Flashback, November 1960: ‘BUtterfield 8,’ The Film Hated by Its Stars and Author, Opens

 A common adage holds that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. Today’s case in point: BUtterfield 8, which MGM released 65 years ago this month.

It’s hard to find anyone today with much good to say about the film. When it came out, critics and even those most closely associated with the outcome of the movie felt just as strongly about the movie:

*Star Elizabeth Taylor took the role of promiscuous party girl Gloria Wandrous because she had to, in order to fulfill the last in a three-picture deal.

*Singer Eddie Fisher, who got his supporting role (his first movie acting credit) only at the insistence of his wife Taylor, never took another onscreen—perhaps out of embarrassment, perhaps because Hollywood regarded it as proof positive that he was best suited for his normal profession;

*Author John O'Hara could be forgiven for his usual cantankerous attitude this time, as he correctly believed that the Charles Schnee-John Michael Hayes screenplay had badly oversimplified his Depression-era novel.  Admirers like myself badly miss a cinematic equivalent of his panoramic view of class-ridden Manhattan in the Prohibition Era, as well as the bitter lament of his Irish-American alter ego, James Malloy, about being viewed as less than American by the WASP elite. (See my blog post from 14 years ago on the real-life scandal that O'Hara used as his springboard.)

With all the disgust these figures felt, American moviegoers reacted differently. BUtterfield 8 earned $10 million at the box office, which, on a budget of approximately $2 million, made it one of the biggest hits of 1960. And, in the new year, Hollywood gave Taylor her the first of two Oscars for a role in a motion picture that was little short of pornography.

The Production Code Administration, Hollywood’s censorship arm, had made it virtually impossible for more than two decades to bring O’Hara’s book to the screen. Although Hayes observed late in his life that in 1960 films didn’t encounter as many difficulties, that might have been in this case because the screenplay eliminated the novel’s references to abortion and lesbianism.

There was also the matter of how to describe Gloria’s occupation: was she a prostitute or not? Certainly in the case of the movie, many have assumed that she was, even though she ostensibly modeled dresses in restaurants and other upscale settings. 

But, particularly because of the opening scene, in which her married lover Weston Liggett left her money from the night before (to pay for the dress he tore in a drunken fit) and a joke by another lover that all the men she’s been with “meet once a year at Yankee Stadium,” the thought lingered among many that she was paid for her services.

(By the way, for the benefit of younger readers, the first two capital letters in “BUtterfield” are not a typo. They refer to how numbers were remembered in those days—thus, “BU” represents 28.)

Conventional wisdom holds that Taylor was awarded her Best Actress Oscar in sympathy for a life-threatening bout of pneumonia that resulted in an emergency tracheotomy. I won’t appraise the merits of the other nominees in the category. But it’s doubtful that they had to surmount as much as Taylor—a subpar screenplay and an extremely miscast co-star (Laurence Harvey).

The opening scene, unfolding with hardly a word for nearly 10 minutes, depends entirely on Taylor’s movements and expressions as she transitions from troubled sleep to anger at the departed Liggett. And her confession to her platonic male friend Steve of the sexual abuse she suffered as a child is searing.

Taylor reportedly did not get along well with director Daniel Mann. (One story goes that, when he handed her two eggs in their shells and told her to cook them in the next scene, Taylor—whose schooling on the MGM lot evidently did not include home economics—responded, “But what do I do with them?”)

Nevertheless, I like to think that, with her great sense of humor, Taylor would have guffawed at the notion that, even with a tawdry melodrama that brought such a sorry end to the studio she had called home for 17 years, she had achieved a career triumph in BUtterfield 8.

Quote of the Day (John O'Hara, With Some Early July Social History)

“They dodged being in love at first, and because they always had been friends, his seeing her increasingly more frequently did not become perceptible until he asked her to go with him to the July 3 Assembly [a large society gathering held twice a year in Gibbsville, PA on New Year's Eve and July 3^rd]. You asked a girl at least a month in advance for the Assemblies, and you asked the girl you liked best. It was the only one he ever freely had asked her to; she knew his mother told him to ask her to the very first one. The Assembly was not just another dance, and in the time between her accepting and the night of the dance they both were conscious of it. A girl gave preference in dates to the man who was asking her to the Assembly.” —American novelist and short-story writer John O'Hara (1905-1970), Appointment in Samarra (1934)

When John O’Hara first wrote about the custom of “Assembly” in the early 1930s, it was contemporary. When he titled the first collection of his extraordinary short stories in the 1960s using the word, however, fewer readers would have recognized the reference. That number has surely dwindled in the sixty-plus years since.

