A Boat Against the Current

Photo of the Day: The Glow of a Heart

2012-02-14T02:58:00.000-08:00

“Love isn't something natural. Rather it requiresdiscipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism.It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.”—Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956)

Starting this past weekend, Times Square has run apromotion by architectural firm Bjarke Ingels Group: If you hold your hand overa large button, a fluorescent “heart” within a 10-ft. crystalline cube begins toglow. When several people put their hands over the button, the heart really glows. I took this shot on Friday, as clumps ofpassersby began to gawk and/or line up for photo opportunities.

Oh, yes: Happy Valentine's Day!

Quote of the Day (John Forsythe, With Welcome, If Un-Thespian, Modesty)

2012-02-13T02:32:00.000-08:00

“I figure there are a few actors like Marlon Brando, George C. Scott and Laurence Olivier who have been touched by the hand of God. I’m in the next bunch.”—John Forsythe quoted in Anita Gates, “John Forsythe, ‘Dynasty’ Actor, Is Dead at 92,” The New York Times, April 4, 2010

This Day in Rock History (Jagger, Richards Set Up in Drug Bust)

2012-02-12T21:30:00.000-08:00

February 12, 1967—When he answered the door at his Sussex, England estate that evening, Keith Richards, somewhat the worse for wear after using LSD at his party, disregarded the urging of Marianne Faithfull, girlfriend of Rolling Stones bandmate Mick Jagger, that if he ignored the visitors outside, they would just go away.

What could possibly be wrong? the rock-‘n’-roll guitarist thought. There was simply a “little old lady” out there, along with more than a dozen uniformed dwarves.

Despite the highly improbable appearance of so many diminutive creatures in matching clothing together at one time, Richards greeted the unknown visitors with open arms. They promptly presented him with a warrant to “search the premises and the persons in them, under the Dangerous Drugs Act 1965.” The law found what it expected to find and arrested those inside.

Well, some of those inside. While Richards, Jagger, and art dealer Robert Fraser were hauled off to the pokey, the drug dealer who had supplied most of the mind-altering substances that night, David Schneiderman—a.k.a. “The Acid King” —was not only left mysteriously untouched by the police, but was not pursued in connection with the case when he almost immediately disappeared.

It took four more decades to confirm, but the suspicions of The Rolling Stones and the rest of the counterculture—that the partiers at Richards’ Redlands home had been set up by police and press acting together—turned out to be true. The ensuing case not only proved a major legal battle of the British Establishment vs. the rising youth culture, but also an early indicator of what has been much in the news recently: that the News of the World was collaborating with police to violate the privacy of celebrities.

The Stones’ manager-producer, Andrew Loog Oldham, promoted them as the nasty, surly, evil counterpart to the Beatles’ nice boys. This was largely hype (it was Jagger who attended the London School of Economics, and Lennon who beat early bandmate and friend Stu Sutcliffe to such a pulp that he believed he had caused the latter’s early death). For all the wonders it might have created for the group’s sales, it also sparked a backlash among people who believed them tools of the devil.

One incident after a Stones gig, when the musicians, refused a much-needed bathroom break at a gas station, relieved themselves nonetheless, made some of the newly-suspicious anxious to induce some humility in them. Among this circle were the brass at The News of the World (NOTW).

Given a seeming scoop—i.e, that one of the group was using narcotics—News of the World reported that the one in question was Mick Jagger. The Stones’ lead singer sued and won because—perhaps on the theory that all druggy rock ‘n’ rollers look alike, anyway—the scandal rag guessed wrong as to the identity of the drugged-out musician: It was Brian Jones.

Now the Fleet Street rag was doubly anxious to get Jagger because he had made them all look like fools. Soon, they found themselves in cahoots with the police.

NOTW had first attempted to work through Scotland Yard, but that agency had thrown cold water on the idea, noting that any arrest would just make martyrs of Jagger and Richards. The Chichester police were more open to the publication’s advances.

The police didn’t have much time to plan this operation, but they didn’t need much. In a preview of the black ops that have gotten Rupert Murdoch’s enterprise in trouble since then, the phones at Richards’ estate were being bugged. A motley crew of law-enforcement officials were gathered together on the spur of the moment.

What happened after Richards opened the door to them has now passed into legend. Blasting from the speakers was Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35”—you know, the one that goes, “Everybody must get stoned.” The 21-year-old Faithfull, grabbing a fur rug to cover herself, was so surprised at what she called “the coppers” making free with the house that she dropped her impromptu covering.

(Perhaps the police avenged themselves for their sexual frustration at this moment by spreading a cruel—and, Faithfull insists, false—rumor involving Jagger, his woman and a Mars bar.)

Jagger and Richards received the support you might expect from other members of the British Invasion--notably, The Beatles and The Who--but unanticipated aid from an influential member of the British Establishment helped to turn public opinion in favor.

William Rees-Mogg, in an editorial titled "Who Breaks a Butterfly Upon a Wheel?” for the paper he edited, the London Times, blasted their unduly harsh sentences after they were found guilty at the subsequent trial. (Jagger was sentenced to three months in prison for possession of four amphetamine pills, and Richards to 12 months for allowing his home to be used for smoking cannabis.)

The musicians were being made examples because of their fame, Rees-Mogg contended. (Jagger, for instance, was a first offender who was caught with a French seasickness pill in his pocket. The medication was sold over the counter in France but required a prescription in England.)

There was a real question whether the slight Jagger would have survived a lengthy prison spell. The Times editor, however, changed the climate of opinion enough that the public did not squawk when the two Stones’ sentences were drastically reduced (to less than two days) on appeal.

When I saw the NOTW connection to the case, I immediately wondered about any involvement of Rupert Murdoch. As it happens, the Australian press baron didn’t take over this paper for another year. This particular incident demonstrates that the wiretapping of celebrities had been going on even before his arrival (though, to be sure, he could have changed the environment of the newspapers he bought, if he had been so inclined).

As for The Acid King and his disappearance: According to a 2010 article in London’s Daily Mail, David Schneiderman changed his name to David Jove, then moved to Hollywood, where he became a small-time producer and filmmaker. Eighteen years after the incident, a female friend introduced him to dinner companion, Marianne Faithfull.

The bust had had a deleterious impact on the former sweet-voiced singer, who, tired of her bad-girl image, decided to embrace it. A decade of drug abuse had followed.

In this 1980s dinner, Faithfull abruptly announced to her friend that the male to which he’d been introduced was none other than the Acid King, and he should be avoided like the plague. Her friend took her advice. (Later, Schneiderman admitted to his daughter--herself a rock musician--that he had helped set everything up at the behest of federal officials in the U.S. and U.K. who wanted to discredit the band and cause them legal problems.)

Schneiderman died in 2004, shunned by Hollywood for drug use so rampant that even it couldn't abide it.

Quote of the Day (Cardinal Bernardin, on a ‘Consistent Ethic of Life’)

2012-02-12T12:10:00.000-08:00

“The primary intention of the consistent ethic of life…is to raise consciousness about the sanctity and reverence of all human life from conception to natural death. The more one embraces this concept, the more sensitive one becomes to the value of human life itself at all stages…. This consistent ethic points out the inconsistency of defending life in one area while dismissing it in another. Each specific issue requires its own moral analysis and each may call for varied, specific responses. Moreover different issues may engage the energies of different people or of the same people at different times. But there is a linkage among all the life issues which cannot be ignored….

