praising it earlier in their discussions. Following a crying fit, she blurted out to Anjelica Huston that her father was “a terrible man, a cruel, dangerous man,” according to the actress’s A Story Lately Told.

O’Brien’s anger was so pronounced that she felt the need to vent twice in print. 

The first time was expressed more obliquely, in the title story of her 1990 collection Lantern Slides. Alluding several times to James Joyce’s novella “The Dead,” which Huston adapted into his final feature film, O’Brien depicted him as a dinner party latecomer called “Reggie,” “obviously a man of note” with “something of the quality of a panther.” 

For all his charm and attractiveness there is something ruthless about him, conveyed nowhere more devastatingly than when the female protagonist, “Miss Lawless,” discovers that he has been “chasing young girls, his wife hardly cold in the grave.”

That same callousness towards ex-lovers and prospective new ones becomes the principal count in Bradbury’s indictment of “John Hudson.” The author hinted far more bluntly than O’Brien had about the source of the character. 

Not only do the transparently “fictional” and real-life characters have similar-sounding surnames, but each is working on a film where the hero is “plowing the sea,” with wife and children off in a foreign land during the screenwriter’s visit. Even the locale of the meeting, “Courtown,” is the name of Huston’s home at the time.

The story is not merely “autofiction”—a genre in which the author and the protagonist are deeply similar but not identical—but more like an autofictional revenge story.

Bradbury, still smarting three decades later over Huston’s condescension and practical jokes at his expense, gave the director’s fictional counterpart a grisly end delivered, appropriately enough, by a ghost of one of the many women he seduced and dumped. 

(A “banshee,” for those unfamiliar with the term, is, according to Irish folklore, a female spirit whose wailing warns of an impending death.)

Ray Bradbury Theater lasted six seasons; this adaptation was the season one finale, indicating how close the author felt to this material.

Ironically, the TV version of “Banshee” starred Peter O’Toole, who had visited Huston’s estate when they both resided in Ireland’s County Galway. 

I’m not sure if Huston even heard about the episode in the year and a half between its airing and his death; his emphysema had grown so bad that he needed to be connected to an oxygen tank, so he might have been beyond caring about his portrayal by then. 

In contrast, Bradbury continued to care very much. Like O’Brien, his disenchantment with his former cinematic hero remained so intense that he needed to exorcise it a second time.

The title of his 1992 novel, Green Shadows, White Whale, echoes another roman a clef about a thirtysomething screenwriter’s creative tension with a director closely modeled on Huston, White Hunter, Black Heart.

(Jennifer Dale, pictured here, played the troubled, wailing supernatural spirit in "Banshee," while Charles Martin Smith was Bradbury's alter ego, the young, much-put-upon screenwriter Doug.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Mork and Mindy,’ With the Alien Considering a Feature of Urban Life)

Mork [played by Robin Williams]: “Why do they call it ‘rush hour’ when nothing moves?”—Mork and Mindy, Season 1, Episode 4, “Mork in Love,” original air date Oct. 5, 1978, teleplay by Lloyd Turner and Gordon Mitchell, directed by Harvey Medlinsky

Quote of the Day (Herman Melville, on ‘Human Madness’)

“Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.”—American novelist, short-story writer, and poet Herman Melville (1819-1891), Moby-Dick or, the Whale (1851)

In the novel Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab personified “human madness.” Gregory Peck, shown here, played the character in the 1956 film adaptation directed by John Huston.

This Day in CIA History (Frank Wisner, Former Ops Head, Kills Self)

Oct. 29, 1965— Frank Wisner, a workaholic former operations chief of the Central Intelligence Agency who directed multiple controversial covert activities in the early era of the Cold War, committed suicide at age 56 on the family farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

The death was the third in two decades of important figures who had shocked Washington by taking their own lives. In 1949, after being asked to resign as Defense Secretary by President Harry Truman, James Forrestal (whom I profiled in this prior post) had leaped from a window while under psychiatric care in Walter Reed Hospital. Philip Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, killed himself with a shotgun in 1963.

