Bruce: “What time is it, Steven?”
Steve: “IT’S BOSS TIME!”—Bruce Springsteen and “Miami Steve” Van Zandt, concluding the 12-minute halftime set at the Super Bowl played by The Boss and the E Street Band
(No disrespect to the actual game—which turned out to be one of the best in the long history of the Super Bowl—but in my humble opinion, the short but sweet four-song set surpassed what took place on the gridiron. The way The Boss ran and skidded along the edge of the stage, you’d have thought he was 38 rather than 58 years old! I also enjoyed the way he integrated his new song, “Working on a Dream,” into as rousing an anthem as the others he played: “Tenth Avenue Freezeout,” “Born to Run,” and, of course, “Glory Days.” Like more than a few of his fans, I only wish he could have played longer! As for what happened on the field in the closing minutes—well, let’s just say I’m sure my brother from Pittsburgh is breathing a lot easier now!)
Monday, February 2, 2009
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Quote of the Day (Richard John Neuhaus, on Death)
“The worst thing is not the sorrow or the loss or the heartbreak. Worse is to be encountered by death and not to be changed by the encounter. There are pills we can take to get through the experience, but the danger is that we then do not go through the experience but around it.” –Richard John Neuhaus, “Born Toward Dying,” in The Best Spiritual Writing 2000, edited by Philip Zaleski (2000)
Maybe it was because I found this essay while searching in the same volume for another poem by John Updike, or maybe it was because so many loved ones and friends recently have been either dying or experiencing debilitating illnesses. But the essay in which I found the above quote from Richard John Neuhaus, who died on January 8, hit me with particular force.
For more than four decades, Fr. Neuhaus engaged passionately in this nation’s political-religious dialogue. Beginning his career as a Lutheran minister who was among the civil-rights marchers at Selma, he later converted to Roman Catholicism and outraged many of his former colleagues by denouncing abortion as fervently as he once had segregation and voting-rights abuses.
Neuhaus did not see his former and current stances as contradictory, and neither do I—though I take issue with a number of aspects of his thought--quite a few, actually--in his later years, including, but hardly limited to, his question, “Is Mormonism Christian?” (His answer: no, though Mormons remain entitled to “respect for their human dignity, protection of their religious freedom, readiness for friendship, openness to honest dialogue, and an eagerness to join hands in social and cultural tasks that advance the common good.” I can just picture their response after reading the rest of the piece—“Thanks a lot, Father.”)
The column that Fr. Neuhaus wrote for the journal he founded, First Things, was called “The Naked Public Square,” taking its name from a 1984 book of his. The column was, in effect, a print prototype for a religion blog, in which he advanced the point that secularism drives the religiously minded out of the national political debate at its own peril.
A couple of years ago, I was startled to read that this priest, so often associated with neo-conservatism, had been preaching at the 5 pm Mass on Sundays at my alma mater, Columbia University. From this fascinating article on the nature of his intellectual thought, evidently written a few years ago, I discovered that Fr. Neuhaus was not assigned full-time to the campus, but rather came up there from his regular parish down by 14th Street to preach on Sunday.
An article from Commonweal Magazine from a couple of years ago indicated that the arrangements with Fr. Neuhaus resulted from a desire by Edward Cardinal Egan for a more conservative ministry on the campus. I’m sure that the appointment probably went over like a lead balloon with a large portion of the Catholic community on Morningside Heights. During my time at the school, in the late Seventies and early Eighties, Fr. Neuhaus’ orthodoxy would not have been widely embraced by a Catholic student body and faculty that, like the rest of the school, tended to be overwhelmingly liberal in thought.
I hope that Fr. Neuhaus and the students to whom he preached didn’t talk past each other. An honorable religious tradition, extending from Jeremiah to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., consists in telling people what they’d rather not hear. The human temptation is to find safety in numbers.
When people begin to wander off the ideological reservation, whether in religion or politics—but especially where the two realms intersect—it’s frightening to find oneself out there alone. What do you do then—softpedal concerns that might outrage people who’ve meant much to you for a long time, or embrace everyone who embraces you, even though you might have serious qualms about their positions or character?
Neither choice, it seems to me, is particularly fruitful. It doesn’t really leave you open to thoughts that demand to be heard and acknowledged. Dialogue within religions as well as between religions need to be conducted in tones of respect as much as challenge.
In that spirit, I urge you to find Fr. Neuhaus’ essay “Born Toward Dying” and read it. What begins as an objective if tough-minded cultural survey of “going through the experience” of death has been earned, one discovers in the grueling autobiographical part of the piece, under the most grueling of circumstances: Fr. Neuhaus had his own near-death experience starting in 1993. No matter what your feelings about his religious orthodoxy or political stances, I think you’ll find his reflections in this case not just erudite and provocative, as with so much of his other work, but moving and profound.
Fr. Neuhaus’ cancer had been in remission before his final, fatal encounter a few weeks ago. How was he changed by his initial battle with death? What did he learn? Hopefully that, at the end, we are not defined before God by labels—liberal or conservative, Catholic or non-Catholic, etc.—but that, no matter what your station in life, as the poet Thomas Gray once put it, “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
Even in death, Fr. Neuhaus will be contributing to the spirited religious discussion in this country with a posthumously published book, American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile, which is supposed to discuss the religious/spiritual aspects of American democracy.
Requiescat in pacem, Fr. Neuhaus.
Maybe it was because I found this essay while searching in the same volume for another poem by John Updike, or maybe it was because so many loved ones and friends recently have been either dying or experiencing debilitating illnesses. But the essay in which I found the above quote from Richard John Neuhaus, who died on January 8, hit me with particular force.
For more than four decades, Fr. Neuhaus engaged passionately in this nation’s political-religious dialogue. Beginning his career as a Lutheran minister who was among the civil-rights marchers at Selma, he later converted to Roman Catholicism and outraged many of his former colleagues by denouncing abortion as fervently as he once had segregation and voting-rights abuses.
Neuhaus did not see his former and current stances as contradictory, and neither do I—though I take issue with a number of aspects of his thought--quite a few, actually--in his later years, including, but hardly limited to, his question, “Is Mormonism Christian?” (His answer: no, though Mormons remain entitled to “respect for their human dignity, protection of their religious freedom, readiness for friendship, openness to honest dialogue, and an eagerness to join hands in social and cultural tasks that advance the common good.” I can just picture their response after reading the rest of the piece—“Thanks a lot, Father.”)
