February 8, 1969—The venerable magazine The Saturday Evening Post, which at one time virtually embodied the mainstream American culture in literature and art, released its final issue, victimized by larger movements in the nation’s culture as well as by particular mistakes made by its management.
The magazine may now seem like a mossy relic from a faraway time, a middlebrow monolith whose passing is not something to be mourned. Yet I would argue that the magazine published the work of some of the nation’s most talented writers and artists; that its demise represented a milestone in the tightening of the short-fiction market; and that its death, hastened by a new medium, constitutes an eerie foreshadowing of the current equivalent of the Great Depression afflicting the media these days.
The artist most commonly associated with the Post, Norman Rockwell, had his last work for the magazine published in December 1963. The editors’ decision to move away from painted covers in favor of photographs did nothing to blunt the magazines’ old-fashioned image, and only turned off longtime readers.
It is certainly true that the magazine’s carefully implemented moral standards could result in a sameness in editorial content. (For example, see how its decision to soften the edges of Erle Stanley Gardner’s lawyer-sleuth Perry Mason resulted in a series far more formulaic than anyone expected.)
But over the years, the Post also published the work of some of the world’s greatest writers, including Willa Cather, Jack London, G.K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane.
My favorite among the magazine’s stable of writers also happens to be my favorite writer, period: F. Scott Fitzgerald. As Matthew J. Bruccoli noted in his edition of The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 65 of the novelist’s 160 published short fiction—approximately 40% of his output—were published in the magazine, including the fine story “The Last of the Belles” and the autobiographical “Basil and Josephine” stories.
Though the Post never had the cachet of, say, The New Yorker, its demise put a chill in writers looking to short fiction to survive. One harbinger of the magazine’s death was the fall of one of its main rivals in publishing short stories, Collier’s.
Over the years, the mass-market magazine market has become an increasingly inhospitable place to the short story. Even The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly have concentrated increasingly on nonfiction over the years. Short story writers are now forced to literary magazines and similar low-paying outlets.
One should also take note of the prominent illustrators whose work first appeared in the magazine, not just Rockwell but also J.C. Leyendecker, Harrison Fisher, James Montgomery Flagg, Steven Dohanos, and Mead Schaffer.
One particular factor in the serial’s demise was an adverse libel ruling resulting from a 1963 article which claimed that football coaches Paul “Bear” Bryant of the University of Alabama and Wally Butts of the University of Georgia had conspired to fix a game. Butts’ victory, in a case that ultimately wound up before the U.S. Supreme Court, resulted in a judgment against the magazine of more than $3 million—an amount that the magazine by this time could little afford to pay, given its decline in advertising revenues.
This past year has seen the demise of a number of magazines, including Radar and 02138. The recession and a hostile environment for print (increased by the Internet) has resulted in many casualties in the literary market. That same assault on old-time media was, in a way, prefigured in the late Sixties and early Seventies, when several major well-loved magazines—not only the Post but also Life and Look—fell by the wayside, victimized by the rise of television.
Showing posts with label This Day in Cultural History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label This Day in Cultural History. Show all posts
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Friday, March 7, 2008
This Day in Cultural History (Monopoly Invented at Height of Great Depression)
Well, I guess there’s a bit more validity to this claim than to the one that Abner Doubleday invented the game of baseball, but it’s not by a whole lot.
The origins of Monopoly actually date back to “The Landlord’s Game,” created by Elizabeth Magie, who used it to teach the virtues of economist Henry George’s single-tax movement. Magie’s Quaker friends may have liked the game, but not Parker Brothers (which, to their credit, told her to secure rights to the idea—which she did in 1904, with Patent #748,626).
Parker Brothers may have inexplicably rejected Magie’s idea, but it was embraced wildly by others who loved it so much that when they made copies they even named particular landmarks after local streets.
Along the way, these enthusiasts—notably including economics departments at academic institutions such as Haverford and Princeton—introduced wrinkles into Magie’s concept, such as charging higher rents when one person owned all the spaces in a particular group—taking it a step closer to what we know as Monopoly.
Another user was Darrow, who encountered the game while in Atlantic City—which is why there are place names in the final game such as Boardwalk and Marvin Gardens. Darrow sold enough copies of the game at the Philadelphia department store Wanamaker’s to spark the interest of a new Parker Brothers executive, Robert Barton.
Another user was Darrow, who encountered the game while in Atlantic City—which is why there are place names in the final game such as Boardwalk and Marvin Gardens. Darrow sold enough copies of the game at the Philadelphia department store Wanamaker’s to spark the interest of a new Parker Brothers executive, Robert Barton.
This time, Parker Brothers figured—not illogically—that if the game could sell so many copies during the Great Depression, its future was very, very bright.
There remained the little matter of Magie, who still held the patent for the Landlord’s Game and all variations of it, including Darrow’s. So, Parker Brothers bought the rights to issue Darrow’s version in exchange for publishing three other games by Magie.
By 1935, half a million copies of Monopoly had been sold, and the next year the total leaped to three million—all remarkable in an age when resentment at Wall Street over starting the Depression was so high that Franklin D. Roosevelt won a landslide Presidential victory by campaigning against “economic royalists.”
There remained the little matter of Magie, who still held the patent for the Landlord’s Game and all variations of it, including Darrow’s. So, Parker Brothers bought the rights to issue Darrow’s version in exchange for publishing three other games by Magie.
By 1935, half a million copies of Monopoly had been sold, and the next year the total leaped to three million—all remarkable in an age when resentment at Wall Street over starting the Depression was so high that Franklin D. Roosevelt won a landslide Presidential victory by campaigning against “economic royalists.”
None of it mattered—Darrow was on his way to becoming the world’s first millionaire board-game designer.
In a case of life imitating a game (which itself imitated life), Parker Brothers was acquired first by General Mills, then by Hasbro, which continues to defend the Monopoly trademark and brand, its past history notwithstanding.
When I was a lad, I seldom, if ever, played Monopoly. This, of course, left me fatally unprepared for the world of business, with the inevitable, lamentable results you might expect in adulthood. I didn’t play the The Game of Life that much, either—and, some might argue, my subsequent success at that barely exceeded my business prowess.
Instead, my game of choice as a youngster was something called Go to the Head of the Class, which fed my ravenous lifelong interest in trivia and, I would argue, even what you are reading now.
In a case of life imitating a game (which itself imitated life), Parker Brothers was acquired first by General Mills, then by Hasbro, which continues to defend the Monopoly trademark and brand, its past history notwithstanding.
When I was a lad, I seldom, if ever, played Monopoly. This, of course, left me fatally unprepared for the world of business, with the inevitable, lamentable results you might expect in adulthood. I didn’t play the The Game of Life that much, either—and, some might argue, my subsequent success at that barely exceeded my business prowess.
Instead, my game of choice as a youngster was something called Go to the Head of the Class, which fed my ravenous lifelong interest in trivia and, I would argue, even what you are reading now.
I pored over the quiz booklet so often that I practically inhaled the answers to questions on matters of serious (“Prior to 1960, who was the youngest man ever to be elected President of the United States”) and not-so-serious (“What were the names of Donald Duck’s three nephews?”) import.
I didn’t realize until now that this game was originally invented in 1936, by the Milton Bradley Co., or that it went through yet another edition nearly 20 years after I played it.
And then, of course, there’s Trivial Pursuit, a game that other people, I learned to my extreme discomfort nearly 20 years ago, take with sometimes nearly deadly seriousness.
