Song Lyric of the Day (Billy Joel, on “The Empire State Laid Low”)

“Seen the lights go out Broadway
I saw the Empire State laid low.”—Billy Joel, “Miami 2017 (I've Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway),” from his Turnstiles LP (1976)

This is one of those albums that I nearly wore out during my high-school years. Its inexplicable lack of mass appeal (stalling at #122 on the charts) left Billy Joel one remove (The Stranger) away from the beginning of his truly significant commercial success.

But song for song, Turnstiles--released on this date 35 years ago--ranks very nearly at the top of his entire discography. While “New York State of Mind” probably has the greatest potential for becoming a standard, other songs have also been covered by other artists, including “Summer, Highland Falls” (Peter, Paul and Mary) and “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” (Ronnie Spector).

The singer-songwriter wrote this, the concluding song of the LP, after seeing the famous New York Daily News headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” But, to an extent, it also reflected his own circumstances.

“Miami 2017 (I've Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway)” is a song about desperation and defiance, two attitudes that Joel was getting to know all too well. He had been forced to fire the original producer of the album, James William Guercio (famous for his work with Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears) and take the producing chores into his own hands. Coming five years after twin career disasters (an onerous contract, a mastering error that left his first album, Cold Spring Harbor, a bit too fast and his voice a bit too high), this latest setback undoubtedly left him reeling.

In a way, this personal adversity made Joel bond even closer to the beleaguered New York area when he returned from the West Coast and formed a new backup band for himself. His rallying cry for the city is, in fact, expressed in entertainment terms: “They turned our power down/They drove us underground/But we went right on with the show.”

“Miami 2017” becomes an anthem of a metro standing tall, no matter what the disaster—bankruptcy, blackout, or bombing. Even at the song’s end (the year 2017, of course: a date that, astonishingly, now seems right around the corner from us), there is one voice--the singer’s--to, if nothing else, “keep the memory alive.”

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

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

Quote of the Day (John Marshall Harlan, on the Supreme Court’s “Brutal” Assault on Civil Rights)

“In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case. It was adjudged in that case that the descendants of Africans who were imported into this country and sold as slaves were not included nor intended to be included under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and could not claim any of the rights and privileges which that instrument provided for and secured to citizens of the United States;… The recent [Thirteenth Through Fifteenth] amendments of the Constitution, it was supposed, had eradicated these principles from our institutions. But it seems that we have yet, in some of the States, a dominant race -- a superior class of citizens, which assumes to regulate the enjoyment of civil rights, common to all citizens, upon the basis of race. The present decision, it may well be apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments of the Constitution, by one of which the blacks of this country were made citizens of the United States and of the States in which they respectively reside, and whose privileges and immunities, as citizens, the States are forbidden to abridge. Sixty millions of whites are in no danger from the presence here of eight millions of blacks. The destinies of the two races in this country are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law. What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments which, in fact, proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens. That, as all will admit, is the real meaning of such legislation as was enacted in Louisiana.”—Justice John Marshall Harlan, dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Another section of this opinion delivered on this date 115 years ago today by John Marshall Harlan, associate justice of the Supreme Court, is far better known to posterity: "our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.'' But this section above is far more prophetic, and deserves to be better known, both for its deep understanding of the high court’s problematic history in preserving the rights of America’s most marginalized citizens and in foreseeing the possibilities for mischief in laying down dangerous new precedents that ignore the intentions underlying constitutional amendments.

At first glance, Harlan, the son of a Kentucky slaveowner, might be the last person one would expect to deliver one of the most ringing calls for racial equality from any American court. Yet he appears to have been one of the few jurists of that era comfortable with socializing with African-Americans--or, for that matter, Hispanics or Chinese.

Harlan is known to the great mass of American high school and college students (if he is at all) for his lonely, courageous dissent from the Supreme Court’s 8-1 finding that segregation could be justified on “separate but equal” grounds. He deserves to be even better known. Apart from his decisions, he was, simply, quite a character. As what colleague Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called the last "tobacco chomping justice," he loved bourbon, golf, baseball, and colorful clothing.

Harlan was appointed to the court by Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877, as the nation began its long, dark retreat from Reconstruction. But the court's unwillingness to preserve civil rights cannot be blamed on him. He rendered 24 years of distinguished service to the highest court of appeals, and a half century later a more sympathetic set of justices would find his reasoning in Plessy compelling enough to begin overturning American apartheid.

Quote of the Day (George Packer, on Intellectual Blundering in Politics)

“Intellectuals can hardly keep away from politics any more than other citizens, and probably less, especially in decades like the nineteen-thirties (or this one, for that matter). But, because they typically bring to it an unstable mix of abstraction and narcissism, their judgments tend to be absolute, when nothing in politics ever is.”—George Packer, “The Spanish Prisoner,” The New Yorker, October 31, 2005, collected in Interesting Times: Writings From a Turbulent Decade (2009)

This Day in Film History (Birth of Margaret Sullavan, Golden-Age Star Gone “Haywire“)

May 16, 1911—Margaret Sullavan, who glittered briefly as one of golden-age Hollywood’s finest actresses, then became one of the victims in a family as cursed as any in a Greek tragedy, was born on this date in Norfolk, Va.—or so she would claim.

