Spiritual Quote of the Day (G. K. Chesterton, on Faith, Hope, and Charity)

“Charity means pardoning the unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.” — English man of letters (and Catholic convert) G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), Heretics (1905)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Road to Utopia,’ As Bing and Bob Plan How To Hide Their Treasure Map)

[In 1890s Alaska, Chester and Duke have each taken their half of a map pointing them to treasure.]

Chester Hooton [played by Bob Hope]: “What're you doing?”

Duke Johnson [played by Bing Crosby]: “Putting mine in my hat in a safe place. And you'd better do the same thing.”

Chester: “In a safe place, huh?”

Duke: “Sure.”

Chester: “Say, what do you think of my underwear?”

Duke: “Not much, but put it there anyway.”— Road to Utopia (1945), screenplay by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, directed by Hal Walker

Quote of the Day (Bob Hope, on Taxes)

“I always like to go to Washington D.C. It gives me a chance to visit my money.”—Bob Hope, on touring the U.S. Treasury, quoted in Daniel Kurtzman, “Bob Hope Jokes: Classic Political Jokes by Comedian Bob Hope,” About.com

Movie Quote of the Day (Bob Hope, on His Prowess With Women)

Dentist “Painless” Peter Potter (played by Bob Hope):  “I've been chased by women before, but never when I was awake!”—The Paleface (1948), screenplay by Edmund Hartmann and Frank Tashlin, with additional dialogue by Jack Rose and uncredited contributions by Monte Brice, Barney Dean and Melville Shavelson, directed by Norman Z. McLeod

Quote of the Day (Bob Hope, on an Election Much Like This Year’s)

“The farmers hate to see it end. All those campaign speeches were good for the crops.”—Bob Hope on the 1984 election, quoted in Edward Rothstein, “The Comedian as Politician, and Often Vice Versa,” The New York Times, June 12, 2010

Quote of the Day (Red Smith, on Entertainer-Mayor Jimmy Walker)

“The crowd was in the Long Island Bowl for the second Sharkey-Stribling fight and the preliminaries were stumbling to a close and there came the rising whine of sirens from outside. A stir and a babble ran through the crowd and heads turned away from the ring and it seemed everyone was standing and craning. Down an aisle swept Jimmy (Walker) with his retinue, with a hand uplifted in jaunty response to the shouts that greeted him. And that entrance was more exciting than any of the fifteen rounds of brawling that followed.”—Red Smith, “As He Seemed to a Hick,” in The New York Herald Tribune, 1946, reprinted in To Absent Friends From Red Smith (1982)

This quote shows, as if you needed a reason, why Red Smith was more than just a great sportswriter, but also a Pulitzer Prize-winning one, with prose as elegant as his subject here, James J. Walker. The magical qualities it ascribes to New York’s mayor in the Roaring Twenties struck me full force as I wrote my prior post on the present occupant of Gracie Mansion, Mike Bloomberg.

Over the last couple of generations, a vogue has emerged for running government as a business. So many people have subscribed to this notion that it has helped elect charm-challenged functionaries like Bloomberg, Jon Corzine and Mitt Romney.

But when you’re talking about business in this context, which company head do you have in mind, a builder or a destroyer—Steve Jobs or “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap? It’s an important question, because the businessman-politician depends crucially for his authority on prosperity, and once that’s gone, so is nearly every shred of the electorate’s interest in his well-being.

But people make an awful lot of allowances for charm, don’t they? You can hardly find a more classic example than Walker, described flatly by Smith as “the most charming man you ever met.”

You can understand what Smith was talking about by checking out the accompanying photo. It’s easy to imagine Walker being born fully formed, with a boutonniere in his lapel, a melody in his heart and a quip on his lips.

The 20th century provided unparalleled opportunities for entertainers to enter politics: Texas radio entertainer-entrepreneur Pappy O’Daniel, Sonny Bono, “The Love Boat’s” Fred Grandy, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and, also in California, George Murphy (as Senator) and Ronald Reagan (as governor). (After the latter’s midnight swearing-in, he turned to Murphy, an old film song-and-dance-man, and cracked: “Well, George, here we are on the late show again!”)

If “Gentleman Jimmy” Walker wasn’t the first of the entertainer-turned-politicians, he was awfully close. The son of an Irish-born alderman, he made his living for a while as a young man on Tin Pan Alley, cranking out such tunes as this one, with a title he would certainly take to heart in years to come: “There’s Beauty in the Rustle of a Skirt.”

