Quote of the Day (Alfred North Whitehead, on ‘The Art of Progress’)

“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.”—English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

Flashback, June 1961: Elvis Flops on Film, Flies in Studio

As June 1961 moved towards its conclusion, Elvis Presley and manager “Colonel” Tom Parker tried to recover from a rare career misstep by the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Earlier in the month, the latest Elvis movie, Wild in the Country, had divided critics while leaving loyal fans in little to no doubt about its lack of value. 

Not only was it his only film to lose money during its initial release, but the title song, rushed out to boost its prospects, only peaked at #26 on the US Billboard Hot 100—hardly up to his lofty commercial standards.

It all turned around on a long session at RCA Studio B in Nashville. True Elvis fans might enjoy “Kiss Me Quick,” “That’s Someone You Never Forget,” and “I’m Yours,” but the two that scored solidly with the public were “(Marie’s The Name) His Latest Flame” and “Little Sister,” which were released as a double single.

Both tunes came from the songwriting team of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. The duo, who managed to get hold of his attention in 1959 by sending a demo for “A Mess of Blues” while still on his Army stint in Germany, went on to write 16 songs for The King. Amazingly, though, they never met the singer who turned their compositions into hits.

Elvis tweaked “Little Sister” slightly, cutting the tempo in half and slowing it down, according to Paul Simpson’s The Rough Guide to Elvis. By the third take, he liked the groove so much that he told his backup musicians to “burn” on the next take. 

That was the one that turned out to be a keeper, confirming Pomus’ hunch that, while Bobby Darin had decided it wasn’t for him, it would be the kind of nasty blues that Elvis did so well.

“His Latest Flame” proved a harder nut to crack. Elvis and his musicians were floundering in the studio, uncertain how to proceed. 

None of the attempts to start it on different instruments seemed to click, until someone called Pomus to see what he would play the piano portion. The songwriter was surprised to hear that his intro was three bars long rather than four.

From that realization sprang the eventual solution: a Latin flavor with a Bo Diddley beat. Tom Petty, asked by Rolling Stone Magazine for the Elvis tunes that most influenced him, described how this one came together from what originally had been “kind of a mess”:

“An acoustic guitar and a snare drum played with brushes carry the rhythm, but when the six-string bass comes in and the piano goes up to the high register, the whole thing jumps out of the speaker.”

I don’t have the technical knowledge to explain this process remotely as well as Petty did. All I know is that I never grow tired of hearing this, and it is easily among my half-dozen favorite songs by The King.

(Five of those musicians, by the way, were participating at the same time and in the same RCA studio in another recording session of a classic: Roy Orbison’s “Cryin’.” Talk about catching lightning in a bottle!)

Technically, Presley’s was a cover version of this Pomus-Shuman composition: Del Shannon had already released it as a single and cut from his debut album, Runaway With Del Shannon. 

But Presley’s interpretation is the one that, more likely than not, you’ll hear on your favorite oldies station, because once the “His Latest Flame/Little Sister” double single was released in August, it shot into the top 5 in the Billboard charts and all the way up to #1 in the UK.

The following year, Elvis lured his fans back to the movies with Blue Hawaii, another formulaic profit-maker that generated additional soundtrack sales. By now, he was tiring of plots that sidetracked him from his ambition to become another James Dean.

But he felt no such ambivalence about “His Latest Flame.” Even while making it, he noted, “It’s a good song. I like it even if it takes us 32 hours.” He had no reason to revise that opinion in the years to come.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Murder by Death,’ With a Character Who Resembles His Actor)

Lionel Twain [played by Truman Capote, pictured]: “That drives me crazy!”

Sam Diamond [played by Peter Falk]: “Sounds like a short ride to me.”— Murder by Death (1976), screenplay by Neil Simon, directed by Robert Moore

The murder mystery spoof Murder by Death premiered 50 years ago today, featuring a cast of highly accomplished film veterans like David Niven, Maggie Smith, Peter Falk, Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, Elsa Lanchester, and James Coco.

But wouldn’t you know it, a mere tyro caught most of the attention of the public: In Cold Blood author Truman Capote, in the only film where he played someone other than himself. (He provided voiceover narration of his stories “The Thanksgiving Visitor” and “A Christmas Memory,” and played the Capote look-alike in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall.)

I bet that you were as surprised as I was to learn that for his performance, Capote was nominated for a Golden Globe in Best Acting Debut in a Motion Picture. But remember, these were the awards that notoriously handed Pia Zadora a statuette as “New Star of the Year” for the 1982 bomb Butterfly. In other words, you have to wonder which Hollywood powerbroker influenced such ridiculous recognition.

I doubt that Neil Simon thought that Capote turned in a noteworthy performance, though I have read a couple of versions of his reaction. When interviewed for George Plimpton’s 1997 oral biography Truman Capote, the playwright-screenwriter, while admitting that hiring the author was more producer Ray Stark’s idea than his own, said that he “had no problem with him.”

