Happy 75th Birthday, Garrison Keillor!

“Librarians, Dusty, possess a vast store of politeness. These are people who get asked regularly the dumbest questions on God's green earth. These people tolerate every kind of crank and eccentric and mouth-breather there is. "—Garrison Keillor, “Cowboy Librarians" skit on A Prairie Home Companion, December 13, 1997

Well, it wasn’t enough that Garrison Keillor—born 75 years ago today in Anoka, Minn.— is a radio legend. No, I also see, from the above quote, that he has a very healthy appreciation of librarians. And, judging by the number of his books on shelves in my neck of the woods, I’d say that the admiration is mutual.

Oh, and one other thing: Keillor had the smarts to lead the movement to rename the World Theater in St. Paul, Minn., after my favorite author, hometown boy F. Scott Fitzgerald—and he broadcast his radio show A Prairie Home Companion for nearly 40 years in this performance venue before retiring a year ago.

This Day in Film History (Birth of Henry King, Versatile Director of Silent and Sound Eras)

Jan. 24, 1886—Henry King, a director who, across four decades, proved highly adept at multiple genres among more than 100 films, was born in Christiansburg, Virginia.

King did not leave his thumbprint on a particular genre, as did Alfred Hitchcock in the thriller or Billy Wilder in satire. Nor was his work characterized by an instantly recognizable visual style, as was the case with Vincente Minnelli, or by preoccupation with certain themes, as Howard Hawks was with males in extreme circumstances.

In fact, his tendency to submerge his themes or concerns for the sake of a particular story made him an ideal foil in a seminal essay, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” by critic Andrew Sarris, who perfectly summed up the attitudes of many auteur critics at midcentury: “On a given evening, a film by John Ford must take its chances as if it were a film by Henry King. Am I implying that the weakest Ford is superior to the strongest King? Yes!”

The King film that Sarris uses for his exercise in absurdity is Twelve O’Clock High, one of five films for which King received an Oscar nomination without ever being awarded the statuette. That 1949 movie, along with another he made the following year with Gregory Peck, The Gunfighter, illustrates how King could bring texture and psychological insights to even hoary genres such as the war movie and the western.

It was King’s achievement and predicament to work efficiently and with little fuss within the Hollywood studio system, an environment in which a head of production or executive producer had the whip hand, with “creative control” the exception rather than the rule for directors. In King’s case, he was the go-to director for Darryl F. Zanuck, the co-founder, head of production and chair of Twentieth Century Fox, as well as one of Tinseltown’s most colorful, strong-willed moguls. Zanuck was a hands-on force in terms of casting, story ideas and scripts.King could influence, but had in the end to bow to, his edicts.

None of this is to say that King did not have special affinity for particular subjects. One of these was rural life—not surprising. One of his first notable films in the silent era, Tol’able David (1921), was filmed not far from the farm where he grew up as a child. A decade later, he returned to the rural milieu with State Fair (1933)

An eye for promising unknowns was also a hallmark of King. He raised to prominence some of Hollywood’s brightest stars, including Ronald Colman in The White Sister (1924); Gary Cooper, a Montana cowboy plucked from obscurity to play the male lead in The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926); Don Ameche, in Ramona (1936); Jennifer Jones, who won an Oscar for playing the French peasant girl with visions of the Virgin Mary in The Song of Bernadette (1943); and Alexander Knox, a Canadian actor who played America’s 28^th President in the 1944 biopic Wilson.

One young actor with whom he developed a longstanding professional relationship was Tyrone Power. King insisted on a screen test for the 21-year-old—who, up till then, had been attempting unsuccessfully to follow his late father into the movies—for the lead in Lloyd's of London, then persuaded Zanuck that the young man would be better in that role than the mogul’s initial preference, Ameche.

In time, Power became the chief box-office star at Twentieth-Century Fox, and King went on to direct him in 10 more films, including historical films (In Old Chicago), westerns (Jesse James), war films (A Yank in the RAF), and a whole series of swashbucklers (The Black Swan, Captain From Castile, Prince of Foxes, and King of the Khyber Rifles). The director--a licensed pilot who, during World War II served in the Civilian Air Patrol--initiated his star into the joys of flying when he took him in his plane to the set of one of their films. (Years later, King flew over the funeral service of the star, who had died on location at age 43, noting sadly, “Knowing his love for flying and feeling that I had started it, I flew over his funeral procession and memorial park during his burial, and felt that he was with me.")

The last collaboration of Power and King was The Sun Also Rises (1957). My decidedly mixed reaction to this adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel is here. It was just one of several literary adaptations made by King in the last decade of his career that, as often as not, turned out to be misfires. His brief role directing another Hemingway project, The Old Man and the Sea (1958), ended up uncredited—probably a good thing, considering what a production mess that Spencer Tracy vehicle became.

But other adaptations by King of Hemingway and his Lost Generation frenemy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, which did earn the director credits, turned out problematic in their own was:

*The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952): Hemingway told his friend Ava Gardner that the only things he liked about this treatment of his short story were her and the hyena.

*Beloved Infidel (1959): As with The Sun Also Rises, the period of the source material—in this case, from 1936 to 1940, during Fitzgerald’s affair with Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, chronicled in her bestselling memoir—is blurred and even evoked inaccurately. Neither of the stars, Gregory Peck and Deborah Kerr, was satisfied with the early script or footage—and, judging by critical reaction, they had reason to be concerned.

*Tender Is the Night (1962): As with The Sun Also Rises and Beloved Infidel, King’s cinema swan song was marred by miscasting—in this case, Jennifer Jones (at 42, well past the age when she could be credible as two-decades-younger psychiatric patient Nicole Diver). In the case of all three films, King and Zanuck relied on actors with whom they had worked well with several times before without adequately considering whether they were age appropriate for this property.