In the foreword to his 1960 trio of novellas, Sermons and Soda-Water, O’Hara explained what he felt increasingly compelled to do, particularly for younger readers not familiar with the original context of the times:

“I have lived with as well as in the Twentieth Century from its earliest days. The United States in this Century is what I know, and it is my business to write about it to the best of my ability, with the sometimes special knowledge I have. The Twenties, the Thirties, and the Forties are already history, but I cannot be content to leave their story in the hands of the historians and the editors of picture books. I want to record the way people talked and thought and felt, and do it with complete honesty and variety.”

You can read O’Hara for his extraordinary facility with dialogue, as well as for the insights into characters that he wants you to infer from below the surface of the story.

But, especially in his later work—and even glancingly, here, in Appointment in Samarra—you come away with a better understanding of a particular time and region (what he called his “Pennsylvania Protectorate” of the anthracite coal area in which he grew up).

It is, as he hoped, something you’re unlikely to learn from “historians and the editors of picture books”—or, I might add, other writers of fiction. 

(For a further consideration of why, "Among American novelists, O'Hara remains our best, begrudging social historian," I urge you to read Charles F. McElwee III's fine 2014 essay on the Website of the John O'Hara Society.)

Flashback, November, 1964: O’Hara Reaffirms Short-Story Mastery With ‘The Horse Knows the Way’

The publication of the latest short fiction collection from John O’Hara, The Horse Knows the Way, in November 1964 should have been cause for unalloyed delight for author and publisher alike. Its 28 tales, like his other work, not only garnered unusually high sales for short fiction but cemented his status as a master of the form.

Instead, O’Hara inadvertently provided more fodder for his detractors. In a foreword, describing his need to get down on paper all he knew about how the people of his town lived, he concluded, “I have work to do, and I am afraid not to do it.”

More than a few critics, however—led by those in the highly influential New York Review of Books and The New York Times Book Review—transposed the key words at the end to read, “not afraid to do it.”

Just the kind of braggadocio you’d expect from O’Hara, they noted.

Predictably, that observation only increased the fury of a man who perceived slights everywhere he turned. It also reinforced why he requested that his publisher, Random House, officially release his books on Thanksgiving: Because, unlike reviewers in the more high-profile Sunday Times Book Review, he would get a respectful hearing from the paper's daily critic, Charles Poore (who thought highly enough of his work and character that he delivered the eulogy after O'Hara died in 1970). 

Worse, like so much else associated with this gifted but touchy writer, the mangled quotation originated from anything but a close reading of O'Hara's work.

Consider, for instance, Adrian Mitchell’s dismissal of the volume in The New York Times Book Review: “It’s not the flat, monochrome characters but the author’s flat, monochrome vision of their world which is so often discouraging.”

But this largely forgotten British novelist, poet, and critic missed what other authors (including E.L. Doctorow, whose left-wing politics was diametrically opposed to that of the increasingly conservative O’Hara’s) have picked up on: that, while O’Hara’s prose might be prismatic, his presentation is anything but. 

With abrupt, often stunning endings, his stories send readers scurrying back through these works, trying to pick up on the clues they missed earlier.

It was true that O’Hara could be his own worst enemy: openly craving the Nobel Prize, for instance, or an honorary degree from Yale University, an institution of higher learning he’d been unable to attend because of the financial complications following the death of his father. Asked why the school had never awarded him that degree, the president at the time, Kingman Brewster, responded simply, “Because he asked.”

But at his best—and the stories in The Horse Knows the Way are consistently good—they fulfill his intention of trying to tell the truth about his time.

Roughly speaking, his short stories occur in three locales, the places where he had spent most of his time: New York, Hollywood, and Gibbsville, PA (the fictional stand-in for his hometown, Pottsville). Like much of his other Hollywood fiction, an example from The Horse Knows the Way, “The Answer Depends,” spotlights the kind of actors who populate much of the fare on Turner Classic Movies.

But my favorite stories from the book are set in Gibbsville, whose physical and emotional geography he knew with bone-deep understanding. These are the stories to seek out in this volume: "At the Window," "The Hardware Man," "The Victim," "The House on the Corner," "Aunt Fran," and "All Tied Up."

“For a while, at least,” O’Hara warned his loyal readers, “this will be my last book of short stories.” It wasn’t so much that he had descended into sloth, however, as that he decided to focus his energy on other projects.