“There are those who support abortion on demand who do not grasp or will not discuss the intrinsic value of human life and the precedence it should take in decision making. The issue—the only issue—they insist, is the question of who decides, the individual or the government.

“Who decides is not the issue. We all decide, but we make our free decisions within limits. In exercising our freedom, we must not make ourselves the center of the world. Other individuals born and unborn are as much a part of the human family as we are.”—Joseph Cardinal Bernardin (1928-1996), “Deciding for Life” (Message for "Respect Life Sunday"), October 1, 1989

Gisele Jinx?

2012-02-11T19:53:00.000-08:00

I’m not sure of the provenance of the image attached to this post, but it sure conveys a Churchillian sense of triumph—a premature feeling that might have turned into rancid disappointment and anger inside the very famous young woman flashing this sign.

For the faithful in New England, the New York Giants’ come-from-behind win in the Super Bowl must have felt like (with apologies to Yogi Berra) Deja Blue All Over Again.

But the outburst by losing quarterback Tom Brady’s celebrity wife, Gisele Bundchen, rubbed salt in the wound. Fox Sports’ Bill Reiter went so far as to suggest that it might spell the end of “The Patriots’ Way.” That, for those of us previously unfamiliar with the term, is the code of omerta imposed by coach Bill Belichick that had succeeded, for much of the past decade, in keeping within the family the inevitable tensions occurring when testosterone-turbocharged young men, striving past every ache and pain and Monday-Morning-Quarterbacking session by fans, fall short in the quest for perfection on any given Sunday.

And wouldn’t you know it, no sooner had Mrs. Brady unleashed The Rant Heard Round the World against a taunting male Giant fan, when the Pats’ Ron Gronkowski—he of the most-talked-about bad ankle in New England since Curt Schilling’s much-hyped bloody sock—was videotaped at an aftergame party, moving as if his throbbing body part had miraculously recovered.

The Patriots' Yoko Ono?
It was a massive breach of the latter-day athletic Spartan code: instead of coming home with his shield (or helmet, in this case) or on it, the record-setting tight end was ready to dance on his, surely making a few fans wonder if he could have moved just as fast to catch Brady’s last-second Hail Mary heave into the end zone. It was a Patriot re-enactment of The Fall: first the sin, then the end of the innocence, all following a woman leading a man astray.

The whole sequence had many Patriot fans speculating if it all might have been part of a “Gisele Jinx.” Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy succinctly summarized the developing consensus: “The notion of Gisele Bundchen as Yoko Ono will gather steam now that Brady’s wife has inserted herself into his professional business.”

What a fascinating turn of events—particularly for a woman who has, from all appearances, led a charmed life as the Uber-Supermodel.

The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women
A friend related, not so long ago, that he had developed a small, unexpected, but fascinating subset of his very busy legal practice: representing models. The practice of discovering and marketing beautiful young women, it appears, can be singularly ugly, with some agents ready to take gross financial advantage of these naïve youngsters.

My friend is far too modest to draw the inevitable conclusion, but there is obviously, in this environment, a burning need for an honest, competent, all-around good guy such as himself to act as legal eagle. (I can’t imagine that my friend, if he had junior male attorneys at his firm, would have a terribly difficult time convincing them to perform for such clients work that would normally be considered the worst kind of drudgery.)

I gather that my friend’s practice includes at least a couple of young women who prance down the catwalk, but I don’t know if any of them have yet ascended to the rarefied level of The Supermodel: the Christies, Cindys, Naomis, Elles, Tyras, and Heidis of the world, the ones who can say: “Go ahead, hate me because I’m beautiful! I’m crying all the way to the bank!” Such women have long convinced me that the term “pouting supermodel” is redundant.

Now comes Gisele. Perhaps her profane outburst that her hubby couldn’t be expected to throw and catch at the same time was simply, as Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Gay contends, a matter of a loving wife standing up for her man in an understandable, if inappropriate, way.

But who could doubt that this was a blow to the Patriots’ esprit de corps, an incident so grievous that it made the appearance of a previously unknown “New Belichick” (one given to smiling, if you can believe it) as evanescent as “The New Newt” in the GOP primaries.

Another one of my friends (and he knows who he is!) has sometimes expressed delight that Brady’s wife has a twin out there, presumably unattached. But outbursts such as Ms. Bundchen’s post-Super Bowl rant make one question the desirability of possessing such eye candy, for reasons going beyond what Jack Nicholson memorably told Michelle Pfeiffer in Wolf : “The problem is, aside from all that beauty, you're not very interesting.“

I’m not talking simply about the fact that, even after she stops walking down the runway and consumes her first Twinkie in two decades, there’s a good chance that Gisele will be netting more money than Tom. (On one side: income from apparel lines, diet/exercise books, reality shows in which she could deliver tough love to aspiring Pouty Supermodels; on his side, a pension which will be lucky to exceed his mounting medical expenses. Do the math.)

I don’t even have just in mind the elemental fight every morning for Mirror Time. From Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe to David Justice and Halle Berry, the longevity of unions between professional athletes and their glamorous spouses does not seem terribly long.

The Difficult Mixture of Football and Supermodels
There is also the issue of why a supermodel would even want to follow closely a game such as football. Football involving tackling is not, after all, unlike soccer, volleyball, softball (a cousin of baseball), or basketball, an activity in which a female is likely to participate at a young age. If you’re a supermodel with a loved one in the game, watching him chased (and, sometimes, upended) by 300-pound mastodons at unbelievable speeds is likely to seem like a Sunday horror show. As for all that complicated play-calling—well, what could be interesting about that?

Even after hours of hanging out with, say, Hannah Storm or Erin Andrews—both of whom might be able to translate the game into fairly understandable terms—professional football is simply not likely to be fully understood or liked by Gisele.

And that lack of understanding might go to the heart of why she missed some fairly elementary things, such as:

* If her husband’s receivers were so bad, then how come they caught a Super Bowl record 16 consecutive passes of his at one point?
* Why had her husband put the Patriots in such a vulnerable position with his safety on the Pats' first possession, as well as with his subpar fourth quarter (6 of 15, 64 yards, an interception)?

* She couldn’t have had Wes Welker in mind with her tirade, could she? Because if so, her husband was at least halfway at fault by throwing so poorly on the play.

* Instead of taking umbrage against the Giants heckler who claimed that Eli Manning owned her husband, why couldn’t she point out, with perfect reason, that her husband faced the Giants’ defense, not its offense—then ask, with equally perfect reason, how her heckler might have fared if he had Justin Tuck chasing him all day?

* Instead of questioning her own team’s wide receivers, she might inquired about the wisdom of Belichick’s plan in guarding against the Giants’ wide receivers—specifically, whether the odds of Mario Manningham staying in-bounds on a crucial play would begin to work in the latter’s favor.

Instead, Brady’s Mrs. has made matters unnecessarily awkward for herself and her husband. No matter how much the two of them might offer abashed apologies, from now on, there’s going to be quite a contingent of Patriot wives who, instead of helping Gisele flip the burgers at the next summer Brady barbeque, would much rather flip her the bird.