The column that Fr. Neuhaus wrote for the journal he founded, First Things, was called “The Naked Public Square,” taking its name from a 1984 book of his. The column was, in effect, a print prototype for a religion blog, in which he advanced the point that secularism drives the religiously minded out of the national political debate at its own peril.
A couple of years ago, I was startled to read that this priest, so often associated with neo-conservatism, had been preaching at the 5 pm Mass on Sundays at my alma mater, Columbia University. From this fascinating article on the nature of his intellectual thought, evidently written a few years ago, I discovered that Fr. Neuhaus was not assigned full-time to the campus, but rather came up there from his regular parish down by 14th Street to preach on Sunday.
An article from Commonweal Magazine from a couple of years ago indicated that the arrangements with Fr. Neuhaus resulted from a desire by Edward Cardinal Egan for a more conservative ministry on the campus. I’m sure that the appointment probably went over like a lead balloon with a large portion of the Catholic community on Morningside Heights. During my time at the school, in the late Seventies and early Eighties, Fr. Neuhaus’ orthodoxy would not have been widely embraced by a Catholic student body and faculty that, like the rest of the school, tended to be overwhelmingly liberal in thought.
I hope that Fr. Neuhaus and the students to whom he preached didn’t talk past each other. An honorable religious tradition, extending from Jeremiah to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., consists in telling people what they’d rather not hear. The human temptation is to find safety in numbers.
When people begin to wander off the ideological reservation, whether in religion or politics—but especially where the two realms intersect—it’s frightening to find oneself out there alone. What do you do then—softpedal concerns that might outrage people who’ve meant much to you for a long time, or embrace everyone who embraces you, even though you might have serious qualms about their positions or character?
Neither choice, it seems to me, is particularly fruitful. It doesn’t really leave you open to thoughts that demand to be heard and acknowledged. Dialogue within religions as well as between religions need to be conducted in tones of respect as much as challenge.
In that spirit, I urge you to find Fr. Neuhaus’ essay “Born Toward Dying” and read it. What begins as an objective if tough-minded cultural survey of “going through the experience” of death has been earned, one discovers in the grueling autobiographical part of the piece, under the most grueling of circumstances: Fr. Neuhaus had his own near-death experience starting in 1993. No matter what your feelings about his religious orthodoxy or political stances, I think you’ll find his reflections in this case not just erudite and provocative, as with so much of his other work, but moving and profound.
Fr. Neuhaus’ cancer had been in remission before his final, fatal encounter a few weeks ago. How was he changed by his initial battle with death? What did he learn? Hopefully that, at the end, we are not defined before God by labels—liberal or conservative, Catholic or non-Catholic, etc.—but that, no matter what your station in life, as the poet Thomas Gray once put it, “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
Even in death, Fr. Neuhaus will be contributing to the spirited religious discussion in this country with a posthumously published book, American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile, which is supposed to discuss the religious/spiritual aspects of American democracy.
Requiescat in pacem, Fr. Neuhaus.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
The Brightness and Darkness of John Updike
For me, this 1976 entry from John Cheever’s journals was more startling than his battles with the bottle, his wife or his bisexuality. Someone identifying himself as “C.B.C.” called him requesting a comment on “a fatal automobile accident” involving Updike.
The fraudulent report—perhaps, Cheever’s daughter Susan suggested, started by an overambitious stringer, “who saw the name on a police blotter and decided to cash in”—sent the older novelist on a crying fit until he learned the truth later in the day.
John Updike, of course, lived for another three decades, much honored—including two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards—before dying of lung cancer in a hospice in Massachusetts this past Tuesday, at age 76.
John Updike, of course, lived for another three decades, much honored—including two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards—before dying of lung cancer in a hospice in Massachusetts this past Tuesday, at age 76.
Cheever’s premature retrospective has been echoed in the obituaries and appraisals that have flooded the conventional media and the blogosphere these last couple of days.
Elsewhere in his journals, Cheever admitted to envying Updike—and who can blame him? Leave aside the latter’s unbelievable productivity, a roughly book-a-year pace that served as an inspiration and rebuke to other published writers, not to mention poor bloggers like myself.
Something more territorial, though, probably nagged at Cheever: Updike was exploring much of the same turf that Cheever had claimed as his own—suburbia, depicted with a similar lyrical sensibility even as it looked askance at its desires.
Elsewhere in his journals, Cheever admitted to envying Updike—and who can blame him? Leave aside the latter’s unbelievable productivity, a roughly book-a-year pace that served as an inspiration and rebuke to other published writers, not to mention poor bloggers like myself.
Something more territorial, though, probably nagged at Cheever: Updike was exploring much of the same turf that Cheever had claimed as his own—suburbia, depicted with a similar lyrical sensibility even as it looked askance at its desires.
When they don’t obsess over every line, writers worry incessantly about their reputations, wishing success for their friends but not too much, if that means that their own worth is overshadowed in the process.
Neither writer needed to worry. Following his novel Falconer, his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, and the journals that divulged his private torment in exquisite detail, Cheever’s place in the mid-century American pantheon, as a successor to F. Scott Fitzgerald in his quest for elusive grace, is secure.
Likewise Updike’s, in a different way: as a man of letters on more of a European model. Imagine Edmund Wilson, only with somewhat less focus on nonfiction—and considerably more success with fiction.
I can’t think of another major American author who worked in so many different genres—the novel, short short, poetry, drama, literary and art criticism—or on so many different subjects: the small town, suburbia, baseball, golf, art.
Neither writer needed to worry. Following his novel Falconer, his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, and the journals that divulged his private torment in exquisite detail, Cheever’s place in the mid-century American pantheon, as a successor to F. Scott Fitzgerald in his quest for elusive grace, is secure.
Likewise Updike’s, in a different way: as a man of letters on more of a European model. Imagine Edmund Wilson, only with somewhat less focus on nonfiction—and considerably more success with fiction.
I can’t think of another major American author who worked in so many different genres—the novel, short short, poetry, drama, literary and art criticism—or on so many different subjects: the small town, suburbia, baseball, golf, art.