To be sure, President Kennedy’s grandfather, John “Honey Fitzgerald” Fitzgerald, didn’t require much coaxing to break into “Sweet Adeline,” and if you want to understand how Alfred E. Smith bonded with voters, then look for the short clip of him belting out his campaign theme song, “The Sidewalks of New York,” that was included several years ago in the TV documentary series The Irish in America: The Long Journey Home.

Maybe it was that shared love of song that led Smith to notice the young Walker and help propel him up the ranks of Tammany Hall, where he would eventually successfully challenge John Hylan for Mayor.

It was Walker’s great good fortune to become Hizzoner when Gotham assumed its status as the leading financial, media, and industrial city of the world. It was his misfortune still to be around when the music ceased after Black Tuesday in 1929.

It’s somehow appropriate that “Beau James,” as he came to be called, was mayor during the Jazz Age. In fact, if you could have equipped him with a Southern accent, he could just as easily have fit in down in jazz capital New Orleans, where “Let the Good Times Roll” could have served as a campaign slogan.

It was under Walker that New York staked its claim as the nerve center of what might later be viewed as the blue state sensibility. At the height of a censorship debate in Albany he cracked, “I have never yet heard of a girl being ruined by a book” (shortened, not long thereafter, to “No girl was ever ruined by a book”).

If anyone knew anything about girls, it was he. Cocktail waitresses added spice to the illegal speakeasies he frequented, and seven decades before Donna Hanover Giuliani announced on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral that “America’s Mayor” had broken their marriage irretrievably, New Yorkers reacted with much greater equanimity when the Catholic Walker left his wife for showgirl Betty Compton.

Residents didn’t seem to mind that, nor a penchant for traveling outside the continental U.S. that exceeded Mayor Bloomberg’s. But after the stock market crashed, Tammany corruption became harder to ignore and Walker was enmeshed in a corruption probe.

Still, it was risky for Franklin Roosevelt to involve himself in the Seabury investigation into these matters, not least of all with the Irish-Americans who were part of Walker’s (and his own) base. Years ago, my godfather, my Uncle Johnny, could still flash with anger in asking how FDR could destroy a mayor who made sure that my uncle’s down-on-their-luck family had a turkey delivered to their apartment on Thanksgiving.

In September 1932, Walker abruptly resigned, then sailed off to Europe soon thereafter. He endured several years of lonely exile (Smith indelibly describes the former mayor calling up reporters while abroad just to shoot the breeze) before returning home. For awhile, it seemed that the answer to a tune he penned in his younger days--"Will You Love Me in December As You Do in May?"--was going to be a firm "no."

Whatever his faults—and they were many—Walker at least did not spend his time out of power in endless bitterness, and perhaps for that reason even a number of his former opponents found it difficult to carry a grudge against him. 

In fact, Fiorello LaGuardia—the anti-corruption candidate who Walker beat for reelection in 1929—even appointed his old rival to be municipal arbiter to the garment industry, eight years after Walker’s fall from power.

Walker’s last years were spent doing what his background eminently fitted him for: head of a record label. He died in 1946 and was buried in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Westchester County. (My uncle would, I strongly suspect, be tickled pink at the prospect that the mayor he loved is buried on the same grounds that he is.)

The entertainment world was not through with New York’s “Night Mayor.” In 1957, Bob Hope starred, uncharacteristically, in a film based on Gene Fowler’s affectionate biography, Beau James.

Over a decade later, Frank Gorshin—just a couple of years removed from his turn as The Riddler on TV’s Batman—headlined a Broadway musical about Hizzoner, Jimmy, with Anita Gillette as Betty Compton. 

Unlike another musical about a New York mayor, Fiorello, this musical lasted only 84 performances. Undoubtedly, “Beau James” would have shrugged the whole thing off with a wisecrack, then have a few laughs at the nearest bar when it was all over.

This Day in Film History (First Televised Oscars)

March 19, 1953—With perennial emcee Bob Hope doing the honors from LA’s Pantages Theater and actor Fredric March making presentations from the NBC International Theatre in New York, the Academy Awards were televised for the first time, taking a giant bicoastal leap forward to the overproduced extravaganza we know today.

The six major awards—for acting, directing, and Best Picture (in this case, The Greatest Show on Earth, one of the all-time upset winners)—each went to a different film, the first time this ever occurred—and still one of only three instances this took place in Academy history.