No, the sense that Gisele is Yoko, or Delilah depriving her husband of his powers at critical moments, can’t be entirely sustained. There are equally, perhaps even more, plausible explanations for why the Patriots dynasty has, as the Giants’ Brandon Jacobs stated with relish, been “decapitated.”

First, perhaps this is all divine punishment for Spygate—a use of videotaping against an opponent so egregious that the NFL imposed a heavy fine.The Patriots have not only not won a Super Bowl since then, but lost in the most agonizing fashion: first, when they were minutes away from concluding a perfect season, and second, when they were on the brink of avenging themselves for that earlier loss. Somehow, the term “genius,” once tossed around regularly about Belichick, sticks a bit more in the throat these days.

The Curse of Bridget Moynahan?
Second, might this be less Gisele’s Jinx than the Curse of Bridget Moynahan? The star of Blue Bloods, Sex and the City and Coyote Ugly has declined to criticize her ex-boyfriend, even after a) he dumped her, taking up with Gisele shortly afterward, and b) he left her pregnant, and even, for a short time before the birth of his first child, seemed distinctly unhappy about impending fatherhood.
But Moynahan's ex-beau, more than anyone, should know better than to read a public silence as ready acceptance of reality. After all, Brady, as someone of Irish descent, should understand that Moynahan can summon all sorts of forces beyond the ken of mortal man. She can pray to the saint for whom she is named, for instance, asking her to take her ex-boyfriend down a peg.

Or she can look in a far less benign direction. Something in the ancient Irish way of life lends itself to impenetrable mists, or calls on the supernatural. (With their groundbreaking tales of vampires, Sheridan LeFanu and Bram Stoker didn’t write from a vacuum, you know.)

If I were the Patriots, I would deeply worry about this curse of a woman scorned. Consider Kate Hudson, who last went out with Alex Rodriguez during the 2009 World Series, and split with him shortly afterward, supposedly over his incurable narcissism. The Yankees not only haven’t come close to winning since, but Kate's Curse seems to be a metastizing force. (How else to explain Brian Cashman's current case of lunacy?)

As he considers what Gisele Hath Wrought, Brady has experienced firsthand the meaning of these lyrics from Peter Allen’s “Don’t Wish Too Hard”:

“How I wished for you and now you’re here
Now I wish that I could disappear and go away.”

Quote of the Day (Skylar Diggins, on Her Court Hairdo Changes)

2012-02-11T07:52:00.000-08:00

“If I had a bad first half, I’ll come back afterhalftime, and you’ll see a bun or a fan ponytail. When my hair goes up, thatmeans it’s time to get down and dirty — I must have been messing around in thefirst half, and I’m just a wild child now.”—Notre Dame women’s basketball pointguard Skylar Diggins, interviewed by Andrew Goldman, “Talk: She Got Game: NotreDame’s Skylar Diggins Knows What She Wants,”The New York Times Magazine, February 12, 2012

Quote of the Day (Dorothy Parker, on Wit vs. Wisecracks)

2012-02-10T02:28:00.000-08:00

“There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.”—Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), interview with The Paris Review, Summer 1956

Song Lyric of the Day (Carole King, on Friends, ‘Winter Spring Summer or Fall’)

2012-02-09T22:18:00.000-08:00

“Winter spring summer or fall,
Hey now, all you've got to do is call.
Lord, I'll be there, yes I will.
You've got a friend.”—Carole King, “You’ve Got a Friend,” from her Tapestry LP (1971)

Throughout the 1970s, when I was either learning to drive or just before, it seemed that the best music in the world came through a car radio. Especially in the summer of 1971, one song insinuated its way into my tween consciousness—first slowly, softly, then achingly trying to balance a young love versus one that had died. The lyrics of “It’s Too Late” seemed so sophisticated, so adult, so like that cool Tom Scott sax solo in the instrumental break, but they couldn’t overcome the piano chords as persistent as the hurt in the voice of the song’s composer.

Like a good friend, the music of Carole King—who, hard to believe, turns 70 today—helps one endure the seasons of hurt and love, harsh as well as gentle. If you can imagine a granola earth mother, the one authentic link between the Brill Building group of songwriters (King, onetime hubby and lyricist Gerry Goffin, Neil Sedaka, Burt Bacharach, and Neil Diamond) and the singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s, that person is unquestionably King.

“You’ve Got a Friend,” from the same Tapestry album that spawned “It’s Too Late,” was “as close to pure inspiration as I’ve experienced,” King later told Paul Zollo, in an interview collected in his Songwriters On Songwriting. “The song wrote itself. It was written by something outside of myself through me.”

The song became a hit for King’s great good friend, James Taylor. If you ask me to pick between King’s and JT’s versions, King’s would win, but just barely. But as for “Up on the Roof,” his cover of her earlier hit—well, I guess it evens out. I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday gift than seeing Taylor perform this at the then-Garden State Arts Center in Holmdel, N.J., in the mid-1980s.

Before she wrote songs for herself, King (and Goffin) wrote songs for others in the 1960s. I could go on and on about who performed which King song, but I’ll just pick out a couple more favorites here: Dave Mason’s 1978 cover of the Shirelle’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” (another I saw in concert, this time in Central Park) and one which I wish I’d seen, but which I fell rapturously in love with every which way the second I first heard it: “Up on the Roof,” performed by Bruce Springsteen in the mid-70s with all the rawness and hunger that made so many of us worship him for life (which you can hear—unfortunately, not seen—in this YouTube version.) It added a whole new level of magic to the song that first became a hit for the Drifters in late 1962.

Quote of the Day (Cyril Connolly, on Education and Concentration)

2012-02-08T02:06:00.000-08:00

“No education is worth having that does not teach the lesson of concentration on a task, however unattractive. These lessons, if not learnt early, will be learnt, if at all, with pain and grief in later life.”—Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938)

Quote of the Day (Mark Twain, on Charles Dickens, 'Only a Man')

2012-02-07T02:20:00.000-08:00

“He brought up handsomely in the centre and faced the opera glasses. His pictures are hardly handsome, and he, like everybody else, is less handsome than his pictures. That fashion he has of brushing his hair and goatee so resolutely forward gives him a comical Scotch-terrier look about the face, which is rather heightened than otherwise by his portentous dignity and gravity. But that queer old head took on a sort of beauty, bye and bye, and a fascinating interest, as I thought of the wonderful mechanism within it, the complex but exquisitely adjusted machinery that could create men and women, and put the breath of life into them and alter all their ways and actions, elevate them, degrade them, murder them, marry them, conduct them through good and evil, through joy and sorrow, on their long march from the cradle to the grave, and never lose its godship over them, never make a mistake! I almost imagined I could see the wheels and pulleys work. This was Dickens -- Dickens. There was no question about that, and yet it was not right easy to realize it. Somehow this puissant god seemed to be only a man, after all. How the great do tumble from their high pedestals when we see them in common human flesh, and know that they eat pork and cabbage and act like other men.”—Mark Twain, “The Great Dickens,” in the San Francisco daily Alta California, February 2, 1868

With a major project needing to be delivered in the next couple of days, I won’t be able to indulge in my usual commentary at the moment. But I couldn’t resist the temptation at least to note today’s bicentennial of the birth of Charles Dickens with this excerpt from an early work by another great writer, Mark Twain, catching the older British author on his American tour.

