TV Quote of the Day (‘Maude,’ In Which She Praises a New ‘Hit Single’)

[Maude Findlay is alarmed as she comes into her living room to find daughter Carol dancing “The Hustle” with lecherous middle-aged married businessman Randy Cutler, who’s about to buy a store from Maude’s husband Walter.]

Maude Findlay [played by Bea Arthur] [turning off the record, picking up another one]: “Randy, Randy, I’m so sorry to interrupt, but you must hear the new album Walter just bought: “Charlton Heston and ‘The Ten Commandments.’ That's the one that has that hit single ‘Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery.’” —Maude, Season 4, Episode 12, “Walter’s Ethics,” original air date Dec. 1, 1975, teleplay by Arthur Marx and Bob Fisher, directed by Hal Cooper

Quote of the Day (Peter De Vries, on Changing Standards for Immorality)

“The standards for immorality are getting progressively steeper, for life and art both. A hundred years ago Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter was given a A for adultery. Today she would rate no better than a C-plus.”—American editor and novelist Peter De Vries (1911-1993), Reuben, Reuben (1964)

Song Lyric of the Day (Lerner and Loewe’s ‘Camelot,’ on ‘The Lusty Month of May’)

“Those dreary vows that ev'ryone takes,
Ev'ryone breaks.
Ev'ryone makes divine mistakes
The lusty month of May!”—“The Lusty Month of May,” from the musical Camelot, lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, music by Frederick Loewe (1960)
 
“Vows” are usually made in June, but if this witty Lerner and Loewe song—not to mention a couple of current events—is to be believed, certain privileged people have trouble living up to them for a full 12 months. Or, in the most recent case, two septuagenarian males who were lusty indeed in their younger and middle years.
 
In London this weekend, the place went mad over the coronation of King Charles III. The oath he took featured three major vows: that he would “govern the Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland… according to their respective laws and customs”; that he would “cause Law and Justice, in Mercy, to be executed in all your judgements”; and, most concretely if problematically, that he would “maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England.”
 
His Highness, you might recall, had a bit of a problem back when he was still Prince of Wales, when he broke his marriage vows to Princess Diana by engaging in an affair with the woman who now gets to be known as Queen Camilla.
 
Here in the United States, another figure who would like similar deference (and gets it, but only from his own Republican Party) had his own problems with vows. 

In a deposition made public at a civil suit now entering what may be its final phase, this fellow (let’s call him the one bestowed on him by talk-show host Stephen Colbert a year and a half ago, “Tangerine Palpatine”--or, in a pinch, the "Florida Fondler") had trouble recalling that he took up with his second wife before he was done with his first.
 
More seriously, he consistently violated—though never so flagrantly as on Jan. 6, 2021—his solemn oath before the American people to “preserve, protest and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
 
We’d better hope that, unlike Camelot—indelibly associated with America’s youngest-elected President—“Tangerine Palpatine” doesn’t get revived, now or by a new generation at some point in the future.
 
(The image accompanying this post shows Vanessa Redgrave performing “The Lusty Month of May” in the 1967 film adaptation of Camelot.)

This Day in Literary History (Danner, Moriarty Shine in TV Adaptation of Updike Stories)

March 12, 1979—Overlooked because of an American Film Institute tribute to Alfred Hitchcock broadcast on CBS was another career summary of a sort—and, in the bargain, one of the finest television movies ever made—running at the same time on NBC: Too Far to Go, an adaptation of heavily autobiographical short stories by John Updike depicting the gradual disintegration of the two-decade marriage of Richard and Joan Maple.

Critics heaped so much praise on the family drama starring Michael Moriarty, Blythe Danner, and Glenn Close (in a couple of brief but significant scenes) that two years later, Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios arranged to have the production released on the big screen with only a few changes (a new musical score by Elizabeth Swados and a few scenes edited out for TV). 

Lacking the high-profile casting and bigger budgets of contemporary films like Kramer vs. Kramer, Ordinary People and Shoot the Moon, Too Far to Go still holds its own with them as a painfully honest dissection of a fracturing upper-middle-class WASP family. 

In his prolific career spanning nearly a half century, Updike wrote more than 20 novels and more than a dozen short-story collections, even a play. You would think that a number of those would have been filmed. 

But, like contemporary Philip Roth, Updike could count only about a half dozen properties adapted for the large or small screen: the little-remembered, James Caan-starring 1970 movie Rabbit, Run; public television showings of the short stories "The Music School," "Pigeon Feathers," and "A and P"; and the much-ballyhooed but cartoonish 1987 movie The Witches of Eastwick, with Jack Nicholson chewing up every bit of scenery in sight as satanic Daryl Van Horne.