One, the novel The Lockwood Concern, which appeared the following year, at least earned some critical plaudits as among his better entries in the long form in the last part of his life.

The other activity, a syndicated column for Newsday, lasted only a year, and did nothing but swell his reputation for bumptiousness and bellyaching about his lack of respect.

Fortunately, he returned to the short story genre in 1966 with Waiting for Winter, whose title strongly hinted at his increasing concern for aging and mortality.

The Horse Knows the Way appeared midway through a decade of flabbergasting productivity in the short-story form for O'Hara: from 1960 to 1968, seven collections of 137 tales, bringing his career total to more than 400. 

Other writers (like my favorite, F. Scott Fitzgerald) impress with their shimmering style, but they never took the measure of so many people from so many walks of life as O'Hara. These late stories, like his earlier ones, rely heavily on dialogue. 

But, because O'Hara feared that younger readers would be more likely to miss the resonances of his tales set decades earlier, they are often more ruminating, even melancholy, as in this passage from "The Answer Depends":

"I don't try to follow the plot lines of Ned Revere's films. In a few minutes after one of his pictures has begun to roll, I am in a daze of recollection, of remembering Ned as a gay companion: irresponsible, Quixotic, romantic, attractive to men as well as to women, and with no illusions then as to his stature as an artist."

Surveying where life has left them, the narrator, a retired actor named "Bobby," concludes: "I don't know who is better off: me, at my TV, with memories as fresh as the news in the morning paper, or Ned, scornful of those pleasant and profitable days, and with the lingering bitter taste of that one success on Broadway."

Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on New Year’s Day in the 1870s)

“Even then fashion moved quickly in New York, and my infantile memory barely reached back to the time when Grandmamma, in lace lappets and creaking ‘moire,’ used to receive on New Year’s day, supported by her handsome married daughters. As for old Sillerton Jackson, who, once a social custom had dropped into disuse, always affected never to observe it, he stoutly maintained that the New Year’s ceremonial had never been taken seriously except among families of Dutch descent, and that that was why Mrs. Henry van der Luyden had clung to it, in a reluctant half-apologetic way, long after her friends had closed their doors on the first of January, and the date had been chosen for those out-of-town parties which are so often used as a pretext for absence when the unfashionable are celebrating their rites.” – American novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937), “New Year’s Day,” in Old New York (1924) 

As we turn the page on another year and even an entire era in American life, it’s useful to look back and see how others from earlier times marked turning points. Few such writers were more acute in their observation than Edith Wharton, one of my favorite authors. (And right here is a plug for The Mount, her Berkshire mansion, which, like her most famous heroine, Lily Bart of The House of Mirth, found itself in considerable financial distress this past year—and which could use all the visitors and financial support it can get.) 

As I was researching this post, I was thrilled to find that there’s a delightful blog about the author—and that its December 27, 2008 post highlights a New York Times article about her birthplace at West 23rd St., a five-story structure that was converted to commercial use some time ago and is now a Starbucks.

When she wrote The House of Mirth in 1905, Wharton was scathing in depicting the constrictive upper-crust society from which she sprang. With the distance provided by a cataclysmic world war and a move across the Atlantic to France, however, her attitude had evolved into something more complex. Sure, she could still decry, in The Age of Innocence (1920), “the old New York way of taking life 'without effusion of blood’,” but, like protagonist Newland Archer, she felt out of place in the rough-and-tumble world that replaced it. 

Wharton’s original proposed title for this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel—the first ever won by a woman, incidentally—was Old New York, but her publisher rejected it. But once she had the bit between her teeth, she was not ready to let go so easily. So she used it for her 1924 quartet of novellas spanning from the 1840s to 1870s. 

“New Year’s Day,” the last novella in the group, has not won the critical acclaim of two others, “False Dawn” and “The Old Maid” (the latter was made into an unjustly neglected 1939 Bette Davis-Miriam Hopkins film). Still, the Wharton style—elegant, yet clear as a country brook—is here, along with a lightly amused attitude toward social dinosaurs such as Sillerton Jackson. 

In reflecting on Old New York, the closest counterpart to it that I could come up with was, believe it or not, John O’Hara’s Sermons and Soda-Water (1960), another novella collection set in what seemed to the author like an increasingly distant past. 

True, there’s the kind of difference you’d expect between a woman to the manor born, coming from a world in which Catholics and Jews were pointedly excluded, and a lapsed Irish-Catholic who desperately aspired to the society of the wealthy but felt excluded by his ethnicity from ever really belonging to it. 