As an aficionado of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, I was disappointed in these treatments of this material. In certain ways, they showed King in all his limitations: as a professional less concerned with an artistic vision than with getting a movie made for a mainstream audience.

On the other hand, they also contain scenes of considerable skill and even beauty—aspects of his work that appear more consistently in, for instance, Twelve O’Clock High and The Gunfighter.  And his love of film--and even his affection for the sometimes problematic actors who feature in them, such as hellraiser Errol Flynn--made him a favorite of those he worked with. Four years before his death in 1982, this affable movie professional enjoyed renewed attention from a seven-week retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art. Its length testifies to his durability in an often-unforgiving industry.

This Day in Literary History (Zelda Fitzgerald Suffers First Nervous Breakdown)

May 22, 1930—Hearing voices, Zelda Fitzgerald, muse and artistic competitor of the author of The Great Gatsby, entered Val-Mont Clinic in Switzerland, as she took another step on the road to mental deterioration following a nervous breakdown the month before.

Zelda had considerable talent for writing, but F. Scott Fitzgerald made it clear that he was the literary breadwinner in the family. Looking for a field that Scott couldn’t enter, she took up painting, then pursued more determinedly what had until then been a longtime hobby: ballet.

Exactly a month ago, Zelda had suffered a psychic collapse while she was ramping up her ballet routine. When her taxi got stuck in a Parisian traffic jam, she became so alarmed about being late for her dance lessons that she jumped out of the vehicle and began running through the streets in her ballet clothes.

Scott promptly checked her into a clinic outside Paris, from which she discharged herself on May 11. Nearly two weeks later, she checked into Val-Mont.

At this juncture, it is probably impossible to sort out the causes of Zelda’s mental distress. Just offering a diagnosis is problematic. Most of the psychiatrists who treated her early believed she was schizophrenic, but her last doctor believed she had untreated bipolar disorder. 

(Years later, it was also disclosed that during her remaining 18 years of off-and-on confinement, one of her attending doctors had had a pattern of inappropriate relations with female patients, and that Zelda might have been one of these victims.)

The notion of untreated bipolar disorder can’t be dismissed out of hand—the 1930s were still, after all, something like the Neolithic era of modern psychiatry. (George Gershwin's psychoanalyst diagnosed the composer's dizziness and intense headaches as symptoms of neurotic depression when they in fact represented the onset of the brain tumor that would kill him at age 38.)

A second question then came to the fore: how much of Zelda’s troubles derived from her own fragile mental state, and how much was due to Scott?

For the first three decades after his death, Scott’s care for his wife did not come under close scrutiny. Changes in beliefs about women’s need for autonomy, as well as the publication of Nancy Milford’s Zelda, opened the way to harsher questions about the novelist's influence on his wife.

Scott’s alcoholism certainly didn’t provide Zelda with the stability she desperately needed. Moreover, she presented him with an annoying dilemma: she was intelligent enough to appreciate his work, but also talented enough to create her own.

A flair for phrase-making, keen eye for detail and sense of irony informed Zelda’s writing. The latter gift was turned, a couple of years into their marriage, on Scott, who had appropriated some of her diary entries into his own work. In a satirical review of his novel The Beauty and Damned, published in the New York Herald-Tribune, she wrote:

"On one page I recognised a portion of an old diary of mine, which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. Mr Fitzgerald...seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home."

In the years before her breakdown, several Zelda short stories had appeared in the magazine College Humor, with her husband sharing a byline, in some cases, to increase her fee.

But when Scott perceived a more direct threat—Zelda’s attempt to craft a full-length novel, submitted to his publisher without his knowledge, based on her experiences but also examining his alcoholism—he protested to his Scribner editor Max Perkins. Save Me the Waltz (1932), written during her convalescence, suffered from lack of publicity from Scribners, which abided by Scott’s wish not to promote the book so as not to encourage her “delusions of grandeur.”

And yet, Scott was hardly the sole contributor to her mental deterioration, nor even necessarily the decisive factor. Mental illness was a virulent strain in her Southern family: her grandmother committed suicide, as did her brother, three years after Zelda’s institutionalization. It should also be noted that Scott tried to secure for her the best psychiatric help in Europe after her collapse.

Moreover, even before the 1930 mental collapse that began her inexorable downward spiral, Zelda had alarmed friends by:

* suddenly bursting into laughter for no reason;

* grabbing the steering wheel of the car as Scott drove, almost plunging them off a cliff;

* taking an overdose of sleeping pills after the end of an affair with a French aviator;

* accusing her husband of sleeping with friend/rival Ernest Hemingway;

* practicing ballet lessons for up to 10 hours a day, to the point where she became wan and thin; and

* developing a crush on her female ballet instructor.

Zelda was released from the Swiss psychiatric clinic in September 1931, but suffered a relapse five months later. By this time, Scott—back in the U.S. , with funds running low—placed her in an institution in Baltimore. After he had applied pressure on her to give up writing, she took up art as therapy. But in 1934, after the publication of Tender Is the Night—in which the schizophrenic rich beauty, Nicole Diver Warren, was modeled on her—she suffered yet another relapse.

We now know that the relationship of Scott and Zelda, far from being simply a tragic love story, was also one of what Scott called “emotional bankruptcy,” marked by emotional manipulation and mutual recriminations. It is a fascinating case, not merely of literary history, but of how attitudes toward women’s ambitions and the psychiatric profession altered the treatment of a beautiful, talented, but profoundly troubled woman partnered with an equally glamorous, tormented--and personally and professionally jealous--husband.