Quote of the Day (Alistair Cooke, on Thanksgiving and Cranberry Sauce)

“It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.”— British journalist and broadcaster Alistair Cooke (1908-2004), Talk About America: Selection of Broadcast Letters from America (1968)

Quote of the Day (Alistair Cooke on Bogie, ‘Saved and Soured by Time’)

“It is fair to guess that far back in the Coward- Lonsdale era, [Humphrey] Bogart was always his own man. He no doubt stood in the wings in his blazer chuckling acidly over the asininities on stage, and he would have been the first man to question that youth ever deposited its bloom on him. But for a long time it obscured, in a sleek complexion, bold eyes and a lid of black hair, his essential and very individual character and its marvelous adaptability to one of the more glamorous neuroses of the incoming day and age: that of the hard-bitten ‘private eye,’ the neutral sceptic in a world exploding with crusades and the treachery they invite. He probably had no notion, in his endless strolls across the stage drawing-rooms of the Twenties, he was being saved and soured by Time to become the romantic democratic answer to Hitler’s new order. “—Alistair Cooke, “Humphrey Bogart: Epitaph for a Tough Guy,” in Six Men: Charlie Chaplin, Edward VIII, H. L. Mencken, Humphrey Bogart, Adlai Stevenson, Bertrand Russell (1977)

A cigarette never seemed far from the lips of Humphrey Bogart in his films, and on this date in 1957 it finally caught up with him, as he succumbed to cancer. Death concluded a career in which he became one of Hollywood’s most honored actors, but it hardly ended the public’s fascination with his persona.

That voice, one of the most distinctive of the sound era in Hollywood, epitomized the word “snarl.” It seemed redolent not merely of all the cigarettes that a Bogart character (or the actor himself) smoked, but of all the booze he consumed. It captured what mystery novelist Raymond Chandler meant when he observed that the actor could be “tough without a gun.”

It was a distinct surprise for me to learn, then, that Bogart’s beginnings were far more benign. Oh, I knew the odd bit of trivia that onstage, he had made famous the eternal cry of preppies: “Tennis, anyone?” But I hadn’t realized, until I visited the Ernest Hemingway Museum in Oak Park, Illinois, that Bogart’s mother, a prominent commercial illustrator, used her baby boy as a model for a baby food ad. (I wrote about this in a prior post.)

As you might expect, Bogart had a sour wisecrack about this: “There was a period in American history when you couldn’t pick up a goddamned magazine without seeing my kisser on it.” But with time, I’ve come to wonder about deeper affinities between Hemingway and Bogart.

In the Quote of the Day, one phrase from Cooke (who got to know Bogie and his last wife, Lauren Bacall, while covering the first Presidential campaign of Adlai Stevenson, whom the two actors backed) really strikes me: the part about a “neutral sceptic in a world exploding with crusades and the treasury they invite.” Actually, it hints at more than the Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe roles that Bogart played in classic film noir. It’s also the essence of the early, and best, Ernest Hemingway fiction.

Gary Cooper might be the actor most identified with the closest thing to successful adaptations of Hemingway that Hollywood ever made (i.e., the original Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls). His looks made him a natural for those works by the novelist featuring a love story, and his love of the outdoors made him a boon comrade to the novelist.

In contrast, Bogart was identified with what might have been the loosest adaptation of a Hemingway novel that Hollywood ever made: To Have and Have Not. I can’t imagine him competing with Cooper in the great outdoors. But in attitude, Bogie, rather than Coop, might be best regarded as the disillusioned but proud Hemingway Hero.

Consider what might be the key line of that novel, from its hero, Harry Morgan: "No matter how, a man alone ain't got no bloody fucking chance." It speaks of a too-deep knowledge of the world. Optimism is for chumps.

Lack of illusion might make you street-smart and tough, but it also makes you weary and sad—qualities that, I think, come through in the image accompanying this post. Like Hemingway's Jake Barnes, not to mention the later Frederic Henry, the Bogie hero is an outsider, no matter which side of the law from which he operates.

But, as the fascist threat loomed larger on the verge of WWII, Hemingway moved his protagonists—still doomed—to a recognition of collective action. War was a dirty business, but sometimes, as when facing a Hitler, there might not be any alternative, and in that case you’d better get it done and over with.

Bogart’s success with The Maltese Falcon moved him into a position where he could become Warner Brothers’ embodiment of America as reluctant—but, in the event, all the more effective—warrior and ally. Casablanca was only the most obvious example of how the actor became, to use Cooke’s formulation, “the romantic democratic answer to Hitler’s new order." There’s also his felicitously named character Sgt. Joe Gunn, leader of a polyglot American tank crew, hopelessly outnumbered against Nazis in North Africa, in the 1943 film Sahara.

More intriguingly, there’s Key Largo, in 1948—superficially an opportunity to bring together two of the iconic actors associated with the gangster picture, Bogart and Edward G. Robinson. In reality, it’s a political allegory of the fight against fascism.

“I had hopes once, but I gave them up,” Bogart’s war vet, Frank McCloud says.