Well, except for two: Capote was “very ill at ease with the dialogue” and “didn’t know how to move,” as he was always looking for his marks.

On the other hand, in commentary for a 1999 DVD release of the movie, Simon said he and director Robert Moore wanted to replace Capote as Lionel Twain, the rich eccentric who invites the world’s greatest detectives to his home for a contest to solve a murder. In the end, that desire didn’t come to pass.

Two rather different reactions, as I say. But when you think about it, both were united in one belief: Capote was making mistakes that professional actors would not have committed, and it was deeply frustrating.

Besides lack of experience, there was another reason why the creators of Murder by Death should have thought better of hiring Capote in the first place: he was already well along in the drink-and-pills spiral that led to his death by liver cancer in 1984.

A couple of years before, he had been in such terrible condition when commissioned to write the screenplay for The Great Gatsby remake that he had to be replaced before he could finish. Gossip spreads fast in Hollywood, and nobody involved with Murder by Death should have been surprised that he would be a handful.

Flashback, June 2001: Early Alarm Sounds About Enron

John Olson (pictured) is not a well-known name, but when he died a few weeks ago, this retired energy analyst was remembered in obituaries for his warning 25 years ago this month about one hot stock—which the object of his skepticism tried to tamp down.

Too bad that others didn’t perform proper due diligence on Enron, which six months later collapsed, in the largest bankruptcy filing to that point in U.S. corporate history.

The initial outsized expectations about Enron’s stock reminded me of a phrase coined by the otherwise colorless former Fed chair Alan Greenspan (who also died this month): “irrational exuberance.” Though Greenspan was discussing speculative market bubbles as a group, I think it applies just as much, maybe even more so, to individual stocks today.

Take a bow, Elon Musk.

You heard about that guy, right? World’s richest person. World’s first trillionaire, courtesy of a very generous compensation plan approved by shareholders of his company, Tesla.

More about him in a minute. But first, a refresher on Enron:

Through much of the Nineties, Enron was a Wall Street darling for advancing from a natural-gas provider to an energy-trading colossus. It reported incredible returns, reaching $90.75 per share on August 23, 2000 with a market capitalization of more than $70 billion, making it the seventh-largest publicly traded corporation in the U.S.

Who wouldn’t want to invest after a management guru like Gary Hamel had praised it for creating “a capacity for perpetual innovation” with an organization consisting of “potential revolutionaries”? Even pundits across the political spectrum like Bill Kristol and Paul Krugman took fees to serve on the company’s advisory committee.

Wall Street was particularly enamored of Enron head Kenneth Lay, a corporate leader used to being listened to. That respect derived not only from the eye-popping numbers he produced but from his cozy relationship with George W. Bush, a rising politico so grateful for the $122,500 contributed to his Texas gubernatorial campaigns that he nicknamed the gray-haired businessman “Kenny Boy.”

In March 2001, Lay and his successor as Enron president, Jeffrey Skilling, were annoyed when a young financial journalist, Bethany McLean, wondering how the company made its money, asked, in a Fortune Magazine article, if Enron was overpriced.

But they really grew incensed when Olson—a local analyst with long experience monitoring the energy industry—told U.S. News and World Report three months later that Enron was "not very forthcoming about how they make their money" and said no "analyst worth his salt . . . can seriously analyze Enron."

Olson chuckled over a misspelled handwritten note that Lay dashed off to his boss in the wake of that interview. The analyst’s equanimity was justified: other observers were soon pursuing the hard questions that he and MacLean had posed about Enron’s operations.

By year’s end, it had all unraveled in a massive bankruptcy and corporate scandal. In May 2006, Lay and Skilling were convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges.

So now you may be wondering, how could Lay possibly relate to Elon Musk?

Some of you reading this might see my eyebrow lifted derisively in his direction because of my distaste for his involvement with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the behest of Donald Trump.

Or you might argue that, unlike Enron, Musk built something that can be seen—rockets, an AI startup fueling data centers, and, through Tesla, the EV, the most significant contribution to the American auto industry since Henry Ford’s assembly line.

You can even accept (as analyst Jeff Sommer does here, before swatting it down) that Tesla can build a successful colony on Mars and reap a bonanza from its military contracts.

But there’s a simpler yardstick for measuring how close Musk comes to the now-infamous Kenneth Lay: What did his prior financial reports promise investors, and did he achieve those goals?

That’s where matters become slippery. A New York Times analysis from earlier this month found that Musk was late or did not deliver on his company deadlines roughly 35 percent of the time. In 33 percent of his more than 600 claims, his companies did not provide a public update—or the plans were too vague to know if he succeeded.

And five years ago, Consumer Reports compiled a telling timeline of his continuous claims that Tesla models would shortly become fully autonomous, along with deaths of people who accepted these assurances that turned out to be—well, let’s just say premature.

In other words, if Musk were a musical, it would be Promises, Promises.