All three men suffered from severe depression, with Wisner and Graham now formally diagnosed as having bipolar disorder and Forrestal exhibiting behavior that has led to more recent diagnoses of delusional disorder or schizophrenia. 

The stress of being in a position of significant responsibility—and, sometimes, not measuring up to it—can result in feelings of worthlessness that lead to self-destructive behavior. Though, unlike Forrestal or Graham, he was little known to the general public, Wisner, by virtue of his leadership in the nuclear age, was as important a figure as either.

Mental illness was not the only tie among these three men. When the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime intelligence organization to which Wisner had belonged, was disbanded, Forrestal supported his lobbying effort for a replacement agency. Moreover, when Wisner, as head of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) authorized Operation Mockingbird in an alleged attempt to influence American and foreign media, he selected Graham to run the project.

These contacts with Forrestal and Graham were only a couple of examples of how Wisner organized a network of mentors, friends, and proteges to further his intelligence activities.

I first became aware of these “global salvationists” intent on countering international Communist influence in Burton Hersh’s 1992 account, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, which examined him in relation to Eisenhower cold warriors John Foster Dulles and younger brother Allen; legendary OSS chief ``Wild Bill'' Donovan; New Deal diplomat William C. Bullitt; and Carmel Offie, the dandyish assistant to Bullitt and Wisner.

Later, in the 1990s, Evan Thomas, in The Very Best Men, changed the focus to how Wisner interacted with colleagues Richard Bissell, Tracy Barnes, and Desmond FitzGerald in the CIA's formative period up to the Vietnam War.

These and other government officials, politicians, and journalists formed part of an elite “Georgetown social set” that, according to Thomas, “shared the same social background, the same ideals, and the same confidence in America’s role in the world.” Perhaps none embodied its aggressiveness and risk-taking quite like Wisner.

The key event in his career occurred towards the end of World War II, when, while stationed in Bucharest in the fall of 1944, he warned his OSS superiors that the Soviets were taking over Romania. 

Haunted by his failure to prevent this early maneuver in the campaign to pull Eastern Europe into the Soviet sphere of influence, Wisner was determined to combat the regime’s infiltration at every turn, there and elsewhere around the world, a far-flung set of espionage and psychological warfare operations that became known as “Wisner’s Wurlitzer.”

With little to no American experience with spycraft before WWII, Presidents of both parties had no record for assessing what worked and what wouldn’t. Two of the more audacious CIA activities sanctioned by Wisner—coups against elected leaders orchestrated in Iran and Guatemala—were initially deemed successful in that they toppled regimes deemed friendly to the Soviets.

Within a quarter century, however, policymakers were grappling with the consequences of the coups: mistrust about American motives throughout Latin America, and in Iran, a revolution that put in power the Ayatollah Khomeini’s hostile theocratic regime.

In Eastern Europe, Wisner was willing to accept ex-Nazis if they would help strike back against the USSR. CIA backing of dissidents within the Eastern bloc could not dislodge the Soviets, however, and the crushed 1956 Hungarian revolution only fed Wisner’s frustration and guilt over encouraging it with propaganda without US military backing.

In December 1956, Wisner suffered a nervous breakdown that several friends attributed to the failed uprising. Psychoanalysis and electroconvulsive treatment were not enough to alleviate his condition.

With access to Wisner’s medical records provided by his children, Douglas Waller contends in the biography The Determined Spy that the spymaster’s mental illness predated any malaise he may have felt about being transferred from Langley to a less consequential London posting. That’s surely true, but the ambitious Wisner’s sense that he was being placed on the shelf surely didn’t help his frame of mind.

Wisner retired in 1962 from the agency to which he had brought his unflagging energy and willingness to push against legal and ethical norms to bring down the Soviets. A lucrative consulting business over the next three years did little to assuage his growing anguish, until he borrowed a shotgun from one of his sons and killed himself.

Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on the Bad and Good Sides of Technology)

“It is only recently, however, that we have, as a nation, begun to see that man’s mind is no more made for technology than is his body, and that, conversely, technology is valuable only in so far as it helps men to cultivate sanity and goodness as well as bodily health. Moreover, we now begin to suspect that many technological advances regarded as wholly beneficial may have their bad as well as good side. For example, technicians have made possible the multiplication of many kinds of novel amusements and distractions, from the modern newspaper to television. People enjoy these distractions. But that does not mean that they are, humanly speaking, altogether good. People also enjoy hashish and opium, when these are made available. It seems possible that we are paying a heavy spiritual price for our new-found amusements.” — English novelist/essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), “If We Survive,” March 16, 1936, in Between the Wars: Essays and Letters, edited by David Bradshaw (1994)

One can only imagine what Huxley’s comments would be today about modern civilization’s increasing reliance on the automobile, social media, robots and AI.

Quote of the Day (Steve Hely, Imagining Ghostwriting College Essays for Rich American Teens)

“They'd send you something about how Anchorman or the golf team had changed their lives. I'd polish it up, change Will Ferrell to Toni Morrison, and golf to learning woodworking from a Darfur refugee.”—American novelist, TV writer-producer, and podcaster Steve Hely, How I Became a Famous Novelist (2009)

Quote of the Day (Fran Lebowitz, on Her Urban Instincts)

“To put it bluntly, I am not the type of person who wants to go back to the land; I am the person of person who wants to go back to the hotel.”—American humorist and actor Fran Lebowitz, Social Studies (1981)

With Nora Ephron gone, the closest thing our time may have to the wit Dorothy Parker might be Fran Lebowitz—and, like Parker, though Lebowitz made her reputation in New York, she was born across the Hudson River—in Morristown, NJ, 75 years ago today, to be exact.

Unlike Parker or Ephron, Ms. Lebowitz has not gone to Hollywood as a screenwriter. In fact, she’s not written anything remotely substantial since the 1990s.

Still, she would dispute any notion that the phrase “writer's block” applies to her, though not for the reason you may think: 

“I would not call it a writer's block,” she has said. “A writer's block to me is a temporary thing. A month, you know, six weeks. This was more a writer's blockade.”

Until she breaks this "blockade," fans will have to make do with the two essay collections Lebowitz published 40 to 50 years ago, Metropolitan Life and Social Studies; view Martin Scorsese’s documentary about her from four years ago, Pretend It’s A City; and watch out for occasional interviews over the years in which she engages in hilarious venting and kvetching with all manner of opinions.

Song Lyric of the Day (Green Day, on Time and Making 'The Best of This Test’)

“Time grabs you by the wrist
Directs you where to go
So make the best of this test
And don't ask why.”— Billie Joe Armstrong, "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)," performed by alternative-rock band Green Day from its album Nimrod (1997)
 
The image accompanying this post, of Green Day performing in Caracas, Venezuela in October 2010, was posted May 12, 2012, by Ed Vill.

Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare, Valuing Virtue Over Vengeance)

“Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th' quick,
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part. The rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance.” —English playwright-poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Tempest (1611)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Book of Job, on the Power of God)

“How you have helped one who has no power!
    How you have assisted the arm that has no strength!”—Job 26:2 (New Revised Standard Version—Catholic Edition)
 
The image accompanying this post, Job Restored to Prosperity, was created in 1648 by the French Baroque painter Laurent de La Hyre (1606–1656).