A friend had invented me to come along to a party in Rockland County, N.Y., held by a couple she knew from work. On the few occasions I had met them before, the husband and wife had struck me as reasonably genial people. Little did I know how a simple game can bring out the latent maniacal element in acquaintances.
As a guest who knew few people at the party, I was reluctant to push myself socially. I certainly was not one to chortle at getting an answer right, let alone winning an entire game.
I tell you this as background for the following. I managed to blurt out, from the darkest recesses of my memory, the answer to “Which former Brooklyn Dodger first baseman later became a television star?” (Answer: Chuck Connors, of The Rifleman fame.) “How did you know that?” someone asked, with what sounded like jealousy. “I dunno,” I answered. “He’s the only actor I could think of who ever played baseball, and he was tall, so I figured he might have been a first baseman.”
That answer mustn’t have satisfied my male host. The next thing I knew, a beer bottle went whistling past my head.
I'm as surprised that I escaped injury as that my jaw didn't drop from shock. I doubt very, very much that I won a game after that. I’d be surprised if I got a single answer right. The incident gave literal meaning to an old Bob Dylan lyric: "It's only people's games that you got to dodge."
I didn’t realize until now that this game was originally invented in 1936, by the Milton Bradley Co., or that it went through yet another edition nearly 20 years after I played it.
And then, of course, there’s Trivial Pursuit, a game that other people, I learned to my extreme discomfort nearly 20 years ago, take with sometimes nearly deadly seriousness.
A friend had invented me to come along to a party in Rockland County, N.Y., held by a couple she knew from work. On the few occasions I had met them before, the husband and wife had struck me as reasonably genial people. Little did I know how a simple game can bring out the latent maniacal element in acquaintances.
As a guest who knew few people at the party, I was reluctant to push myself socially. I certainly was not one to chortle at getting an answer right, let alone winning an entire game.
I tell you this as background for the following. I managed to blurt out, from the darkest recesses of my memory, the answer to “Which former Brooklyn Dodger first baseman later became a television star?” (Answer: Chuck Connors, of The Rifleman fame.) “How did you know that?” someone asked, with what sounded like jealousy. “I dunno,” I answered. “He’s the only actor I could think of who ever played baseball, and he was tall, so I figured he might have been a first baseman.”
That answer mustn’t have satisfied my male host. The next thing I knew, a beer bottle went whistling past my head.
I'm as surprised that I escaped injury as that my jaw didn't drop from shock. I doubt very, very much that I won a game after that. I’d be surprised if I got a single answer right. The incident gave literal meaning to an old Bob Dylan lyric: "It's only people's games that you got to dodge."
Friday, February 1, 2008
This Day in Cultural History
February 1, 1969 – Canadian-born Joni Mitchell makes her debut at Carnegie Hall. Though not a roof-raising experience such as Benny Goodman’s 31 years before (or, for that matter, the Beatles nearly five years before this), it propels Mitchell firmly into the top ranks of soft-rock singer-songwriters, a movement that will soon see James Taylor, Carly Simon, Carole King, and Jackson Browne at the top of the charts.Th
Mitchell’s growing prominence will bring her to the attention of Crosby Stills and Nash and the L.A. music and entertainment scene, including mogul David Geffen. The kind of parties she would soon join are memorably evoked in An American Band: The America Story (see pp. 121-122).
Thirty-seven years to the day later, with Mitchell in semi-retirement and deep gloom over her status as a “heritage” (i.e., mature) artist in the recording industry, a tribute to the great poet-artist and her songs of commitment and freedom is held in the same venue in which she broke into the mainstream of American music. The list of performers range from the firmly established (Judy Collins, Tom Rush) down to much younger artists (Nellie McKay, Jesse Malin). Proceeds from the concert benefited Music for Youth, which fosters innovative music education programs and scholarships for young people.
Mitchell’s growing prominence will bring her to the attention of Crosby Stills and Nash and the L.A. music and entertainment scene, including mogul David Geffen. The kind of parties she would soon join are memorably evoked in An American Band: The America Story (see pp. 121-122).
Thirty-seven years to the day later, with Mitchell in semi-retirement and deep gloom over her status as a “heritage” (i.e., mature) artist in the recording industry, a tribute to the great poet-artist and her songs of commitment and freedom is held in the same venue in which she broke into the mainstream of American music. The list of performers range from the firmly established (Judy Collins, Tom Rush) down to much younger artists (Nellie McKay, Jesse Malin). Proceeds from the concert benefited Music for Youth, which fosters innovative music education programs and scholarships for young people.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
This Day in Cultural History
January 30, 1933—On the same day that a real-life contemporary villain seized power halfway around the world, a fictional hero from America’s Western past premiered on Detroit’s WXYZ radio station: The Lone Ranger.
The character—lone survivor of an ambush, saved by the Indian Tonto, and wearing a mask as he sought vengeance—was created at the behest of tight-fisted station owner George Trendle and fleshed out by writer Fran Striker (who also wrote the long-running Green Hornet series). One of the early actors to play the Lone Ranger (and the one who claimed to have come up with “Hi-yo, Silver!” because he couldn’t whistle for the horse) was George Stenius, who became better known in later years as film director George Seaton (most notably for the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street).
Besides some 3,000 radio episodes, the show also ran on TV for eight years, starring Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger and Jay Silverheels as faithful sidekick Tonto.
Various elements of the show—the mask, the white stallion and silver bullets, the Lone Ranger’s “Creed” —became a part of American legend. But the character—a combination of Robin Hood and Zorro—also fed the American public’s deep and eternal fascination with outsider-vigilante figures who act outside the law in order to save it.
From a TV commercial commercial from the early ‘70s hawking a classical music set, starring that most British of character actors, John Williams (the detective in Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder), I first learned that the theme I had grown up with was actually Rossini’s “William Tell Overture.” I did not know until now, though, that the musical motif was chosen because it was in the public domain and, therefore, nobody had to be paid royalties for its use. Just another example of how cheap—I’m sorry, parsimonious—station owner Trendle could be!
The character—lone survivor of an ambush, saved by the Indian Tonto, and wearing a mask as he sought vengeance—was created at the behest of tight-fisted station owner George Trendle and fleshed out by writer Fran Striker (who also wrote the long-running Green Hornet series). One of the early actors to play the Lone Ranger (and the one who claimed to have come up with “Hi-yo, Silver!” because he couldn’t whistle for the horse) was George Stenius, who became better known in later years as film director George Seaton (most notably for the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street).
Besides some 3,000 radio episodes, the show also ran on TV for eight years, starring Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger and Jay Silverheels as faithful sidekick Tonto.
Various elements of the show—the mask, the white stallion and silver bullets, the Lone Ranger’s “Creed” —became a part of American legend. But the character—a combination of Robin Hood and Zorro—also fed the American public’s deep and eternal fascination with outsider-vigilante figures who act outside the law in order to save it.
From a TV commercial commercial from the early ‘70s hawking a classical music set, starring that most British of character actors, John Williams (the detective in Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder), I first learned that the theme I had grown up with was actually Rossini’s “William Tell Overture.” I did not know until now, though, that the musical motif was chosen because it was in the public domain and, therefore, nobody had to be paid royalties for its use. Just another example of how cheap—I’m sorry, parsimonious—station owner Trendle could be!
Sunday, January 27, 2008
This Day in Cultural History
January 27, 1885 – Jerome Kern, one of the half-dozen most important contributors to the Great American Songbook, was born in New York City to a first-generation German-Jewish family. The 16-year-old was able to overcome his father’s insistence on joining the family retail business by making a spectacular mistake: singing an order for 200 pianos rather than the two he was assigned to secure. (Well, it was just two decimal places off!)