But both Wharton and O’Hara wrote their books in the later part of midlife, when they could see the end coming not just for themselves but for their world, and their worldviews had evolved into something that veered between nostalgia and conservatism. That left them all the more resolved to record not just the details of that world—say, how little kids chased after fire engines, for Wharton, or the Gershwin tunes one might hear at a country club, for O’Hara—but the social mores of this American aristocracy. "I have work to do, and I am afraid not to do it," O’Hara wrote a few years later in the foreword to a collection of short stories, The Horse Knows the Way.

Both authors were also obsessed with affairs of the heart and with how marriages endure—or fracture. The best novella in Sermons and Soda-Water, “Imagine Kissing Pete,” is about a bad marriage that, against all odds, survives and even, to an extent, thrives. “New Year’s Day” concerns an adulterous liaison that the narrator, as a boy, discovers in a hotel across the street from his 23rd Street brownstone; about the adult disapproval that clues him into the fact that a major transgression, a defiance of the social order, has taken place; and about how the beautiful woman at the center of the scandal lives out the rest of her life. 

The Fifth Avenue hotel where the affair occurs is scorned by New York aristocrats, chiefly because of the unrefined, overdressed partygoers who congregate there for the holiday. Little do they know that it’s this hoi polloi, not themselves, who represent the wave of the future in Gotham.

This Day in Literary History (O’Hara Returns to Short Fiction in ‘Sermons and Soda-Water’)

Nov. 24, 1960—Eleven years after angrily abandoning short fiction after a negative review in the principal outlet for his work, The New Yorker, John O’Hara marked his return to the form that was his strength (and to the magazine’s fold) with a boxed set of three novellas, Sermons and Soda-Water.

From his first (and usually considered best) novel, Appointment in Samarra, in 1934, O’Hara had brought an excellent ear for dialogue and an encyclopedic knowledge of his characters that helped him depict class distinctions with pinpoint accuracy. But a decade’s departure from the short story brought with it new strengths: a renewed commitment to “get it all down on paper while I can,” a greater desire to depict the social circumstances of his time for a new generation, and an empathy enhanced by the losses and misfortunes of friends.

The collection’s title, derived from Lord Byron’s Don Juan ("Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, / Sermons and soda-water the day after"), suggests its subject: the journey of O’Hara and his generation from their riotous youthful excess in Prohibition through the cataclysms that brought them up short: the Depression and World War II.

Though I consider O’Hara’s novels in his last two decades to be, at a basic level, pleasurable, they were not always consistent, and many critics regard them far more skeptically, as loose, baggy monsters.

But it is hard to find fault with his short stories of the 1960s, which, for breadth of characters and depth of social observation, is virtually unrivaled in American literature.

In a post from nine years ago, on O’Hara’s 1961 story collection, Assembly, I discussed how more fully the nature of this achievement, as well as the nasty Brendan Gill review that precipitated his break from The New Yorker and editor William Maxwell’s shrewd judgment in securing his services again.

The story that convinced Maxwell that the notoriously touchy O’Hara was worth dealing with again was one of the novellas from Sermons and Soda-Water, “Imagine Kissing Pete,” a kind of American “Scenes From a Marriage.” A union begun as an act of spite (sexy Bobbie Hammersmith weds possibly the least desirable member of her circle, Pete McCrea, to get back at a former beau) is followed by mutual infidelity, arguments and straitened circumstances. Yet against all odds, after 30 years, the couple arrive at not merely accommodation but respect and even affection for each other.

As I discussed in this post from 12 years ago about Robert Montgomery, O’Hara missed out on a chance to have that talented writer-director adapt “Imagine Kissing Pete” because of a boorishness that often alienated many admirers.

The other two novellas in the trilogy, "The Girl on the Baggage Truck" and “We’re Friends Again,” though not as superb as “Imagine Kissing Pete,” are similarly distinguished by an elegiac tone and compassion for how his characters dealt with fate that was missing from his earlier short stories.

Typical in this regard is the conclusion of “We’re Friends Again,” in which the narrator ponders what he has learned about his best friend and the latter’s wife:

“I realized that until then I had not known him at all. It was not a discovery to cause me dismay. What did he know about me? What, really, can any of us know about any of us, and why must we make such a thing of loneliness when it is the final condition of us all? And where would love be without it?”

