TV Quote of the Day (“Glee’s” Sue Sylvester, on Failure)

“I’m going to ask you to smell your armpits. That’s the smell of failure, and it’s stinking up my office.” —Sue Sylvester (played by Jane Lynch), Glee, “Acafellas,” Season 1, Episode 3, written by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan, air date September 16, 2009

Thank God Jane Lynch brought home an Emmy the other night. Can you imagine her creation barking out this command on national TV if she lost?

Quote of the Day (Sean Hayes, on His Flower-Delivery Job)

“For another $100, I helped when they were selling Mad About You into syndication. A friend and I drove a truck with flowers around to all these affiliates. We had to deliver them and say, 'Hi, I'm from Columbia TriStar, and I'm mad about you!' It was the worst job because it took so long. We started saying, 'Hi, I'm from Columbia TriStar, and I'm mad at you.'”—Sean Hayes, on delivering flowers, quoted in Tanner Stransky, “Sean Hayes: 5 Crazy Things I've Done For A Job,” Entertainment Weekly, April 23-20, 2010

Quote of the Day (Luke Timothy Johnson, on How Best to Learn About Jesus)

“Jesus is best learned not as a result of an individual’s scholarly quest that is published in a book, but as a continuing process of personal transformation within a community of disciples. Jesus is learned through the faithful reading of the Scriptures, true, but he is learned as well through the sacraments (above all the Eucharist), the lives of saints (dead and living) and the strangers with whom the exalted Lord especially associates himself. Next to such a difficult and complex form of learning Jesus as he truly is—the life-giving Spirit who enlivens above all the assembly called the body of Christ—the investigations of historians, even at their best, seem but a drab and impoverished distraction.”—Luke Timothy Johnson, “The Jesus Controversy: Why Historical Scholarship Cannot Find the Living Jesus,” America, August 2-9, 2010 (available only to subscribers)

This portrait by Paolo Veronese, Jesus and the Adulteress (1585), illustrates “the strangers with whom the exalted Lord especially associates himself.” The incident, one of the most indelibly powerful among all four Gospels, also demonstrates the all-too-literal and deconstructionist tendencies in historical scholarship that take its cues from the “Jesus Seminar.”

For one thing, this story comes from the Gospel of John. As Johnson notes in his genial, but carefully measured critical analysis, the scholars associated with the Jesus Seminar tend to credit most the Gospel of Luke.

In fact, the Jesus Seminar calls this a “floating” or “orphan” story, one that the group wishes was true but cannot find in the earliest manuscripts related to the Gospels. I wish Johnson could have examined in greater detail some of the problems with what the new historical scholarship credits or calls into question (e.g., in a culture before the printing press, how much even ended up getting written down?).

I write this, as longtime readers of this blog realize, as someone fascinated by history, and, like Johnson himself, enthralled by the grace and charm of one of those associated with the Jesus Seminar, John Dominic Crossan. Yet historians, like scientists, have to learn to be humble about the limits of their knowledge.

Biblical historians, in particular, can, as Johnson observes, miss the big picture: how much the four Gospel writers, all coming from different backgrounds and writing at different times, still converge in attesting to the extraordinary influence of Jesus on those he touched in his three-year ministry, and, as an ineffable presence, in all the centuries since.

Flashback, August 1935: Out-of-Work Actors Look to DC for Help

Hallie Flanagan (in the image accompanying this post) undoubtedly wondered how she would balance employing thousands of out-of-work theater professionals and creating a vibrant national theater as she was sworn in as head of the Federal Theatre Project. It’s doubtful, however, that she expected that this new agency within the Works Progress Administration would become an early battleground over governmental funding for the arts, in a foreshadowing of the culture wars late in the 20th century.

The site of Ms. Flanagan’s swearing-in on August 27, 1935 must have seemed symbolic to her and all those who shared her hope of making theater a vital part of every corner of America: the University of Iowa, deep in the heartland of America, where the cornerstone was being laid for a new theater. She shared with playwright Elmer Rice, who had submitted a plan for the New Deal’s theater project, the vision of a decentralized theater, one that would be not a museum piece but taking its cue from the current times.

