Quote of the Day (Teresa Carpenter, on ‘Crime As Entertainment’ in the Eighties)

“It would be no exaggeration to call the ’80s the decade of Crime as Entertainment. An epoch where fascination with ‘reality’ permeated every nook and crevice of television. The first and most visible manifestation of the phenomenon was the unprecedented number of miniseries and movies-of-the-week based loosely upon true tales of mayhem. In 1981, there was Murder in Texas recreating the demise of Texas heiress and equestrian, Joan Hill. The following year brought The Executioner’s Song based upon Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the felonious life and ultimate electrocution of Gary Gilmore. Nineteen-eighty-four was a bloody year, giving us both The Burning Bed and Fatal Vision, followed close upon by the following year’s extravaganza, The Atlanta Child Murders. Nineteen-eighty-seven produced not one, but two, network miniseries on the rather minor case of Frances Schreuder, a demented Mormon heiress who induced her son to kill her father. And, of course, in the closing months of the decade were offerings fresh off the newsstands: The Preppie Murder and Howard Beach: Making the Case for Murder.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Teresa Carpenter, “1980-1989: Crime as Entertainment,” The Village Voice, Jan. 2, 1990

Forty years ago today, the crime referred to in the above paragraph, “The Preppy Murder,” occurred in Central Park. In the attempt to create “entertainment” out of a story, the media’s use of “preppy” represented a misnomer. 

That would not be the only distortion involving the case. To the shame of the American legal system, the next one perpetuated sexism that violated female victims all over again.

It has infuriated me that, though account after account eventually got around to the exact background of the accused, Robert Chambers, the words “preppy killer” and “privilege” appeared to leach out these subtleties. 

His mother was an Irish-born private nurse who struggled to scrape together enough to pay (with the help of scholarships) his way into several private schools, including York Preparatory School. Though trying to pass in the circles of wealth, Robert possessed neither the affluence nor the self-assurance that came with the term “preppy.”

Thank God the press didn’t have an equivalent term to latch onto in the early 1900s, when Chester Gillette, a poor relation of an industrialist, took his pregnant girlfriend on a lake in upstate New York, clubbed her while out alone on their boat, and left her to drown. 

In fact, Gillette briefly attended a prep school in his youth, but in all the subsequent accounts of the case—the breathless newspaper reports as well as, in fictional form, Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy and the Montgomery Clift film A Place in the Sun—that aspect of his life was not emphasized, unlike the Chambers case. (I examined that earlier crime in this blog post from 18 years ago.)

What did come up was the moral vacuity that led the social-climbing Griffith to that point. 

It is that same soul emptiness, it seems to me, that lies unaddressed, after acres of newsprint and hours of news footage, in the story of how Chambers ended the life of Jennifer Levin, the 18-year-old with whom he left the Upper East Side bar Dorian’s a little after 4 in the morning. Less than two hours later, she was found dead in Central Park, strangled.

It would, then, have been fine to call the person who took her life “The Central Park Strangler,” as some news outlets did, because that's exactly the act that occurred. 

But editors needed a way to convey the morbid fascination with a tall, well-dressed, handsome youth. “Preppy” did the trick.

Then Chambers—first in accounts to the police quickly picking apart his story, then through his attorney Jack Litman—began with a contortion act of his own. While engaged in intercourse with him in the park, she had “hurt” him, he claimed, and an “accident” occurred when he tried to disengage.

The shamelessness of the statement was breathtaking: not only was her capacity to “hurt” him limited because she was nearly a foot shorter and 100 pounds lighter than Chambers, but the scratch marks on his face indicated that she had engaged in a desperate struggle against him—and now, being dead, the victim had no way to dispute his story.

Litman employed the same defense he used nearly a decade before in staving off a murder conviction for client Richard Herrin for killing ex-girlfriend Bonnie Garland—i.e., insinuate that the victim, in her relationship with the defendant, was responsible for her own death.