Unlike with Enron, nobody has yet proven that Tesla’s accounting practices are fraudulent. But it would be enormously difficult to decipher even if anyone tried to do so. Now with Vanity Fair, Bethany MacLean has questioned the ethics and governance behind his complicated 2019 acquisition of Solar City.

Testifying before Congress in 2002, Olson cautioned that “It is axiomatic on Wall Street that if a stock price is rising arithmetically, management egos tend to rise exponentially.”

That was the case as Lay pressured editors and analysts for better press coverage, and maybe even more so with Musk. He was only half-joking when he said, while hosting Saturday Night Live in 2021, “To anyone I’ve offended, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”

Put that together with his use of ketamine, a dissociative drug, and you’ll understand why in The Atlantic last year, Shayla Love wrote that Musk’s “cognitive and psychological health is of concern not only to shareholders of his companies’ stocks but to all Americans.”

One last resemblance between Lay and Musk: each backed a successful candidate who then followed through on the ballyhooed businessman’s policy prescriptions. Lay, for instance, influenced Bush’s gubernatorial policies on electricity deregulation, taxes and tort reform.

Musk’s Presidential beneficiary-patron has permitted him even more latitude. Past robber barons were content to bribe and sway officeholders, but in taking his position with DOGE, Musk joined the government, if briefly.

That takeover was so swift and audacious that observers could hardly rouse themselves to ask if self-interest might be the principal reason for his lightning strike against the agencies that regulated his enterprises. Were he alive today, Kenny Boy might be asking, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Quote of the Day (Mel Brooks, on a Source of Jewish Humor)

“When the tall, blond Teutons have been nipping at your heels for thousands of years, you find it enervating to keep wailing. So you make jokes. If your enemy is laughing, how can he bludgeon you to death?”—Oscar- and Tony-winning American comic actor-writer-director Mel Brooks, Playboy interview, October 1966

Happy birthday to Mel Brooks, born 100 years ago today in Brooklyn!

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Titus Brandsma, on Love Over Neo-Paganism)

“Neo-paganism may reject love, but history teaches us that, despite everything, we will be victorious over this neo-paganism through love. We will not abandon love. Love will win back the hearts of these pagans. Nature is stronger than philosophy. Let a philosophy reject and condemn love and call it weakness, the living testimony of love will always renew its power to conquer and captivate the hearts of men.”—Carmelite priest, professor and journalist St. Titus Brandsma (1881-1942), Spiritual Itinerary of Carmel (1936)

Exhibit Review: "‘Born To Run' at 50," Passaic County Arts Center, Hawthorne NJ

Fifty-one years ago this month, when Eric Meola came to photograph Bruce Springsteen for the upcoming song collection, Born To Run, the Columbia Records singer-songwriter had two albums under his belt that attracted little interest. It was a real question how long the label would retain this young musician whose talent hadn’t yet registered with the public.

That sense of everything riding on the present moment permeated the studio where Springsteen had been reworking his songs for months. Not surprisingly, Meola found “someone who had put his soul on the wire for the better part of a year to make eight songs.”

The intensity of one artist was matched by the one viewing and capturing his image. “I had a sense of the history unfolding in front of my camera,” Meola remembered. “I wanted to photograph that history more than anything I have ever worked on.”

The product of that session featuring Springsteen and saxophonist and onstage foil Clarence Clemons is at the heart of “Born To Run at 50,” an exhibition at the Passaic County Arts Center (PCAC) in Hawthorne, NJ, containing a sampling of items from the recently opened Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music at Monmouth University.

Three months ago, at the time the exhibit opened, I clipped an article out of my local paper, The Bergen Record, about this commemoration of that landmark album’s cultural impact and the aftermath of its success.  The other day, picking up that piece again, I wondered when I should see it.

At that point, a lyric from another Springsteen LP went through my mind: “Summer’s here and the time is right.” There was no doubt that I had to see this.

One photo plucked out of the Meola session, folded in half and wrapped around, ended up on the cover of Born To Run and found their way, Springsteen noted, in “the windows of every record store in America”: the one with him leaning on the cover of Clemons—“the big man with the big smile,” in Meola’s words.

But in truth, almost any of the more than two dozen outtakes displayed on the walls of the PCAC would have made for a compelling visual image of this turning point in The Boss’s life.

My favorite shows the same Springsteen attire (black leather jacket, tweed cap) as the album cover, but with sneakers hanging off the guitar and an “Elvis Fan Club of NYC” button on his jacket.

In addition to the evocative Meola photos, the exhibit contains other artifacts documenting Springsteen’s time in New Jersey in the two-year period between Born To Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, such as:

*A handwritten note addressed to the “landlordess” of the cottage where he composed Born To Run, apologizing for a later payment of a water bill (two humorous postscripts ask, “Do you like my classy writin’ paper?” and “I’m practicing my autograph. Whadya think?”

*An artistic recreation of the customized guitar featured on the cover of the album;

*A video from his acclaimed 1978 performances at the now-defunct Capitol Theatre in Passaic;

*A now-ragged sweater worn by The Boss thrown into the audience at one of these shows, then caught—and now displayed, like a precious relic, all these years later.

