Quote of the Day (Sinclair Lewis, on an Evangelist’s Planned Jersey Shore Project)

“The pier was an immense structure, built of cheap knotty pine, painted a hectic red with gold stripes. It was pleasant, however, on hot evenings. Round it ran a promenade out over the water, where once lovers had strolled between acts of the opera, and giving on the promenade were many barnlike doors.

[Evangelist Sister] “Sharon [Falconer] christened it ‘The Waters of Jordan Tabernacle,’ added more and redder paint, more golden gold, and erected an enormous revolving cross, lighted at night with yellow and ruby electric bulbs….

“All of Clontar, with its mile of comfortable summer villas and gingerbread hotels, was excited over the tabernacle, and the Chamber of Commerce had announced, ‘We commend to the whole Jersey coast this high-class spiritual feature, the latest addition to the manifold attractions and points of interest at the snappiest of all summer colonies.’

“A choir of two hundred had been coaxed in, and some of them had been persuaded to buy their own robes and mortar boards.

“Near the sand dune against which Sharon and Elmer [Gantry] lolled was the tabernacle, over which the electric cross turned solemnly, throwing its glare now on the rushing surf, now across the bleak sand.

"‘And it's mine!’ Sharon trembled. ‘I've made it! Four thousand seats, and I guess it's the only Christian tabernacle built out over the water!’”—Pulitzer and Nobel Literature prize-winning American novelist Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), Elmer Gantry (1927)

I came across this quote after watching on TCM, decades after the first time I saw it, the 1960 film adaptation of Elmer Gantry. (In the attached image, that’s Burt Lancaster as the titular preacher and Jean Simmons as Sharon Falconer.)

In the movie, the grand evangelical center that Sharon envisions is built (and then destroyed in a fire) in the fictional Midwestern city of Zenith. I was all the more surprised, then, to discover that Sinclair Lewis set Sharon’s project in a seaside community in New Jersey. I wondered, given that the novelist conducted extensive interviews and research while writing his fiction, if he had a particular Jersey Shore town in mind.

For help, I turned to Dr. Sally E. Parry, Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Illinois State University and Executive Director of the Sinclair Lewis Society. She wrote back that though the novelist did most of his research in the Midwest as he visited churches (especially in Missouri), he did not, to the best of her knowledge, model the tabernacle on a particular place.

Sharon Falconer, she continued, is strongly based on Aimee Semple McPherson, whose ministry was primarily centered in California.  “The novel was also inspired to a certain extent by Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), which Lewis admired (Carol Kennicott discusses it in Main Street). Theron Ware is a Methodist preacher who is awakened to a variety of religious beliefs, including some by Sister Soulsby.”

Dr. Parry confirmed one possibility I raised: that Lewis might have learned about some Jersey Shore spots while working as a janitor for six months at Helicon Hall, the novelist Upton Sinclair’s 1906 utopian experiment in Englewood, NJ.

Now that I think of it, locating Sharon’s tabernacle by the shore might have appealed to the novelist in a couple of other ways: it would have testified to the growing national ambitions of her ministry, and this geographic location would have been even more resonant for a structure named after “the Waters of Jordan.”

Whatever the case may be, this novel, like so much of the writer’s other work at the height of his influence on American culture in the 1920s, continues to reverberate a century later.

In the late 1980s, in an appearance at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, Tom Wolfe highlighted the conclusion of this stinging satire, where Gantry notices “a new singer, a girl with charming ankles and lively eyes, with whom he would certainly have to become well acquainted.” Lewis had certainly anticipated the sensational sex scandals that had recently engulfed televangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, he observed.

The death this past week of the latter reminded me that Swaggart was involved in another scandal three years after the one that led to his defrocking by the Assemblies of God. 

Unfortunately, the immense moral and political sway wielded by today’s mega-church leaders has led them to ignore the lessons of history offered by the Bakker and Swaggart cases, with Robert Morris and Mike Bickle among the recent high-profile preachers who have strayed from the straight and narrow path through sexual misconduct.

I can’t imagine that Sharon Falconer’s “Waters of Jordan” could cleanse the enormous sins they have committed.

This Day in Film History (Burt Lancaster, 'Modernist Movie Hunk,' Born)

November 2, 1913—Burt Lancaster, who used his athleticism to get his foot in the movie industry, then his intelligence and drive to build a versatile, Oscar-winning multi-decade career, was born into an Irish Protestant household in the East Harlem section of New York City. Yet, though he sometimes appeared in films with a Big Apple setting, he never exuded the aura of a “New York actor” the way that James Cagney, John Garfield or Marlon Brando did, nor did he follow any modish acting tradition. He was simply, in the words of Time movie critic Richard Corliss, “the first modernist movie hunk.”