The judge in the Central Park case dismissed Litman’s motion to introduce Levin’s diary as evidence at the trial. But the lawyer had already characterized it to the press as a record of her encounters with other young men.  Moreover, for a New York Magazine cover story about the case, he made sure to contrast Chambers’ past as an altar boy with Levin's dating history.

Litman sowed enough doubts about Levin’s character to induce a jury deadlock for more than a week on the second-degree murder charge against Chambers. Rather than put the Levin family through the trauma of another trial, prosecutor Linda Fairstein agreed to Litman’s proposal that Chambers plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter.

Then, with the trial over, a video emerged that depicted the former altar boy in a rather different light: out on bail, at a party surrounded by women, twisting the head off a doll before pronouncing, in a high-pitched voice, “I think I killed her.”

It was too late to affect jury deliberations, though it certainly may have led some members of the public to rethink their fascination and even support for the clean-cut young man. It certainly would have lent credence to the charge that he displayed depraved indifference to human life.

Even after serving the full 15 years of his sentence, Chambers was not done with the law. Arrested again in 2004, this time for drugs, he served 100 days in Riker’s Island, then was arrested a third time in 1907, for drugs again. He did not leave Sullivan Maximum Security Correctional Facility in upstate New York until three years ago.

Ironically, he spent more time as an involuntary guest of the state for his substance abuse problems than he did for taking Levin’s life.

After seeing her daughter traduced by the defense and the media, Ellen Levin became a victim’s-rights advocate, lobbying for “rape-shield” legislation that limited defenses’ attempts to discuss a victim’s prior sexual history.

Unfortunately, today, even after the MeToo movement—and perhaps as backlash to that social phenomenon—defense lawyers still resort to smearing victims, justifying it, as Litman did 40 years ago, as part of their responsibility to represent clients, no matter how unpopular those defendants or those tactics might be.

In that sense, the “crime as entertainment” that Carpenter noted 36 years ago remains a staple of the court system—only this time the drama is a legal horror show. And the public fascination with good-looking defendants continued with Luigi Mangione in the first months after his arrest for murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

I experienced the same sense of deja vu when I read the title of a YouTube video from Australia about the latter case: "What would drive a young, privileged white man to kill?"

This Day in Art History (Death of Thomas Moran, Painter of Dramatic Western Landscapes)

Aug. 25, 1926— Thomas Moran, a British emigrant whose many sweeping landscapes led him to become known as “the dean of American painting,” died at age 89 at his home in Santa Barbara, CA.

His most significant art resulted from his participation in Ferdinand V. Hayden's 1871 Geological Survey Expedition to the Yellowstone region in the West. When he returned east, Congress bought for inclusion in the Capitol Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (pictured) and The Chasm of the Colorado, for the then-princely sum of $10,000 each.

The sensation that these sparked created a groundswell of support for creating, within a year, Yellowstone National Park—the cornerstone of the parks system that a Ken Burns documentary called “America’s Best Idea.”

Displacement motivated the Moran family’s migrations in his childhood, an involuntary movement that he would later convert to a more positive—and lucrative—wanderlust. 

His parents, who were handloom weavers, had left Dublin, Ireland for Bolton, Lancashire, England to improve their economic prospects. But mechanization put them out of work and compelled them to move to Kensington, just outside Philadelphia, PA.

While working as an apprentice at a local wood engraving firm, Moran took up painting and drawing, until he became adept at watercolors and illustrations. Influenced by British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner, Moran was uninterested in “realism,” but instead aimed for “idealization.” “The mere restatement of an external scene is never a work of art, is never a picture,” he explained.

Despite his strenuous attempts to build his practice and reputation, Moran was not a logical addition to the 1871 Geological Survey Expedition, in the eyes of others or even necessarily himself. First, the very idea of having an artist dedicated solely to recording impressions of a new territory hadn’t even occurred to the normally visionary Thomas Jefferson when he authorized the Lewis and Clark Expedition nearly seven decades before.