Quote of the Day (Joe Namath, on Victory and Other Things)

2012-02-06T02:41:00.000-08:00

“If you’re not gonna go all the way, man, I mean, why go at all?”—Joe Namath, 1973 Brut TV commercial

Jets legend Joe Namath was famous for scoring on and off the field. His prognostication skills, however—at least, as demonstrated by picking the New England Patriots to win yesterday’s Super Bowl—leave something to be desired.

Eli Manning, from all appearances, is not into the colorful off-the-field life that Broadway Joe led. I don’t think he even has his own nickname.

But he’s gone “all the way” to the Lombardi Trophy, twice earning MVP nods in the biggest game of the year. He and long-maligned Coach Tom Coughlin are now genuinely in any discussion of the elite of their profession—and, in time, should receive full consideration for admission into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

New England fans—not to mention Vegas oddsmakers—should have heeded the message we Giant fans have been trying to send them these past two weeks: “Eli’s coming…Hide your heart….No, you’ll never get away from the burnin’ a-heartache…”

Quote of the Day (Cardinal Newman, on God’s Support)

2012-02-05T08:19:00.000-08:00

"May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done! Then in His mercy may He give us safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last!"—John Henry Cardinal Newman, Sermon 20, Wisdom and Innocence (1834)

Quote of the Day (John Updike, on Illustrations vs. Reality)

2012-02-04T13:13:00.000-08:00

“Illustrations affected me more strongly than reality; a picture of falling snow, for example, whether in black-and-white line drawing or blurry four-color reproduction, moves me more than any actual storm.”— John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989)

Song Lyric of the Day (Melanie, on Those Who ‘Came to Keep the Dark Away’)

2012-02-03T02:21:00.000-08:00

“Some came to sing, some came to pray
Some came to keep the dark away.”—Melanie, “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain),” from her Candles in the Rain LP (1970)

Joni Mitchell, giving up the opportunity to travel to Woodstock at the insistence of her manager, who wanted her to appear on the Dick Cavett Show, wrote her song on her generation’s seminal event based on what she saw on a TV set in a Manhattan hotel room and on what boyfriend Graham Nash related afterward. Maybe that is why, to some extent, it still comes off as rather metaphysical. (“We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon.”)

In contrast, Melanie Safka, who turns 65 today, produced a song perhaps not as resonant in the long term, but more immediately visceral (“We were so close, there was no room/We bled inside each other‘s wounds“)—perhaps because she was there and was moved by the sight of the candles being lit after a downpour, letting the world know everything was okay. At the time this record was released, few other songs on the radio could match it for its passion and immediacy.

With time, of course, Melanie’s moment passed. Unlike the bohemian Mitchell, whose songs consistently re-enact her tug of war between intimacy and freedom, Melanie chose, by the mid-1970s, to recede from the music business to raise a family. Also unlike Mitchell, who passed through two marriages and numerous relationships in the years since Woodstock, Melanie stayed married to the same man until his death two years ago.

Melanie’s impact was short-lived, but it was huge while it was occurring. Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Lady Gaga can all, in a sense, be regarded as musical offspring of Madonna. But in the current folk/pop/rock environment, it is impossible for me even to summon up another performer remotely resembling Melanie. And that speaks volumes—every note of it sad—about the contemporary musical scene.

This Day in Literary History (Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ and the Irish Literary Revival)

2012-02-02T03:57:00.000-08:00

February 2, 1922—On the morning of his 40^th birthday, James Joyce was presented with the first copy of his novel Ulysses, by his friend Sylvia Beach, owner of the Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Co. As my college friend Steve was good enough to remind me recently, the great event occurred on Groundhog’s Day.

Only 1,000 copies of the book were printed in that initial run, but news about its extraordinary nature soon spread. Not everyone was pleased. At least a few Irish citizens, for instance, were so annoyed by Joyce’s modernist masterpiece that they probably wished that he, like the groundhog, had instead chosen to hibernate a while longer. One of those was Lady Augusta Gregory, one of the artistic directors of Ireland’s Abbey Theatre and a longtime patron of writers.

In one chapter of Joyce’s novel, for instance, he had referred to her as an “old hake”--an Irish term for a gossipy woman. She would also have read (or, at least, heard) a line about “our peasant plays,” an unmistakable reference to the type of material that she, William Butler Yeats, and John Millington Synge had staged at the Abbey. Synge himself, dead 13 years, came in for a jab. Shakespeare, one of Joyce’s characters notes, was the “chap that writes like Synge.”

It’s been months since I saw Woody Allen’s very fine Midnight in Paris, but now I’m a little chagrined that he didn’t get around to depicting Joyce among the 1920s notables that Owen Wilson encounters on his nocturnal excursions. With his deteriorating eyesight, his drinking and his fine tenor voice (so fine that many, including wife Nora, felt he should have been a singer rather than a writer), Joyce would have made as distinct an impression as any of the culturati in the final cut of the movie, even Ernest Hemingway.

“Jim” Joyce (as the young American called him) and Hemingway had something else in common besides their Paris days: they frequently bit the hand of anyone kind enough to help them when they were starting out. Hemingway’s works are littered with the victims of his numerous literary assassinations: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harold Loeb, Sinclair Lewis, and John Dos Passos, to name just a few.

At least let’s give Joyce credit for this much: those whom he attacked had plenty of opportunity to prepare themselves for what he might say.

Take Yeats, for instance. The great poet and friend of Lady Gregory is believed to have met Joyce only twice. The first and more memorable of the two encounters occurred in October 1902. The conversation might have taken an inexorable turn for the worst when Yeats, slightly annoyed by Joyce’s suggestion that the folklore-derived plots of Yeats’ plays evidenced the poet’s deterioration, pointed to a page in one of Joyce’s short stories and countered that he had “got that from somebody else who got it from the folk.” Joyce, already certain that he was sui generis, insisted that it came from his own mind.

As Joyce got up to go, he turned to Yeats and asked how old he was. On being told 36 (one year younger than he actually was), the 20-year-old Joyce responded: “I thought as much. I have met you too late. You are too old.”

Joyce, in other words, was already demonstrating a youthful arrogance perhaps only exceeded by Orson Welles at the time of Citizen Kane: the kind that led Herman Mankiewicz, the filmmaker's collaborator on that classic, to crack, "There but for the grace of God, goes God."

One month after Yeats had his encounter with Joyce, the poet arranged for the young man to meet Lady Gregory. You have to ask yourself why Yeats did something so preposterous -- and to someone who was his friend, for heaven's sake--when his own encounter with this young welp turned out to be so unsatisfactory. The only explanation I have is that misery loves company.

Early in 1903, Lady Gregory arranged for the Daily Express to send Joyce books to be reviewed. This would help alleviate his money problems while getting his name before the public. One of the books the editor of this publication mailed Joyce was Lady Gregory’s own Poets and Dreamers. I'm sure there was an expectation that Joyce would go easy on it.