The linked trilogy also marked a return of O’Hara’s alter ego, Jim Malloy, a hard-drinking young writer who had appeared in the 1934 coming-of-age novella “The Doctor’s Son” and the novels BUtterfield 8 (1935) and Hope of Heaven (1938). He is not unlike Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman—a reappearing literary stand-in for the author who, having experienced his own reverses (controversial books, failed relationships, brushes with mortality), functions as a moved observer of friends over time.

The comparison might seem surprising at first, but the turn that O’Hara took in his short fiction in his fifties resembles in some ways that of Henry James:

*Both were writers of manners who, in the fifties, began to write longer fiction as their literary ambitions expanded;

*Both used their disappointing attempts to break into the world of entertainment (James, on the London stage; O’Hara, on Broadway and in Hollywood) as fodder for character creation; and

*Both, terribly saddened by the deaths of loved ones (O’Hara, second wife Belle and close friends Robert Benchley, James Forrestal and Philip Barry; James, sister Alice and brother Willkie), increasingly considered mortality in their work; and,

*Both found the novella an artistically satisfying vehicle.

 Good introductions to both writers can, in fact, be found in such collections (Great Short Novels of Henry James and The Novellas of John O'Hara). They allow for extended treatment of character and theme without the elaborate plot requirements of a longer novel. Above all, they exhibit his sense of verisimilitude, the sense of authority and honesty conveyed by what he called “special knowledge” of social customs.

This Day in Irish-American History (James Forrestal, Self-Made Man and Cabinet Casualty, Born)

Feb. 15, 1892—James Forrestal, who earned riches on Wall Street and acclaim as one of the architects of the national security state before succumbing to despair brought on by his workaholic style, was born in the upstate community of Beacon, N.Y.

Given what I have just written, you might wonder why my headline, instead of using the phrase “military history” or even “business history,” referred to “Irish-American history.” 

But Forrestal, the son of an Irish immigrant father and American mother of Irish descent, spent much of his adult life in near-total rejection of his background—not just Roman Catholicism but even his ethnicity and family.

This all-stops-out attempt at assimilation represented one means by which Irish-Americans of his time could fit into America and attain success. But it exacted a terrible cost: a lack of a home life or roots, culminating in a suicide that haunted his lofty social-cultural set and powerful figures in Washington, D.C. for generations to come.

Forrestal grew up in a time when the Ivy League was a WASP bastion, when Jews were excluded by quotas, and Catholics—particularly those of the lower-middle-class—were often looked down upon.

Initially rejected by Princeton, he was at last accepted, then shone so brightly, in academics and on the school paper, that the Class of 1915 voted him Most Likely to Succeed. Then, a few weeks before graduation, he dropped out, for reasons that remain unexplained.

The inability to get a degree, after the various sacrifices he and his parents had made to get him through school, appears to have led him to cut off contact with his family. (A tentative attempt to reconcile with his mother--who had originally wanted him to become a priest--by buying her a house a decade later went nowhere: she didn't move into the house.) 

Then, after a brief stint as a clerk/handyman—quite below what his classmates had been making—he took a job with William A. Read and Co., a New York investment banking firm that later became Dillon, Read and Co.

The resulting career there—interrupted only by service as a naval aviator in WWI—was astonishingly successful. He made partner at age 31, and by 1932, the heart of the Depression, he made $5 million—more than $82 million in today’s currency.

Although he wore the map of Ireland on his face, Forrestal continued to shed his heritage, becoming an Episcopalian, giving up on contact with his family, and refusing to refer to himself as Irish-American.

That denial allowed him to “pass” in WASP society, contract an advantageous marriage to a Vogue columnist beautiful enough to be photographed by Cecil Beaton, and advance on Wall Street.

In 1940, Forrestal left Dillon, Read to become one of the “dollar-a-year” businessmen who, forgoing their normal much larger private-sector salaries, helped the Roosevelt administration fulfill his desire to make America “the arsenal of democracy.” 

He worked seven days a week as undersecretary of the navy, so he was the natural choice to became secretary of the department itself in 1944 when his boss Frank Knox died.

So successful was Forrestal—first for FDR, then for Harry Truman—that he was tapped to spearhead the reorganization of the armed services into a single Defense Department; so exhausted was he in that effort by the dawn of the Cold War and constant political infighting, and so forlorn about being trapped in an unhappy marriage to his now-alcoholic wife, that he suffered a nervous breakdown.

After leaving the Defense Department, a depressed Forrestal, confined to Bethesda Naval Hospital for exhaustion, asked to see a Roman Catholic priest so he could confess. His request was denied. Not long afterward, he threw himself out the window of the 16th floor at the hospital. 

