If the name in that quote sounds very vaguely
familiar, it’s because the socialite described here shows up as one of the characters
in the not-terribly-well-known 1989 film Bloodhounds of Broadway, a mashup of several Damon Runyon short stories including “Social Error,” and featuring Julie Hagerty
(pictured) as Miss Mackyle.
Runyon is best known for the musical Guys and Dolls,
adapted from two of his other stories. He made a tidy sum in the Thirties and
Forties with Hollywood transferring some of his properties to the screen, not
always successfully.
I think you really must read his words on the page
rather than seeing them on a screen to appreciate their unusual quality. Films convey the funny patois of his characters
but not the danger and menace that sneak up between the colorful phrases, like “tough
joints,” “blowing the safe open” and “Dannemora” (for readers outside the
tristate region, an upstate New York maximum security facility).
Runyon himself had something of an “underworld
complex.” Much of the considerable money
he earned as a New York sportswriter and short-story writer was spent at the racetrack,
where he met many gamblers and absorbed the speech patterns that later figured so
prominently in his work.
Some of those people turned up as thinly disguised
people in his stories, including:
*Bat Masterson, who became Sky Masterson;
*Walter Winchell (Waldo Winchester);
*Arnold Rothstein (Nathan Detroit);
*Texas Guinan (Miss Missouri Martin);
*Harry Morgan (The Lemon-Drop Kid);
* Otto Berman (Regret);
* Frank Costello (Dave the Dude);
*Johnny Broderick (Johnny Brannigan)
I haven’t been able to discover the original
inspiration for Harriet or Red Henry, but they must have been something else.
The circumstances of Hawkins’ birth were infinitely fungible in his telling, including its location (on an ocean liner) and time (as much as eight years after the event).
Even his formal musical education
could be fudged, with biographers unable to document claims that he attended
Washburn College in Topeka or the University of Chicago.
His real musical development needed no embellishment. Encouraged from an early age by his mother, a pianist and organist, Hawkins tackled the piano by age five, the cello at seven, and (an outgrowth in range and color), the tenor sax at nine. He was a natural musical talent.
In adulthood, he interacted with a galaxy of jazz
talent across four decades, from Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson (whose
band he joined) in 1924 to Sonny Rollins in the mid-1960s. Through vertical
improvisation, he showed how to use his chosen instrument—which had earlier taken
a supporting role to clarinets in jazz bands—to weave chords in a progression
to improvise, rather than doing so through scales.
But the first decade in that time was spent learning
the tenor sax thoroughly enough to make it do his bidding, while the last half
decade was a remorseless physical decline. For all practical purposes, then, the
height of his influence extended from the Thirties through the Fifties.
The year 1939 may have represented his zenith with his
rendition of “Body and Soul.” Though the Eddie Hayman-Johnny Green composition
had attracted attention since its release in 1930, Hawkins’ performance helped make
it a standard, opening up manifold interpretations even within its strictly
instrumental format.
What was especially noteworthy was how, after the
first two bars, Hawkins largely dispensed with the melody in favor of a riff and
variations. (“It’s Coleman Hawkins superimposed on Johnny Green, if you will,”
the composer told Fred Hall in a January 1986 interview that was later collected
in an anthology edited by Robert Gottlieb, Reading Jazz.)
Having already inspired the likes of Lester Young and Ben
Webster by disclosing how the unique, full-bodied sound of the tenor sax, Hawkins
quickly also recognized its potential through the fast tempos, complex chord progressions
and improvisational lines of bebop.
It was Hawkins who in 1944 made the first recording of
young Dizzy Gillespie’s “Woody ‘n’ You” (see this blog post from the independent public radio station KUVO) and Hawkins who in that same year
employed pianist-composer Thelonious Monk as part of his quartet.
In his younger years, even with his short, compact
frame, Hawkins dominated virtually every room where he was present with his
dapper attire, attractive dates, and cosmopolitan manner.