For longtime fans like myself, the exhibition (which runs through July 19 at the PCAC (in the John W. Rea House, 675 Goffle Road, Hawthorne) offers the opportunity to relive when the New Jersey rock ‘n’ roll scene (including good friend Southside Johnny) burst with vitality and the seemingly endless promise of being young and alive.

For later generations, it tells a story of how music was recorded, promoted, and performed long before the digital era utterly transformed how the industry reached millions of listeners worldwide.

The exhibit has whetted my interest in seeing what other events may be sponsored by PCAC. And, at some point, I’ll have to drive down to Monmouth County and spend a few hours at the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music.

Quote of the Day (Philip Roth, on the End of a Summer Love)

“What was it inside me that had turned pursuit and clutching into love, and then turned it inside out again? What was it that had turned winning into losing, and losing—who knows—into winning? I was sure I had loved Brenda, though standing there, I knew I couldn't any longer."— Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Philip Roth (1933-2018), Goodbye, Columbus and Other Stories (1959)

(The image accompanying this post shows Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw in the 1969 adaptation of Goodbye, Columbus.)

Britain’s Gamble 10 Years Ago—and Ours

I don’t imagine the British know much baseball history. More’s the pity, because if they had, this week’s major political event might have reminded them of the adage of the great New York catcher and philosopher, Yogi Berra: “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

For my mostly stateside readers, I’m talking about Monday’s announcement by Keir Starmer (pictured) that he would step down as Prime Minister. Wouldn’t you know it, it was almost 10 years to the day that David Cameron did likewise.

Cameron’s decision immediately followed his failed gamble that a defeat of a referendum calling for Brexit would deflate the anti-free trade movement within his Conservative Party.

Instead, the yes vote to withdraw from the European Union precipitated his own fall from power, and overshadowed the terms of five subsequent PMs (including, now, Starmer) who eventually stood in front of 10 Downing Street to say, too, they would be stepping down.

Six leaders in 10 years represent no way to run a government, let alone a business. Coalition fractures mean at minimum that long-term projects won’t start, and that unscrupulous leaders will make a money or power grab while they can. At worst, they encourage a voter perception of anarchy and the need for a strongman to quell the chaos.

Sifting through the controversies that eventually engulfed Starmer in an article last month in The Financial Times, Anthony Seldon, co-founder of the Museum of the Prime Minister, summarized questions related to this streak of ineffective British leaders:

“Is it the incumbents or the system that is responsible? Are the problems the prime minister faces simply greater than before? Has the job now become impossible?”

Seldon cites three government structures in decline that are contributing to the current “churn at the top”: the replacement of Members of Parliaments motivated by the public interest by ones acting in their own private one; a deterioration of the civil service; and an electorate susceptible to instant gratification.

He also fears current developments in the two established parties, the Conservatives and Labour: “It is entirely possible that one or both will cease to exist as exist as mainstream parties in the next 10 [years]. If that happens, another source of national stability will be swept away.”

Seldon’s sweeping historical overview is fine, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t take into account how the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-09 stoked popular resentment on both sides of the Atlantic against international trade arrangements that millions came to regard as inequitable.

That popular unrest was manifested in the successful Brexit campaign, which produced its own inevitable lamentable consequences in the public sphere, according to The New York Times’ Michael D. Shear and Megan Specia:

“Perhaps no part of British society was changed more by Brexit than its political landscape, which has fractured into a chaotic tug of war in which no party seems able to satisfy the demands of an angry and disillusioned public for long.”

With all the hang-wringing by Seldon, Shear and Specia over volatility in the British government, they should cast their eyes “across the pond.” Here, unsteadiness over the past decade was generated not by six people, but by just one, driven by rage and retribution?

Yes, just as Britain took a flyer on a major shift in government, so did the United States 10 years ago this fall, when it elected Donald Trump—a candidate with no governmental or national security experience—President. Anger over two major issues that landed him in the White House also propelled the Brexit campaign: immigration and unequal class outcomes over trade policy.

In the last 10 years, Britain has only had one leader who remotely resembles Trump: Boris Johnson. As I wrote in this post from 10 years ago, when it looked like Johnson would not seek the brass ring, their shared traits include brashness, lying, an overactive libido, non-ideological conservatism, irresponsibility, a brand name, and faux populism.

Even so, Johnson has been no match over time for Trump, who, even after being cast out of the White House in the 2020 election, darkened American politics with ceaseless conspiracy mongering and his bid to return to power to avoid criminal and civil responsibility for his misdeeds.

And now, when he’s not busy earning nicknames like “Landscaper in Chief” and “The Creature From the Green Lagoon,” the Trump Presidency has created a vortex of instability characterized by longtime friends and allies insulted and alienated, promises made and broken, policy positions taken before being forsaken, including:

*Republican Senators cozy up to him unashamedly, only to find themselves “primaried” and losing their seats for no reason they can account for.