For the first decade and a half of its existence, the Oscars were not the scripted, flack-friendly, unabashedly gaudy spectacles of our time. In 2008, when the ceremony almost came derailed because of union unrest, it should be remembered that the early history of the awards were dominated by the industry’s rocky relationship with the labor movement.

The Academy Awards started out in 1927 as a banquet thrown by the International Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (the “International” part was quickly dropped)—the brainchild of mogul Louis B. Mayer, who saw it as a potential company union at a time when the industry’s directors, actors and screenwriters remained outside the basic agreement with Hollywood’s employees. If you were a member of the academy, you voted for the awards as instructed by your bosses.

Resignations en masse by creative talent during the Depression dropped the Academy’s membership from 600 to 40 by the time Frank Capra was elected President of the Academy in 1935. The director of It’s a Wonderful Life—a film about a man whose life undergoes a dramatic turnaround and spiritual rebirth—engineered a similar miracle by saving the Oscars, including, over the next couple of years, luring creative talent back with a ceremony in which film pioneer D.W. Griffith received a lifetime achievement award, democratizing voting procedures to neutralize studio influence, and introducing new supporting acting awards.

After 1942, increased attendance, along with a war that made an industry party look out of place, resulted in a move to theaters. And even though the festivities were broadcast live on the radio, if you were an Oscar recipient you didn’t particularly care what you said or for how long (thus, Greer Garson’s rambling acceptance speech for Mrs. Miniver, which urban legend quickly exaggerated from five to 45 minutes—a claim that made the Irish actress’ face as red as her hair).

You could, in effect, let your hair down—as Bing Crosby did when, rushing to get to the show, he left his toupee behind—only to find himself up on the podium without it when he won for Going My Way.

With TV claiming a larger share of viewers’ attention and dollars, Hollywood decided in 1953 to market in the new medium, with a black-and-white broadcast going out to all of the U.S. and Canada. The experiment worked, and then some, garnering the largest audience in commercial television history up to that time.

From that moment on, it was inevitable that the awards lengthened with all those long recipient walks to the stage, all that fussing over hideously inappropriate gowns, all those commercial breaks, and all those musical numbers (including a duet between Snow White and Rob Lowe that made the erstwhile Brat Packer more of an industry laughingstock than that little sex tape with two groupies he met at the 1988 Democratic Convention).

Guiding the show at this pivotal 1953 broadcast was a familiar, soothing presence—Bob Hope, then in the middle of his record 18 appearances as host, and himself an award recipient that night. (He was given an honorary statuette, providing him with more fodder for his running joke about never winning a competitive Oscar. That statuette is in the picture accompanying this post.)

It’s hard for anyone under 40—and virtually impossible for anyone under 30—to understand how ingrained Hope became in the fabric of American entertainment. It’s only a start to realize that this British immigrant established the template for the host as quipmeister that would later be used, to varying degrees of success, by Johnny Carson, Billy Crystal, Steve Martin, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock, Ellen DeGeneres, and most infamously, David Letterman. (“Oprah, Uma…Uma, Oprah!”)

You might begin to grasp Hope’s importance a bit more when you trace his influence on the performing style of later stars—especially Woody Allen, whose early schtick as a would-be Romeo with a coward’s instincts owed much to popular Hope vehicles such as “The Road to…” series done with friend Crosby and The Paleface.

But most of all, consider this: in seven decades in show business, while others (like radio comedian par excellence Fred Allen) floundered as they adapted to new media, Hope thrived on each in turn—vaudeville, movies, radio, and TV. So much of that owed to a near-limitless stockpile of jokes.

How limitless, you ask? Well, get this—after writing his own material at the start of his career, Hope employed other writers to help with his topical monologues—more than 100 unseen scribes by the end of his life. He’d not only put them in teams and cobble together scripts from the best of their efforts, but then—and this is what it takes a librarian like myself to appreciate— categorize the jokes and scripts by subject matter and file it all in cabinets in a fire- and theft-proof, walk-in vault, in an office next to his residence in North Hollywood, California.

The Library of Congress’ collection of this “Joke File” – now digitized and scanned, as you might expect—runs to 85,000 pages. I repeat: 85,000 pages. Un-be-lievable.

For the broadcast that launched the Oscars on its way to the global phenomenon it is today, it was only appropriate that it would feature this colossal presence in American entertainment, this indefatigable performer before America’s armed forces, this unapologetic jester of the American Century.