Few were ready to dare more, whether through a fictional trilogy inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, another novel suggested by Hamlet, a late-Seventies satire on an African dictator (The Coup), or a first-person narrative of a 21st-century American who becomes hooked by Islamic fundamentalism (Terrorist).
And I haven’t touched on the decades-long tetralogy that is probably his best-known work, on Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, which won him his two Pulitzers.
Not that Updike didn’t misfire occasionally. You would, too, if you put out so much work. For me, at least, his sentences sometimes went over the line from baroque to rococo.
And I haven’t touched on the decades-long tetralogy that is probably his best-known work, on Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, which won him his two Pulitzers.
Not that Updike didn’t misfire occasionally. You would, too, if you put out so much work. For me, at least, his sentences sometimes went over the line from baroque to rococo.
As for his sex scenes: As recently as this past fall, he won Britain’s Lifetime Achievement for Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. I think that should be renamed in his honor, in much the same way that the winner of America’s Super Bowl now receives the Lombardi Trophy
When all is said and done, though, I suspect that his reputation will rest most securely on his massive output of short stories. Most of it sticks to the milieu of his own life, which he knew intimately.
When all is said and done, though, I suspect that his reputation will rest most securely on his massive output of short stories. Most of it sticks to the milieu of his own life, which he knew intimately.
As a massive record of American life, they will be ranked along with Cheever’s. The high quality of the prose exceeds that of another great New Yorker short-story master, John O’Hara, though not his range in characters.
In particular, I think his fictional couple Richard and Joan Maple, whose marriage he charted from its hopeful beginning to painful end over two decades—roughly the period of his own first marriage. Those stories formed the basis of a fine TV film, Too Far to Go, starring Michael Moriarty and Blythe Danner, with Glenn Close in an early, supporting role.
Back to Updike and Cheever. They resembled each other in one other way: Their belief, increasingly unfashionable in an age hailing “The Death of God,” in their sense of the powerful, immanent presence of God.
In particular, I think his fictional couple Richard and Joan Maple, whose marriage he charted from its hopeful beginning to painful end over two decades—roughly the period of his own first marriage. Those stories formed the basis of a fine TV film, Too Far to Go, starring Michael Moriarty and Blythe Danner, with Glenn Close in an early, supporting role.
Back to Updike and Cheever. They resembled each other in one other way: Their belief, increasingly unfashionable in an age hailing “The Death of God,” in their sense of the powerful, immanent presence of God.
No matter how guilt-ridden Cheever felt over his addiction to drink and lust, he seldom if ever felt separated from God. Particularly at an Episcopalian service, he felt God almost as a physical presence, as real as the sunlight coming through the windows of his church.
By the end of his life, Updike had upset some liberals for his belief in God, as well as Vietnam War critics for his reluctant backing of the conflict and later feminists for what they deemed sexist treatment of his female characters. (The earlier criticisms had a good deal more justice than the later ones.)
By the end of his life, Updike had upset some liberals for his belief in God, as well as Vietnam War critics for his reluctant backing of the conflict and later feminists for what they deemed sexist treatment of his female characters. (The earlier criticisms had a good deal more justice than the later ones.)
James Wood, whose atheism sometimes warps his critical faculties (sample essay titles: “Sir Thomas More: A Man for One Season" and "Knut Hamsun’s Christian Perversions”), took off after “John Updike’s Complacent God,” attacking in particular the novelist’s belief, influenced by theologian Karl Barth, that God confers grace through the gift of creation.
Contra Wood, Updike’s belief in the world’s governing divinity is anything but “complacent.” Particularly in his early years, he had a real affinity for the Christian existentialism of Soren Kierkegaard.
Contra Wood, Updike’s belief in the world’s governing divinity is anything but “complacent.” Particularly in his early years, he had a real affinity for the Christian existentialism of Soren Kierkegaard.
A terror more powerful than that afflicting the physically tormented Cheever lay not far beneath the surface of Updike’s sex-and-death-drenched world. In his poem “Religious Consolation,” originally published in The New Republic and reprinted in Best Spiritual Writing 2000, Updike notes:
“One size fits all. The shape or coloration
Of the god or high heaven matters less
Than that there is one, somehow, somewhere…”
Why do we need more worlds? he asks rhetorically. The answer: because “This one will fail.”
More precisely than Wood, who fixated on Updike's almost sensual delight in the sentence, Cheever identified the best elements of his younger friend's work: the connection to "his most exalted and desperate emotions" that informed his faith and his understanding of weak but striving humanity.
“One size fits all. The shape or coloration
Of the god or high heaven matters less
Than that there is one, somehow, somewhere…”
Why do we need more worlds? he asks rhetorically. The answer: because “This one will fail.”
More precisely than Wood, who fixated on Updike's almost sensual delight in the sentence, Cheever identified the best elements of his younger friend's work: the connection to "his most exalted and desperate emotions" that informed his faith and his understanding of weak but striving humanity.
TV Quote of the Day (“30 Rock,” on “The C-Word”)
Liz Lemon (played by Tina Fey): “We need to fire Lutz.”
Pete Hornberger (played by Scott Adsit): “What? Why? What happened?”
Liz: “He called me the worst name ever.”
Frank Rossitano (played by Judah Friedlander): “What did he call you?”
Liz: “I'm not gonna repeat it. That's how much I hate it.”
Pete: “Fat can?"
Liz: “No.”
Frank: “Mouth hooker?”
Liz: “No.”
Frank: “Monster bitch.”
Pete: “Hatchet face.”
Liz: “No! The one that rhymes with the name of your favorite Todd Rundgren album.”
Frank (utterly confused): “It rhymes with Hermit of Mink Hollow?” –30 Rock, Season 1, “The C Word,” written by Tina Fey
(Now that Frasier has gone into Syndication Heaven, 30 Rock has become my favorite sitcom. You could, I suppose, say it harkens back to two great situation comedies starring Mary Tyler Moore: The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Both of the latter shows take at least some time out away from the workplace to focus on the characters’ family and/or nutty neighbors and friends. 30 Rock, however, allows Liz Lemon, head writer for a Saturday Night Live-type sketch comedy, virtually no life outside the frenzied studio--even her social events feel like work--making her all the more crestfallen when she discovers that some co-workers really don’t like her.