*The same senators are assured by White House aides that Trump will support a housing bill they’ve been working on with Democrats for over a year, only for the President to cancel the signing event at the last minute, insisting he won’t put his signature on it until Congress passes his pet voter ID legislation.

*Trump publicly speculated about making Venezuela the 51^st state.

*Even as the Trump administration negotiated with Iran, it prepared and launched a surprise invasion.

*With the “Memo of Understanding” (not yet a treaty, let alone one fulfilling initially stated war aims), Trump is teaching Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu what US observers have known for years: don’t count on his loyalty when he finds it disadvantageous.

*By exempting many agricultural commodities he announced last year, Trump has “raise[d] questions about the coherence of the president’s tariff initiatives as a whole,” according to a report this month by the American Enterprise Institute.

*At the start of the Iran War, he called for “unconditional surrender”—a demand long-since dropped.

I wish the British all the best as they look for a competent leader who’ll last more than Boris Johnson’s three years or Starmer’s two. But it could always be worse. They could choose a Trumpian leader desperate and able to stay on longer, perpetrating untold damage in the process.

(The image accompanying this post, of Keir Starmer, is his official portrait, taken July 5, 2024, on his appointment as Prime Minister, by Simon Dawson/ No 10 Downing Street.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Simpsons,’ As the Family Goes to an Unusual Doctor)

[Homer Simpson says that he has made an appointment with Dr. Marvin Monroe for the family.]

Lisa Simpson [voice of Yeardley Smith]: “You're taking us to a doctor that advertises on pro wrestling?”

Homer Simpson [voice of Dan Castellaneta]: “Boxing, Lisa, boxing. There's a world of difference.”—The Simpsons, Season 1, Episode 4, “There's No Disgrace Like Home,” original air date Jan. 28, 1990, teleplay by Al Jean, Mike Reiss, and Jon Vitti, directed Kent Butterworth and Gregg Vanzo

This may be the only reference from this episode of 36 years ago that needs to be updated. These days, Dr. Monroe would not advertise on boxing or pro wrestling, but on UFC.

And, as part of their therapy, the family would watch that “sport” on the White House lawn.

Quote of the Day (Damon Beres, on a New, ‘More Actively Anti-Social’ Digital Era)

“[W]hat is now unfolding...is the beginning of a new digital era, more actively anti-social than the last. Generative AI will automate a large number of jobs, removing people from the workplace. But it will almost certainly sap humanity from the social sphere as well. Over years of use—and product upgrades—many of us may simply slip into relationships with bots that we first used as helpers or entertainment, just as we were lulled into submission by algorithmic feeds and the glow of the smartphone screen. This seems likely to change our society at least as much as the social media era has.”— American tech journalist and editor Damon Beres, “Dispatches: Get a Real Friend,” The Atlantic, December 2025

Quote of the Day (Alice McDermott, on Perceptions of Literature Vs. ‘Chick Lit’)

“A woman narrating the story of her life with an annoying boyfriend was chick lit. A man narrating the story of his life with an annoying woman was, well, literature.” ― American novelist Alice McDermott, What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction (2021)

The image accompanying this post was taken by Slowking4, showing Alice McDermott reading at the 2018 Gaithersburg Book Festival, May 19, 2018.

Photo of the Day: José de San Martín Monument, Central Park, NYC

Longtime New York Times columnist James Reston wrote that Americans would do anything for Latin America except read about it. Let’s see how many of my readers disprove his contention.

I came across the equestrian statue in this photo a couple of weeks ago, when I was walking near the entrance to Central Park at 59^th Street and Avenue of the Americas. It pays tribute to José de San Martín (1778–1850), a general who led Argentina, Chile, and Peru to independence from Spanish rule—then remarkably, instead of seizing power, as so many post-independence soldiers did over the last two centuries, resigned his post.

The San Martin statue, dedicated in 1951, is a smaller-scale replica of one in Buenos Aires created in 1862 by the French sculptor Louis-Joseph Daumas.

Whether intentional or coincidental, the Central Park version faces another equestrian statue of a second Latin American liberator, Simon Bolivar, as if in commemoration of their historic July 1822 encounter in Guayaquil, Peru.

Nobody is quite sure what the two commanders said in this closed-door meeting, but two months later San Martin resigned his title as “Protector of Peru,” in an attempt to ensure South American unity.

That hope was frustrated. Two years later, dismayed over the continued fracturing of the nations he’d just helped free as well as the death of his wife from tuberculosis, San Martin set sail with his daughter for Europe, and never returned. Following his death in France in 1850, his remains were transferred to the Cathedral of Buenos Aires in Plaza de Mayo.

North Americans should know more about San Martin’s military campaigns. His 1817 crossing of the Andes particularly displayed his cunning, audacity, and precise planning. Before marching, he used Mapuche natives to spread misinformation about his next moves among the opposing Spanish forces.