Together with lyric partners such as Oscar Hammerstein II, Guy Bolton, P.G. Wodehouse, and Dorothy Fields, Kern wrote, for Broadway and Hollywood, such enduring standards as “All the Things You Are,” “Smoky Gets in Your Eyes,” “Ol’ Man River,” “A Fine Romance,” and “The Way You Look Tonight.” Everybody knows this—or should.
But did you know that Kern also compiled one of the greatest book collections in American history? I didn’t either, until I was working for a brief spell at an antiquarian book magazine during what seems like a lifetime ago.
Like yours truly, Kern had a mania for collecting—but unlike yours truly, his earnings during the Roaring Twenties enabled him to purchase on a grand scale invaluable rare books from the past few centuries (think first editions of Robinson Crusoe and Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”). Eventually, because of his increasing musical workload and need to pay more attention to his wife’s precarious health, Kern reluctantly decided he had to part with his collection.
The resulting booksale is still regarded as a highlight of antiquarian book history. It was actually two sales, spread out over the first two weeks of 1929, with the collection sold off in pieces to maximize sales. The items were sold separately rather than as a unit to maximize their sales potential.
The price for the entire collection--$1,729,462—capped a period of madly appreciating prices on the rare-book market, much like the stock market. In fact, the antiquarian book market would not see prices as high on a number of items for another 50 years.
Kern’s decision to sell the collection in early 1929—just before the onset of the Great Depression—illustrates that the great composer’s acute sense of timing was not only confined to music.
Together with lyric partners such as Oscar Hammerstein II, Guy Bolton, P.G. Wodehouse, and Dorothy Fields, Kern wrote, for Broadway and Hollywood, such enduring standards as “All the Things You Are,” “Smoky Gets in Your Eyes,” “Ol’ Man River,” “A Fine Romance,” and “The Way You Look Tonight.” Everybody knows this—or should.
But did you know that Kern also compiled one of the greatest book collections in American history? I didn’t either, until I was working for a brief spell at an antiquarian book magazine during what seems like a lifetime ago.
Like yours truly, Kern had a mania for collecting—but unlike yours truly, his earnings during the Roaring Twenties enabled him to purchase on a grand scale invaluable rare books from the past few centuries (think first editions of Robinson Crusoe and Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”). Eventually, because of his increasing musical workload and need to pay more attention to his wife’s precarious health, Kern reluctantly decided he had to part with his collection.
The resulting booksale is still regarded as a highlight of antiquarian book history. It was actually two sales, spread out over the first two weeks of 1929, with the collection sold off in pieces to maximize sales. The items were sold separately rather than as a unit to maximize their sales potential.
The price for the entire collection--$1,729,462—capped a period of madly appreciating prices on the rare-book market, much like the stock market. In fact, the antiquarian book market would not see prices as high on a number of items for another 50 years.
Kern’s decision to sell the collection in early 1929—just before the onset of the Great Depression—illustrates that the great composer’s acute sense of timing was not only confined to music.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
This Day in Cultural History
January 26, 1908 – Jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli was born in Paris, France. Often hailed as the godfather of his instrument, he came to public attention as part of Django Reinhardt’s Hot Club of France quintet.
Grappelli’s counterpart on the classical violin, Yehudi Menuhin, once commented: “Stephane is like one of those jugglers who send 10 plates into the air and recovers them all." I have four examples of what Menuhin means—and of his own dazzling collaboration with Grappelli—in four songs on my iPod: “The Lady is a Tramp,” “Night and Day,” “All the Things You Are,” and “A Fine Romance”—from their CD, Menuhin & Grappelli Play Berlin, Kern, Porter, and Rodgers & Hart (1985), a collection that is variously lyrical and antic.
Grappelli died in 1997, having delighted fans in concert well into his 80s. Someone with a touch so pure could be graced only by God, so I’m sure he is now performing similar wonders for St. Peter behind the pearly gates now.
Grappelli’s counterpart on the classical violin, Yehudi Menuhin, once commented: “Stephane is like one of those jugglers who send 10 plates into the air and recovers them all." I have four examples of what Menuhin means—and of his own dazzling collaboration with Grappelli—in four songs on my iPod: “The Lady is a Tramp,” “Night and Day,” “All the Things You Are,” and “A Fine Romance”—from their CD, Menuhin & Grappelli Play Berlin, Kern, Porter, and Rodgers & Hart (1985), a collection that is variously lyrical and antic.
Grappelli died in 1997, having delighted fans in concert well into his 80s. Someone with a touch so pure could be graced only by God, so I’m sure he is now performing similar wonders for St. Peter behind the pearly gates now.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
This Day in Literary History (Birth of Edith Wharton, First Female Pulitzer Fiction Winner)
January 24, 1862 – In New York City at 14 West 23rd Street, Edith Newbold Jones was born to a pair of socially prominent New Yorkers. The girl grew up to marry, take her husband’s name, and, as Edith Wharton, become the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel The Age of Innocence, an examination of the “Old New York” uppercrust into which she was born.
Where to start writing about Wharton? Should I discuss her graceful, clear-as-a-country-brook style? Her waxing and waning literary reputation over the years? Her Gilded Age “cottage” in the Berkshires, now restored to its former beauty? Hollywood’s heightened interest in her work over the last two decades? The comparatively little known but downright chilling ghost stories she wrote throughout her career, all the way up to her death?
Any of these would do—and, if this blog lasts long enough, maybe I’ll tackle all of these. But I thought I would share just one item: the portrait in her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Temperamentally, the novelist and the politician would seem to possess little in common: one, a woman who depended on solitude and skeptical vision to etch her satires of her class; the other, a male who thrived on being “in the arena” of politics.
But the two, born within four years and four blocks of each other, sprang from the same time and socioeconomic background, wrote incessantly, and were deeply ambivalent about their class. Roosevelt lashed out against “malefactors of great wealth” while Wharton’s fiction continually returned to the conflict between sexual freedom and a highly stratified social hierarchy.
Wharton’s short reminiscence of the President is warm and revealing, reflecing this pair’s deep affinity for each other, even on the infrequent occasions they met.
Wharton, a distant cousin of TR’s second wife, Edith, had known him since her “first youth,” she noted, but they did not really click until Roosevelt, succeeding to the White House upon the assassination of William McKinley, asked her to lunch, where they could talk about a book of hers he admired, The Valley of Decision.
According to Wharton, except for small circles such as those revolving around John Hay, Henry Adams, and Roosevelt’s friend Henry Cabot Lodge, Washington was an inhospitable place for the intellect. Not surprisingly, the ardent bibliophile Roosevelt was delighted to find a kindred spirit when Wharton came to lunch. “Well, I am glad to welcome to the White House some one to whom I can quote “The Hunting of the Snark’ without being asked what I mean!” the President cried in relief upon seeing her.
On another occasion, at a reception surrounding commencement ceremonies at Williams College, the President encountered her again and, temporarily shaking off his academic hosts, he went off into a corner with her to speak about a new history he’d just read. “But that was the President’s way,” she wrote, “and as everybody knew him, everybody forgave him; and moreover they all knew that in another ten minutes he would be cornering someone else on some other equally absorbing subject.”
