TV Quote of the Day (Paul Lynde, on Hell’s Angels)

Host Peter Marshall: “Paul, why do Hell's Angels wear leather?”

Paul Lynde: “Because chiffon wrinkles too easily.”—Hollywood Squares

As a youngster in the late Sixties and early Seventies, I was addicted to quiz shows, including It’s Academic and the Art Fleming-hosted, Merv Griffin-created Jeopardy. 

But the quiz show with a difference—about as serious as a banana peel on the floor of a vaudeville show—was Hollywood Squares.

Moving across metaphorical tic-tac-toe boards, contestants had to decide whether or not to believe the celebrities in the boxes. More often than not, that meant listening to wisecracks by the likes of comics Rose-Marie, Marty Allen, Jan  Murray, Wally Cox, and Charley Weaver (real name: Cliff Arquette—yes, Rosanna’s granddad).

Center square came to be occupied by Paul Lynde, a stage, film and TV supporting actor who found his own measure of stardom on Hollywood Squares.

“Eccentric,” “fey,” “campy,” “flamboyant,” “bitchy”—it seemed as if, in an effort to capture his essence, critics trotted out every word but “gay,” which is what the actor—who died on this day in 1982 of a heart attack at age 55—was.

Technically, Lynde never admitted his sexual orientation. But if he never formally came out of the closet, he left less than a millimeter of doubt about it.

Theater historian Ethan Mordden, in his discussion of the golden age of Broadway drama, All That Glittered, sees the 1950 John van Druten comedy Bell, Book and Candle as full of encoded language about gays, in the guise of a lighthearted comedy about witches and warlocks. One of the latter, Nicky, is described as “impish, and somewhat impertinent.”

That could describe Lynde as well, particularly when he appeared as witch-housewife Samantha Stevens’s Uncle Arthur, “The Clown Prince of the Cosmos,” on the Sixties sitcom, Bewitched.

One of the actor’s big breaks occurred in the musical Bye Bye Birdie, when, as father Harry MacAfee, he asked grouchily, “What’s the Matter With Kids Today?” 

TV producers may have had that in mind when they finally promoted him, from supporting player to lead actor, in the short-lived, eponymous The Paul Lynde Show (1972).

Audiences never really took to the show, and critics pointed out, rightly, how much its premise—a conservative father barely tolerating his daughter and no-account, lusty son-in-law—resembled All in the Family. 

(I may be one of the few people alive who remembers this sitcom, and, for all its slavish imitation of the huge CBS hit, I doubt if Carroll O’Connor could have packed quite the same kind of inflections into his voice that Lynde’s Paul Simms did in upbraiding the friends of his daughter and son-in-law as “NUUUU-die LOOO-neys!”)

In the current TV environment, when people can say practically anything at any hour, Lynde and Hollywood Squares should be seen in the context of their time. 

Some of his responses would have been considered pretty risqué for that period. (Marshall: “Paul, can anything bring tears to a chimp's eyes?” Lynde: “Finding out that Tarzan swings both ways!”) 

Other responses would, if delivered today, be considered so politically incorrect that they would provoke boycott threats, and such vituperation as to short-circuit a career. (Marshall: “What is the official currency of Puerto Rico?” Lynde: “Food stamps.”)

Though many of the show’s viewers could have guessed that Lynde was gay, they might have had a tougher time figuring out that offscreen, he was a heavy drinker who often struggled with his weight and depression. 

How much of that was due to the particular context of his time, when his sexual orientation was a matter of shame, and how much the product of the insecurity that so often plagues figures in the entertainment industry?

Photo of the Day: A Statue to Sing About

Three decades ago, having endured four years of commuting to a New York institute of higher learning, I thought of myself as, at least to some extent, wise to the ways of the city.

Then one day, walking with a native of the Upper West Side on our way to a movie, I noticed a seeming small oasis of green. “Verdi Square,” I read aloud from the sign on the perimeter of teh park to my college friend as we passed by.

“Too bad that isn’t it what most people call,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Well, what do they call it?” I asked innocently.

“Needle Park.”

In an instant, I knew I wasn’t as grizzled an urban veteran as I thought.  Yet I still recognized that place name as part of an Al Pacino film about drug dealers and addiction. “Let’s go,” I said to my friend, moving hurriedly.