Quote of the Day (Megan Marshall, on Academic Fiction)

“After so many years of reading about them, fictional college professors have come to seem like family to me. I'm not…a member of their ranks, but I do retain a college student's fascination with what goes on behind the scenes, not unlike the curiosity children feel about what their parents may be doing when they’re not around. These books also explore sex—usually adulterous sex—and driving intellectual ambition, as in our American ‘ur-narrative,’ [Nathaniel Hawthorne’s] Fanshawe. But books about professors are novels of middle age, and their consolations are those of midlife: redemption and reconciliation. The college student has grown up to be a professor, and life, though not lacking in complexity, can be good after all.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning American scholar and biographer Megan Marshall, “Academic Discourse and Adulterous Intercourse,” The Atlantic Monthly, Fiction Issue 2006

TV Quote of the Day (‘Seinfeld,’ As George Discovers What Jerry’s Girlfriend Thinks of Him)

George Costanza [played by Jason Alexander]: “What did Jodi say?”

Jerry [played by Jerry Seinfeld]: “She had a good time.”

George: “Is that it?”

Jerry: “Pretty much.”

George: “Did she say anything about, uh...”

Jerry: “What?”

George: “Nah. It's all right. Great! She had a good time.”

Jerry: “Yeah.” (A so-so yeah as he sips coffee)

George: “You just hesitated.”

Jerry: “I was blowing on the coffee.”

George: “She didn't like me?”

Jerry: “Look, it's not like you're gonna be spending a lot of time with her.”

George: “So she doesn't like me?”

Jerry: “No.”

George: “She said that?”

Jerry: “Yes.”

George: “She told you she doesn't like me!”

Jerry: “Yes.”

George: “What were her exact—"

Jerry: "‘I don't like him.’"

George: “Uh-Huh.” (gulp) “Why didn't she like me?”

Jerry: “Not everybody likes everybody!”

George: “I tried to be nice. I wasn't nice?”

Jerry: “You were very nice!”

George: “I bent over backwards for that woman! Is it that thing I said about her sister?”

Jerry: “It has nothing to do with her sister.”

George: “I don't even know her sister but believe me, if she's getting traffic tickets, she's not that good-looking!”— Seinfeld, Season 5, Episode 9, “The Masseuse,” original air date Nov. 18, 1993, teleplay by Peter Mehlman, directed by Tom Cherones

Quote of the Day (Stephen King, on ‘The Evil That Men Do’)

“I think it's relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is unsettling.”—American horror-fiction writer Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot (1975)

Evil can live on in politics, as well as among the undead.

Quote of the Day (Joseph Conrad, on Youth, ‘The Feeling That Will Never Come Back Anymore’)

“I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back anymore—the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon, too soon—before life itself.”— Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), “Youth: A Narrative,” originally published in Blackwood’s Magazine (1898), republished in Youth, A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (1902)

Photo of the Day: All-Out for Halloween, in a Big Way

Over the last 30 to 40 years, Halloween decorations have increasingly filled the lawns where I live in Northern New Jersey. It’s been a way for baby boomers Gen Xers (and, I guess now, Millennials and Gen Z) to relive their childhoods, and on a scale that their budget-conscious ancestors, after being raised during the Great Depression, would never have dreamed of embracing.

Recently I took this photo several miles from my home. What you see here is only half of all of the figures on the lawn and front porch of this suburban house.

Nor does this photo convey the sounds coming from this ghoulish assembly. Just passing on  the street—not even stepping on the lawn—is enough to elicit the witch on the right-hand side, for instance, to cackle, “Lost your way? Don’t be afraid—I’ll show you! Heee-heee-haaa-haaa!”

This year, Halloween splurging on decorations, masks, makeup, costumes, and candy has continued, despite the threat of tariffs. According to the National Retail Federation, Halloween spending is expected to reach $13.1 billion this year, breaking its prior record of $12.2 billion.

Omar Villafranca’s CBS News report from a month ago indicates that consumers are hitting discount stores and merchants are absorbing as many of the tariff costs (5% to 19% on costumes manufactured overseas) as possible, but there’s only so much they can do. A fog machine sold by a Fort Worth merchant mentioned in the article, for instance, sold for $58 last year but $74 now.

And chocolate candy? The price of the cocoa used for this has more than doubled since the beginning of 2024, a casualty of changing weather patterns (heavy rains followed by El Nino-induced droughts leading to black pod disease and crop rot, according to a USA Today report earlier this month by Betty Lin-Fisher and Carlie Procell).