When it was all over four years later, Ms. Flanagan—who had taken leave from Vassar, where she had become a school legend for establishing a daring experimental theater—could look back with pride on the fact that the Federal Theatre Project had put to work approximately 10,000 theater professionals; that many of them had had their self-respect restored by being taken off the welfare rolls; and that at least 12 million people had attended performances by the numerous companies connected with the agency.

Yet this visionary woman, already at a handicap because she was, by her own admission, “totally lacking in administrative experience,” also felt frustrated about running interference between those like WPA head (and Franklin Roosevelt confidante Harry Hopkins) who wanted to provide “free, adult, uncensored theater,” and conservative critics who picked up on well-publicized examples of agitprop drama that were not necessarily representative of the agency.

This ideological clash was probably best described by John Rhys Moore, who, in a Kenyon Review article from 1968, explained how reaction set in:

“The depression created a sense of fraternity and common purpose among people who had never known such feelings, but it also sharpened distrust and hostility. New political alignments appeared with bewildering rapidity as angry saviors fell out among themselves.”

One play that particularly raised the hackles of conservatives was Marc Blitzstein’s musical The Cradle Will Rock. Its pro-labor, even frankly left-wing sentiments gave hives to timorous bureaucrats terrified of the right wing. It was a triumph for producer John Houseman and his boy-wonder director-partner, Orson Welles—just as their “voodoo Macbeth” had been—but exacted a price: one year after its premiere, Congress--with many members annoyed at the thought of funding attacks on capitalism, by this and other plays mounted by the FTP--drove a stake through the program’s heart, in an early example of "defunding the left."

Quote of the Day (Irving Thalberg, on Credit)

“Credit you give yourself is not worth having.”—MGM production head Irving Thalberg, explaining why he refused to allow his name to appear on the credits of films with which he was associated, quoted in Julie Lugo Cerra, Culver City: The Heart of Screenland (2004)

Irving Thalberg (pictured left, with movie-star wife Norma Shearer) inspired the creation of Monroe Stahr in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last, unfinished novel The Last Tycoon. He only let his name be put on one of his films: The Good Earth.

Nevertheless, Hollywood remembers this driven, sickly creative force at Oscar time with the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, given to “creative producers whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production.”

Quote of the Day (Chevy Chase, on “Caddyshack” Co-Creator Doug Kenney)

“Someone suggested that maybe I could help clean Doug up. I was the last guy to ask! We went to Hawaii. The point was to dry out. But why would that happen? Look at us at that age and the time. I had to go back to California, and within a couple of days Doug's body was found at the bottom of a ravine.”—Caddyshack star Chevy Chase, on the death of that film’s co-screenwriter, Doug Kenney, quoted in Chris Nashawaty, “Caddyshack,” Sports Illustrated, August 2, 2010

Thirty years ago today, one month after the opening of his hit Caddyshack, Doug Kenney—who had brought his irreverent, authority-defying brand of comedy from National Lampoon (where he was a founding editor) to Animal House—plunged to his death from a cliff in Hawaii. When his body was discovered a few days later, the news shook Young Hollywood—though, in a way, it shouldn’t have.

The Sports Illustrated oral history on the making of his last hit—from which Chase’s rueful quote comes--gives some hints on what brought Kenney to his sad end. Nearly everyone involved in that film (with Ted Knight being a notable exception) sampled the drugs being passed around like candy cars on the set.

Kenney’s influence can be seen through the types of entertainment that came in the wake of National Lampoon—not merely his own films, but also Saturday Night Live, SCTV, good friend Harold Ramis' filmography, Christopher Guest’s parodies, and P.J. O’Rourke’s work.

Robert Sam Anson’s Esquire October 1981 cover story on the life and death of the hugely talented and troubled Kenney nettled the screenwriter's many close friends. They preferred to focus on the good Doug, the warm, generous guy who made sure actress Cindy Morgan received two complimentary tickets to the premiere of Caddyshack when she’d been left off for no good reason—not the quarrelsome man who got into shoving matches with colleagues in post-production on the film.