(I wrote “claimed” in the above partly because several Internet references I came across gave her year of birth as 1909. Since a gentleman never asks a lady her age, we’ll take the actress’ word for it.)

There’s a good chance many reading this won’t recall Sullavan’s name—or, if they do, might confuse it with Maureen O’Sullivan (yes, Jane to Tarzan, not to mention Mia Farrow’s mom), who not only possessed a surname that sounded like hers but also was almost exactly the same age (born a day later); labored at the same studio, MGM, in the 1930s as an ingénue; and left in the 1940s to devote herself to her family. Talk about doppelgangers!

If you can distinguish between the two ladies, here’s what you’re likely to know about Margaret:
1) She starred in The Shop Around the Corner (1940), a sparkling Ernst Lubitsch comedy whose plot was copied by, among other films, the Judy Garland vehicle In the Good Old Summertime, the Broadway musical She Loves Me, and Nora Ephron’s too-clever-by-half Internet-age version, You’ve Got Mail.

2) Offscreen, her seemingly blessed family life—marriage to magnetic theatrical agent and producer Leland Hayward, three bright, attractive kids—collapsed due to her divorce, the children’s mounting depression, and her own suicide—a story recounted in eldest daughter Brooke Heyward’s 1977 bestseller, Haywire.

It’s a measure of the greatness of the Hollywood studio system that, though she worked in it for less than a decade, Sullivan had 16 films to her credit. But it’s a measure of the triviality of the same system that the actress, despairing of “this bizarre place,” refused to sign a long-term contract and left the studio as soon as she could. We do not, then, have the kind of vast, multi-decade filmography left by her MGM rival for roles and men, Katharine Hepburn.

I first became aware of Sullavan through a series held in the 1980s at New York’s late, lamented film revival house, the Regency: “Screen Teams.” I wasn’t surprised at other teams in this series—Tracy and Hepburn, Powell and Loy—but I was to find the immortal Jimmy Stewart paired with Sullavan, whom I hadn’t heard of up to that point.

As it happened, Stewart and Sullavan might have made for the most natural team of them all. After all, the two of them, along with Henry Fonda (Stewart’s great friend and Sullavan’s first husband), started out as part of the repertory University Players in Falmouth, Mass.

Sullavan pushed for Stewart to be her co-star after he joined MGM. In all, they made four films together. As for Fonda: though his marriage to Sullavan foundered after only two months, the two stayed on good terms thereafter, and their children became friends.

Children…this might be as good a point as any to deal with the tragedies that finally overwhelmed Sullavan and her family.

The first thing people would want to know is: how could it all go so wrong? How could children--and their parents--who seemed to have everything--a father’s personal plane that he flew everywhere, nannies, Jimmy Stewart for a babysitter, parties with Hollywood’s finest among the invited guests, with the children receiving invitations to pose for the cover of Life Magazine (Brooke) or join the famous Williamstown Theater Festival (younger sister Bridget)--have seen it all fall down?

It started with the parents’ tendencies--a wandering eye (Leland’s) that led to infidelity and divorce; a high-strung temperament (Margaret’s) that had already made most of her directors regard her as a pill and a half, and that only worsened in time. As Margaret advanced into middle age, her hearing difficulties radically worsened. Now that she had pretty much abandoned Hollywood for Broadway (she originated the role of “Sabrina” that went to Audrey Hepburn on the screen), this latter problem was disastrous--she would miss cues.

It all came to an end for Sullavan on New Year’s Day 1960, when she died of a drug overdose. It was eventually ruled accidental, but the coroner’s report was widely understood as a heavily hedged act of mercy to a heartbroken family.

Nor was that the end of the Heywards' problems. Bridget and Bill, each in a mental-health institution at the time of their mother’s death, would also kill themselves: Bridget, 21 years old, only eight months later, and Bill, in 2008, at age 66, with a shot to the heart.

Following Bridget‘s funeral, Brooke Heyward poured out her anguish to family friend Tom Mankiewicz: "I'm the daughter of a father who's been married five times. Mother killed herself. My sister killed herself. My brother has been in a mental institution. I'm 23 and divorced with two kids."

Mankiewicz, looking down from the 10th-floor apartment where the reception was held, laid out her choice in the starkest possible terms: "Brooke, either you've got to open the window right now and jump out, or say, 'I'm going to live,' because you're right, it's the worst family history that anybody ever had. Either you jump out the window or you live."

Hayward’s memoir, a #1 bestseller on its initial appearance, was released again this year, having gained additional poignancy because of the recent death of her brother.