Two other differences with the earlier MTM shows:
1) Rapid dialogue. All three shows feature brilliant ensemble casts, but the words in 30 Rock seem to fly out at supersonic speed, mirroring the manic, stressful environment of the show-within-a-show. Even the quote above doesn’t hint at how sharp it is—and by multiple members of the cast. It’s like the cast sat down and watched a “Screwball Comedies of the Thirties” Festival. Saying that every member of the cast has to be at the top of his game doesn’t indicate the intensity involved—it’s more like every cast member has to attack the net.
2) Pushing the censorship envelope. You have to see this scene within an even larger context. It begins with Lutz about to say the “C” word, only to have the camera cut away to guest Rachel Dratch speaking about her “runt” (the same trick used in the "Austin Powers" movies). Then it’s on to this scene, which goes to the edge again, only to pull back with a clever pop reference (reminding many of us Baby Boomers of Rundgren’s pop prime in the Seventies, when fans—including more than a few at the Wollman Ice Skating Rink, where I saw him—held up signs reading, “Todd Is God.”
Oh, by the way: My favorite Todd album is still Something/Anything?)
Pete Hornberger (played by Scott Adsit): “What? Why? What happened?”
Liz: “He called me the worst name ever.”
Frank Rossitano (played by Judah Friedlander): “What did he call you?”
Liz: “I'm not gonna repeat it. That's how much I hate it.”
Pete: “Fat can?"
Liz: “No.”
Frank: “Mouth hooker?”
Liz: “No.”
Frank: “Monster bitch.”
Pete: “Hatchet face.”
Liz: “No! The one that rhymes with the name of your favorite Todd Rundgren album.”
Frank (utterly confused): “It rhymes with Hermit of Mink Hollow?” –30 Rock, Season 1, “The C Word,” written by Tina Fey
(Now that Frasier has gone into Syndication Heaven, 30 Rock has become my favorite sitcom. You could, I suppose, say it harkens back to two great situation comedies starring Mary Tyler Moore: The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Both of the latter shows take at least some time out away from the workplace to focus on the characters’ family and/or nutty neighbors and friends. 30 Rock, however, allows Liz Lemon, head writer for a Saturday Night Live-type sketch comedy, virtually no life outside the frenzied studio--even her social events feel like work--making her all the more crestfallen when she discovers that some co-workers really don’t like her.
Two other differences with the earlier MTM shows:
1) Rapid dialogue. All three shows feature brilliant ensemble casts, but the words in 30 Rock seem to fly out at supersonic speed, mirroring the manic, stressful environment of the show-within-a-show. Even the quote above doesn’t hint at how sharp it is—and by multiple members of the cast. It’s like the cast sat down and watched a “Screwball Comedies of the Thirties” Festival. Saying that every member of the cast has to be at the top of his game doesn’t indicate the intensity involved—it’s more like every cast member has to attack the net.
2) Pushing the censorship envelope. You have to see this scene within an even larger context. It begins with Lutz about to say the “C” word, only to have the camera cut away to guest Rachel Dratch speaking about her “runt” (the same trick used in the "Austin Powers" movies). Then it’s on to this scene, which goes to the edge again, only to pull back with a clever pop reference (reminding many of us Baby Boomers of Rundgren’s pop prime in the Seventies, when fans—including more than a few at the Wollman Ice Skating Rink, where I saw him—held up signs reading, “Todd Is God.”
Oh, by the way: My favorite Todd album is still Something/Anything?)
Friday, January 30, 2009
This Day in Broadcast History (Pegeen Fitzgerald, “First Lady of Radio Chatter,” Dies)
January 30, 1989—In the New York City apartment from which she taped so many of the shows she did for more than two generations with husband Ed and, eventually, by herself, Pegeen Fitzgerald—nicknamed “The First Lady of Radio Chatter”—died of breast cancer, at age 78.
Amid the current in-your-face shouting of today’s talk-radio hosts, it’s hard to believe there was a time when the decibel level was lower or when on-air personalities didn’t scream at guests.
It wasn’t that the Fitzgeralds didn’t fight--it was just that it was with each other, done in their own living room, and concerning the little relationship ticks that get under the skin of longtime married couples.
Last month, I visited the Paley Center for Media (successor to the Museum of Television and Radio in Manhattan) to listen to a tape of a Fitzgerald show from 1971, late in their run. On and on they went about a utility incident just down the block from their apartment. I kept waiting for them to switch to something else. I was still waiting as I caught 40 winks!
If I, a middle-aged male, found my attention span sorely tested, then surely those who grew up with video games and MTV would be stunned beyond belief by the couples’ dialogues—with little to break things up but clattering teacups, the meowing of Pegeen’s numerous cats, and, on one memorable occasion, the barking of seals from across the street in the Central Park Zoo.
I doubt if you’ll find more than one or two people under the age of 50—maybe not even under the age of 60—who recall Ed Fitzgerald and his wife today. Yet, if you want a very early template for the kind of chit-chat that Regis and Kelly do in the morning, the place to look is with “The Fitzgeralds: Book Talk, Back Talk and Small Talk,” which pulled in 2 million listeners at the peak of their careers.
You could measure the Fitzgerald’s influence and success in several ways:
* Compensation--$160,000 a year in the 1940s, when radio—and their format—reached its peak.
Amid the current in-your-face shouting of today’s talk-radio hosts, it’s hard to believe there was a time when the decibel level was lower or when on-air personalities didn’t scream at guests.
It wasn’t that the Fitzgeralds didn’t fight--it was just that it was with each other, done in their own living room, and concerning the little relationship ticks that get under the skin of longtime married couples.
Last month, I visited the Paley Center for Media (successor to the Museum of Television and Radio in Manhattan) to listen to a tape of a Fitzgerald show from 1971, late in their run. On and on they went about a utility incident just down the block from their apartment. I kept waiting for them to switch to something else. I was still waiting as I caught 40 winks!
If I, a middle-aged male, found my attention span sorely tested, then surely those who grew up with video games and MTV would be stunned beyond belief by the couples’ dialogues—with little to break things up but clattering teacups, the meowing of Pegeen’s numerous cats, and, on one memorable occasion, the barking of seals from across the street in the Central Park Zoo.
I doubt if you’ll find more than one or two people under the age of 50—maybe not even under the age of 60—who recall Ed Fitzgerald and his wife today. Yet, if you want a very early template for the kind of chit-chat that Regis and Kelly do in the morning, the place to look is with “The Fitzgeralds: Book Talk, Back Talk and Small Talk,” which pulled in 2 million listeners at the peak of their careers.