While much else about Roosevelt (including bellicosity and the celebration of Anglo-Saxon “manifest destiny” that lies at the heart of his two-volume pre-Presidential history, The Winning of the West) has not aged well in our more politically correct age, this almost childlike curiosity about anything and everything remains deeply appealing. Not for nothing was one of his many books entitled A Book-Lover’s Holiday in the Open. (Even that title evokes a chuckle, as if he were balancing a copy of Macaulay in one hand while bagging an elk in the other.)
A habitual coffee drinker reputed to have coined the future advertising slogan “good to the last drop!” while visiting Andrew Jackson’s Nashville home The Hermitage, Roosevelt might have been the most wired man in Washington, and you practically share his infectious enthusiasm in Wharton’s description. It’s easy to see how so many wanted to follow him in everything.
But TR probably transmitted his bibliophilia to nobody so much as his children, including his namesake, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. I have not yet started the first volume of Rick Atkinson’s “Liberation Trilogy” about the American destruction of the Third Reich, An Army at Dawn, but I just had to buy it as soon as I peaked at his vivid description of Theodore Jr.
Gassed in WWI and left with a permanent limp, Ted Jr. rose to become vice president of the Doubleday publishing house in the 1930s. With war looming again in Europe, he re-enlisted, brought copies of The Pilgrim’s Progress and a history of medieval England with him, and cheerfully endured challenges from the staff officers in his brigade by reciting long passages from Kipling.
If the general public remembers the younger Roosevelt at all these days, it’s likely because of reruns of The Longest Day, in which he was played by Henry Fonda. But that marvelous actor added much of his own taciturnity to a real-life brigadier general whose rumpled, intellectual nature became as noted as his valor in battle. (The only general in the first amphibious wave on Omaha Beach on D-Day, Ted Jr. waded ashore-- arthritic knees, faulty ticker and all -- then led several assaults along the beachhead under such constant enemy fire that his superior, Omar Bradley, described it as the single bravest act he witnessed during the war.)
All that restless intellectual energy, all that recklessness with one’s life that Wharton noted in Roosevelt and that Theodore Jr. displayed in military service, were also present in another President: John F. Kennedy.
Unlike TR, JFK did not really write the history that established his literary credibility, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage, playing at best a supervisory role in its preparation. And unlike the Roosevelts, who displayed a Victorian sexual morality, Kennedy acted more like a Regency rake.
But like TR, JFK showed the world a surface exuberance that hid a thoughtful interior—in both cases, probably the consequence of sickly childhoods that left each man inner-directed, bookish, and absolutely certain that “the strenuous life” must be grasped in all its essentials because it will be lost all too soon.
“Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough,” Roosevelt observed. Numerous family tragedies growing up, as well as his own brushes with death, also made Kennedy all too familiar with “black care.”
JFK often asked his wife to recite his favorite poem, WWI poet-soldier Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.” Frequently with aides, he would bring to mind Henry V’s “St. Crispin’s Day” exhortation to his troops—“We band of brothers, we happy few.” Underlying the famous Shakespeare speech was the possibility of death at Agincourt.
One of my uncles, who served on a PT boat in the South Pacific next to Kennedy, told me several years ago that ever since coming home from the war, he felt he had been living on borrowed time. The same realization fed the burning drive that everyone noticed in Kennedy.
Shrewdly, Wharton detected “something premonitory in this impatience” to know more and live more on the part of her fellow New Yorker. It’s impossible to shake the same feeling about Roosevelt’s son, or about the other Harvard grad who achieved the Presidency while still only in his early 40s, only to die all too young.
Where to start writing about Wharton? Should I discuss her graceful, clear-as-a-country-brook style? Her waxing and waning literary reputation over the years? Her Gilded Age “cottage” in the Berkshires, now restored to its former beauty? Hollywood’s heightened interest in her work over the last two decades? The comparatively little known but downright chilling ghost stories she wrote throughout her career, all the way up to her death?
Any of these would do—and, if this blog lasts long enough, maybe I’ll tackle all of these. But I thought I would share just one item: the portrait in her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Temperamentally, the novelist and the politician would seem to possess little in common: one, a woman who depended on solitude and skeptical vision to etch her satires of her class; the other, a male who thrived on being “in the arena” of politics.
But the two, born within four years and four blocks of each other, sprang from the same time and socioeconomic background, wrote incessantly, and were deeply ambivalent about their class. Roosevelt lashed out against “malefactors of great wealth” while Wharton’s fiction continually returned to the conflict between sexual freedom and a highly stratified social hierarchy.
Wharton’s short reminiscence of the President is warm and revealing, reflecing this pair’s deep affinity for each other, even on the infrequent occasions they met.
Wharton, a distant cousin of TR’s second wife, Edith, had known him since her “first youth,” she noted, but they did not really click until Roosevelt, succeeding to the White House upon the assassination of William McKinley, asked her to lunch, where they could talk about a book of hers he admired, The Valley of Decision.
According to Wharton, except for small circles such as those revolving around John Hay, Henry Adams, and Roosevelt’s friend Henry Cabot Lodge, Washington was an inhospitable place for the intellect. Not surprisingly, the ardent bibliophile Roosevelt was delighted to find a kindred spirit when Wharton came to lunch. “Well, I am glad to welcome to the White House some one to whom I can quote “The Hunting of the Snark’ without being asked what I mean!” the President cried in relief upon seeing her.
On another occasion, at a reception surrounding commencement ceremonies at Williams College, the President encountered her again and, temporarily shaking off his academic hosts, he went off into a corner with her to speak about a new history he’d just read. “But that was the President’s way,” she wrote, “and as everybody knew him, everybody forgave him; and moreover they all knew that in another ten minutes he would be cornering someone else on some other equally absorbing subject.”
While much else about Roosevelt (including bellicosity and the celebration of Anglo-Saxon “manifest destiny” that lies at the heart of his two-volume pre-Presidential history, The Winning of the West) has not aged well in our more politically correct age, this almost childlike curiosity about anything and everything remains deeply appealing. Not for nothing was one of his many books entitled A Book-Lover’s Holiday in the Open. (Even that title evokes a chuckle, as if he were balancing a copy of Macaulay in one hand while bagging an elk in the other.)
A habitual coffee drinker reputed to have coined the future advertising slogan “good to the last drop!” while visiting Andrew Jackson’s Nashville home The Hermitage, Roosevelt might have been the most wired man in Washington, and you practically share his infectious enthusiasm in Wharton’s description. It’s easy to see how so many wanted to follow him in everything.
But TR probably transmitted his bibliophilia to nobody so much as his children, including his namesake, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. I have not yet started the first volume of Rick Atkinson’s “Liberation Trilogy” about the American destruction of the Third Reich, An Army at Dawn, but I just had to buy it as soon as I peaked at his vivid description of Theodore Jr.
Gassed in WWI and left with a permanent limp, Ted Jr. rose to become vice president of the Doubleday publishing house in the 1930s. With war looming again in Europe, he re-enlisted, brought copies of The Pilgrim’s Progress and a history of medieval England with him, and cheerfully endured challenges from the staff officers in his brigade by reciting long passages from Kipling.
If the general public remembers the younger Roosevelt at all these days, it’s likely because of reruns of The Longest Day, in which he was played by Henry Fonda. But that marvelous actor added much of his own taciturnity to a real-life brigadier general whose rumpled, intellectual nature became as noted as his valor in battle. (The only general in the first amphibious wave on Omaha Beach on D-Day, Ted Jr. waded ashore-- arthritic knees, faulty ticker and all -- then led several assaults along the beachhead under such constant enemy fire that his superior, Omar Bradley, described it as the single bravest act he witnessed during the war.)