You get an idea of the tone of the subsequent review in this phrase: “in the fullness of its sterility.”

Oh, did I forget to mention that Lady Gregory was not happy one bit about this?

Perhaps Joyce felt the aid he received was not commensurate with his genius. Perhaps he hated the feeling of being beholden to anyone. At the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, vows to “forge, in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race.” That’s a grandiose ambition, but, because it acknowledges no influences or creative forbears, it’s also filled with isolation and alienation.

So, as novelist-critic Thomas Flanagan wrote in his essay collection There You Are, Joyce managed, in Ulysses, to accomplish "an Irish rebellion of the deepest and the subtlest kind, a rebellion within the word, within language itself." It was an act of separation not merely from the "acquired speech" of Stephen's English dean of studies, nor even from the Roman Catholic Church from which Joyce famously fell away, but also from Gregory, Yeats, and the other Protestant lights of the Irish Literary Revival.

Ironically, for all of Joyce’s attempts to pick a fight with Lady Gregory, he shared with her a highly developed ural sensibility--or, if you will, an ear for dialogue. It would serve both exceedingly well throughout the rest of their careers.

Lady Gregory's attempt to capture the spoken cadences of Irish peasants represented an important advance in a country where previous writers had settled for thick and awkward dialect that turned people into caricatures. And in Ulysses, almost by way of compensating for what he could no longer see, the visually impaired Joyce created dialogue and interior monologues ("stream of consciousness") that caught ordinary Dubliners on a seemingly ordinary day that his prose made extraordinary.

Quote of the Day (Leon Wieseltier, on Disappearing Book- and Record Stores)

2012-02-02T02:27:00.000-08:00

“The commerce of culture is a trade in ideals of beauty, goodness, and truth. A hunger for profit exploits a hunger for meaning. If the one gets too ravenous, the other may find it harder to subsist. The disappearance of our bookstores and our record stores constitutes one of the great self-inflicted wounds of this wounding time.”—Leon Wieseltier, “Washington Diarist: Going to Melody,” The New Republic, February 2, 2012

Quote of the Day (Charles Mackay, on Nations as ‘Desperate Gamblers’)

2012-02-01T02:24:00.000-08:00

"Money…has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper…. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."--Historian Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness Of Crowds (1841)

TV Quote of the Day (For Suzanne Pleshette, on What Would Have Been Her 75th Birthday)

2012-01-31T02:40:00.000-08:00

Dr. Robert "Bob" Hartley [played by Bob Newhart]: [Unhappy with Emily's choice of marriage counselor] “Emily, I thought you were supposed to find someone neutral.”

Emily Hartley [played by Suzanne Pleshette]: “I did.”

Bob: “She's a woman!”

Emily: “That's right, Bob. I said neutral, not neuter.”—The Bob Newhart Show, “I’m Okay, You're Okay, So What's Wrong?”, Season 2, Episode 10, air date November 17, 1973, written by Earl Barret, David Davis and Lorenzo Music, directed by George Tyne

I’m a fan of both Alfred Hitchcock and John O’Hara, but it was unfortunate that two films—one directed by the “Master of Suspense” (The Birds), the other adapted from a novel by the Pennsylvania writer (A Rage to Live)—wasted the talents of the wondrous young actress Suzanne Pleshette. (Hitchcock particularly seemed put off by the Method-trained brunette; Pleshette later recalled that the director seemed to regret casting her as the woman who loses her boyfriend to blonde Tippi Hedren. Maybe that’s why her character ended up pecked to death by the mysteriously vicious avian creatures.)

Fortunately, television found a place for her. In one of her numerous appearances as a guest on The Tonight Show, where her off-screen bawdy sense of humor was barely contained, someone noticed that she hit it off with comedian Bob Newhart, and she was soon cast his wife in his eponymous show, one of the signature hits of the MTM series factory.

Pleshette, born on this date in 1937, died at age 70—way, way too soon for her legion of fans, particularly those of us who felt that her throaty laugh and shrewd but understanding wifely smile made her the best reason to tune in every week for six seasons of The Bob Newhart Show. She was the closest television counterpart to the vivacious wife played by Irene Dunne in classic Thirties screwball comedies such as The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife.

I never really cared to watch Newhart’s follow-up series in the Eighties--probably because I couldn’t imagine a better on-air partner for him than Pleshette. I’m sure he had fans like myself in mind when he conceived the series finale of the latter show, which depicts him in bed with his first TV wife rather than the younger, blonde one--the past eight seasons all a dream.

That finale became so famous that in 1999, a headline in the humor publication The Onion read, “Universe Ends as God Wakes Up Next to Suzanne Pleshette.”

Quote of the Day (Comic Merrill Markoe, on Living by Herself)

2012-01-30T02:23:00.000-08:00

"One great thing I noticed about living by myself: all of my annoying habits seem to have disappeared."—Humorist Merrill Markoe, quoted in "Quotes," Reader’s Digest, October 2011

Quote of the Day (William Ellery Channing, on Being ‘Content With Small Means’)

2012-01-29T08:27:00.000-08:00

“To live content with small means.
To seek elegance rather than luxury,
   and refinement rather than fashion.
To be worthy not respectable,
   and wealthy not rich.
To study hard, think quietly, talk gently,
   act frankly, to listen to stars, birds, babes,
   and sages with open heart, to bear all cheerfully,
   do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never.
In a word, to let the spiritual,
   unbidden and unconscious,
   grow up through the common.
This is to be my symphony.”—American Unitarian clergyman, writer and philosopher William Ellery Channing (1810-1884), “My Symphony”

Flashback, January 1077: Emperor Yields to Pope in Snows of Canossa

2012-01-28T23:51:00.000-08:00

In one of the most extraordinary moments in the papacy’s two-millennia history, the former Benedictine monk Hildebrand—having become, against his wishes, Pope Gregory VII, and now known to history as St. Pope Gregory VII—brought the German emperor Henry IV to heel by making him stand barefooted outside the castle where the pontiff was staying in Canossa, Italy, shivering for three days in the severest winter temperatures in years, before granting absolution and rescinding the excommunication under which the ruler had been placed.

The good feeling between the two, however, was short-lived. Henry, smarting from the indignity he had to endure, struck back at the pope when he had the chance, invading Rome and forcing Gregory into bitter exile seven years later.

“How many divisions does the Pope have?” Joseph Stalin once asked. The question, though sardonic, got to the heart of papal authority. Nowhere, I would argue, was the issue joined more momentously than in the snows of Canossa. Indeed, I would rank it among the half-dozen most dramatic moments in the history of the popes. (The other moments, in case you were wondering, are the upside-down crucifixion of St. Peter; Pope Leo the Great’s visit to Attila the Hun outside Rome to persuade the barbarian ruler to leave the Imperial City alone; Pope Julius’s assumption of an army to quell unrest; and the unsuccessful attempt on the life of John Paul II).

The issues that Gregory confronted during his papacy bedeviled the church for the next few centuries as well, even down to the present day: simony, lay investiture, and clerical celibacy. In the evolving understanding of the relationship between Church and state, the battle between the pope and the emperor didn’t settle matters, but it made matters impossible to ignore.