Like Cary Grant, Lancaster was a circus acrobat before becoming an actor, and a beefcake physique was his primary asset when his film career began in his thirties. Perhaps that particular athletic skill gave the two men the ability to land on their feet even after taking a major risk: seeking roles without the backing of a major studio.

Unlike Grant, however, who frequently acted in comedies (and often, improbably enough with his Cockney background, in the sophisticated, drawing-room kind), Lancaster tilted heavily toward drama. In addition to his job in a circus, he had also worked as a refrigerator repairman, engineer in a meatpacking plant, firefighter, salesman, and singing waiter. That varied background fed his hunger to distinguish himself, but it also probably gave him the confidence to believe he could act believably in any role once he set his mind to it.

The actor would need that self-assurance after he first secured attention as a doomed boxer in the 1946 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Killers.” He could have traded on his raw physicality, with eventual diminishing returns, the way that Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger have done recently. But he prized the kind of range that would assure endurance. 

While Grant essentially worked as a free agent, choosing from whichever part came his way, Lancaster took the extraordinary step of developing his own projects. So, in 1948, linking up with agent Harold Hecht, he became one of the first actors to become an independent producer. Together with James Hill, they would create some of the most popular or critically acclaimed films of the Fifties: Come Back, Little Sheba, Sweet Smell of Success, and Marty (the last not starring him, but nevertheless winning Best Picture). These movies would also serve as a launching pad for a wider career that resulted in Oscar nominations for From Here to Eternity, Birdman of Alcatraz, Atlantic City, and Elmer Gantry (the last, as a corrupt minister, giving him his victory in the Best Actor category).

While blessed with all the glamour of an old-fashioned studio star (as late as the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, critic Kenneth Turan remembered, the “spectacularly fit 58-year-old actor” made a dramatic appearance just before an interview with a preluncheon dive off the rocks into the Mediterranean, in full view of a hotel restaurant), Lancaster seemed ideally positioned to capitalize on film noir, a movie genre that sprang from the grimness of postwar America. He could certainly be cast credibly as a romantic lead. But those “great white Chiclets flashing” (critic Pauline Kael’s words) could alternately be used to grin, or nearly to devour, as in his deeply chilling portrait of a Walter Winchell-like columnist in Sweet Smell of Success.

That, in a way, gave him a crucial advantage in a fierce competition among an entire generation of actors—friend and frequent costar Kirk Douglas, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Paul Newman. All of them wanted the same kind of anti-hero roles becoming increasingly common in the postwar era. Especially the last four of these were associated with method acting. Lancaster for much of his career was heavily opposed to “The Method.” What he could not bring to a scene by dredging up from his own pit of emotions, he would summon through massive rehearsing and discussions with directors. That preparation could translate into interference with directors, but also a passion that to make the best product, as well as growing daring in choice of roles (e.g., even playing an Italian aristocrat in Luchino Visconsi's 1963 The Leopard).

Athleticism allowed Lancaster to project, in different degrees, energy, strength, and a sense of command. But his gaze radiated intensity--frequently related to love, but many times to cruelty. You can feel that ice-cold sense in Sweet Smell of Success. Lancaster had initially resisted director Alexander Mackendrick's suggestion that he wear glasses. Just what a mistake that was can be seen onscreen, where the spectacles transform the magnificent physical specimen that was Lancaster into what Vanity Fair contributor Sam Kashner termed a "tense, bespectacled ghoul" with the possibility of latent violence. Kashner's article from 13 years ago, on the making of this cult film, mentions that Orson Welles had been co-screenwriter Ernest Lehman's initial choice to play the role of J.J. Hunsecker, but it is hard to see how the former enfant terrible of Hollywood--already experiencing terrible weight problems--could have conveyed the sense of coiled menace brought by Lancaster.

Ironically, while disdaining The Method for much of his career, Lancaster succeeded by bringing the entire range of his own complicated personality to the screen. A man who played a multitude of parts, he contained multitudes himself. Generous, idealistic and deeply committed to causes (he was one of the early advocates for AIDS victims), he could also convey threat. "People were frightened of Burt," recalled partner Hill, "and he never did anything to make people unfrightened of him.” Lancaster was not above lifting the small Hecht into the air and threatening to throw him out the window. The father of five children, an actor who played the title role in the 1970s mini-series Moses the Lawgiver, he was also an atheist and compulsive womanizer who had trouble adhering to the commandment about not committing adultery.