But the rumors of wonders in the Yellowstone region—along with entrepreneurs like Jay Cooke who hoped advertisements would stir travel to this virtually unknown American interior—sparked the need for a visual record of what was encountered. 

A railroad manager and friend of Moran’s urged Hayden to hire him for this purpose, with the added inducement that the artist would pay his own way and simply hoped for a cavalry escort for protection.

It does not appear that Hayden and his associates were informed that Moran was frail and had never trekked through anything approximating the physical environment where he would go now. But he quickly impressed his counterpart in photography on the expedition, William Henry Jackson, with his “fine courage…[N]one was more untiring on the trail, or less mindful of unaccustomed food or hard bed under a little shelter tent, than he was.”

For most of the 1870s, to be closer to New York publishers who published his work in their magazines, Moran and his wife Mary (another artist) lived in Newark, NJ. In the early 1880s they relocated to East Hampton, NY, the beginning of that town’s status as an art mecca. (Today, their studio is a National Historic Landmark overseen by the East Hampton Historical Society.)

Public taste can be fickle, and Moran had to adapt to buyers no longer interested in the Far West scenes that had once caused sensations. With obvious resignation about the changing art market, Moran told a reporter, "I prefer to paint western scenes, but the Eastern people don't appreciate the grand scenery of the Rockies. They are not familiar with mountain effects and it is much easier to sell a picture of a Long Island swamp than the grandest picture of Colorado."

Even after his beloved wife died in 1900, Moran continued to travel, in the company of his daughter Ruth or his old friend and expeditionary companion Jackson. He revisited the places that initially fascinated him while adding Venice as a subject of some of his most popular paintings.

It would take seven decades before the National Gallery of Art mounted the first major retrospective of Moran’s work, coinciding with the 125^th anniversary celebration of the creation of Yellowstone National Park. 

Museumgoers were able to behold on that occasion 97 paintings and watercolors and 17 photographs—including, most importantly, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Chasm of the Colorado, and Mountain of the Holy Cross (1875), which Moran and his admirers were previously unable to convince Congress to keep together as one whole.

(For an informed analysis of Moran’s technique, I urge you to read landscape painter Stapleton Kearns’s April 2011 blog post.)

Quote of the Day (John Cheever, on a Mid-Century Duchess in Rome)

“If you should happen to be the son of a coal miner or were brought up (as I was) in a small town in Massachusetts, the company of a ranking duchess might excite some of those vulgar sentiments that have no place in fiction, but she was beautiful, after all, and beauty has nothing to do with rank. She was slender, but not thin. And rather tall. Her hair was ash blond, and her fine, clear brow belonged against that grandiose and shabby backdrop of limestone and marble, the Roman palace where she lived. It was hers, and, stepping from the shadows of her palace to walk along the river to early Mass, she never quite seemed to leave the grainy light. One would have been surprised but not alarmed to see her join the company of the stone saints and angels on the roof of Sant' Andrea della Valle. This was not the guidebook city but the Rome of today…Donna Carla lived, like you and me, with one foot in the past.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer John Cheever (1912-1982), "The Duchess,” originally published in The New Yorker, Dec. 13, 1958, reprinted in Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1958)

Quote of the Day (Frances Trollope, Loathing a Most American Summer Fruit)

“The huge fruit [watermelon] is cut into half a dozen sections, of about a foot long, and then, dripping as it is with water, applied to the mouth, from either side of which pour copious streams of the fluid, while, ever and anon, a mouthful of the hard black seeds are shot out in all directions, to the great annoyance of all within reach.”—English novelist and travel writer Frances Trollope (1779-1863), Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)

To her infinite horror, Mrs. Trollope first came across this fruit (one I love, BTW) while visiting Cincinnati in 1830. I’m afraid that her bad opinion wouldn’t be improved by the image accompanying this post: Juliette Lewis in the 1993 film, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.