His death haunted his literary friends Philip Barry and John O’Hara, inspiring, respectively, the play Second Threshold and the sprawling novel From the Terrace.

This Day in Theater History (‘Pal Joey’ Introduces the Musical Heel)

December 25, 1940— When it premiered at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Pal Joey opened Broadway to more mature subject matter as the first American musical about an anti-hero. Without it, I would argue, you would never have the monstrous stage mother in Gypsy, the emcee in Cabaret, or the all-too-human leads in Stephen Sondheim’s landmark musicals like Follies.

When people think of names associated with Pal Joey, the ones that come to mind are its composer and lyricist, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. But the person often overlooked on the production team is the person who came up with the idea, the creator of the libretto and the original source on which it was based: John O’Hara.

In a way, that’s symbolic of what has happened to his place in American culture since his death 45 years ago: Once a bestselling novelist and short-story writer, he’s now hardly remembered in comparison with his good friends Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Some readers of this blog may know of a song from Pal Joey called “I Could Write a Book.” Well, O’Hara could—and did—write lots of them—novels, short stories, essay collections—and that’s not even counting plays, unproduced screenplays, or letters.

Pal Joey may have had the most unusual genesis of any of his works, as a series of about a dozen sketches in The New Yorker written in the form of letters to a friend from his “Pal Joey” Evans, a two-bit nightclub entertainer.

The sketches themselves were slight, but like Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner, O’Hara took a virtuosic delight in slang such as “take a powder” (get out), “making with the throat” (singing), “joint,” “crib,” and “angle.” Oh, yes—and the most delicious malapropisms until Archie Bunker came along, including my favorite, Joey’s account of his annoyance: “I lost my composer.”

When he was well along in this series, O’Hara wrote to Rodgers to see if he and partner Hart would want to adapt it into a musical. Rodgers recalled years later that he quickly said yes, because it would not only be different from anything they’d ever done but also different from anything anyone had ever done in a musical. Now, what did Rodgers mean?

Much of it stems from the slang word that Joey may use most frequently, and certainly, most enthusiastically: “mouse,” or young woman who’s caught his eye. Nowadays, we would call Vera Simpson, the rich, older society woman who pays for his clothes and his Chicago nightclub where he is emcee while making him her kept man, a “cougar.” These terms suggest predators and prey.

Virtually everybody in this animal kingdom uses everyone else, except for one sweet young woman, Linda, who still carries the torch for Joey. It’s a mark of the musical’s cynicism that Linda is as dumb as a rock.

Surprisingly, O’Hara’s interest in the musical faded after he first came up with the idea. George Abbott, a veteran director and script doctor, liked to have playwrights at out-of-town tryouts to make last-minute changes, but O’Hara went AWOL. So Abbott was left to make most of these changes, and he was also the one who helped create the plot: the affair between Joey and Vera. 

Pal Joey was not a great success in its first run, because of its risqué subject matter, its lack of a sympathetic lead or happy ending, and its premiere during a musicians’ strike that limited the radio exposure that songs in new musicals needed at that time. The critical quote that most succinctly summarized the state of opinion at that time came from Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, who queried, "Although it is expertly done, can you draw sweet water from a foul well?"

Over time several songs, especially “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and “I Could Write a Book,” became standards, and a cast album and revival in 1952 (which featured a young but already brassy Elaine Stritch) really thrust the show and its music into the popular consciousness. (Less successful were the 1957 film adaptation starring Frank Sinatra, and a 2008 “revisal”—i.e., a rewritten book—produced by the Roundabout Theater and starring Stockard Channing. See my review at the time of the latter here.)

The original 1940 production was also notable for launching young talents. Three of them ended up at MGM Studios: the actor Van Johnson; a chorus-line dancer who became a noted director-choreographer, Stanley Donen; and the show’s lead, who impressed just about everyone with his dancing: Gene Kelly (with a dancer in the image accompanying this post). (Kelly can also be found, in all-too-brief form, in this YouTube clip--taken from a patron who surreptitiously taped the show at the time.

This production, as well as its 1952 revival, which he also worked on, gave O’Hara a yen for the theater that he never really got over. One of the hardest-to-find O’Hara books is one that came out in 1964, Five Plays. They were unproduced, and they remain so, partly because he didn’t take well to director’s suggestions. But he was still working on another play at the time of his death in 1970.