All that restless intellectual energy, all that recklessness with one’s life that Wharton noted in Roosevelt and that Theodore Jr. displayed in military service, were also present in another President: John F. Kennedy.
Unlike TR, JFK did not really write the history that established his literary credibility, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage, playing at best a supervisory role in its preparation. And unlike the Roosevelts, who displayed a Victorian sexual morality, Kennedy acted more like a Regency rake.
But like TR, JFK showed the world a surface exuberance that hid a thoughtful interior—in both cases, probably the consequence of sickly childhoods that left each man inner-directed, bookish, and absolutely certain that “the strenuous life” must be grasped in all its essentials because it will be lost all too soon.
“Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough,” Roosevelt observed. Numerous family tragedies growing up, as well as his own brushes with death, also made Kennedy all too familiar with “black care.”
JFK often asked his wife to recite his favorite poem, WWI poet-soldier Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.” Frequently with aides, he would bring to mind Henry V’s “St. Crispin’s Day” exhortation to his troops—“We band of brothers, we happy few.” Underlying the famous Shakespeare speech was the possibility of death at Agincourt.
One of my uncles, who served on a PT boat in the South Pacific next to Kennedy, told me several years ago that ever since coming home from the war, he felt he had been living on borrowed time. The same realization fed the burning drive that everyone noticed in Kennedy.
Shrewdly, Wharton detected “something premonitory in this impatience” to know more and live more on the part of her fellow New Yorker. It’s impossible to shake the same feeling about Roosevelt’s son, or about the other Harvard grad who achieved the Presidency while still only in his early 40s, only to die all too young.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
This Day in Cultural History (Arthur Miller's 'After the Fall' Opens to Controversy)
January 23, 1964 —The latest drama of guilt and personal responsibility from Arthur Miller, After the Fall, starring Jason Robards, Jr. and Barbara Loden (pictured with the playwright here), opened at Lincoln Center.
The production quickly became swallowed up in controversy—like so much of the playwright’s life to this point, as much for political as personal reasons.
The tragedy marked the first time in over a decade that Miller had worked with Elia Kazan, the director who had not only influenced a generation of more naturalistic theater and film actors but had also shepherded two of Miller’s key plays onto the stage: All My Sons and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman.
The tragedy marked the first time in over a decade that Miller had worked with Elia Kazan, the director who had not only influenced a generation of more naturalistic theater and film actors but had also shepherded two of Miller’s key plays onto the stage: All My Sons and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman.
But the two friends’ opposing decisions on “naming names” before Congress at the height of the Hollywood red scare—Kazan acquiescing, Miller defying—fractured their friendship.
But the two former friends came together to collaborate on the inaugural production of a new repertory theater then being installed at Lincoln Center.
But the two former friends came together to collaborate on the inaugural production of a new repertory theater then being installed at Lincoln Center.
Surmounting their disagreements over politics—and disregarding in particular those who claimed that “friendly witnesses” before HUAC should be professionally shunned—Miller and Kazan came together over a play that, for all its traditional Milleresque musings on responsibility, the Holocaust, and the obligations of marriage and family, also featured at its center a thinly veiled version of the woman who had been lover to Kazan and wife to Miller—Marilyn Monroe.
The news of Monroe’s death came as Miller was finishing After the Fall. Inevitably, given the open wounds of a marriage that had collapsed during the disastrous filming of The Misfits, the central situation of the play—a fortysomething angst-ridden liberal, “Quentin,” confronts a past that includes his blacklisting and his failed marriage to a substance-abusing entertainer, “Maggie”—was inspired by the relationship between the playwright and Monroe.
But the decision of the actress playing Maggie, Barbara Loden, to wear a blonde wig sealed the identification with America’s recently deceased sex symbol, to the near-total exclusion of the play’s nettlesome themes and challenging dramaturgy, including the spartan setting and the non-linear plot.
More than twenty years after its premiere, Miller was still bitter in reflecting on the play’s reception in his autobiography, Timebends: “With a few stubborn exceptions the reviews were about a scandal, not a play, with barely a mention of any theme, dramatic intention, or style, as though it were simply an attack on a dead woman.”
I first became aware of the play ten years later, in the midst of discovering his other dramas, in a 1974 TV production that included Christopher Plummer as Quentin, Faye Dunaway as Maggie, and a pre-Lou Grant and pre-Sopranos Nancy Merchand as Quentin’s mother.
Other attempts have been made to mount the play, including one by New York’s Roundabout Theatre Co. and, in a remarkable attempt to free it from the link to Monroe, a 1990 Royal National Theatre production in London that featured, as Maggie, a black actress, Josette Simon. But, with the legend of Monroe burning brighter with every year, the play remains a handful for any director and cast.
Monroe’s bewitching of one male after another is astonishing, and not only because she intrigues gays as much as heterosexuals. (Think of Andy Warhol’s pop art paintings of the star, or Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” tribute to “Norma Jean.”)
She also led an American statesman (and, possibly, his Attorney-General brother) to flirt with disaster by engaging in an affair; she led a proud ex-ballplayer ex-husband to contemplate wedding her again after her divorce from Miller came through; and she led a prize-winning novelist (Norman Mailer) into one of the most embarrassing books of his career, a dissection of the meaning of her life.
But the male she may have transfixed the most was Miller, for he ended up writing about her a second time, in what turned out to be his last production, Finishing the Picture.
I saw this play—an even more thinly veiled fictionalization of their crumbling relationship than After the Fall, occurring on the troubled set of The Misfits—not long after it premiered in Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in October 2004. It was hard to resist getting a ticket for a show starring Matthew Modine, Stephen Lang, Harris Yulin, Frances Fisher, Stacy Keach, Linda Lavin, and Scott Glenn.
The play moved along at a brisk pace, and, particularly with Lang and Lavin playing characters based on Actors Studio head Lee Strasberg and his wife Paula, included large doses of uncharacteristic and highly welcome humor from Miller. Moreover, it spotlights a dilemma omnipresent on nearly every film: the presence of insurance companies that can derail a production if a star becomes incapacitated or dies.
But one aspect of the play was disturbing: the character at the center of this turmoil is always seen in the most distressing of circumstances—running across the darkened stage naked in those moments when she wasn’t moaning in a drug- or alcohol-induced stupor. In fact, I can’t recall the Monroe character uttering a single intelligible syllable the whole night. It was as if Miller could not even allow his ex-wife a voice.
Terry Teachout, a prolific cultural critic whose blog has served as an inspiration for mine, dissents from the notion of Miller’s greatness that has prevailed once again after a mid-career fall from critical favor. In turn, I take issue with Teachout: Miller’s intense concentration on the family and personal failings as the source of tragedy—not one’s place in society—reinvented it for modern audiences without losing elements that had bound audiences from the Greeks to the present day.
The great irony of the playwright’s later life might have been that he never commented publicly—and only at the very end came to grips privately—with the tragedy of his post-After the Fall years: the 1966 birth of his son Daniel, stricken with Down’s syndrome.
Though it had been an open secret among his inner circle for awhile, a Vanity Fair article from this past fall led to much consternation in the blogosphere—especially over the notion that the wife Miller married after his divorce from Monroe, photographer Inge Morath, wanted to keep the baby.
Miller, however, was determined to keep it out of his life. Eventually the baby was placed in a Connecticut mental institution, where he remained for 17 years, under appalling conditions. The playwright never spoke of this fourth child and never mentioned him at all in Timebends.
Remarkable, once removed from the facility, Daniel improved and even thrived. In his last decade, Miller finally began meeting occasionally with his son, and, to his credit, changed his will shortly before his death so that his son might have a stake in the estate.