Quote of the Day (Sherri Shepherd, About First Working With Tracy Morgan on ’30 Rock’)

“When they picked me up, I had just had ten White Castle cheeseburgers and was really bloated and self-conscious. The first scene was supposed to be me in lingerie during our honeymoon — I called wardrobe, and they really worked with me. Tracy Morgan scared the crap out of me because I had never met with him before. When I walked in, the first thing he said to me was, ‘I like you. I’m going to get you pregnant.’ I was like, I thought that was just a line — you’re serious! He was very flirtatious and fun and weird. We both lived in the Trump building on 60th, and he had a shark tank in his apartment that he was not supposed to have — the guy who played Grizz had given it to him as a gift. One day, the lightbulb exploded, water came down, and all of a sudden it was like Mount Vesuvius in my apartment. I grabbed my wigs, I grabbed some clothes, and I grabbed my son, Jeffrey, all in that order.”— American actress, comedian, author, podcaster, and television personality Sherri Shepherd quoted by Shamira Ibrahim, “The People’s Bestie,” New York Magazine, Sept. 22-Oct. 5, 2025

The image of Sherri Shepherd accompanying this post was taken at the first anniversary celebration for "Hell's Kitchen" on Broadway, Apr. 9, 2025

Quote of the Day (Jane Goodall, on Disregarding Advice About Animals)

“When I started out I was told animals needed numbers not names, that mind, personality and emotion were unique to humanity. To me, this was so obviously not the case. A fact anyone with a pet could attest to.”— English primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall (1934-2025) quoted by Michael Segalov, “Interview: Jane Goodall: ‘People are Surprised I Have a Wicked Sense of Humour,’” The Guardian (UK), Feb. 18, 2023

The image accompanying this post, of Jane Goodall visiting the United States Mission Uganda, was taken Apr. 4, 2022, by the United States Mission Uganda.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Tonight Show,’ With Steve Allen As ‘The Great Swami’)

Announcer [played by Gene Rayburn]: “My husband passed away twenty-five years ago. But when I go into the living room, I can still see him sitting there by the fire. What should I do?”

The Great Swami Allen [played by Steve Allen]: “Bury him.”— Tonight Show skit by Steve Allen quoted in Ben Alba, Inventing Late Night: Steve Allen and the Original Tonight Show (2005)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Tom Holland, on the Bible)

“A history of the Bible…cannot just be a history of intellectuals. Its impact is immeasurable precisely because it was felt by soldiers as well as by scholars, and by down-and-outs as well as by dons. It is a book that has, over the millennia, inspired revolts and grandiose schemes of revolution and wars and pogroms and expeditions to different continents.” — English novelist, popular historian, and podcaster Tom Holland, “In the Beginning Was the Word,” The Financial Times, Apr. 13-14, 2019

Quote of the Day (Stephen King, on ‘The Best Men’ in 2025)

“In the year 2025, the best men don't run for president, they run for their lives.”—American novelist Stephen King (under the pseudonym Richard Bachman), The Running Man (1982)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Prizzi’s Honor,’ on a Hit Man’s Head-Scratcher)

[Charley is telling former girlfriend Maerose about new love Irene Walker.]

Charley Partanna [played by Jack Nicholson]: “I met her in a church. It just happened. I knew she was the woman for me. She'd organized the scam in Vegas. I go looking for the bad guy and it turns out to be my woman, can you imagine this? Not only that—Pop tells me she's the piece man for the Nettabino contract. Just the same, I love her, Mae... I love her.”

Maerose Prizzi [played by Anjelica Huston]: “Well...”

Charley: “How can I live with this? I gotta do something about it. I gotta straighten it out.”

Maerose: “Then do.”