You could measure the Fitzgerald’s influence and success in several ways:
* Compensation--$160,000 a year in the 1940s, when radio—and their format—reached its peak.
* Satire—The couple’s on-air sniping led to a parody, “The Bickersons,” starring Don Ameche and Frances Longford.
* Imitators—After their show became a success, Pegeen told People Magazine in an interview two years before her death, Variety “counted 78 couples who were doing shows. Ten years later they found that all of them were divorced or dead.” Well, not quite that soon—though you couldn’t blame the Fitzgeralds for scorning the Johnny-and-Jane-come-latelies who tried to piggyback on their success. The most prominent were Tex and Jinx McCrary and columnist Dorothy Kilgallen and husband Richard Kollmar.
* Imitators—After their show became a success, Pegeen told People Magazine in an interview two years before her death, Variety “counted 78 couples who were doing shows. Ten years later they found that all of them were divorced or dead.” Well, not quite that soon—though you couldn’t blame the Fitzgeralds for scorning the Johnny-and-Jane-come-latelies who tried to piggyback on their success. The most prominent were Tex and Jinx McCrary and columnist Dorothy Kilgallen and husband Richard Kollmar.
The latter couple, with their la-di-da talk of opening nights at the Thea-tuh and that new restaurant they’d tried, especially brought out the scorn in the Fitzgeralds. Jack Benny and Fred Allen became famous in their radio heyday for their fake “feud,” but the war of words between the Fitzgeralds and the Kollmars was the real thing—so much so that eventually their common corporate parent, WOR, was forced to tell them to knock it off.
As my turn at the console at the Paley Center indicated, I didn’t know what to make of the Fitzgeralds. As it turned out, for years neither did WOR. You’d expect that incomprehension after 30 or 40 years, when the station suits began mumbling ominously about the highly desired “demographics” (i.e., baby boomers), the absence of whom could kill a longrunning TV show as certainly as it did a radio mainstay (as happened with The Beverly Hillbillies, still going strong in the early 1970s when CBS terminated it).
But WOR had also been nonplussed by the Fitzgerald’s concept at the start of it all, in 1940. You could understand the discomfort of the station—after all, this was not only one of the first shows not derived from theater or vaudeville, but also without a producer, without an engineer, without even a script. (Well, almost no script—perversely enough, that was the part of the show that the couple did prepare beforehand.)
The reason why the on-air couple came together at all owed to circumstance. In the late Thirties, both Ed and Pegeen had their own shows for specific audiences—Ed, a book-review spot and an all-night program called “Almanac de Gotham”; Pegeen, a fashion show for women.
Pegeen’s illness one day scared the radio execs. What was happening with their mealticket? If she really felt bad, couldn’t she be persuaded to broadcast from her apartment while she recuperated?
She might have been a canny businesswoman (she’d been a department-store advertising manager before her showbiz gig), but Pegeen was also in her way old-fashioned and modest. It wouldn’t do, she said, for her regular announcer to see her in her bathrobe. She proposed an alternative male stand-in: her husband.
So there they were that day in 1940, with just the microphone and as little else as possible between them and their listeners. WOR was undoubtedly pleased that the show didn’t turn out to be a disaster, and probably very pleasantly surprised, if not shocked, to see that the experiment was so successful.
As I discovered when I put on the earphones at the Paley Center, the Fitzgeralds’ style was rambling when it wasn’t obsessional. Francis X. Clines, The New York Times’ peerless longtime “About New York” columnist (now a member of the editorial board), summed up the format as well as anyone: “They wool-gather and play off each other. They steep themselves daily in remembrances using the airwaves as their Proustian bed.”
Superficially, at least, Ed would seem my type of guy: a lover of books and theater, sporting the last name of my favorite novelist. Only when I listened to the couple, I found Ed to be a grouchy old cuss. Now Pegeen—she was easier on the nerves, with an easy laugh that suggested she’d learned to tolerate her older mate’s contrary ways over the years and that, with a little bit of eavesdropping on the part of you the listener, you would, too.
Well, most of the time, anyway. They did have their on-air disagreements. One involved a particular penchant of Ed’s, who, from his days as a child actor, had picked up the characteristic of raising his hands when he thought his wife was dropping her voice. One morning, Pegeen decided to return the favor. Her annoyed hubby walked away from the table and left her to complete the show on her own.
Over the years, their listeners became used to the Fitzgeralds broadcasting from homes all over the place in the Northeast, including:
* a 22-room triplex on East End Avenue;
* a Fifth Avenue penthouse with an actual lawn;
* an entire island off the Connecticut shore (put at their disposal by a sponsor)
* the Hotel Pierre, across from the Central Park Zoo
* Kent, Conn., in the foothills of the Berkshires.
We’re so used these days to program directors changing formats at will—sometimes within months. Though their locales might have changed, the Fitzgeralds’ format didn’t over 40 years. By the early 1970s, WOR had gotten restless enough with the show that it tried to kill it. The show’s longtime loyal viewers protested and staved off its execution for nearly another decade.
Not long after Ed’s death from cancer in 1982, the station finally axed the show, but Pegeen managed to find a stint on the local New York public radio station, WNYC-FM. As a faithful listener these last few years to the Leonard Lopate Show, I was surprised to learn before he arrived, the time slot had been known as Senior Edition, with Pegeen Fitzgerald sharing airspace with Marty Wayne and Kate Borger.
Both by herself and with Ed, Pegeen made no bones about her vegetarianism and her passion for animal rights. She became president of the Millennium Guild, a group co-founded by George Bernard Shaw, and maintained over 500 cats in five shelters in Connecticut and New York. (Elderly listeners even left their animals to the Fitzgeralds in their wills.) One of her causes, the Last Post Animal Sanctuary in Connecticut, survives as a result of her deathbed request to her lawyer that this work continue after her death.
Pegeen’s interest in animals showed a particular soft spot she had for the vulnerable. But I like the strong interest she took in human strays, too—the orphans, convicts and former convicts she aided over the years.
The Paley Center in its Manhattan location has only two tapes from the Fitzgeralds’ 40-plus years on the airwaves. One was the 1971 show I mentioned previously; the other, an excerpt from a 1949 show that became compiled as part of a “radio bloopers” episode.