A New York parade on the day I walked by prevented me from coming close to the statue, so it is a bit hard to see to its top, more than 34 feet off the ground.

But you can see from the photo that San Martin’s right arm is raised. I would guess that it’s not merely commanding his men in battle, but directing the 5,000 troops he had trained in Argentina into rugged passes in the Andes more than 10,000 feet high.

By the time he left the mountains and entered Chile, the Spanish royalist forces opposing him, confused by the false intelligence passed along through the Mapuches, did not know where to concentrate their forces. San Martin defeated them soundly at the Battle of Chacabuco.

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on Something ‘Savage, Uncanny and Frightening’ in the South)

“[I]t was in a small Southern city… that I once saw the surface crack for a minute and something savage, uncanny and frightening rear its head. Then the surface closed again—and when I have gone back there since, I’ve been surprised to find myself as charmed as ever by the magnolia trees and the singing darkies in the street and the sensuous warm nights. I have been charmed, too, by the bountiful hospitality and the languorous easy-going outdoor life and the almost universal good manners. But all too frequently I am the prey of a vivid nightmare that recalls what I experienced in that town five years ago.”—American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), “The Dance,” The Red Book Magazine (June 1926), reprinted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (March 1953)

A century ago this month, The Red Book Magazine published something unusual for F. Scott Fitzgerald: a murder mystery. He was not completely averse to genre fiction (his short stories “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and "A Short Trip Home" have Gothic/horror elements), but his foray into detective stories was another matter entirely.

How much of  it was a lark while he did the rounds of night spots in France, where he had moved so he and his family could live more cheaply? (His output for the year consisted of the short story "Your Way and Mine" and the essay "How To Waste Material.") And how much of it was part of a fascination with murder that was leading him on a dead end in his initial stages of creating the long-gestating Tender Is the Night? 

To be sure, neither Agatha Christie, with her cunning plots, nor Dashiell Hammett, with his terse dialogue and morally compromised characters, had much to fear by this interloper in their territory.

But Fitzgerald being Fitzgerald, he had to bring something of himself to this exercise. There’s his fascination with the South, where he had met his wife Zelda; his almost effortlessly lyrical writing style; and his “flaming youth” characters, this time transplanted to a Charleston small-town ball.

And with a single phrase that sounds distinctly politically incorrect in our time—“singing darkies in the street”—he introduces a concern he had slipped into his novel from the year before, The Great Gatsby: race. 

Recall that from that Jazz Age masterpiece, his hideously brutal and idiotic recipient of inherited wealth, Tom Buchanan, launches into an incoherent rant about “Nordic” superiority—a precursor of the “great replacement theory” advocated most prominently today by Tucker Carlson.

In “The Dance,” suspicion of the murder that unexpectedly breaks out in this “small Southern city” falls on one of the “singing darkies” evoked by the story’s female narrator—and the threat of lynching hangs very much in the air.

“The Dance” was not included among the 43 tales collected in 1989 by literary scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli for The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. But as far as I’m concerned, just about everything Fitzgerald wrote had some mark of charm or style—and this curious work of short fiction is no different.

This Day in Film History (Louis B. Mayer Loses MGM Showdown)

June 22, 1951—Loews Inc. announced the results of a long-rumored feud in its Hollywood subsidiary, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM): production chief Dore Schary would replace Louis B. Mayer (pictured) as head of the largest of Hollywood’s seven major studios.

The press release mentioned that Mayer was becoming an independent producer, but it was inconceivable to longtime employees—including many who came out the following day to bid him goodbye—that the mogul would voluntarily end his 27-year reign, including a stretch when he was the highest-paid man in America.

Those suspicions proved correct: Mayer had traveled from his Hollywood offices to the studio’s New York-based financial directorate to present an ultimatum to Loews President Nicholas Schenck: It’s either Schary or me. Instead, Schenck called his bluff and forced his resignation.

Forget about Schary: Mayer had also talked down his boss so much that it would have been a miracle for word of the backbiting not to reach Schenk eventually.

They spoke constantly—"two or three times a day in an age when coast-to-coast telephone calls were not so easily made as they are today,” according to David McClintick’s account of a later Tinseltown-New York power struggle, Indecent Exposure—but were seldom on each other’s wavelengths.  Mayer referred to him variously as “The General," "Nick Skunk," “the smiler and the killer," and “the big cheese.”

Ironically, Mayer had brought back to MGM the number-two he came to loathe. A former screenwriter, Schary was chafing as production chief at RKO after its acquisition by the increasingly eccentric Howard Hughes when he was invited back to the lot he had once known as his professional home.

Schary’s key demand for his return—that he bring along his pet project, Battleground—sparked conflict between himself and his new boss.

One of the most grittily realistic WWII dramas released in the early postwar period, it was anathema to Mayer, a mogul not just of old-fashioned tastes but even Victorian ones. If his movie factory could have churned out only musicals and Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy series, he probably wouldn’t have minded very much. 