Charley: “Do what? Do I ice her? Do I marry her? Which one of these?”— Prizzi’s Honor (1985), screenplay by Richard Condon and Janet Roach, adapted from the novel by Richard Condon, directed by John Huston

Quote of the Day (Honore de Balzac, on Hobbies)

“A man who has no hobby does not know all the good to be got out of life. A hobby is the happy medium between a passion and a monomania.”— French novelist Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), “La Grande Breteche,” in Scenes From Private Life (1830)

Quote of the Day (Robert Frost, on Acceptance)

“Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be be.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963), “Acceptance,” in West-Running Brook (1928)

Quote of the Day (William Boyd, on How ‘Novelists Are a Bit Like Spies’)

“Novelists are a bit like spies in the sense that we look at the world with the same kind of forensic attention. Not because we think somebody might be following us or because we’ve given away some secret, but because we’re interested. And so you notice that your neighbor has changed her hairstyle three times in the last month, just as a spy notices the same car has been parked outside for three days.”— British novelist, short story writer, screenwriter and film director William Boyd, quoted by Christian House, “Novelists Are Like Spies,” Financial Times, Sept. 6-7, 2025

The image accompanying this post, of William Boyd, was taken on Feb. 22, 2009, by Michael Fennell.

Quote of the Day (Diane Keaton, on Her Transformative Acting Moment)

“There was no discussion with my parents on the night I sang ‘Mata Hari’ in our Santa Ana High School production of the musical Little Mary Sunshine. Under the direction of our drama teacher, Mr. Robert Leasing, the production was worthy of Broadway—at least I thought so. I was Nancy Twinkle, the second lead, who loves to flirt with men. In my big number, ‘Mata Hari,’ I ran around the stage singing about the famous double agent ‘who would spy and get her data by doing this and that-a,’ ending with a grand finale featuring me sliding down a rope into the orchestra pit. That was when I heard the explosion. It came from the audience. It was applause. When Mom and Dad found me backstage, their faces were beaming. Dad had tears in his eyes. I’d never seen him so excited…. I could tell he was startled by his awkward daughter—the one who’d flunked algebra, smashed into his new Ford station wagon with the old Buick station wagon, and spent a half hour in the bathroom using up a whole can of Helene Curtis hairspray. For one thrilling moment, I was his Seabiscuit, Audrey Hepburn, and Wonder Woman rolled into one. I was his heroine.”—Academy Award-winning actress Diane Keaton (1946-2025), Then Again (2011)

Why did the passing of Diane Keaton over the weekend sadden me the way it did? It shouldn’t have. At age 79, she was at the leading edge of the baby boom, the demographic to which I belong—one that, even among friends and relatives, never mind celebrities, has faced mortality, leaving those of us left behind pondering the losses.

In her memoir Then Again, Keaton herself reflected with rueful irony on the famous people she met whose aging surprised her, notably Audrey Hepburn at the 1977 Academy Awards: “Backstage, I pretended to listen to her words, but in truth I couldn’t get my mind off age and what it does to a person.”

Maybe I was so stunned by the news of Keaton’s death—and why she was, too, by seeing Hepburn in person, two decades after she burst onto the screen—because of the nature of her medium.

If movie actors are lucky and they don’t mind transitioning into character roles, they can continue to work even after gray hairs and wrinkles become impossible to ignore. Yet it remains the case that, unlike the stage, film preserves their early appearances, when they are young, vibrant and luminous.

Maybe that’s why, for today’s “Quote of the Day,” I decided to concentrate not on Keaton’s thoughts on growing older, but on her early days—even before she was a professional.

Her “Eureka” moment in high school, I think, epitomizes what convinces so many actors to pursue this as a calling, no matter how many discouraging experiences they may subsequently have. It’s the same kind of thunderstruck realization that animates the finest show-business memoir I know, playwright Moss Hart’s Act One.

In Keaton’s case, the applause she heard from an audience enabled her to triumph over her awkwardness by incorporating it into her persona and making it endearing, the way she would more than a decade later as Annie Hall—and inspire a moment of pride in her family that would only increase with the years.