As for the songwriting team that created it: “It was the most satisfying and mature work that I was associated with during all my years with Larry Hart,” recalled Rodgers in his autobiography. It would also be their last. The notoriously unreliable, alcoholic Hart was in no condition to work on the next project Rodgers had in mind, and its setting—rural life in the late 19^th century—was far removed from the contemporary urban milieu in which the lyricist excelled. Oklahoma launched a new partnership between Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II that would be even more wildly successful than either of them--than anybody, really, certainly including the fictional Joey Evans--had ever known before.

This Day in Literary History (O’Hara’s ’10 North Frederick’ Published)

November 24, 1955—Random House, yielding to the desire of bestselling author John O’Hara to get a decent critical shake for his latest novel, released Ten North Frederick on Thanksgiving. The ploy, aimed squarely at the daily reviewers of The New York Times, worked: the book earned such a favorable review from critic Charles Poore that the publisher released most of O’Hara’s books on the holiday for the remaining 15 years of his life.

It shouldn’t have mattered—since A Rage to Live six years before, O’Hara had been earning enough from his books to live in the affluent style he chronicled in his fiction—but critics had increasingly given him the backs of their hands, and it stung.

Critic Dwight Macdonald referred to The New York Times’ two regular daily reviewers, Poore and Orville Prescott, as “the lead-dust twins,” but at least as far as O’Hara was concerned, significant differences existed between the two. Prescott had lambasted A Rage to Live for its “sensationalism,” primarily for being “only the story of a woman for whom there is a common but unprintable word.” Poore did not like all of O’Hara’s work (he later had serious reservations about Ourselves to Know), but he never regarded him as anything other than a serious novelist who deserved at least a respectful hearing.

The thin-skinned O’Hara obviously wanted to avoid being  reviewed by Prescott—and eventually, he figured out a way to circumvent him. At the time, the Times critics alternated the days of their reviews, a practice to which the Good Gray Lady adhered religiously. This meant that Prescott did not review on Thursdays.

Publishing on Thanksgiving, then, might have seemed to ordinary bibliophiles a reminder to get hold of another O’Hara title for Christmas. For the novelist, however, it meant stealing a critical march on someone who had done him dirt in print.

Ten North Frederick went through 58 international printings between its original publication and 1970—no surprise. But it also netted unusual critical acclaim for an O’Hara work, culminating in a National Book Award the following year—a recognition so unusual that the legendarily cantankerous author choked up at the end of his acceptance speech.

In nearly 40 years of reading and re-reading O’Hara, this novel remains a particular favorite of mine—even though, as I noted in a prior post, his most enduring legacy is as a master of the short story. Yet the 60^th anniversary of its publication—and my viewing, after all this time, of its 1958 fine film adaptation starring Gary Cooper and Geraldine Fitzgerald (both in the image accompanying this post)—has made me reflect anew on why it works so well for me.

For the first time in a novel since the book that first brought him notice, Appointment in Samarra, O’Hara returned to Gibbsville, a fictionalized version of his eastern Pennsylvania birthplace, Pottsville. And, though it is longer and less fiercely concentrated than that earlier work, it deals with similar themes: society’s image of an individual vs. his self-image, free will vs. determinism. That can be seen, very subtly, even in its first paragraph, as a new widow prepares herself for the crowd coming to pay respects at the funeral of her husband:

“Edith Chapin was alone in her sewing room on the third floor of the house at Number 10 in Frederick Street. The room was warm, the day was cold and unbrightened by the sun. The shutters in the bay-window were closed, but the slats in the shutters were open, and Edith Chapin could, when it pleased her, go to the bay-window and look down on her yard and the two-story garage that had been a stable, and above and beyond the gilded figure of a trotting horse on the weather vane she could see roof upon roof upon third story upon third story of the houses on the rising hill. She would know the names of nearly all of the people who lived in them, she knew the names of the owners. She had spent her lifetime in the town, and it was easy to know who everyone was and where everyone lived. It was especially easy for Edith because she had always had a reputation for shyness, and it was not expected of her to make a fuss over people. She could notice them and study them, if it pleased her, without any further social effort on her part than simple politeness called for. It had always been that way.”

Notice the wealth of information suggested by these seven sentences:

*A great length of time is evoked—first by “the two-story garage that had been a stable,” symbolizing the seismic social change wrought by the automobile, second by the note that Edith “had spent her lifetime in town.” The rest of the novel will consider the entire lifetime of her husband, Joe, an eminent lawyer who, by virtue of inherited wealth, is the most prominent man in town.