In contrast to Mayer’s conservative Republican sympathies, Schary—two decades younger—was an industrial-strength New Deal Democrat who wanted more socially conscious fare like Battleground that sent a message.

Battleground’s triumph with critics and, more important, the public (it was one of the top box-office hits of 1949) boosted Schary’s cachet with Schenck while undermining Mayer’s.

With television emerging as a rival medium, lost court cases weakening studio control over stars and movie houses, and international Communism threatening audience optimism across the country, Mayer no longer seemed in touch with public tastes. The question was, would Schary?

Mayer might have been wrong about the commercial prospects for Battleground, but turned out to be right about another war film on the bubble in his final days at MGM: John Huston’s adaptation of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Even with an authentic war hero, Audie Murphy, as the lead, audiences stayed away, proving Mayer’s contention that they would find it too depressing.

In the long run, Schenck might have been correct that Mayer was too old and set in his ways to continue running MGM, but it did not mean that Schary was the right leader to steer the studio through its choppy new waters. 

A highly capable scriptwriter and playwright (as he would show in a few years with his biopic about polio-stricken Franklin Roosevelt, Sunrise at Campobello), he proved less adept at managing talent or sensing what audiences wanted. Any positive impression generated by his geniality faded once his corporate mismanagement became apparent.

In contrast, even before he participated in the 1924 merger that established MGM, Mayer had been involved with the movie industry in multiple capacities, so he knew the business thoroughly.

While Schary soon frustrated the studio’s musical hands with his complete lack of interest in the genre, Mayer valued their contributions.

And, while Schary would in a few short years drive away stars like Clark Gable from their longtime home, Mayer, for all his paternalism, sincerely wanted to prove there was no hype in MGM’s longtime slogan, “More stars than there are in the heavens.”

There was no ultimate victor in the MGM showdown. In late 1955, Schenck would be kicked upstairs when Arthur Loew Sr. became president of his family company. Among Lowe Sr.’s most notable moves in his single year at MGM was firing Schary, who spent his remaining quarter-century of life doing what he probably was most cut out for to begin with: writing.

As for Mayer, he was able neither to make a go at independent producing nor in regaining control of MGM when the studio’s declining finances wore down investors’ patience. 

When he died in 1957, though some deplored his penny-pinching tendencies, others would have agreed with one of his stars, Katharine Hepburn, when she wrote in her autobiography, “L.B. Mayer was a shrewd man with enormous understanding of an artist. He was not stupid, not crude. He was a very sensible fellow, and extremely honest.”

Quote of the Day (Matt Whitaker, on God and a Streep-Related Commandment)

“You shall not bow down to any statue, or worship any image, or green-light any Hollywood bio-pic about the LORD. For then some producer will say, ‘Let's see if Meryl's avail?’ And, if she be avail, she'd probably be great. She's always great. But I, the LORD, am a jealous God. And I sometimes get the feeling that you like Meryl more than you like me.”—Humorist Matt Whitaker, “Shouts and Murmurs: Commandments of the Lord Who Created Meryl Streep,” The New Yorker, Jan. 7, 2019

All hail Meryl Streep today, on her 77^th birthday! As Whitaker puckishly implies, she’s been Hollywood’s go-to actress for virtually any role you can imagine (three Oscar victories and 21 nominations!), courtesy of a near-flawless command of foreign accents and a willingness to physically transform herself into nearly anything.

Was there ever any real doubt about her coming back to her role as Miranda in The Devil Wears Prada 2? The real question is if we can imagine any role of a female of a certain age with her not in it?

Savor Prada 2 while you can, Streep-philes: you’ll have to wait till 2027 for her next screen appearance, in the Greta Gerwig-helmed Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew.

This Day in Film History (‘Virginia Woolf’ Erodes Censorship Barriers)

June 21, 1966—Mike Nichols was so worried about the reaction to his film directing debut, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, that he left the Pantages Theater early with the movie’s editor, Sam O'Steen.

Nichols need not have been concerned about the popular or critical reception to his adaptation of one of the most acclaimed yet controversial plays of the postwar period. 

With the draw of real-life couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, this scalding marital drama may have been, at $7.5 million, the most expensive black-and-white movie ever produced, but its $10.3 million box-office take ensured profits for Warner Bros.

Over the winter, Hollywood poured more honors on the film, with 13 Academy Award nominations, including for every category in which it was eligible—the first time this had occurred since Cimarron in 1931. Subsequently, wins went to Taylor (her second Best Actress win), Sandy Dennis for Best Supporting Actress, and Haskell Wexler for Best Cinematography.

From the moment Edward Albee’s play opened on Broadway in 1962, it was considered a hot property—but also, in some quarters, too hot to handle. Its frequently profane language and sexual explicitness unnerved the trustees of Columbia University enough that they overruled the recommendation of its Pulitzer Prize panel that the award go to the playwright.

Acquiring the property was unusual for Jack L. Warner, an aging mogul with conservative tastes that increasingly veered towards prestige musical blockbusters like My Fair Lady and Camelot.