Fifteen years ago, the monument in this onetime gathering place for musicians (even before Lincoln Center was built seven blocks down) was restored. Though I’ve read on the Internet that several years ago, the city began to take extra measures to eliminate the rodent population cropping up here, neither the rats nor the drug dealers who are their human counterparts in pestilence showed up (at least in the daytime) over the Christmas holidays when I walked past again, and took this picture.

I hope that the park is now experiencing a renaissance of grace and stability--all the more reason to enjoy the statue of the great Italian opera composer that serves as the square’s centerpiece, created by Sicilian sculptor Pasquale Civiletti.

Quote of the Day (Laura Kightlinger, on Old Boyfriends)

“Getting back together with an old boyfriend is pathetic. It’s like having a garage sale and buying your own stuff back.”—Comic Laura Kightlinger, quoted in “Laugh!”, Reader’s Digest, October 2011

Photo of the Day: Park, Lake and City II

This is yet another view of the man-made lake in Central Park, complementing the image I posted last week.

Quote of the Day (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, on Christ and a ‘Higher Ideal’)

“Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ.”— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

Quote of the Day (John Steele Gordon, With a Bad Guess on the National Debt)

“For the first time in more than 70 years, the United States is dealing with the politics of surplus. Between 1930 and 1997, the government ran surpluses in only 10 years, and they were small ones. Meanwhile, the national debt ballooned by a factor of no less than 340, from $16.1 billion to about $5.5 trillion. But now the government has taken in more money than it spent for the last four years, and it does not appear that will change in the near future [emphasis added].”—John Steele Gordon, “Perils of the Surplus: How Andrew Jackson Got in Big Trouble When He Was in Bush’s Fix,” American Heritage, May 2001

Dredging up old predictions that make people look stupid is hardly confined to the political black art of opposition research. Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky found that their 1984 book The Experts Speak barely exhausted its subject, so they were able to return in 1998 with an expanded edition.

So I don’t mean to pick on John Steele Gordon for his errant guesstimate above, even though pointing out mistakes made by someone famous and/or presumed to be knowledgeable is—let’s be honest here!—awfully fun. I don’t share many of Gordon’s conservative positions, but this business-and-financial historian can offer many useful insights, I’ve found over the years.

No, what Gordon’s bad guess points to is the inherent difficulties in economic soothsaying. Particularly when it comes to the national debt (the subject of one of Gordon’s books), economists are like old sea dogs about to sail again: blissful unaware that they’re heading right into a perfect storm.

The beauty of economic forecasts, at least when employed by journalists, is that only very, very seldom does anyone go back to determine how on target those estimates really are. I should state right here that I’m not one of these economist-trackers. I did not set about learning how well Gordon’s predictions accorded with eventual reality; I simply happened to be perusing an American Heritage issue from 10 years ago when I found the above quote.

Today, according to data from the U.S. Treasury Department, the national debt stands at $13.6 trillion dollars—an amount that would have staggered Gordon had he known it in 2001. Meanwhile, the deficit has grown from $459 billion in 2008 to $1.3 trillion in 2011, according to a “TRB” article by Timothy Noah in The New Republic‘s December 29, 2011 issue.

These numbers should surprise no one. “The experience of the past 15 years is that budget deficits—and surpluses—can oscillate wildly,” noted longtime political observer Michael Barone in a 2005 column for U.S. News and World Report. The question is, why? (Or, in this case: Why was Gordon so wrong about deficits after 2001?)

What happened was, to use a title out there, "a series of unfortunate events."  Who would have guessed in May 2001 that, in a little over four months from then, the nation would be unexpectedly attacked by terrorists, and that this would plunge us not only into an effort to guard internal security with virtually no precedent, as far as cost was concerned, but also into two foreign wars, halfway around the world, along with consequent prolonged efforts at nation-building? Who would have guessed a recession (the longest since the Great Depression) that dramatically reduced government revenue? Who would have guessed that Congressional Republicans would continue the Bush tax cuts, even as the deficit grew--or that the Democrats would embark on their own major new program (Obamacare) whose overall impact we still can’t completely gauge?