That slender track record makes this unexpectedly successful adaptation all the more striking, then.

In effect, this collection functions as Updike’s version of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage. Melodrama is blessedly absent, though the couple’s serial infidelities figure throughout. Updike demonstrates that impulses, acted on or not, make all the difference to a couple and to those (especially children) in their orbit.

Reaction was overwhelmingly positive to the lithe and luminous Danner, somewhat less so to Moriarty. In fact, David Denby of New York Magazine wrote: “Pale as Banquo’s ghost, slender but puffy, with no visible eyebrows…, he talks in a cobwebby, fey manner that sounds like Daniel Patrick Moynihan imitating Truman Capote.”

Updike himself, speaking at a library showing of the film 20 years later, allowed that his opinion of Moriarty’s performance had risen upon this second viewing. Even though Danner’s character also commits multiple affairs, audience sympathy shifts decidedly toward her at the expense of Moriarty. 

If what ended up in the final product turned out to be so acute, it might have been because several of its collaborators had experienced something like these events: not just Updike, but also Moriarty and director Fielding Cook had recently undergone wrenching divorces.

The writer of the teleplay, William Hanley, used the Maples’ impending divorce as the central narrative device, with frequent flashbacks to show them in both happy times and moments when the fractures in the marriage began to show. What makes all this so moving is that, despite how they miscommunicate, wound, and ultimately betray each other, some residue of affection and love remains.

Part of creating a teleplay or screenplay involves not just what to include, but what to leave out. For instance, one of Updike’s stories, “Marching Through Boston,” about the couple’s participation in a civil-rights demonstration spearheaded by the visiting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., would, if included, have dated the action indelibly, and an annoyed Richard’s resort to African-American dialect at one point would have been politically incorrect.

On the other hand, several other scenes work as well on film as they did on the printed page: 

*An early scene, set in Greenwich Village when the Maples are only married a few years, when Moriarty accompanies family friend Rebecca (played by Glenn Close, in her first film credit) back to her apartment and manages to barely put aside temptation; 

*Another when Danner’s Joan explains how “the properly equipped suburban man” has a wife, a mistress, and a “red herring”; 

*And a searing scene toward the end, when Moriarty’s Richard falls emotionally apart when the couple break the news of their separation to their children.

A book tie-in to the TV film, featuring the same title as the made-for-television movie, collected the stories for the first time. Thirty years later they were reassembled and renamed as The Maples Stories, featuring a foreword by Updike and a coda, the story “Grandparenting,” which catches up on the divorced couple—remarried to new partners—as they witness the birth of their elder daughter’s son.

I had heard about the film long ago but never had a chance to watch it at the time. I was reminded of it when I came across the 1956 short story that began the saga, "Snowing in Greenwich Village," in a very fine New Yorker anthology, Wonderful Town, and I resolved to see the movie at long last. 

It was not easy for me to find this film. I can’t recall any TV listings for it in the last 20 to 30 years, either on network TV or cable stations. I finally found one DVD copy in my suburban library system. Ideally, it would make for great viewing on my local PBS station, Channel 13, in its Saturday night “Reel 13” series of classics and independents.

Oh, heck, just make it easy on yourself. Buy a copy of this made-for-TV gem on Amazon. You won’t regret it.

Appreciations: Irwin Shaw’s ‘Girls in Their Summer Dresses’

“When I think of New York City, I think of all the girls on parade in the city. I don’t know whether it’s something special with me or whether every man in the city walks around with the same feeling inside him, but I feel as though I’m at a picnic in this city. I like to sit near the women in the theatres, the famous beauties who’ve taken six hours to get ready and look it. And the young girls at the football games, with the red cheeks, and when the warm weather comes, the girls in their summer dresses.”—Irwin Shaw, “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” from Short Stories: Five Decades (1978)

Not having read this classic short story by Irwin Shaw (1913-1984) in over three decades, I was surprised to rediscover that it is set in November. But such is the power of the title—which memorably evokes the intensity of male desire, out and about in the eye-candy factory of Greenwich Village on an early Sunday afternoon—that it overwhelms memory.

This story was published in The New Yorker in February 1939, but I can’t find a single detail which would date it then as opposed to now. There are no references to current events, no now-quaint technology, no dialogue with contemporary slang. Shaw simply lets you eavesdrop on Michael and Frances Loomis on a deceptively beautiful day that ends with ugly truths.