This Day in Theater History (Novelist Balzac Scores Stage Hit at Last, Posthumously)

Aug. 23, 1851—Honoré de Balzac might have been dead for a year and five days, but he achieved the stage triumph he’d been craving for nearly three decades at the Gymnase Theatre in Paris with the comedy Mercadet.

I am far more familiar with the novels and short stories that comprise La Comédie humaine, a wide-ranging, interwoven panorama of French life in the first half of the 19^th century, than with Balzac’s plays.

Astonishingly, he did not confine his energies to the more than 90 novels and dozens of tales for which he is best known, but also turned out six major plays, along with a verse drama from his early 20s, Cromwell, that should probably best be termed “apprentice fiction.”

(Oh, I almost forgot: in his 20s, to keep the financial wolves at bay, he churned out essays and journalistic pieces, many under pseudonyms, and at the time of his death he also left 46 works unfinished. And I thought Hemingway was bad!)

What audiences saw 175 years ago in Mercadet wasn’t Balzac’s first crack at this material. It had first emerged from his busy pen as Le Faiseur (“The Speculator”). It must have been something of a mess, because it fell to Adolphe d’Ennery to act as what we might call a “script doctor” today.

You might call d’Ennery Balzac’s counterpart for the stage, as he was sole or co-author of more than 280 plays—except with this difference: he knew how to keep and even boost the totals he made from his work. 

He certainly had a good idea of how to fix Le Faiseur, whittling it down from five to three acts, retitling it, and making it easily the biggest theater success of Balzac’s career (though even in this instance, it was only a moderate success).

Let’s give Balzac some credit instead of ridiculing him for his lack of stage success in his lifetime. First, he took great pleasure in adding drama to his fiction.

In a February 1934 French Review article with the intriguing title “Balzac Precursor of Eugene O’Neill,” the French and Italian literature scholar Hermann H. Thornton observed, “Only the most literal-minded compiler of literary manuals could fail to see in him a dramatic author of the first rank,” pointing to his tendency to demarcate scenes, to read his own work aloud, and to speak “with excellent diction.”

Moreover, he hasn’t been the only novelist who’s had trouble in turning from fiction to the footlights.

Though John O’Hara wrote the “book” portion of the classic Rodgers & Hart musical Pal Joey, that show lopped in its initial 1940 run—and his other unproduced dramas (collected in the 1961 collection, Five Plays) have, to my knowledge, been barely remembered, never mind staged, since the pugnacious author wrote them.

Charles Dickens’ attempt at amateur theatricals led not to major London stage success but to a clandestine love affair with a teenaged actress (as I explained in this post from 18 years ago).

And I can’t neglect to mention Henry James—whose Guy Domville was such a crushing fiasco that it ended after a half-dozen attempts his desperate hope for a London stage hit, as I related in this post.

Stage flops were not the only thing that James and Balzac (worshipped as “the father of us all” by the American expatriate) had in common: they were both obsessed by what James called “the money passion.” 

It seems that, though D'Ennery streamlined the novelist’s script, he didn’t strip away its devastating satire of post-revolutionary French bankers and mountebanks who will let nothing stand in the way of profits—including a roguish, inveterate speculator of a father who is out as much for his own creature comforts as for his daughter’s dowry.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Alfred Kazin, on God and Creation)

“To love God is to be grateful for the Creation and the Intelligence that keeps the universe going (while man is forever assaulting it). How odd that the first laws of science are still scriptural—that there is a world here rather than nothing."—American literary critic and memoirist Alfred Kazin (1915-1998), A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin (1996)

Quote of the Day (James Wolcott, on Movie Revival Houses of the Seventies)