Exposure to the couple, on such a limited basis, is probably not the best way to judge a show or a life. It certainly didn’t give me a sense of the other fascinating aspects of Pegeen’s personality: not just her animals-rights advocacy, but also her hobbies (painting, collecting toy antique fire engines, and racing antique cars), and her parties.
Over nearly half a century, Pegeen Fitzgerald and the man she waggishly styled her “Lord Edward” made viewers feel like invited guests in their homes. Though the early-morning talk show format they pioneered persists, it’s now colored far more strongly with show-business trappings. The Fitzgeralds’ lifestyle and idiosyncratic form of entertainment are now part of a world we have lost.
As my turn at the console at the Paley Center indicated, I didn’t know what to make of the Fitzgeralds. As it turned out, for years neither did WOR. You’d expect that incomprehension after 30 or 40 years, when the station suits began mumbling ominously about the highly desired “demographics” (i.e., baby boomers), the absence of whom could kill a longrunning TV show as certainly as it did a radio mainstay (as happened with The Beverly Hillbillies, still going strong in the early 1970s when CBS terminated it).
But WOR had also been nonplussed by the Fitzgerald’s concept at the start of it all, in 1940. You could understand the discomfort of the station—after all, this was not only one of the first shows not derived from theater or vaudeville, but also without a producer, without an engineer, without even a script. (Well, almost no script—perversely enough, that was the part of the show that the couple did prepare beforehand.)
The reason why the on-air couple came together at all owed to circumstance. In the late Thirties, both Ed and Pegeen had their own shows for specific audiences—Ed, a book-review spot and an all-night program called “Almanac de Gotham”; Pegeen, a fashion show for women.
Pegeen’s illness one day scared the radio execs. What was happening with their mealticket? If she really felt bad, couldn’t she be persuaded to broadcast from her apartment while she recuperated?
She might have been a canny businesswoman (she’d been a department-store advertising manager before her showbiz gig), but Pegeen was also in her way old-fashioned and modest. It wouldn’t do, she said, for her regular announcer to see her in her bathrobe. She proposed an alternative male stand-in: her husband.
So there they were that day in 1940, with just the microphone and as little else as possible between them and their listeners. WOR was undoubtedly pleased that the show didn’t turn out to be a disaster, and probably very pleasantly surprised, if not shocked, to see that the experiment was so successful.
As I discovered when I put on the earphones at the Paley Center, the Fitzgeralds’ style was rambling when it wasn’t obsessional. Francis X. Clines, The New York Times’ peerless longtime “About New York” columnist (now a member of the editorial board), summed up the format as well as anyone: “They wool-gather and play off each other. They steep themselves daily in remembrances using the airwaves as their Proustian bed.”
Superficially, at least, Ed would seem my type of guy: a lover of books and theater, sporting the last name of my favorite novelist. Only when I listened to the couple, I found Ed to be a grouchy old cuss. Now Pegeen—she was easier on the nerves, with an easy laugh that suggested she’d learned to tolerate her older mate’s contrary ways over the years and that, with a little bit of eavesdropping on the part of you the listener, you would, too.
Well, most of the time, anyway. They did have their on-air disagreements. One involved a particular penchant of Ed’s, who, from his days as a child actor, had picked up the characteristic of raising his hands when he thought his wife was dropping her voice. One morning, Pegeen decided to return the favor. Her annoyed hubby walked away from the table and left her to complete the show on her own.
Over the years, their listeners became used to the Fitzgeralds broadcasting from homes all over the place in the Northeast, including:
* a 22-room triplex on East End Avenue;
* a Fifth Avenue penthouse with an actual lawn;
* an entire island off the Connecticut shore (put at their disposal by a sponsor)
* the Hotel Pierre, across from the Central Park Zoo
* Kent, Conn., in the foothills of the Berkshires.
We’re so used these days to program directors changing formats at will—sometimes within months. Though their locales might have changed, the Fitzgeralds’ format didn’t over 40 years. By the early 1970s, WOR had gotten restless enough with the show that it tried to kill it. The show’s longtime loyal viewers protested and staved off its execution for nearly another decade.
Not long after Ed’s death from cancer in 1982, the station finally axed the show, but Pegeen managed to find a stint on the local New York public radio station, WNYC-FM. As a faithful listener these last few years to the Leonard Lopate Show, I was surprised to learn before he arrived, the time slot had been known as Senior Edition, with Pegeen Fitzgerald sharing airspace with Marty Wayne and Kate Borger.
Both by herself and with Ed, Pegeen made no bones about her vegetarianism and her passion for animal rights. She became president of the Millennium Guild, a group co-founded by George Bernard Shaw, and maintained over 500 cats in five shelters in Connecticut and New York. (Elderly listeners even left their animals to the Fitzgeralds in their wills.) One of her causes, the Last Post Animal Sanctuary in Connecticut, survives as a result of her deathbed request to her lawyer that this work continue after her death.
Pegeen’s interest in animals showed a particular soft spot she had for the vulnerable. But I like the strong interest she took in human strays, too—the orphans, convicts and former convicts she aided over the years.
The Paley Center in its Manhattan location has only two tapes from the Fitzgeralds’ 40-plus years on the airwaves. One was the 1971 show I mentioned previously; the other, an excerpt from a 1949 show that became compiled as part of a “radio bloopers” episode.
Exposure to the couple, on such a limited basis, is probably not the best way to judge a show or a life. It certainly didn’t give me a sense of the other fascinating aspects of Pegeen’s personality: not just her animals-rights advocacy, but also her hobbies (painting, collecting toy antique fire engines, and racing antique cars), and her parties.
Over nearly half a century, Pegeen Fitzgerald and the man she waggishly styled her “Lord Edward” made viewers feel like invited guests in their homes. Though the early-morning talk show format they pioneered persists, it’s now colored far more strongly with show-business trappings. The Fitzgeralds’ lifestyle and idiosyncratic form of entertainment are now part of a world we have lost.