By the mid-1960s, as his increased drinking affected
his appearance, Hawkins looked more like a jazz Methuselah. In a Spring 1998
reminiscence in The Antioch Review, jazz historian and critic Gary
Giddins described his physical impact in a 1966 performance at New York’s
Village Vanguard:
“The grizzled, full-bearded patriarch still looked
sharp and slightly forbidding, even if he had receded a bit into his tailored
gray silk-mohair. He gazed over the crowd with sad but alert eyes, his
tight-lipped smile implying bemusement and perhaps disdain. When he greeted
someone between sets, his voice was stately and deep, a match for his sound on
tenor. He exuded dignity.”
The image accompanying
this post, of a pair of Eastern Bluebirds in Michigan, was taken Apr. 14, 2010,
by Sandysphotos2009.
In looking through my past blog posts, I was surprised
to discover that, though I had written about much connected to this
property—General Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel, a director whose one-reel 1907 short triggered a landmark copyright decision, and a 1925 budget-busting silent epic—I’d never written about the version that
thousands have seen, in theaters and on television, for the past three
generations.
This post, then, is my attempt to rectify this
situation and to give this movie all the honor it deserves.
The 1959 remake became one of the most honored films
in Hollywood history, netting Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director (William
Wyler), and Best Actor (Charlton Heston). The 11 it netted in all set a record
for the time that has only been equaled since then by Titanic in 1997
and The Return of the King in 2003.
It is also among the most influential movies in screen
history. Most recently, Francis Ford Coppola listed it among the 20 films
that inspired the epic he released a few months ago, Megalopolis.
Yet another director-producer’s debt to the film is more
obvious. The first installment in “Star Wars” saga, The Phantom Menace,
features a pod race that is a homage to the archetypal chariot race of Ben-Hur.
Even more so, the first trilogy in George Lucas’ bestselling
series, focusing on Anakin Skywalker, bears strong similarities to Lew Wallace’s
hero: another slave who makes a splash by competing in a great race, but never
really feels entirely at home in the society that now embraces him, and is
consumed by revenge for much of the action.
Ben-Hur also left its
mark on the evolution of the film epic itself. Without ever stinting on
pyrotechnics (it became the first film shot with Panavision lenses to win the
Best Cinematography Oscar), it veered sharply from the sword-and-sandals movies
associated with Cecil B. DeMille (The Ten Commandments), Howard Hawks (Land
of the Pharoahs), and King Vidor (Solomon and Sheba).
Wyler delegated direction of the chariot race sequence
to Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt, while concentrating with his usual
perfectionism on the actors’ performances. His creation of a more intimate,
character-driven epic would release later releases such as Lawrence of
Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Young Winston, Reds, and, only
a year later, Spartacus.
(In fact, Kirk Douglas only pursued the latter
property when he lost out in the competition to play Ben-Hur to Heston, being
offered instead the consolation prize of the titular hero’s friend-turned-enemy,
Messala—a role that he considered nothing more than a second-rate villain.)
This desire to focus on characters rather than spectacle
has led some viewers to regard the hour-and-a-half remaining after the chariot
race to be anticlimactic. But this misunderstands the nature of the property.
The movie took its cue from the subtitle of the Wallace
novel, “A Tale of the Christ,” tracking the miracle following Christ’s
crucifixion that eventually frees Judah of the bitterness that has spurred his
quest even as it deformed his life.
In their quest for character development, Wyler and
producer Sam Zimbalist (who died of a heart attack in Rome just as the movie
neared completion) employed six different screenwriters: Karl Tunberg, Gore
Vidal, Christopher Fry, S. N. Behrman, Maxwell Anderson, and Ben Hecht.
Decades after the film’s release, Vidal caused a stir with
his suggestion of a gay subtext in the Judah-Messala relationship. Audiences at
the time were less likely to notice such elements than today, and in any case
both Wyler and Heston denied them when asked about it in later years.
More likely, contemporary audiences would have
responded to the Cold War resonance of the plot.
Judah’s refusal to renounce his Jewish heritage and pursue
Roman glory with Messala triggers his family’s fall from wealth and influence,
not unlike how rejection of informing consigned a host of Hollywood talent to blacklisting
in the McCarthy Era.
At the same time, the presence of Rome as an authoritarian
power imposing its will on a restless foreign people would have reminded many
of the similar role played by the Soviet Union.