“Revival houses in the 70s, nearly all of them shoestring operations, had their own distinct character, a creaky, lived-in, refuge-for-lost-souls wombiness that honored the passage of time and fostered sinking into reverie. It was as if the graininess of the films seeped into the worn carpets and seat cushions. The Elgin, despite its Deco exterior (preserved during its renovation and resurrection as the Joyce, home to contemporary dance), had a disreputable mise en scène, perhaps the residue of its midnight showings of John Waters’s Pink Flamingos. Architecturally, the Thalia was a true weirdo, with its reverse parabolic floor and flimsy soundproofing; ventilation didn’t seem to be a priority, either—'The air in the theater seemed left over from F.D.R.’s third term,’ one Thalia veteran recalled. (Now an adjunct to Symphony Space, the Thalia has been handsomely re-modernized and re-christened the Leonard Nimoy Thalia.) The seats at Theatre 80 St. Marks [pictured] were a stress test for the lumbar region, and the rear screen projection often made black-and-white films look bleachy, but the concession bar served Colombian coffee—singular then—and the audiences seemed more collegial than those at revival houses that attracted more solitary jaybirds. The much-traveled prints were usually far from pristine, at worst a flickering strip of scratches, blotches, missing frames, and faded colors. But there’s something to be said for encountering art in a primitive condition—it makes the synapses work a little harder.” —American essayist James Wolcott, “Revival of the Fittest,” Vanity Fair, February 2018

Though I had a chance to take a film class taught by a well-known film critic while I was an undergrad, I disdained the opportunity. It was a “gut” course—i.e., easy—I had heard, so my guilt overtook my curiosity. 

I had to wait until after I graduated in the early Eighties for my true education in classic movies to begin, in precisely the sometimes scruffy revival houses that Wolcott describes so well.

It started with a short-lived theater on Eighth Avenue in the Forties where I saw Body Heat and Gallipoli long earlier their original runs, before I advanced (or, maybe I should say, backtracked) to more vintage fare. 

At the Thalia, for instance, I saw silent films accompanied by Steve Sterner on piano (though I must say, nothing beat Lee Erwin on the mighty organ in a far different venue, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, for The Phantom of the Opera).

I continued with Theatre 80 St. Marks, where I saw Orson Welles’ 1948 version of Macbeth and wondered if the hideous voices was due more to a poorly recorded soundtrack or the director’s disastrous decision to attempt a Scottish accent. 

(Later, I continued to attend performances at this East Village space when it became for a number of years the home of the Pearl Theatre Company.)

The Regency Theatre furthered my education in film until, after 68 years of operation, it was taken over by the chain Cineplex Odeon (which many of us felt like calling “Cineplex Odious”) in 1987, then transferred my allegiance to the Biograph Cinema.

Though it only lasted from 1988 to 1991, it continued the Regency’s tradition of running weeks of themes so you could catch up on directors and theaters quickly. 

(For instance, in the “Screen Teams” series, for one segment devoted to William Powell and Myrna Loy, I saw the eightysomething but still game Ms. Loy in the audience, waving to fans in the theater’s front seat for well-deserve applause).

By the early Nineties, the proliferation of the VCR meant the decline of the revival houses. You’ll notice that I used the word “decline” rather than “extinction.” 

If you’re in the New York metro area, you will still find theaters devoted to classic or unusual older films—notably Film Forum or the Museum of Modern Art in the city itself and (mixed with current independent films and live events) the Barrymore Film Center near me in Fort Lee, NJ.

Yes, I am a TCM fan, and against all modern trends, I prefer DVDs to streaming. But nothing beats a movie classic on the big screen. 

It’s not just widescreen epics like Lawrence of Arabia, or silent films to live musical accompaniment, that are shown to their best advantage there.

Simply put, nothing beats sharing the laughs of a great comedy with an audience, or seeing how meticulously a black-and-white film was crafted with its contrasts and shadows. 

For any of my readers who haven’t tried yet these vintage theaters that have inexplicably survived into the digital age, seek them out. This is how movies were meant to be experienced in the first place.