TV Quote of the Day (‘All in the Family,’ With a Difference of Opinion on Singing)

Cousin Maude [played by Bea Arthur] [after Maude sings loudly to wake everybody up]: “Are you waiting for a special invitation? I said breakfast is on the table.”

Archie Bunker [played by Carroll O’Connor]: “I heard ya. So did every moose up in Canada.”—All in the Family, Season 2, Episode 12, “Cousin Maude’s Visit,” original air date Dec. 11, 1971, teleplay by Phil Mishkin, Michael Ross, and Bernie West, directed by John Rich

This Day in Theater History (George Kelly Reaches Career Peak With ‘Craig’s Wife')

Oct. 12, 1925—After years of developing his craft from vaudeville skits to full-length comedies, playwright-director George Kelly triumphed in the next stage of his evolution as a playwright-director with Craig’s Wife.

The drama opened at Broadway’s Morosco Theatre in the first of 360 performances, staged by Kelly himself. And, in what many observers believed was a consolation prize for being bypassed the prior year, Columbia University awarded him the highest prize in American theater, the Pulitzer Prize, midway through its run.

Coming on the heels of his prior Broadway success, the comedy The Show-Off, Kelly should have been able to look forward to additional adoring audiences. But, at age 38, he would never create another hit. When he died 50 years later, he was all but forgotten—a fate that largely continues to this day. (Many familiar with the life story of Grace Kelly know that she made her professional acting debut at age 19 in her uncle's satire, The Torch-Bearers.)

In a post from last spring, I wrote about the 1936 film adaptation of this domestic drama, starring Rosalind Russell. I intend to write yet another post, on the 1950 remake starring Joan Crawford, later this year.

But the play itself is little seen these days. Even a couple of other plays by Kelly, Philip Goes Forth and The Fatal Weakness, have been mounted in the late dozen years by the estimable Off-Broadway troupe The Mint Theater.

Why did Kelly fall off his high place in American theater?

*Audiences rejected his continued turn toward drama. Kelly’s next three plays, Daisy Mayme, Behold the Bridegroom, and Maggie the Magnificent, flopped. Even before the Great Depression ensued, audiences preferred his comedies.

*Changing times brought changing audience and critical tastes. Once Kelly returned to comedy in 1931 with Philip Goes Forth, theatergoers were more open to plays by the likes of Clifford Odets that addressed the multiple crises affecting the nation. Kelly decamped for remunerative but unsatisfying work in Hollywood as a screenwriter. When he returned to Broadway later in the Thirties and Forties, he continued to work in the vein of the character-driven, “well-made play” tradition, at a time when younger playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller were experimenting with different stage forms.

*His economic and social conservatism left him out of sync with the times. Kelly despised the New Deal and regarded the politically progressive Group Theater as faddish. A deeply religious Roman Catholic, he was similarly dismissive of psychology and the greater sexual frankness associated with Williams and William Inge.

*He had rigid views of how his plays should be staged. Kelly insisted not only that he direct his own plays but that actors interpret his lines exactly as he dictated them. This did not allow for much in the way of innovation or in allowing the introduction of collaborators who could approach his work with a fresh eye.

*In particular, “Craig’s Wife” is often regarded as misogynistic. The title character of Kelly’s most honored work made a fetish of her home, to such an extent that it destroyed her marriage and left her isolated at the play’s end. The 1936 film version introduced elements that would motivate her unrelenting materialism, but these are largely absent from the play itself.

*He had no interest whatsoever in promoting himself. It wasn’t only that Kelly felt that his work should speak for itself, but he desired to maintain his private life. Not only would there be no interviews during his career, but, with the destruction of nearly all his personal papers a few years before his death, no opportunity for a posthumous biography that might intrigue readers with previously guarded secrets. In the years since Kelly’s death in 1974, it has become increasingly believed that those “secrets” related to his sexual orientation. A lifelong bachelor, Kelly introduced William Eldon Weagley as his “valet,” even to his Philadelphia-based siblings, but their 55-year relationship strongly suggests that the playwright was gay.