At least sone among the studio hierarchy felt qualms about the finished product, which retained much of Albee’s incendiary dialogue. At one early screening, Life Magazine reported, one Warner executive groaned when the lights came up, "My God! We have a $7 million dirty movie on our hands!"

They were right to be concerned. Though the Production Code that had restricted profanity and sex onscreen for the prior three decades was coming under increasing fire from filmmakers and critics, it still presented roadblocks.

The Catholic Legion of Decency, which aimed to identify and boycott any movie it deemed morally objectionable, represented an especially significant roadblock to widespread distribution and popular acceptance of the film. Archbishops and priests promoted pledges by the faithful to avoid any cinema that the organization condemned.

Nichols had fought constantly with screenwriter Ernest Lehman to stick as closely as possible to Albee’s original dialogue and plot. He had survived being removed when generous starting hours for Taylor and Burton left the production 30 days behind schedule and with double the budget. He was not about to let the picture sink before it had a good chance of being seen by the public.

When the 80 judges for the Catholic Legion panel met, Nichols promised Warner execs, he would have his good friend Jacqueline Kennedy—practically a venerated figure after her husband’s assassination—sit behind prominent clerics like “Monsignor What’s-His-Face” and pronounce at the picture’s conclusion, “How Jack would have loved it."

The plot worked, as the Legion assigned Virginia Woolf a new rating—A-IV (“morally unobjectionable for adults, with reservations")—which took into account the work’s moral seriousness while signifying that its often scabrous language and subject matter were not for the squeamish.

After haggling with Warner Bros. over its content, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) used a similar strategy as the Legion, designating the film as the first to bear the notice, "No one under 18 will be admitted unless accompanied by his parent." Its first attempt at a rating system followed two years later.

While the censorship walls crumbled rapidly on the nation’s cinemas in the late 1960s, it took a bit longer for the old restrictions to fade on television. I well remember the first time the film aired on CBS in February 1973.

Then 13 years old, I wondered exactly what was being signaled when the “Tiffany Network” issued its pre-viewing disclaimer urging parents and “sensitive viewers” to use “judgment and discretion.” I soon received what The New York Times’ Howard Thompson termed “an adult earful.”

Nowadays, in whatever medium it appears, it is seldom that such editorial handwringing occurs. Although CBS aired the show starting at 9 pm, when many kiddies would be fast asleep, Turner Classic Movies, for instance, has been known to show it during daytime. 

(A waggish filmmaking friend of mine once noted that TCM never had to worry about children watching their movies, as the cable channel’s average viewing age was 65!)

Viewers who couldn’t get beyond the blistering language that caused so much sturm und drang were likely to miss the symbolism of the names given the feuding, sadistic middle-aged academic couple at the heart of the play and film: George and Martha.

Like the first American President and his wife, Albee’s couple were unable to conceive—certainly not a baby, perhaps only drink-induced disorder and destruction among fellow academics ostensibly oriented towards reason.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Anselm of Canterbury, on Justice and Angels)

“The angels are separated between those who adhering to justice enjoy all the goods they wish and those who having abandoned justice lack any good they desire.”—“Doctor of the Church” and “Father of Scholasticism” St. Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033–1109), Three Philosophical Dialogues: On Truth/On Freedom of Choice/On the Fall of the Devil, translated by Thomas Williams (2002)

Quote of the Day (James Burrows, on His Classic Character-Driven Sitcoms)

“The concept is never what attracts me; it’s the execution. There are lots of shows about bars, news and radio stations, cabdrivers, and shrinks. I want to see what the characters that are put into these situations do. I’m concerned about believability and the economy of the comedy, the shortest distance between the character and the laughter, and the best way to get there. When I direct an episode, I have a lot of notes. I am apt to tell writers, ‘Fifty percent of what I say is gold and fifty percent is garbage. It’s your job to figure out which is which.’”— James Burrows (1940-2016), the “Steven Spielberg of TV Sitcoms,” with Eddy Friedfeld, Directed by James Burrows: Five Decades of Stories from the Legendary Director of Taxi, Cheers, Frasier, Friends, Will & Grace, and More (2022)

The subtitle of the memoir by James Burrows, who died yesterday, says it all: more than 1,000 episodes of the best-loved sitcoms of our time. The son of Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer-director Abe Burrows, he sharpened his considerable comic instincts in association with sitcom stars and showrunners Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, Glen and Les Charles, Chuck Lorre, Marta Kaufman and David Crane.

Oscar-winning film director Christopher Nolan put it more succinctly—the way Burrows would have liked it—by terming him “the modern master of the sophisticated comedy.” In employing four cameras on sets, he recorded each actor constantly and selected among their reactions for the final cuts.

No wonder he told those he filmed, “always be ready, always be funny.” And no wonder the likes of Jennifer Aniston (pictured, from Friends), Tony Danza, Ted Danson, Woody Harrison, and Sean Hayes, among many others, shot to stardom under his careful guidance.