But one wonders about the psychic toll his longtime abandonment of his son took on the playwright. Miller’s creative output began to decline later in the decade, not long after the birth of his child—an ironic development in the life of a playwright whose work returns obsessively to the theme of fathers and sons.
The news of Monroe’s death came as Miller was finishing After the Fall. Inevitably, given the open wounds of a marriage that had collapsed during the disastrous filming of The Misfits, the central situation of the play—a fortysomething angst-ridden liberal, “Quentin,” confronts a past that includes his blacklisting and his failed marriage to a substance-abusing entertainer, “Maggie”—was inspired by the relationship between the playwright and Monroe.
But the decision of the actress playing Maggie, Barbara Loden, to wear a blonde wig sealed the identification with America’s recently deceased sex symbol, to the near-total exclusion of the play’s nettlesome themes and challenging dramaturgy, including the spartan setting and the non-linear plot.
More than twenty years after its premiere, Miller was still bitter in reflecting on the play’s reception in his autobiography, Timebends: “With a few stubborn exceptions the reviews were about a scandal, not a play, with barely a mention of any theme, dramatic intention, or style, as though it were simply an attack on a dead woman.”
I first became aware of the play ten years later, in the midst of discovering his other dramas, in a 1974 TV production that included Christopher Plummer as Quentin, Faye Dunaway as Maggie, and a pre-Lou Grant and pre-Sopranos Nancy Merchand as Quentin’s mother.
Other attempts have been made to mount the play, including one by New York’s Roundabout Theatre Co. and, in a remarkable attempt to free it from the link to Monroe, a 1990 Royal National Theatre production in London that featured, as Maggie, a black actress, Josette Simon. But, with the legend of Monroe burning brighter with every year, the play remains a handful for any director and cast.
Monroe’s bewitching of one male after another is astonishing, and not only because she intrigues gays as much as heterosexuals. (Think of Andy Warhol’s pop art paintings of the star, or Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” tribute to “Norma Jean.”)
She also led an American statesman (and, possibly, his Attorney-General brother) to flirt with disaster by engaging in an affair; she led a proud ex-ballplayer ex-husband to contemplate wedding her again after her divorce from Miller came through; and she led a prize-winning novelist (Norman Mailer) into one of the most embarrassing books of his career, a dissection of the meaning of her life.
But the male she may have transfixed the most was Miller, for he ended up writing about her a second time, in what turned out to be his last production, Finishing the Picture.
I saw this play—an even more thinly veiled fictionalization of their crumbling relationship than After the Fall, occurring on the troubled set of The Misfits—not long after it premiered in Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in October 2004. It was hard to resist getting a ticket for a show starring Matthew Modine, Stephen Lang, Harris Yulin, Frances Fisher, Stacy Keach, Linda Lavin, and Scott Glenn.
The play moved along at a brisk pace, and, particularly with Lang and Lavin playing characters based on Actors Studio head Lee Strasberg and his wife Paula, included large doses of uncharacteristic and highly welcome humor from Miller. Moreover, it spotlights a dilemma omnipresent on nearly every film: the presence of insurance companies that can derail a production if a star becomes incapacitated or dies.
But one aspect of the play was disturbing: the character at the center of this turmoil is always seen in the most distressing of circumstances—running across the darkened stage naked in those moments when she wasn’t moaning in a drug- or alcohol-induced stupor. In fact, I can’t recall the Monroe character uttering a single intelligible syllable the whole night. It was as if Miller could not even allow his ex-wife a voice.
Terry Teachout, a prolific cultural critic whose blog has served as an inspiration for mine, dissents from the notion of Miller’s greatness that has prevailed once again after a mid-career fall from critical favor. In turn, I take issue with Teachout: Miller’s intense concentration on the family and personal failings as the source of tragedy—not one’s place in society—reinvented it for modern audiences without losing elements that had bound audiences from the Greeks to the present day.
The great irony of the playwright’s later life might have been that he never commented publicly—and only at the very end came to grips privately—with the tragedy of his post-After the Fall years: the 1966 birth of his son Daniel, stricken with Down’s syndrome.
Though it had been an open secret among his inner circle for awhile, a Vanity Fair article from this past fall led to much consternation in the blogosphere—especially over the notion that the wife Miller married after his divorce from Monroe, photographer Inge Morath, wanted to keep the baby.
Miller, however, was determined to keep it out of his life. Eventually the baby was placed in a Connecticut mental institution, where he remained for 17 years, under appalling conditions. The playwright never spoke of this fourth child and never mentioned him at all in Timebends.
Remarkable, once removed from the facility, Daniel improved and even thrived. In his last decade, Miller finally began meeting occasionally with his son, and, to his credit, changed his will shortly before his death so that his son might have a stake in the estate.
But one wonders about the psychic toll his longtime abandonment of his son took on the playwright. Miller’s creative output began to decline later in the decade, not long after the birth of his child—an ironic development in the life of a playwright whose work returns obsessively to the theme of fathers and sons.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
This Day in Cultural History
January 22, 1968 – Several months after an initial special earned excellent ratings, “Rowan and Martin’s ‘Laugh-In” premiered on NBC and became an overnight success with its fast-paced sketches, one-liners, and guest cameo appearances.
Throughout its five-year run on Monday night, the comedy-variety series spawned a slew of cultural catchphrases, given great currency in their own time but without a lot of staying power: “You bet your sweet bippy,” “Veeery interesting,” “Here come da judge! Here come da judge!”, “Beautiful Downtown Burbank” and “Sock it to me!”
(The last was delivered at one point by GOP candidate Richard Nixon, in a successful attempt to counteract a lethal image—a combination of cutthroat politician and weeny. “Tricky Dick’s” appearance was almost as bizarre as his later Oval Office handshake with Elvis Presley – but decidedly less surreal than the fact that a photograph of this historic meeting has become the most requested item at the National Archives.)
The show’s “hosts,” Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, took on the usual roles that comedy teams assumed during that time: one (Martin) a dimwit, the other (Rowan) a suave straight man.
In the last few years, though, I have come to think of Rowan’s image as one of the most colossal frauds ever perpetrated on a TV audience, because early in the 1960s, the Las Vegas comedian had enraged mob kingpin Sam Giancana by making a play for his mistress, the singer Phyllis McGuire.
(Goodfella (slang)—n. – A Mafia gangster, given to fitting designated contract hits and people who rub him the wrong way with cement shoes. Synonym: “Wiseguy.”)
(Dumbfella (slang)—n. Anyone who sleeps with wife, mistress, broad, etc. of said goodfella. Ex.—Dan Rowan).
Some stars of the show saw their celebrity fade almost as soon as the series ended—Ruth Buzzi, Alan Sues, Arte Johnson, Judy Carne, and the execrable Tiny Tim. (For anyone younger than 40, wondering who this last person could be, aside from a character out of Dickens, here’s a piece of advice: Don’t go there, son!).
Others enjoyed a few other brief moments in the spotlight (Henry Gibson in the Robert Altman film Nashville, JoAnne Worley more recently on Broadway, in The Drowsy Chaperone).
The most enduring entertainment figures to come from the show are two actresses and one off-screen creative force.
Goldie Hawn became best known on the show as the ditzy blonde who gyrated in a bikini with wisecracks scrawled on her midriff when she wasn’t giggling helplessly at something or other. Within two years of her first appearance, she had won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Cactus Flower and was well-launched on a multiple-decade career as a comic force in films.