(The image accompanying this post was, of course, the famous beach love scene between Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in his first Oscar-nominated role, From Here to Eternity, used in that film’s trailer.)

This Day in Baseball History (Future Preacher Sunday Goes Down Swinging)

May 22, 1883—A future as America’s foremost evangelist in the first third of the 20^th century was the furthest thing on the mind of 20-year-old Billy Sunday as he made his major-league debut with the Chicago White Stockings. As it was, big-league pitching was giving him hell enough.

It would be another several years before Sunday had his come-to-Jesus moment, but his experience on this particular day should have been enough to make him plead for divine intervention—or, as an alternative, make a Damn Yankees-like pact with the devil. Facing “Grasshopper Jim” Whitney of the Boston Beaneaters, then in the midst of a 30-win season, he ended up striking out four times.

By rights, Sunday should not have felt too badly. The White Stockings had won the game, 4-3. Going hitless against that particular pitcher was nothing to be ashamed of: With virtually no restrictions on pitcher delivery in those days, Whitney came at hitters with terrifying speed. Moreover, Sunday had been signed by manager “Cap” Anson, a future Baseball Hall of Fame member who knew a thing or two about talent. Besides, Sunday was a rookie. He’d get over it.

But over the next couple of days, it seemed as if he wouldn’t. Sunday whiffed in his first 14 at-bats. Years later, then, when he would tell audiences, “The Devil has two strikes on you already,” one gets the sense that it had become more than a mere metaphor for him.

Eventually, Sunday did get the hang of major-league hurlers—enough to compile a .248 average over eight seasons. Better yet, he stole at least 246 bases in the 396 games in which records of that statistic were kept from 1886 through 1890, meaning that he might have approached 300 bases throughout his career.

In time, Sunday met a bigger enemy than a wicked fastball or curve: alcohol. In those days, there was little to do outside of the game except visit the local saloon, and Sunday fell easily into this lifestyle.

Midway through his career, that changed one day as he sat with a teammate on a Chicago street. A woman passing by caught his interest with her spiel about coming to a revival meeting where fallen women would tell tales of how drinking had started them on a downward spiral. Sunday attended the meeting, and promptly converted.

Sunday (what an appropriate surname for a preacher!) was no scholar—part of the reason why it took more than a decade for the Presbyterian Church to get around to licensing him. But, while addressing an audience, he was a phenomenon.

Sinclair Lewis based the title character of his 1927 novel Elmer Gantry on a number of ministers, but an indelible memory for him in the creation of the character had to be his 1917 visit to one of Rev. Sunday’s revival meetings. 

At that time, the United States was on the brink of passing one of Sunday’s great causes—Prohibition. This was before the rise of radio and movies in the 1920s, so all Sunday had was his voice, and that stage presence. 

But what a stage presence. Gantry had all the super-concentrated force of a stereotype, with virtually every form of hypocrisy that Lewis could think of. But as a preacher showman-athlete, he more than a little resembles Sunday.

It wasn’t merely that Sunday would pound the pulpit, roaring, the cynosure of all eyes in an auditorium, the magic voice that would coax sinners to walk down the “sawdust trail” toward the stage. He would also skip, run, bounce, and gyrate. In a throwback to his old playing days, he’d liken a sinner reaching for Heaven to a runner sliding for home, even running the length of the stage to demonstrate it. 

Another famous evangelical “Billy,” Billy Graham, had all the trappings of the modern media over the course of his long career, but his famous “crusades” were decidedly cooler affairs than the sawdust-and-sweat spectacles put on by Sunday.

In his Oscar-winning role in Elmer Gantry, Burt Lancaster was ideally cast. Before becoming an actor, he had been a circus acrobat, and he combined that physicality with a raw charisma that harked back to Sunday’s style before large crowds.

Sunday’s celebrity was great enough that he made significant money over the course of his career. Unfortunately, he would need that in his later years, for at the height of Prohibition, his sons indulged in the same drinking sprees that he had turned away from at the height of his career. 

Constantly, Sunday and his wife were forced to pay off extortionists to hush up his sons’ indiscretions. Perhaps the low point of his life occurred in 1933, when one of his sons, George, committed suicide.

(The accompanying photo shows Sunday late in his playing career, by which time he had come to the Pittsburgh Alleghenys.)