“Hopes for what?” asks Robinson’s crime kingpin, Johnny Rocco.

“A world in which there's no place for Johnny Rocco.”

McCloud’s decision to act against Rocco parallels long-isolationist America’s entrance into the war. The actor who played the reluctant hero became such a symbol of his nation’s cool resolve that Nobel Prize-winning novelist Albert Camus--himself a member of his country’s Resistance--effected, with his cigarette and trench coat, the style of Bogart.

For an interesting take on the actor and his persona--not to mention the Stefan Kanfer recent bio, Tough Without a Gun--see this post from the classic-film blog “Out of the Past” from its creator, Raquelle.

This Day in British History (Henry VIII, Mercurial Tyrant, Dies)

January 28, 1547—King Henry VIII of England died, ending the 38-year reign of a tyrant of unquenchable appetites who changed the course of British and world history.

I love mnemonic devices as means of helping me remember all sorts of esoteric facts (such as HOMES, an acronym for the Great Lakes). The couplet that generations of schoolchildren remembered about the fate of Henry’s wives -- “Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived” – strikes me as particularly inspired, if a bit flip about their ultimate fates.

In the early ‘70s, I remember watching The Six Wives of Henry VIII as a summer mini-series on CBS (this was probably after WNET had broadcast it earlier), and was enthralled by its depiction of the massive monarch.

In a reminiscence of the show in his Masterpiece: A Decade of "Masterpiece Theater" (1981), the series’ urbane host Alistair Cooke made as well-argued a case as you can get for Henry as a complicated figure: “a fine musician, a remarkable athlete, linguist, mathematician; a statesman of imagination and industry who unified the government of England, Wales and the northern provinces and whose foresight in building a navy made possible the later defeat of the Spanish Armada and opened the Atlantic to the colonizing of America; a theological scholar subtle enough to find plausible pretexts, other than his ire at the Pope and his fear of Spain, for wanting to break with Rome.”

How even-handed an assessment. How reasonable. How British.

And how beside the point.

The problem with Cooke’s picture is that it’s Henry as a young man. Moreover, it overlooks the instinct to carry all before him that was present from early in his career. Cardinal Wolsey told another adviser, “I warn you to be well advised and assured what matter ye put in his head; for ye shall never pull it out again.”

I’ve come to think of Henry as a psychopath with a scepter, much of it the result of his own doing.

The king’s appetites for food led to a bloated frame—and resulting ulcers on his leg. By his mid-40s, he had grown so abnormally obese that in one four-year period his waist increased by 17 inches. (That's why I like the portrait accompanying this blog.)

Two jousting accidents left him depressed and belligerent.

The miscarriages suffered by his first two wives and the lack of children from his three children, coupled with his physical torments and rages, a diagnosis of syphilis one that cannot be dismissed out of hand.

In a fascinating essay contributed to Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (1995), Richard Marius made a revisionist case against the depiction of St. Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, and even disputed the notion that Henry was a “raging maniac.”

But Marius’ own portrait of the king is, if anything, of a man far more dangerous than the movie image he disputes. “In public, especially in his younger days, he could be viperlike in his cunning. Henry remained personally friendly, almost to the last, with many of the people he destroyed—including [Thomas] Cromwell and Thomas Cardinal Wolsey.”

Make no mistake, then: this was a cruel and capricious ruler who sent loyal retainers to the gallows when he wasn’t hounding them to a premature grave, a man who broke with Rome not for any serious theological disagreement but (contra Alistair Cooke) because of the result of a sexual liaison.

This was an imperious monarch who fomented what historian Eamon Duffy called a “stripping of the altars” and helped sever a people who had no argument with the Pope from a religion to which their ancestors had adhered for centuries.

Yet a triumphant Protestantism dubbed Henry’s older daughter “Bloody Mary” and, even today, in a nation where church attendance has dropped precipitously, the initials “D.F.” (for “Defender of the Faith,” the title given by the pope to Henry for his defense against Luther) are retained on coinage. Go figure.

(For an excellent 1914 contrarian view of pre-Reformation England, please see History of the Catholic Church From Renaissance to the French Revolution, by the Jesuit historian James MacCaffrey.)

Henry has proven an irresistible subject for stage, film and TV, starting with Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. 

His reign presented three actors with the opportunity for plenty of scene-chewing, landing each Academy Award-nominated roles—Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII (the one winner in the group); Robert Shaw in A Man for All Seasons; and Richard Burton in Anne of the Thousand Days. 

On TV, he’s been portrayed by Keith Michell (The Six Wives of Henry VIII) and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (the recent Showtime series The Tudors).

Michell’s portrayal may be the best at detailing the gradual devolution of this monarch into physical and emotional decrepitude, but Shaw’s seems to me to penetrate the most to the heart of the absolutist impulse that achieved its apotheosis in the 20th century: a leader of surpassing hail-fellow-well-met charm one moment who can, on a dime, turn into a tyrant who poses an overwhelming danger to anyone unlucky enough to be within the vicinity of his wrath. (For a contemporary counterpart, see Forest Whitaker’s Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.)