Lily Tomlin played Ernestine the nosy phone operator and Edith Ann, the mischievous six-year-old, before scoring a year-long Broadway hit in the mid-1980s with her one-woman show, The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe.
The off-screen figure was Lorne Michaels, a writer for the show who began to tire of its constraints. Nearly a decade after Laugh-In’s premiere—by which time it had become a spent force and shuffled off to TV Valhalla—Michaels created and produced another variety show, Saturday Night Live. More than 30 years after its first airing, that show remains a fixture in the TV firmament.
Throughout its five-year run on Monday night, the comedy-variety series spawned a slew of cultural catchphrases, given great currency in their own time but without a lot of staying power: “You bet your sweet bippy,” “Veeery interesting,” “Here come da judge! Here come da judge!”, “Beautiful Downtown Burbank” and “Sock it to me!”
(The last was delivered at one point by GOP candidate Richard Nixon, in a successful attempt to counteract a lethal image—a combination of cutthroat politician and weeny. “Tricky Dick’s” appearance was almost as bizarre as his later Oval Office handshake with Elvis Presley – but decidedly less surreal than the fact that a photograph of this historic meeting has become the most requested item at the National Archives.)
The show’s “hosts,” Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, took on the usual roles that comedy teams assumed during that time: one (Martin) a dimwit, the other (Rowan) a suave straight man.
In the last few years, though, I have come to think of Rowan’s image as one of the most colossal frauds ever perpetrated on a TV audience, because early in the 1960s, the Las Vegas comedian had enraged mob kingpin Sam Giancana by making a play for his mistress, the singer Phyllis McGuire.
(Goodfella (slang)—n. – A Mafia gangster, given to fitting designated contract hits and people who rub him the wrong way with cement shoes. Synonym: “Wiseguy.”)
(Dumbfella (slang)—n. Anyone who sleeps with wife, mistress, broad, etc. of said goodfella. Ex.—Dan Rowan).
Some stars of the show saw their celebrity fade almost as soon as the series ended—Ruth Buzzi, Alan Sues, Arte Johnson, Judy Carne, and the execrable Tiny Tim. (For anyone younger than 40, wondering who this last person could be, aside from a character out of Dickens, here’s a piece of advice: Don’t go there, son!).
Others enjoyed a few other brief moments in the spotlight (Henry Gibson in the Robert Altman film Nashville, JoAnne Worley more recently on Broadway, in The Drowsy Chaperone).
The most enduring entertainment figures to come from the show are two actresses and one off-screen creative force.
Goldie Hawn became best known on the show as the ditzy blonde who gyrated in a bikini with wisecracks scrawled on her midriff when she wasn’t giggling helplessly at something or other. Within two years of her first appearance, she had won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Cactus Flower and was well-launched on a multiple-decade career as a comic force in films.
Lily Tomlin played Ernestine the nosy phone operator and Edith Ann, the mischievous six-year-old, before scoring a year-long Broadway hit in the mid-1980s with her one-woman show, The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe.
The off-screen figure was Lorne Michaels, a writer for the show who began to tire of its constraints. Nearly a decade after Laugh-In’s premiere—by which time it had become a spent force and shuffled off to TV Valhalla—Michaels created and produced another variety show, Saturday Night Live. More than 30 years after its first airing, that show remains a fixture in the TV firmament.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
This Day in Cultural History
January 19, 1953 – Lucy Ricardo gave birth to baby Ricky on I Love Lucy. The episode of the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz sitcom drew more viewers (44 million) than the inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower as President the following day.
The seven shows concerning the pregnancy were filmed early the prior fall, until Ball – in a case of life imitating art, pregnant herself with her first child, at age 41 – decided that carrying 33 extra pounds was too much.
As it happened, “Little Ricky” Ricardo and Lucy and Desi’s real-life child, Desi Jr., were both delivered on this date. The madcap redhead – who, many Hollywood insiders had thought only a few years ago, was approaching the end of her reign as “The Queen of the B’s” – found seven thousand letters and a thousand telegrams waiting for her at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. Before long, more than 1 million well-wishers would write her.
Fans of I Love Lucy can learn more about this episode – and many, many more – at the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center in Jamestown, N.Y. I visited this fascinating museum last summer, combining it with a trip to nearby Chautauqua, N.Y.
I hope to write, at far greater length, about this museum at a future time, and perhaps even another venue. But for now, I thought I would include this tidbit from her life, as well as a photo I took – the first one of my own that I’ve ever posted to this blog.
This particular shot is one of four giant murals in downtown Jamestown. It depicts another fondly remembered episode from the show – in which Lucy Ricardo extols the benefits of “Vitameatavegamin” to disastrous, and increasingly hilarious, effect in a commercial.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
This Day in Cultural History
January 16, 1938 – For one night “The King of Swing,” Benny Goodman, captured the holy temple of classical music, New York’s Carnegie Hall, for the jazz world, bringing to the form unparalleled recognition and respectability.
In a way, it was only natural that Goodman should be an ambassador for the form, because he was used to breaking down barriers. One of 12 children born to Russian immigrants, the Chicago native had, by the time he was 30, vaulted to the top of one of the few art forms that were distinctively American, jazz.
Taught for two years by the classically trained clarinetist Franz Schoepp but soon falling under the influence of New Orleans jazzmen like King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, Goodman had already, by the time of the Carnegie Hall appearance, become the first prominent jazz musician to perform the classical repertory. In 1936, he played publicly with two African-American musicians, pianist Teddy Wilson and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, then hired them for his band, breaking the jazz color line separating white from black.
Orchestrated by entertainment impresario Sol Hurok, the Carnegie Hall concert sold out weeks in advance. The 28-year-old Goodman was tentative at first, using the first half hour to highlight guest soloists from the Duke Ellington and Count Basie orchestras. His 13 tuxedo-clad sidemen (and one sidewoman) may also have been nervous, with trumpeter Harry James later confessing to feeling “like a whore at church.” But Goodman gained momentum when he came out with his “small group,” including Wilson and Hampton. (Indeed, notes critic Will Friedwald, their appearance might have marked the first instance when a Carnegie Hall audience saw black and white musicians playing side by side.)
After intermission, Goodman’s big band finally showed what the dance-crazy kids at New York's Paramount had been screaming about a couple of years before. Rousing renditions of "Bei Mir Bist Du Schon" and "Swingtime in the Rockies" built the audience’s enthusiasm until late in the show, when Goodman unfurled his piece de resistance: the orchestra’s barn-barning signature tune, “Sing, Sing, Sing.”
Goodman, drummer Gene Krupa, and trumpeter Harry James took rousing solo turns before Goodman turned the spotlight over to pianist Jess Stacy, who had never before been featured on this particular song. Stacy’s two-minute turn, evolving from steamboat stride to impressionist chords that reflected his interest in Ravel and Debussy, had audience members on the edge of their seats, wondering what could possibly come next – until Krupa and the rest of the band kicked in for the conclusion that left the capacity crowd hoarse.
Demanding of himself, Goodman was equally so with his band, insisting on precise arrangements and playing. In interview he gave critic Gary Giddins late in his career, Goodman – whose nickname “The Professor” might owe as much to his cerebral musicianship as to his owlish appearance – summed up the paradox at the heart of his career: “Listening to music is emotional. Sometimes you like something a lot, and another time you hate it. The whole goddamn thing about jazz is emotional. I like to feel the excitement. If it doesn’t come out as a wide endeavor – wild with restraint – it doesn’t have it.”