For a quarter-century, Hildebrand had been the power behind the throne for six different popes, all of whom came to respect his administrative ability and integrity. The former quality might have endeared him to the successors of St. Peter, but the latter asset made him something more astounding: the clear favorite as pope for the populace.

The legend of his selection as pope was completely out of character with the way affairs were already being conducted in the highest reaches of the Church in this age, as political horsetrading took place to secure this office. Instead, right during the funeral of Pope Alexander II, the crowd began to chant, “Hildebrand shall be pope!” His earnest protestations that he wasn’t worthy of the position proved unavailing with the College of Cardinals, who immediately fell behind the crowd’s lead and elected Hildebrand by acclamation.

Less than two years later, Gregory was confiding to his friend Abbot Hugh of Cluny, France, that he felt overwhelmed by the challenges facing him: "The Eastern Church has fallen away from the Faith and is now assailed on every side by infidels. Wherever I turn my eyes--to the west, to the north, or to the south--I find everywhere bishops who have obtained their office in an irregular way, whose lives and conversation are strangely at variance with their sacred calling; who go through their duties not for the love of Christ but from motives of worldly gain. There are no longer princes who set God's honour before their own selfish ends, or who allow justice to stand in the way of their ambition.”

As archdeacon of Rome for the past 14 years, Gregory knew as well as anyone how much turmoil the Church was enduring. The fall of the Roman Empire had left a vacuum of order that only the Church had been able to fill. Later, as new European rulers struggled to unite the fragmented realms that dotted the continent, they sought papal blessing on their power.

At the same time, for all the need these rulers felt for the Church, they also saw Church officials as elements to be used as part of their own power structure. They would couple rights to temporal property and duties with their own conferring of the bishop’s pastoral staff and ring. Frequently, they appointed friends as bishops. This made eminent sense to them, for in the loyalty-based feudal system they could have greater certainty of allegiance to their rule. Henry IV of Germany, a twentysomething royal, was one of these believers in what came to be called lay investiture.

The principle did not, however, make sense to many Church reformers, particularly Gregory. At this point, the hereditary nature of feudal lordships and vassals made particularly thorny the issue of married priests and bishops. In particular, during the 10^th century “Rule of the Harlots,” several popes became strongly associated with the corrupt aristocratic family the Theophylacti, and especially wife Theodora and her two daughters, who exerted undue influence over papal elections through marriages, affairs and conspiracies. With simony, the buying and selling of church offices, also rampant, both within the Church itself and among rulers making ecclesiastical appointments, scandal loomed.

At his first synod a year after becoming pontiff, Gregory threw down the gauntlet to the German bishops, denouncing the simony and clerical marriage so widespread among them. They resisted and, when Henry refused to remove one bishop who owed his office to simony, Gregory sought to counteract him.

Gregory’s moves were uncommonly bold. He not only excommunicated Henry—declaring his relationship with the Church and its community gravely impaired—but also that the emperor’s subjects were, in these circumstances, not bound by any loyalty to him. While rulers had removed popes before, no pontiff had ever dared to depose a monarch.

The excommunication by Gregory gave leave for German bishops to rebel openly against Henry. He could not retain power without making peace with the pope. Yet, though he had invited Gregory north into Germany, the pope, suspicious of his intentions, stopped in northern Italy, at the nearly impregnable castle at Canossa possessed by his friend and protectress Matilda.

In his 1983 history of the Papacy, Keepers of the Keys, Nicholas Cheetham disputes the commonly held notion that Henry stood barefoot out in the snow. The monarch was, however, dressed as a penitent before the castle gate, and stayed there for three days running.

At last, convinced of Henry’s sincerity, Gregory met with him, held a mass of forgiveness and lifted the excommunication. Henry, however, annoyed at subjecting himself to the pope, went back on his word as soon as he got back to Germany.

Three years later, Gregory renewed Henry’s excommunication. For the next four years, Henry sought to enter Rome and replace Gregory with his own anti-pope. Gregory’s own position had become more precarious, as the Italian populace had wearied of war. The last straw came at the moment of what should have been the pope’s triumph, when Gregory’s Norman ally, Robert Guiscard, returned to Rome with such overwhelming forces that Henry and his anti-Pope, Clement, were obliged to withdraw. But Guiscard’s troops, excited by the prospect of the ancient city’s riches, looted Rome and massacred many of its inhabitants--who, at this very moment, also watched in horror as their homes were consumed by fire.

The Romans blamed Gregory for their plight, and now he was forced to leave himself. He died a year later, in 1085, a dozen years into his pontificate, with his last words sounding like the prophet Jeremiah, wearied and beaten down because of his love of God: “I have loved justice and hated iniquity; that is why I am dying in exile.”

Gregory did indeed hate iniquity, but he did not see that his attempt to protect the autonomy of the Church provided a justification for papal supremacy that later pontiffs would exploit. The attempt to root out simony foundered under his successors, and the practice became a key charge in Martin Luther’s furious indictment of the Church in the 16^th century.

The most enduring fruits of Gregory’s actions were bans on lay investiture and married clergy. In the centuries since Canossa, the Church continued to be hard-pressed by temporal powers, but it is difficult to think how much worse its plight might have been if it had left to kings the ability to appoint bishops. Moreover, for all the clear difficulties that a lack of married clergy present to the Church, it is also the case that it would have been far more difficult to send married ministers instead of single men with no family ties around the world to evangelize.

Photo of the Day: Saturday in Bryant Park

2012-01-28T23:20:00.000-08:00

Today, with a few minutes to spare before I saw the Roundabout Theatre’s production of The Road to Mecca (a review on that will come later), I walked over to Bryant Park. With one of the nicest days of this winter at hand, I wanted to get a shot of how this spot behind the Central Research Library in the New York Public Library system looked. As you can see, a full crowd was out in force to enjoy the day.

For a period not so many decades ago, Bryant Park fell into the kind of urban decay and disorder that once bedeviled New York City. Its more recent beautification and revival demonstrates what concerned citizens can do when they put their minds to it.

Quote of the Day (Umberto Eco, on Thomas Aquinas)

2012-01-28T22:32:00.000-08:00

“[I]t is hard to understand how scandal could come from this person, so unromantic, fat, and slow, who at school took notes in silence, looked as if he weren't understanding anything, and was teased by his companions. And, in the monastery, as he sat at the table on his double stool (they had to saw off the central arm to make room for him) the playful monks shouted to him that outside there was an ass flying and he ran to see, while the others split their sides (mendicant friars, as is well known, had simple tastes); and Thomas (who was no fool) said that to him a flying ass had seemed more likely than a monk who would tell a falsehood, and the other friars were insulted.”—Umberto Eco, “In Praise of St. Thomas,” in Travels in Hyperreality: Essays (1986)

Have you ever read a piece whose first few sentences left an extraordinary impression on you? Such was my experience 25 years ago, when I read this essay by bestselling Name of the Rose novelist Umberto Eco in the Autumn 1986 issue of The Wilson Quarterly. The vivid opening in question went like this:

“The worst thing that happened to Thomas Aquinas in the course of his career was not his death, on March 7, 1274, in Fossanova, when he was barely 49, and, fat as he was, the monks were unable to carry his body down the stairs.”