*Edith gazes down on “the houses on the rising hill.” Her affluence is implied not just by topography but by her manner of beholding those in her orbit; they are beneath her. At the same time, she knows “the names of nearly all of the people who lived in them [and] the names of the owners.” Quietly, O’Hara has distinguished between landlords and tenants (“the people who lived in them”), another clue to the issues of class that obsess him. It might be said that O’Hara, with his insatiable curiosity about people, knew all about houses and their inhabitants. But he sometimes transformed what he knew for fictional purposes. In this case, he took the real-life home that most resembles the Chapins’—a house on George Street in Pottsville, owned by his mentor at a local newspaper—and made it into a far grander home on the written page, according to biographer Frank MacShane. One other thought about the matter of observation here: Technically, there is no passage in the book when O’Hara, as third-passage narrator, enters the consciousness of Joe Chapin. But through the entire experience of everybody gathered at the house for the funeral,  the reader learns as much about him as it is possible to do about a human being with all his inevitable secrets and need for privacy.

*The fact that Edith has lived all her life in town speaks volumes about her narrow horizons. But, except for education at Yale, Joe’s is no broader.

* Edith can look out the window “when it pleased her,” and she can notice and study the townspeople “if it pleased her.” The near-exact repetition of that phrase was not a mistake on O’Hara’s part. Pleasure is a highly contingent matter for Edith. Just as important, it’s a silent assertion of her will—an instinct in stark contrast to her largely passive, though decent and kind-hearted, husband.

*The weather—“cold and unbrightened by the sun”—summons not just a dismal day or time of year, but also, we will learn by the book’s end, the frigid marriage of Joe and Edith. Later,  O’Hara will peg this character unmistakably, without the screen of symbolism: “Protestantism for her religion, extravagance nowhere in her character, and discontent never far from her contemplation.”

*“Edith…always had a reputation for shyness, and it was not expected of her to make a fuss over people.” Much of the rest of the novel will unpeel an onion—the reputation of Joe Chapin as a success—versus the reality—a failure as a family man and in the one ambition he seeks to satisfy in midlife. Similarly, Edith’s reputation for “shyness” will be revealed as a sham. She is not a wallflower, but a withholder of affection. As for what is “expected,” that comes to hamstring her husband. Well into middle age, he does exactly what first his parents, then society, thinks he will do. He has never had to take risks—even small ones, let alone large ones—with the result that his inner resources are lacking. When, at age 50, he finally does decide to seek what he wants—the U.S. Presidency—he cannot grasp how preposterous the notion is, without the slightest political experience. It’s inevitable that, in the preliminary step toward this, running for lieutenant governor of the state, he will be cheated out of a $100,000 donation to the Republican Party by local boss Mike Slattery—who, by his comparatively lower-class upbringing, has far fewer compunctions about seizing what he wants.

There is something else to be noticed about the sentences in this first paragraph: they are long, leisurely even, in the manner of someone about to relate a story about three generations—not just Joe Chapin but also his parents and children.  But O’Hara also knew how such sentences could set up the reader for a short, devastating one, the kind that comes at the end of this long opening section about the funeral, when the mourners begin to quarrel over who will direct a subscription for the memorial they plan in his honor: “Joseph B. Chapin was finally dead. They had started fighting over him.”

Hypocrisy and cruelty run rampant in this kind of social order. Only love—even the furtive, helpless romance between Joe and a friend of his adult daughter’s—provides a grace note in a life discovered, tragically late, to have been empty at its core.

In a very real sense, O’Hara was laying down a marker for himself with Ten North Frederick. In the first two decades of his career writing fiction, his ability to write fast had been undercut by heavy drinking. Then, in the course of a year and a half in the 1950s, his life changed dramatically because of a near-fatal stomach ulcer, the death of his beloved second wife, the resulting primary responsibility for his nine-year-old daughter, and remarriage, on his 50^th birthday.

The change in O’Hara was signaled by his pouring an entire bottle of scotch down the drain. After that, he never had another drink. All the energy he had once wasted on pub crawling now went into one of the most astonishingly prolific periods ever exhibited by a major American novelist.

The critical reputation of O’Hara has been dogged by the perception that he never wrote another novel as good as his rookie effort, Appointment in Samarra. A different but equally sizable group of people disliked his unsparing treatment of how characters interact, including through sex.

It’s a sign of the skill and complexity of O’Hara’s tough-minded realism in Ten North Frederick that he provided an answer of sorts through the otherwise not very sympathetic Judge Lloyd Williams: “Well I don’t give a damn what you think or anyone else. Nothing personal. I just see what I see and I don’t shut my eyes to it.”