As overwhelmingly sad as the offscreen life of her mother was, I can’t end this post with that tragedy. Had Margaret Sullavan lived the happiest of lives, she still would have been worth writing about because of her shining, if all too briefly glimpsed, talent.

Her fans (notably including Stephen Sondheim), though not quite a cult, note that she had only one indisputable classic, The Shop Around the Corner. But, as Orson Welles (who would certainly know about such things) once noted, “Sometimes one is all you need.” I would argue, though, that there is another unfairly neglected film of hers: Three Comrades (1938), the only film of hers that garnered her an Oscar nomination (also the only screenwriting credit for F. Scott Fitzgerald).

Sullavan was attractive enough to have become a silent-film actress, but the talkies were ready- made for her. It’s not so much her petite frame that everyone always remarked about her, but that voice--husky but supple. Critic Dan Callahan describes its range, with remarkable precision, in a film-by-film assessment in the online film journal Bright Lights:

“When you first hear it, it sounds limited and ephemeral, like Billie Holiday's singing voice. But Lady Day could do just about anything with her voice, and Sullavan's vocal range is limitless too, not hamstrung by particularity, but freed to roam wherever she chooses. She could bring it down low for a big booming growl; she could lift it up high, higher, oh higher!; or she could keep it in a middle register and break it into a thousand tingling laryngitis pieces.”

Shorter--but, like Sullavan herself, more magical--was the description of the same voice provided by the silent film actress turned shrewd observer of the place where she once worked, Louise Brooks: “That wonderful voice of hers. Strange, fey, mysterious — like a voice singing in the snow."

Song Lyric of the Day (The Beach Boys, Mourning “The Girl I Used to Know”)

“Where did your long hair go?
Where is the girl I used to know?
How could you lose that happy glow?”--”Caroline, No,” written by Brian Wilson and Tony Asher, performed by the Beach Boys from their Pet Sounds LP (1966)

Unlike “Sloop John B” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “Caroline, No" never made it into Billboard’s Top 10, peaking only at #32. But if it doesn’t have the infectiousness of these two singles, nor the sheer grandeur of “God Only Knows,” it’s nevertheless an indispensable part of Pet Sounds.

The LP, which was released on this date 45 years ago, might have been the 11th studio album for the Beach Boys, but it was the one in which they made a decisive transition from their traditional subject matter of surfing and hot rods in favor of something more ambitious and adult. With unrivaled vocal harmonies and dense, multilayered tracking owing more than a little to Phil Spector's "wall of sound," it was a kind of pop symphony--a parallel made explicit 11 years ago, when Brian Wilson toured the country playing the album with local symphony orchestras.

In this concept album about the course of a love affair, “Caroline, No” concludes matters on a note of heartbreak. That indelible image of long hair gone perfectly symbolizes loss of innocence. Here was arguably pop music's most troubled genius, opening a window into his heart with this song and the even more plaintive "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" (which provided the title for a fine 1995 documentary about the Beach Boys' major creative force).

Pet Sounds might have driven a wedge among the Beach Boys (Mike Love questioned the wisdom of Brian’s movement away from their longtime commercially viable hits), but their fellow artists recognized it for the pop landmark it was. Paul McCartney, a particular admirer, sought to top it with the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Wilson in turn tried to counter with Smile before Brian Wilson's nervous breakdown led to a truncated version of that project, Smiley Smile.

Too bad lead singer Love was so obtuse about Pet Sounds' move into new territory: A musician in his sixties looks downright foolish singing about being true to your school, or "When I Grow Up to be a Man." On the other hand, the exhilaration and torments of love can be understood whether you're seventeen or seventy.

For all the aural pleasure it provides, I also associate Pet Sounds with two films that define the era in which it was made. The later film, Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, marks its protagonist’s introduction to the magic of rock ‘n’ roll in the form of “God Only Knows.” A quarter century earlier, over the closing credits, Warren Beatty’s Shampoo commented ironically on the empty emotional life its stud protagonist had been left with by playing “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.”

But more often than not, when I hear the latter song--and the wondrous album from which it sprang--my heart swells with joy.

Quote of the Day (James Thurber, on Man, Machines and Sex)

“…so-called civilized man finds himself today surrounded by the myriad mechanical devices of a technological world. Writers of books on how to control your nerves, how to conquer fear, how to cultivate calm, how to be happy in spite of everything, are of several minds as regards the relation of man and the machine. Some of them are prone to believe that the mind and body, if properly disciplined, can get the upper hand of this mechanized existence. Others merely ignore the situation and go on to the profitable writing of more facile chapters of inspiration. Still others attribute the whole menace of the machine to sex, and so confuse the average reader that he cannot always be certain whether he has been knocked down by an automobile or is merely in love.”—James Thurber, “Sex ex Machina,” in Let Your Mind Alone! And Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces (1937)