Quote of the Day (Bernard Shaw, As ‘St. Joan‘ Turns on Her Accusers)

“You think that life is nothing but not being stone dead. It is not the bread and water I fear: I can live on bread: when have I asked for more? It is no hardship to drink water if the water be clean. Bread has no sorrow for me, and water no affliction. But to shut me from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers; to chain my feet so that I can never again ride with the soldiers nor climb the hills; to make me breathe foul damp darkness, and keep from me everything that brings me back to the love of God when your wickedness and foolishness tempt me to hate Him: all this is worse than the furnace in the Bible that was heated seven times. I could do without my warhorse; I could drag about in a skirt; I could let the banners and the trumpets and the knights and soldiers pass me and leave me behind as they leave the other women, if only I could still hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying through the healthy frost, and the blessed blessed church bells that send my angel voices floating to me on the wind. But without these things I cannot live; and by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil, and that mine is of God.”—George Bernard Shaw, St. Joan (1923)

In his preface to Three Plays for Puritans, George Bernard Shaw posed the question, “Better Than Shakesepear?”, referring to their respective treatments of Cleopatra. His answer, of course, was that his own was.

That particular point might be arguable, but not the question of whose treatment of St. Joan of Arc was superior. In the Bard’s Henry VI, Part I, Joan (here called Joan La Pucelle) is a villain, and her death at the stake for witchcraft celebrated. In St. Joan, Shaw depicts her as the surprising center of one of the great theatrical treatments of intolerance. The above monologue, when Joan recants her confession and rounds on her accusers, is one of the most eloquent passages in all of Shaw. (It is also the one that Jane Fonda’s Bree, on one of her fruitless auditions when she is not doing tricks as a call girl, recites in the 1971 thriller Klute.)

Shakespeare and Shaw are only two of the many writers--and, for that matter, filmmakers--who have been fascinated by the Main of Orleans, who was born on this date--the Feast of the Epiphany--in 1412. Schiller, Mark Twain, Anatole France, Jean Anouilh, and Mary Gordon are among the authors who have found this young girl (dead before she even reached 20 years old) a figure epitomizing what Kathryn Harrison, in an op-ed article for The New York Times, termed “Enduring Power.”

Filmmakers, too, have been drawn to her: Victor Fleming, Robert Bresson, Otto Preminger (in a 1957 adaptation of Shaw’s play), and, in one of the most powerful of all silent films, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). (The star, Maria Falconetti, is in the image accompanying this post.)

The script from Dreyer’s film drew heavily on the actual trial transcripts. That, along with testimony from more than 100 witnesses the 1456 “retrial” ordered by the Vatican that reversed the earlier judgment, have proven crucial to biographers. It is doubtful that any other ordinary, young European of the time has ever had her life documented so thoroughly.

This leads to a crucial point about Shaw’s take on the life of the saint. The playwright delighted in paradox, and from first (his preface states, “Though a professed and most pious Catholic..she was in fact one of the first Protestant martyrs”) to last (the Dominican friar Martin Ladvenu, her spiritual counselor in her last days, explains that “At the trial that sent a saint to the stake as a heretic and a sorceress, the truth was told [and] the law was upheld”], this play follows the same pattern as his other many plays.

But Shaw’s point--that the first trial was conducted honestly by well-meaning fanatics, while the “retrial,” a product of “shameless perjury, courtly corruption, calumny of the dead” nevertheless correctly exonerated Joan--simply flies in the face of the facts, including what was documented at the above-mentioned tribunals.

Joan was held for a year in a dank cell as a prisoner of war, then tried for heresy. As the Regine Pernoud/Marie-Veronique Clin biography, Joan of Arc: Her Story demonstrates, she should, according to canon law operative at the time, not only have been held in an ecclesiastical prison (where she would have been guarded by women rather than men, and thus been treated better), but would also have been entitled to legal representation. Instead, this provincial woman, under threat of death, faced off against multiple leading legal minds and intellectuals (the University of Paris was heavily involved in the proceedings). Despite Shaw’s contention that the condemnatory trial of 1431 delivered a wrong verdict despite the principals’ best intentions (Cauchon, her prosecutor, says, “I will not have it said that we proceeded on forced confessions”), the first trial was riddled with political biases from its inception.

And yet, Shaw still managed to convey much of the greatness of this simple rural girl who confounded older, more worldly men. As she defends herself against her clerical accusers, Shaw--whose will stated that his only religious belief was in “creative revolution”--gives some of the most eloquent words of faith to a saint who had to wait for posterity to be understood:

“I see now that the loneliness of God is his strength: what would He be if He listened to your jealous little counsels? Well, my loneliness shall be my strength too; it is better to be alone with God; His friendship will not fail me, nor His counsel, nor His love. In His strength I will dare, and dare, and dare, until I die. I will go out now to the common people, and let the love in their eyes comfort me for the hate in yours.”

(Incidentally, poet-biographer Ben D. Kennedy has his own blog devoted entirely to the Maid of Orleans.)