His death—and the drug use that led to it (it’s still uncertain if he jumped or stumbled from the cliff)—hit far too close to home. After that, for far too long a time, his friends didn’t want to cooperate with other reporters or biographers.

Too bad—within two years of Kenney’s demise, they were doomed to repeat the cycle, as another one of their own, John Belushi, also fell victim, far too young, to drugs at the height of his fame.

The 33-year-old Kenney was especially mourned by fiancée Kathryn Walker, an accomplished actress who would later find happiness (for a time) as the second wife of musician James Taylor.

This Day in Baseball History (Hack Wilson Passes Chuck Klein’s NL HR Mark)

August 26, 1930—It took only a year before the National League record for homers in a single season, set by Chuck Klein of the Philadelphia Phillies, was broken. In contrast, the new record, achieved by Hack Wilson of the Chicago Cubs during one of the greatest offensive seasons in baseball history, would last 68 years.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to write about the Cubs’ centerfielder. Part of it is because I’m a sucker for great sports nicknames, and the one given to Lewis Robert Wilson seems pretty fitting for a slugger who never stinted on a swing.

But I’ve also wanted to write about Wilson because the magnitude of his season of glory was inversely proportional to the brevity of his career—at least for someone of his great skills.

In a sense, Wilson was a far unlikelier athlete than Babe Ruth. The Bambino might have weighed a ton, too, but it was distributed on a 6-ft.-2-in. frame, and through most of his career it never affected his defensive prowess. Moreover, for all his bibulous activities, it’s not apparent that liquor seriously hampered his achievements.

None of this can be said about Wilson, who stood five ft. six inches but weighed 195 pounds. The man who covered the most ground of any position player in Wrigley Field was like a beer keg chasing flying balls.

The 25,000 fans in attendance at Wrigley Field saw their hero near his zenith the day he surpassed Klein’s mark of 43 HRs. Wilson’s roundtripper formed part of his 4-RBI barrage that powered the Cubs to a 7-5 win, helping manager Joe McCarthy’s squad stay in first place. (No talk of futility in those days: the team had made it to the World Series the year before.)

For the rest of the 154-game season, Wilson amassed another 12 homers, giving him 56 for the year. While a number of NL hitters exceeded the 50-homer mark over the next half-century, nobody surpassed Wilson's achievement until the 1998 season.

Stop right there—I know what you’re thinking: It was McGwire and Sosa who broke it that year, wasn’t it? Well, they deserve to go into the record books, all right—as long as it’s with syringes next to their marks!

I’m with you on that, brother!

But there’s one record set by Hack that remains inviolable—his record for RBIs set in a season. Since 1938, no NL batter—not even in the steroid era—has come within 25 RBIs of Wilson’s 190.

Correction—make that 191. Hack is one of the few baseball players whose stats actually improved after he died. That amazing feat was accomplished when a modern statistician reviewed all the box scores for the season and decided Wilson had been been robbed of at least one run batted in.

It was typical of Wilson’s life that this bit of good news happened too late for him to enjoy it. The following year, peevish Rogers Hornsby rather than tough-but-fair Joe McCarthy managed—or, in the case of “The Rajah,” mismanaged—Wilson and the Cubs.

It’s true that baseball’s decision to “deaden” the ball that season would have led to poorer offensive totals for Wilson. But his boozing only exacerbated his power outage in 1931, as his 13 homers represented less than a quarter of those he belted in 1930. 

Moreover, Wilson was a chaotic, divisive presence on the field and in the clubhouse, with his antics finally leading to his suspension toward year’s end. By 1934, he was washed up and out of the game.

In his last years, Wilson came to enough self-knowledge to admit on a radio program that “Demon Rum” had shortened his career and adversely affected his relationships. When he died in 1948, his old drinking buddies had to pass the hat in their favorite pub to ensure that the penniless former slugger had a funeral.

It took another 31 years after that for sportswriters to ignore career offensive totals that look no better than ordinary. Instead, Cooperstown’s Committee considered what he did in his prime (1926-1930) and how he stood against the elite of his time, finally deciding this powerfully built, squad refugee from the coal region of Pennsylvania deserved induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1979.