Quote of the Day (Robert J. Samuelson, on Americans’ Susceptibility to Advertising)
“Essentially, Americans are like the dog on the racetrack chasing the mechanical rabbit always just ahead. Americans always want a bigger car, for example, or a car with leather upholstery, or a GPS device or a DVD player in the back seat. It’s a familiar cycle that turns luxuries into necessities.”—Economist Robert J. Samuelson, “A Conversation With Robert J. Samuelson: Inflation Rules,” in The American Interest, January/February 2009, interviewed by Adam Garfinkle (excerpt only on Web site)
(Amid a longer—and equally interesting—discussion of how the hyperinflation of the Seventies led to the disinflation of the next quarter-century, which in turn led to our current crisis, Samuelson pauses to reflect on advertising and its influence on Americans’ thriftless behavior.)
(Amid a longer—and equally interesting—discussion of how the hyperinflation of the Seventies led to the disinflation of the next quarter-century, which in turn led to our current crisis, Samuelson pauses to reflect on advertising and its influence on Americans’ thriftless behavior.)
Thursday, January 29, 2009
This Day in Colonial History (Benjamin Franklin Transformed into American Rebel)
January 29, 1774—The Massachusetts Assembly thought that it would be one step closer to seeing the last of their hated royal governor, Thomas Hutchinson, by petitioning King George III for his dismissal. Instead, the petition furnished an excuse for reactionaries in Parliament to strike at the moderate agent for the firebrand colony, Benjamin Franklin.
The monarch’s advisory body, the Privy Council, may have felt it was removing a troublesome bit between its teeth by castigating Franklin from his role in leaking Hutchinson’s correspondence. Instead, it converted a colonial who thought of himself primarily as an Englishman into one of the Mother Country’s most dangerous enemies—a wily foe who gave the drive for American independence prestige, then won crucial support for the new nation as America’s diplomat to France.
Americans visiting London are understandably shocked to find Franklin’s home at 36 Craven Street preserved. Sites in Philadelphia, they can understand—this was the city to which he escaped as a teenage runaway apprentice and that, in turn, he devoted most of his philanthropy. Even sites in Boston, the city of Franklin’s birth, don’t nonplus tourists.
But London is the only city in the world to preserve, in original form, a home associated with Franklin. 36 Craven, just off Trafalgar Square, was where he lived for 18 years, from 1757 to 1775. The address reflected his desire to conquer the center of London as surely as he had the City of Brotherly Love.
He loved London—the adulation he received as a scientist, the friends he could meet in the fashionable new coffeehouses that were providing alternatives to alcoholic establishments, the society women he could flirt with—and his work as agent for the Massachusetts Assembly and as deputy postmaster-general for the colonies provided him with convenient excuses for why he couldn’t go home sooner. He had stayed away from home for more than a decade, constantly pleading urgent business, even when his wife suffered a partial stroke. Her death in late 1774, while he was still away from home, left him some guilt.
In the decade preceding the American Revolution, Franklin sought unsuccessfully to make King George III and his ministers see reason regarding the colonies. In 1774, he had dragged his feet on presenting Massachusetts’ petition to remove Governor Hutchinson and the latter’s lieutenant governor and brother-in-law, Andrew Oliver, arguing that patience was the colonies’ best course.
But then came the Hutchinson letter controversy. You think that the Valerie Plame leaking imbroglio was bad—not to mention the one nearly 40 years ago involving Daniel Ellsburg and the Pentagon Papers? Well, take those two cases, multiply them, then take the product and square it. That’s how controversial the Franklin affair was.
Gov. Hutchinson had been indiscreet enough to write British minister Thomas Whately from 1768 through the following year on how to bring colonial agitators to heel by restricting their liberties. In Massachusetts, the tinderbox of the American Revolution, exposure of their contents would make a sensitive situation far worse than it already was.
Somehow, Franklin came into possession of this political nitroglycerin. He never said how, and we don’t know to this day. But he sent the dozen letters to friend Thomas Cushing, speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly. Don’t copy them, he warned—just show them around to a few trusted friends.
One of the friends Cushing trusted was Samuel Adams. Big, big mistake! The agitator, as thrilled by this correspondence as Count Dracula would be by the presence of a blood bank, copied and distributed it. The reaction, as Adams hoped, was strong and powerful enough that the letters were specifically cited in the assembly’s petition to remove Hutchinson and Oliver.
In England, things got really crazy because of the affair. By this time, Thomas Whately, the original recipient of the correspondence, had died. But his brother William thought he knew the culprit—an American named John Temple, former governor of New Hampshire, now deeply sympathetic to the colonists.
The incensed Temple didn’t sue William Whately for everything he had, as he would today. Instead, he challenged him to a duel. The two men had at each other in England’s Hyde Park. They survived for probably the most common reason why anyone did in those days: the participants’ incompetence with weapons. Neither Whately nor Temple could wield a sword very well, and when Temple nicked Whately, the requirements of honor were judged to have been met. Only Whately’s friends claimed that Temple hadn’t fought fairly, leading the American to reschedule a rematch with the minister.
Enough already, Franklin decided. He owned up in a public display that he’d been the only one responsible for the letters’ distribution. Early in January 1774, sensing that trouble was ahead, he had asked permission to have counsel by his side when he appeared before the Privy Council.
That may have been a mistake: by allowing counsel to represent him, he gave up the ability to speak on his own behalf. This turned out to be critical, because it soon became apparent that it would be him, not the Massachusetts petition, that would occupy the council’s attention.
Franklin’s supporters were outnumbered in the crowded room by detractors by a 4-to-1 margin. The British Solicitor-General, Alexander Wedderburn, subjected Franklin to more than an hour of abuse—rancor so bad, supposedly, that the worst of it never ended up being printed.
What we do know of it was bad enough. Wedderburn charged Franklin with being “the prime agitator” behind the controversy. As Wedderburn continued his assault, with the anti-Franklin crowd of peers hooting and hollering for all they were worth, Franklin remained silent, fuming. Though the court’s manner of conducting busy left him unable to speak, he also believed that the manifest unfairness of Wedderburn’s conduct would turn reasonable men away from the abuse.
The proud 68-year-old bottled up his emotions for as long as he could, then, as soon as the proceedings had adjourned for the day, with the council issuing its previously prepared report exonerating Hutchinson, turned on Wedderburn. Bumping into his tormenter outside the hearing room, he said, with unmistakable intent that would be fulfilled more than a year later: “I will make your master a little king for this.”