Quote of the Day (Sally Jenkins, on What Sports Can Teach)

“These are the elements of a good process for anyone who wants to choose and act well in the face of extraordinary pressures: Conditioning, Practice, Discipline, Candor, Culture, Failure, Intention.”—American sportswriter Sally Jenkins, The Right Call: What Sports Teach Us About Work and Life (2023)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Bryan Mealer, on the Need for ‘A New Social Gospel’)

“To defeat hatred and creeping fascism and begin the healing of this nation, we—all Americans—need a new social gospel, and not just one that makes liberals feel comfortable. It is a gospel forged from the rubble, and it must include everyone. It will be messy and painful, and we must push forward even when our friends ask us, 'What’s the point?' When they ask us, 'How can you speak to those people?' Our big tent must shine like a light unto the world, and it must be a home to all—Republicans and Democrats, Jews and Romans, even to the demons that fly out from the debris."— American journalist and author Bryan Mealer, “The Struggle for a New American Gospel,” The New Republic, October 2018

The accompanying picture of Bryan Mealer was taken on Jan. 23, 2024, by NolanM77283.

Quote of the Day (Megan Abbott, on ‘The Boredom of Teenage Girls’)

“There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.”—American novelist and screenwriter Megan Abbott, Dare Me (2012)

Something to keep in mind as the school year kicks in: the season of Mean Girls.

Quote of the Day (P. G. Wodehouse, on an Unfortunate Outcome of Lion Hunting)

“It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't.”— English humorist P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975), Ring for Jeeves (1953)

The image accompanying this post, of a lion in Nairobi, Kenya (looking anything but dead), was taken on Aug. 17, 2017, by Antony Trivet.

Quote of the Day (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Offering the First Glimpse of Her Monster)

“Last Monday (July 31st) we were nearly surrounded by ice, which closed in the ship on all sides, scarcely leaving her the sea-room in which she floated. Our situation was somewhat dangerous, especially as we were compassed round by a very thick fog. We accordingly lay to, hoping that some change would take place in the atmosphere and weather.

“About two o’clock the mist cleared away, and we beheld, stretched out in every direction, vast and irregular plains of ice, which seemed to have no end. Some of my comrades groaned, and my own mind began to grow watchful with anxious thoughts, when a strange sight suddenly attracted our attention and diverted our solicitude from our own situation. We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the north, at the distance of half a mile; a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge and guided the dogs. We watched the rapid progress of the traveller with our telescopes until he was lost among the distant inequalities of the ice.” — English novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851), Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

A few weeks ago I attended a lecture on Frankenstein that highlighted the opening section of the novel, from which this passage is taken—a set of letters from the explorer Robert Walton to his sister. His epic ambition—to discover the North Pole, in an age when ice and extreme cold posed mortal danger—anticipates that of Victor Frankenstein, a nearly frozen scientist he picks up in these barren arctic wastes.

In the grip of “the dark tyranny of despair,” Frankenstein warns against this quest for the glory accruing to scientific discovery: “You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been.”

The “shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature” is the rejected creation who has brought Frankenstein untold misery. The glimpse that Walton’s crew has of him here is elusive, to be filled in by the extended account that Frankenstein is about to offer the explorer.

Walton’s “frame story” (or, to use a term from one of my college English classes some years ago about Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw,” an “envelope story”) was not included in the classic 1931 adaptation of the novel starring Boris Karloff as the monster. Despite its many faults, the 1994 remake (from which the accompanying image was taken), starring Robert DeNiro as the Creature and Kenneth Branagh as Victor, did include this narrative device.

It will be interesting to see if Guillermo del Toro’s version (in limited release next week) will do likewise. I hope so, because it reinforces a lesson relevant to our time: that heedless pursuit of scientific knowledge might produce unexpected and unwelcome consequences.