“The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” can be read rapidly, largely because of its heavy use of dialogue, in one not-very-long sitting, so “slice of life” is a better description of its method than “plot.” Yet, when the story is over, the entire stable axis of the Loomises’ world has shifted.

Years ago, a guy at a party related to me how his wife would spot his eye wandering every time an attractive woman passed by. “And guess what? You’re the beneficiary of all that pent-up sexual energy,” he said he rationalized to her.

One imagines his wife nodding knowingly and smiling in amusement. It’s not unlike the reaction of Frances in only the third paragraph into Shaw’s work, as she has to warn her husband that he’ll break his neck looking at a woman as they cross Fifth Avenue.

Before long, we begin to gather that Frances is the more ardent one in the relationship. She kisses him on the tip of the ear; he protests, albeit mildly, that they’re on Fifth Avenue.  She talks about her plan for the day, which, unlike most of their time together, will involve just the two of them; he mumbles one word, “Sure”—not enough to disguise the fact that he’s been distracted by yet another woman, this one a “hatless girl with the dark hair, cut dancer-style like a helmet.”

This is the seismic break in the story. When Frances speaks next, it’s “flatly.” Now, she is no longer giggling indulgently at a human weakness of the man she loves; he’s demonstrated that he’s incorrigible. From this point on, the dialogue shows how this relationship, having sustained one collision with an iceberg, gradually but inexorably opens ever more gaping holes. Adverbs take on more meaning because of their spare use throughout. At the start of the tale, the couple walk “lightly,” the way a husband and wife still in the first bloom of love do; but after their bickering starts, they join hands “consciously.” Within minutes, it seems, the bloom has fallen off their five-year marriage, and it will take a conscious effort from now on that they will find harder to maintain in order to keep it alive.

Michael and Frances drink at a bar in an attempt to ignore the chasm that has opened between them, but the alcohol only spurs them to more threatening candor. Michael rationalizes, even wallows in, his penchant for ogling; Frances presses him progressively harder to acknowledge the full implications of this. It’s like the lyric from the Carly Simon song “No Secrets”: “You always answer my questions, but they don’t always answer my prayers.”

At last, Michael admits, under Frances’ prodding, that yes, he would “like to be free,” and that, at some point, he’s “going to make a move.” I suspect many of my readers have observed moments in the lives of couples they know when they suddenly realize that there’s an irreparable rent in the relationship. These two admissions by Michael represent such moments in this story.

Not unlike John O’Hara, Shaw made his fortune in midlife with sprawling novels that lent themselves to pulp Hollywood treatments, such as the films The Young Lions and Two Weeks in Another Town and the miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man and Top of the Hill. “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” represents an alternative, better route: sharply observed short fiction. (PBS adapted it for a 1981 episode in its “Great Performance” series, with Jeff Bridges and Carol Kane playing the couple.)

In a post for the blog “The Reading Life,” Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin analyzed the shattering impact of this “small, grim classic, a story so simple and subtle that it feels like life”:

“Michael and Frances might be any of us, and the easy, insinuating way their comfortable back-and-forth devolves into something more elemental resonates with the force of argument, of people not so much completing as complicating each other -- no matter what the weather or the time of year.”

I can’t think of a story that better captures youthful love turned suddenly fragile on the brink of middle-aged torpor and disillusionment, featuring a male animal who causes lasting pain in service to a desire that is as evanescent as summer itself.

Quote of the Day (Newt Gingrich, With His 4th No-Adultery Pledge)

"I will also oppose any judicial, bureaucratic, or legislative effort to define marriage in any manner other than as between one man and one woman. I also pledge to uphold the institution of marriage through personal fidelity to my spouse and respect for the marital bonds of others."(emphasis added)— Presidential candidate (and breaker of the Seventh Commandment) Newt Gingrich, in a letter to the Iowa-based group The Family Leader announcing his support of the group's positions, quoted in Chris Moody, “Newt Gingrich Takes His Fourth ‘No-Adultery Pledge,’” The Ticket blog, December 12, 2011

Legend has Henry of Navarre, late in the 16^th century, shrugging off his Protestant faith by converting to Catholicism with the words, “Paris is worth a mass.” The same cynicism and shamelessness is present in Newt Gingrich’s agreement to a document that he has already violated in his two prior marriages. But are you honestly surprised anymore by what he would do or say in order to be elected?

Quote of the Day (Balzac, Seeing Through the Likes of The Sperminator Years Ahead of Time)

“Men are like that—they can resist sound argument and yield to a glance.”—Honore de Balzac, A Marriage Settlement (1835)