That he did. The day after the proceedings, the Council delivered another blow to Franklin by dismissing him from his postmaster job. By that time, he had crossed a mental Rubicon in his attitude toward the Mother Country. Taking off the clothes he had worn to the Privy Council hearings, he vowed that he would never wear them again until he could help dismember the British empire. It took ten years before he could make good on his claim, but he wore the clothes when he signed the Treaty of Paris ensuring American independence.
The breach with England also led Franklin to break off relations with his son William, the royal governor of New Jersey, who had become a confirmed Loyalist, as well as several friends in the U.K. who had not signed with him. It was part of the process that turned this long-loyal British subject into what biographer H.W. Brands termed “The First American.”
The monarch’s advisory body, the Privy Council, may have felt it was removing a troublesome bit between its teeth by castigating Franklin from his role in leaking Hutchinson’s correspondence. Instead, it converted a colonial who thought of himself primarily as an Englishman into one of the Mother Country’s most dangerous enemies—a wily foe who gave the drive for American independence prestige, then won crucial support for the new nation as America’s diplomat to France.
Americans visiting London are understandably shocked to find Franklin’s home at 36 Craven Street preserved. Sites in Philadelphia, they can understand—this was the city to which he escaped as a teenage runaway apprentice and that, in turn, he devoted most of his philanthropy. Even sites in Boston, the city of Franklin’s birth, don’t nonplus tourists.
But London is the only city in the world to preserve, in original form, a home associated with Franklin. 36 Craven, just off Trafalgar Square, was where he lived for 18 years, from 1757 to 1775. The address reflected his desire to conquer the center of London as surely as he had the City of Brotherly Love.
He loved London—the adulation he received as a scientist, the friends he could meet in the fashionable new coffeehouses that were providing alternatives to alcoholic establishments, the society women he could flirt with—and his work as agent for the Massachusetts Assembly and as deputy postmaster-general for the colonies provided him with convenient excuses for why he couldn’t go home sooner. He had stayed away from home for more than a decade, constantly pleading urgent business, even when his wife suffered a partial stroke. Her death in late 1774, while he was still away from home, left him some guilt.
In the decade preceding the American Revolution, Franklin sought unsuccessfully to make King George III and his ministers see reason regarding the colonies. In 1774, he had dragged his feet on presenting Massachusetts’ petition to remove Governor Hutchinson and the latter’s lieutenant governor and brother-in-law, Andrew Oliver, arguing that patience was the colonies’ best course.
But then came the Hutchinson letter controversy. You think that the Valerie Plame leaking imbroglio was bad—not to mention the one nearly 40 years ago involving Daniel Ellsburg and the Pentagon Papers? Well, take those two cases, multiply them, then take the product and square it. That’s how controversial the Franklin affair was.
Gov. Hutchinson had been indiscreet enough to write British minister Thomas Whately from 1768 through the following year on how to bring colonial agitators to heel by restricting their liberties. In Massachusetts, the tinderbox of the American Revolution, exposure of their contents would make a sensitive situation far worse than it already was.
Somehow, Franklin came into possession of this political nitroglycerin. He never said how, and we don’t know to this day. But he sent the dozen letters to friend Thomas Cushing, speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly. Don’t copy them, he warned—just show them around to a few trusted friends.
One of the friends Cushing trusted was Samuel Adams. Big, big mistake! The agitator, as thrilled by this correspondence as Count Dracula would be by the presence of a blood bank, copied and distributed it. The reaction, as Adams hoped, was strong and powerful enough that the letters were specifically cited in the assembly’s petition to remove Hutchinson and Oliver.
In England, things got really crazy because of the affair. By this time, Thomas Whately, the original recipient of the correspondence, had died. But his brother William thought he knew the culprit—an American named John Temple, former governor of New Hampshire, now deeply sympathetic to the colonists.
The incensed Temple didn’t sue William Whately for everything he had, as he would today. Instead, he challenged him to a duel. The two men had at each other in England’s Hyde Park. They survived for probably the most common reason why anyone did in those days: the participants’ incompetence with weapons. Neither Whately nor Temple could wield a sword very well, and when Temple nicked Whately, the requirements of honor were judged to have been met. Only Whately’s friends claimed that Temple hadn’t fought fairly, leading the American to reschedule a rematch with the minister.
Enough already, Franklin decided. He owned up in a public display that he’d been the only one responsible for the letters’ distribution. Early in January 1774, sensing that trouble was ahead, he had asked permission to have counsel by his side when he appeared before the Privy Council.
That may have been a mistake: by allowing counsel to represent him, he gave up the ability to speak on his own behalf. This turned out to be critical, because it soon became apparent that it would be him, not the Massachusetts petition, that would occupy the council’s attention.
Franklin’s supporters were outnumbered in the crowded room by detractors by a 4-to-1 margin. The British Solicitor-General, Alexander Wedderburn, subjected Franklin to more than an hour of abuse—rancor so bad, supposedly, that the worst of it never ended up being printed.
What we do know of it was bad enough. Wedderburn charged Franklin with being “the prime agitator” behind the controversy. As Wedderburn continued his assault, with the anti-Franklin crowd of peers hooting and hollering for all they were worth, Franklin remained silent, fuming. Though the court’s manner of conducting busy left him unable to speak, he also believed that the manifest unfairness of Wedderburn’s conduct would turn reasonable men away from the abuse.
The proud 68-year-old bottled up his emotions for as long as he could, then, as soon as the proceedings had adjourned for the day, with the council issuing its previously prepared report exonerating Hutchinson, turned on Wedderburn. Bumping into his tormenter outside the hearing room, he said, with unmistakable intent that would be fulfilled more than a year later: “I will make your master a little king for this.”
That he did. The day after the proceedings, the Council delivered another blow to Franklin by dismissing him from his postmaster job. By that time, he had crossed a mental Rubicon in his attitude toward the Mother Country. Taking off the clothes he had worn to the Privy Council hearings, he vowed that he would never wear them again until he could help dismember the British empire. It took ten years before he could make good on his claim, but he wore the clothes when he signed the Treaty of Paris ensuring American independence.
The breach with England also led Franklin to break off relations with his son William, the royal governor of New Jersey, who had become a confirmed Loyalist, as well as several friends in the U.K. who had not signed with him. It was part of the process that turned this long-loyal British subject into what biographer H.W. Brands termed “The First American.”
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