Beloved by the public throughout his 40-year career, Goodman was respected by fellow musicians for his accomplished playing but also universally scorned for displaying what Giddins called “his legendary cheapness, absentmindedness, mandarin discipline, rudeness to musicians, and various eccentricities.”
Even his liberal outlook on race was marked by his curmudgeonly nature. His later pianist-arranged Mel Powell remembered his boss this way to jazz critic Dan Morgenstern: “Benny was one of the very, very few white people I’ve known who had not a fiber of racism in him. He was absolutely, authentically color blind…One of the real giveaways to his outlook was that he could be as rude to a black man as to a white man. He did not get patronizing or suddenly gentle. Not at all. And I always found that admirable.”
Even family members were not exempt: a PBS documentary on his life included in an interview with one of his daughters, who recalled that when she was considering a career in music, he told her curtly she did not have the talent.
No matter how much of a martinet he might have been offstage, Goodman secured a distinct place for himself and the jazz world with his Carnegie Hall appearance. Its importance – and Goodman’s unique crossover appeal – was underscored on the 50th anniversary of the concert, when the great jazzman’s daughter, Rachel Goodman Edelson, handed one of her late father’s clarinets to Isaac Stern on stage as the first donation to a future museum at Carnegie Hall (later called the Rose Museum).
In a way, it was only natural that Goodman should be an ambassador for the form, because he was used to breaking down barriers. One of 12 children born to Russian immigrants, the Chicago native had, by the time he was 30, vaulted to the top of one of the few art forms that were distinctively American, jazz.
Taught for two years by the classically trained clarinetist Franz Schoepp but soon falling under the influence of New Orleans jazzmen like King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, Goodman had already, by the time of the Carnegie Hall appearance, become the first prominent jazz musician to perform the classical repertory. In 1936, he played publicly with two African-American musicians, pianist Teddy Wilson and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, then hired them for his band, breaking the jazz color line separating white from black.
Orchestrated by entertainment impresario Sol Hurok, the Carnegie Hall concert sold out weeks in advance. The 28-year-old Goodman was tentative at first, using the first half hour to highlight guest soloists from the Duke Ellington and Count Basie orchestras. His 13 tuxedo-clad sidemen (and one sidewoman) may also have been nervous, with trumpeter Harry James later confessing to feeling “like a whore at church.” But Goodman gained momentum when he came out with his “small group,” including Wilson and Hampton. (Indeed, notes critic Will Friedwald, their appearance might have marked the first instance when a Carnegie Hall audience saw black and white musicians playing side by side.)
After intermission, Goodman’s big band finally showed what the dance-crazy kids at New York's Paramount had been screaming about a couple of years before. Rousing renditions of "Bei Mir Bist Du Schon" and "Swingtime in the Rockies" built the audience’s enthusiasm until late in the show, when Goodman unfurled his piece de resistance: the orchestra’s barn-barning signature tune, “Sing, Sing, Sing.”
Goodman, drummer Gene Krupa, and trumpeter Harry James took rousing solo turns before Goodman turned the spotlight over to pianist Jess Stacy, who had never before been featured on this particular song. Stacy’s two-minute turn, evolving from steamboat stride to impressionist chords that reflected his interest in Ravel and Debussy, had audience members on the edge of their seats, wondering what could possibly come next – until Krupa and the rest of the band kicked in for the conclusion that left the capacity crowd hoarse.
Demanding of himself, Goodman was equally so with his band, insisting on precise arrangements and playing. In interview he gave critic Gary Giddins late in his career, Goodman – whose nickname “The Professor” might owe as much to his cerebral musicianship as to his owlish appearance – summed up the paradox at the heart of his career: “Listening to music is emotional. Sometimes you like something a lot, and another time you hate it. The whole goddamn thing about jazz is emotional. I like to feel the excitement. If it doesn’t come out as a wide endeavor – wild with restraint – it doesn’t have it.”
Beloved by the public throughout his 40-year career, Goodman was respected by fellow musicians for his accomplished playing but also universally scorned for displaying what Giddins called “his legendary cheapness, absentmindedness, mandarin discipline, rudeness to musicians, and various eccentricities.”
Even his liberal outlook on race was marked by his curmudgeonly nature. His later pianist-arranged Mel Powell remembered his boss this way to jazz critic Dan Morgenstern: “Benny was one of the very, very few white people I’ve known who had not a fiber of racism in him. He was absolutely, authentically color blind…One of the real giveaways to his outlook was that he could be as rude to a black man as to a white man. He did not get patronizing or suddenly gentle. Not at all. And I always found that admirable.”
Even family members were not exempt: a PBS documentary on his life included in an interview with one of his daughters, who recalled that when she was considering a career in music, he told her curtly she did not have the talent.
No matter how much of a martinet he might have been offstage, Goodman secured a distinct place for himself and the jazz world with his Carnegie Hall appearance. Its importance – and Goodman’s unique crossover appeal – was underscored on the 50th anniversary of the concert, when the great jazzman’s daughter, Rachel Goodman Edelson, handed one of her late father’s clarinets to Isaac Stern on stage as the first donation to a future museum at Carnegie Hall (later called the Rose Museum).
Thursday, January 3, 2008
This Day in Cultural History
January 3, 2000 – The final Peanuts daily cartoon strip appeared, leaving with a dying fall. Almost literally: Less than six weeks later, a stunned world would mourn the passing of Charles Schulz through colon cancer.
By and large, I stopped reading the strip after the early 1980s. An essay in my college newspaper only a couple of years before noted that the thrill had left the Peanuts gang. No way, I thought.
But over time, increasingly forced to the conclusion that Woodstock was a wuss and that the cartoon was no longer required reading, I was forced to agree with the writer that Charles Schulz had lost his way. I wasn’t surprised, then, to learn from reviews of David Michaelis’ recent biography, Schulz and Peanuts, that the creator of Charlie Brown and Co. suffered from deep-seated melancholy, even after his work had reached readers in some 75 countries and 21 languages. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether this depression traced back to childhood abandonment, the struggle to produce “every single one of the 17,897 strips” without assistants, or some other cause – the work reflected the struggle.
Actually, I’m happier now to read the “Classic Peanuts” strip in my Sunday paper that now bids fair to run forever, like a cartoon counterpart to “I Love Lucy.” It’s a bit like wanting to remember an elderly relative at a younger, more vibrant age.
And vibrant it was. There was a reason that the mascot at St. Cecilia football games – the pet beagle of the convent – was named Snoopy; why You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown became an unexpected musical hit; or why the holiday “Peanuts” specials, featuring the evocative jazz compositions of pianist Vince Guaraldi (departed this life all too soon), became such a beloved part of the “Wonder Years” of baby boomers. Whether it was Charlie Brown silently, perpetually holding the torch for “the little red-headed girl,” or Snoopy giddily doing battle with the Red Baron from his doghouse, Schulz captured the universal inner feelings of all ages, masterfully condensed into his troupe of youngsters.
Just how universal became to me when I visited the Twin Cities several years ago. As I walked through downtown St. Paul, searching for the statue of F. Scott Fitzgerald, I was astonished to find dozens of Snoopy characters all around, like the one in the picture above. Before he died, Schulz had granted permission to erect the statues to the sculpture-manufacturing company Tivoli Too. In fact, poor Scott was completely lost in the shuffle of not only dozens of cartoon characters, but even more tourists coming from all over the world to see Schulz’s creations – 450,000 in the first year alone. Scott had stayed lifesize, but the Peanuts crew had leaped from the crowded frames of the strip to become larger than life.
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