Well! Let me tell you, that’s not the kind of anecdote I would have been likely to hear during 12 years of parochial school. More’s the pity, I think. It would have helped many a student, then and now, to know that the greatest scholar-saint of the Middle Ages carried on his own (ultimately losing) battle with gluttony, but that somehow he’d endured to achieve his staggering life work, Summa Theologica.

The Eco quote above hints at the reputation that St. Thomas Aquinas, whose feast day is celebrated by the Roman Catholic Church today, acquired in his early years as “the dumb ox.” There’s a danger, when such rich anecdotes are employed, that the reader will dwell on that eccentric little story to the exclusion of all else.

But Eco knows, from his years of lecturing on semiotics at the University of Bologna, that such stories also hook readers as they grapple with an important argument of the author’s: “Within Thomas’ theological architecture you understand why man knows things, why his body is made in a certain way, why he has to examine facts and opinions to make a decision, and resolve contradictions without concealing them, trying to reconcile them openly.” Reacting to the cross-currents of his time--surging Islam, renewed interest in Greek philosophy--Thomas succeeded in overturning old Church strictures against Aristotle, while forging a solid theological synthesis that has withstood constant assaults across the centuries.

In other words, as his age experienced the first whiffs of the material world, Thomas—not a heretic or revolutionary, Eco agreed, but a “concordian”—“simply gave the church a doctrinal system that put her in agreement with the natural world.”

Flashback, January 2007: Synge’s ‘Playboy’ Causes Dublin Riot

2012-01-27T23:33:00.000-08:00

At Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, the company’s initial good feelings about the reception of John Millington Synge’s new three-act comedy were rudely destroyed at its Saturday night premiere on January 26, 1907, when the audience took offense, midway through the play, to what one theatergoer called “an unusually brutally coarse remark.”

The line in The Playboy of the Western World that set off a week of rioting and debate came from young protagonist Christy Mahon, who, when told he could find other girls besides the one he loves, remarks: “It’s Pegeen I’m seeking only, and what’d I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself, maybe, from this place to the Eastern World?”

One word in particular— ”shifts,” an Irish expression for ladies’ undergarments— started the donnybrook. The company might have inadvertently heightened the impact of the remark, however, by substituting for “chosen females” the more geographically precise, but earthier, phrase, “Mayo females.”

At the end of the first act, Lady Augusta Gregory, one of the theater’s artistic directors, sent a telegram to her company partner, poet William Butler Yeats, who was lecturing in Scotland: “Play great success.” But by the curtain, she’d had to send another, acknowledging that the show had been “broken up” because of the offensive word.

Two nights later, Gregory, noting not just a packed house but one with an unusually high concentration of males in one section, correctly surmised that the disorder at the premiere was about to be repeated. She not only took the precaution of securing police protection, but also college athletes who might discourage the ruffians.

Neither tactic worked. In fact, the mob regarded the athletes as a challenge rather than an impediment to their mischief, and pummeled one of the would-be burly protectors to such an extent that he had to be carried out by one of the actors he was ostensibly guarding. From the moment the curtain rose, nearly 40 men, many equipped with tin trumpets, managed to make the play inaudible.

On Monday, February 4, Yeats--back in Dublin by this time, and having issued an invitation to debate the meaning of the play--told Abbey playgoers that the play demonstrated the rise of "a new thought, a new opinion, that we had long needed."

The reception for The Playboy of the Western World was nothing like that given at the Abbey to Synge’s Riders to the Sea, when the audience was so overwhelmed by the one-act tragedy they had just witnessed that they sat in stunned silent at the show’s conclusion.

Instead, Playboy brought to the fore internal tensions within the company, as well as the adversarial relationship that was developing between its prime movers— an overwhelmingly Protestant Irish group— and the larger Irish Catholic Dublin populace that, in its nationalist fervor, took quick offense against anything that remotely smacked of the hated stock “stage Irishman” character fostered by their longtime British overlords.

Many on that second, even more tumultuous Monday performance agreed with Joseph Holloway, a local architect who later claimed that, over 40 years, he had never missed an Abbey show. Synge, he wrote testily in his diary, possessed a “dungheap of a mind.” But he also recorded a dissent by another theatergoer, George Roberts, who said, “The play is the finest ever written if you had only the wit to see it!”

Contemporary critics and theatergoers are far more likely to side with Roberts, seeing Playboy of the Western World as a landmark in world drama, a truly original work that matched a hilarious plot twist (a cowardly youth who, mistakenly believing he’s killed his bullying father, becomes the hero of the countryside) with language that raised common peasant speech to levels of unexpected poetry and eloquence.

Time proved that Playboy of the Western World was one of the cornerstones of the Irish Literary Renaissance, a significant outpouring of talent and genius in a small land whose liberties had been traduced and language nearly destroyed by a colonial power. It became one of the best-known works of the Abbey, the first state-subsidized theater in the world.

Photo of the Day: Demarest Railroad Depot

2012-01-27T22:47:00.000-08:00

I’m a sucker not just for railroads but also for thestations that once dotted their lines. Thisparticular station, in Demarest, N.J., several miles north of where I live,was considered “the handsomest of the line” on the Northern Railroad of NewJersey. Until my (very) early childhood, in the early 1960s, passenger trainsstopped here.

My area needs another rail link to New York very,very badly. In the last few years, transportation planners and governmentofficials have, variously, tied themselves in knots or (in the case of Gov.Chris Christie) badly fumbled the ball on this issue. I rue the years when thiscountry made our passenger trains economically unfeasible. We have lostsomething environmentally useful and—in the case of this depot—aesthetically pleasingin the process.

Quote of the Day (Clive James, on U.S. vs. Foreign Talk Shows)

2012-01-27T02:55:00.000-08:00

“In Britain and Australia, most of the talk shows go on the air once a week for a limited season. In America it is more like once a day forever. The host's huge salary is his compensation for never being free to spend it. The schedule is crushing, and the top-of-the-show monologue, if the host were to write it on his own, would need a full day’s work, with no time left over for all the other preparation he has to do.”—Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (2007)

Quote of the Day (Anthony Trollope, on Winter in England)

2012-01-26T02:19:00.000-08:00

“The comic almanacs give us dreadful pictures of January and February; but, in truth, the months which should be made to look gloomy in England are March and April. Let no man boast himself that he has got through the perils of winter till at least the seventh of May.”—Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne (1858)

Photo of the Day: Colors of the (Fall) Day

2012-01-25T22:25:00.000-08:00

I took this photograph what feels like a long timeago: late October 2008, around Concord, Mass. I’d like to think it’s WaldenPond, but I didn’t label this when I had the chance.

Quote of the Day (Tennessee Williams, on Memory)

2012-01-25T03:00:00.000-08:00

“Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.”—Tennessee Williams, Stage Directions for Scene 1 of The Glass Menagerie (1944)

Photo of the Day: Now, What Was That About Snow?

2012-01-24T21:23:00.000-08:00

I took this photo of Depot Park, down the street from me in Englewood, N.J., after rain had washed away the weekend snow. Towering in the back, partly hidden by trees, is my spiritual home for virtually my whole life, St. Cecilia’s Roman Catholic Church.

Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on the ‘Social Aristocracy’ of Her Youth)

2012-01-24T04:38:00.000-08:00

“The readers (and I should doubtless have been among them) who twenty years ago would have smiled at the idea that time could transform a group of bourgeois colonials and their republican descendants into a sort of social aristocracy, are now better able to measure the formative value of nearly three hundred years of social observance: the concerted living up to long-established standards of honour and conduct, of education and manners. The value of duration is slowly asserting itself against the welter of change, and sociologists without a drop of American blood in them have been the first to recognize what the traditions of three centuries have contributed to the moral wealth of our country. Even negatively, these traditions have acquired, with the passing of time, an unsuspected value. When I was young it used to seem to me that the group in which I grew up was like an empty vessel into which no new wine would ever again be poured. Now I see that one of its uses lay in preserving a few drops of an old vintage too rare to be savoured by a youthful palate; and I should like to atone for my unappreciativeness by trying to revive that faint fragrance.”—Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934)

Yes, I know that I had two posts, on the short story “The Triumph of Night” and the novella Ethan Frome, at the end of last year. Some of you might have a feeling of déjà vu over this.

But it seems to me we can never celebrate enough the achievement of Edith Wharton, born on this date in 1862. She would be appalled to know that her childhood home, at 14 West 23^rd Street, instead of featuring select people of her class being invited to afternoon tea, has been converted into a Starbucks that provides liquid refreshment to the masses (or, at least, those of the masses okay with paying the inflated New York price for varying species of coffee).

She was a snob, sorry to say. But among the giants of American literature, that’s a relatively venial sin. The important thing was that she could write brilliantly--clearly, elegantly--and that she was not blind to the failings of the “social aristocracy” in which she was born.

The excerpt from Wharton’s autobiography quoted above points to an evolution in her thinking about the past and her class. She was still capable of the kind of sublimely witty observation she tossed off in The Age of Innocence: “An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.”

But “twenty years ago” from the publication of A Backward Glance, World War I had blown the world to hell. For all its restraints on individual freedom and the ability of men and women to form what a character in The House of Mirth called “a republic of the spirit,” the New York elite had at least preserved order--a value in noticeably short supply not just in war-torn Europe, but afterward, in Prohibition America.

As she eyed the past, Wharton must have felt as if she were commemorating ghosts. Her memoir was dedicated “to the friends who every year on All Souls Night come and sit with me by the fire,” and her last tale, completed before her death in 1937, was the ghost story “All Souls.”

Photo of the Day: Brownstone View, Upper West Side

2012-01-23T21:49:00.000-08:00

This photo, which I took at the end of the year, shows somewhere in the vicinity of 76^th Street.

Quote of the Day (Will Rogers, on How Elections Are Like Marriages)

2012-01-23T02:21:00.000-08:00

"Elections are a good deal like marriages. There's no accounting for anyone's taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it's the same with public officials."—Attributed to American humorist and man-of-all-media Will Rogers (1879-1935)

Photo of the Day: Two for a Ride In the Park

2012-01-22T20:55:00.000-08:00

Yet another photo I took, on the last Friday of 2011, in Central Park.

Song Lyric of the Day (Craig Finn, on How the Cross Exists For Those ‘Confused and Cold and Scared’)

2012-01-22T08:31:00.000-08:00

“We're awake and we're aware
That we're confused and cold and scared
And the cross reminds us that He died for me and you.”—Craig Finn, “Honolulu Blues,” from his Clear Hearts, Full Eyes CD (2012)

I had never heard of Craig Finn, nor his longtime rock ‘n’ roll band the Hold Steady, let alone this new solo CD, until I read David Carr’s profile of the singer-songwriter in today’s New York Times. Originally from Minnesota, Finn now resides in Brooklyn, where, according to the article, he now attends, when he can, St. Anthony-St. Alphonsus Roman Catholic Church.

For those who went to hear this tune, here’s the YouTube link.

Song Lyric of the Day (David Crosby, Influencing Newt?)

2012-01-21T23:38:00.000-08:00

“So you see what we can do
Is to try something new —that is if you're crazy too
But I don't really see, why can't we go on as three.”—“Triad,” written by David Crosby, from the CD 4 Way Street, performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (1971)

What a difference sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll makes! In October 1967, Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman sacked Byrds bandmate David Crosby for pushing the group too hard to play his songs. The last straw was probably “Triad,” which the future CSNY legend later stated was about “lust and perversion.” Even for the bohemian atmosphere of Sixties rock ‘n’ roll, Crosby’s mating call for multiples was the equivalent of stepping on the third rail.

But the song did end up getting performed--not just by CSNY, but also by Jefferson Airplane, on their 1968 “Crown of Creation” LP. And so, it began to penetrate, slowly, into the general public consciousness.

Could it be that one of those affected was Newt Gingrich? You’d never think that the man who advised members of the Occupy Wall Street movement to go home and take a bath would ever consort with protesters who took a walk on the wild side. But in the late 1960s, while a grad student at Tulane University, that’s exactly what he did. It was beyond simply going one toke over the line. No, it turns out, according to an essay by Tim Wise, that during this time, Gingrich also backed the idea that the student newspaper should be allowed to print photos of nude statues with enlarged genitalia, along with shots of the sculptor himself also in the altogether.

Maybe at one of these protest sessions, Newt first heard Crosby’s musings about a different kind of love. That might be speculation, but where else could such an innocent, impressionable mind such as Gingrich’s find out about this stuff?

In the old days, they used to call “this stuff” “free love,” but today’s Tea Party-friendly Newt would probably call it something else. “Free,” after all, sounds vaguely Communistic. He’d probably want to label it “an opportunity relationship,” though the “opportunity” sounds as if it would have benefited one person only: himself.

Which brings us, inevitably, to his role in the increasingly nutty GOP Presidential race. The same day that Gingrich heard that Rick Perry was not only withdrawing, but throwing his support behind him, the news broke of the ABC News interview with the former House Speaker’s second wife, in which Marianne Gingrich claimed that he pressed her for an “open marriage” as their relationship came to an end.

Former White House speechwriter Peggy Noonan wasn’t alone among Republican old pros when she speculated, in her weekly Wall Street Journal column, that the latter news “is going to have an impact. ” The funny thing was, that view turned out to be dead wrong--at least for now.

It’s hard not to interpret Gingrich’s double-digit victory margin in the South Carolina primary as “Annoy the Media Day.” How else to view this tally as anything but that, in a state with evangelicals who, under normal circumstances, would shake their heads and flood talk-radio stations wiht complaints about the shame of this all?

In the wake of the Clinton-Lewinsky imbroglio, all the old, familiar rules about politicians and sexual waywardness have been scrambled. Clinton and Rudolph Guiliani went out of office with sky-high ratings, but the public didn’t look so kindly on others. Arnold Schwarzegger earned a “Sperminator” tag for knocking up the family help, and John Edwards finds himself with all doors to future high office closed to him for the foreseeable future, even if he survives his current simultaneous legal and health crises.

In this world-turned-upside-down, Anthony Weiner lost favor in his heavily Democratic district in New York--yes, the same place that most South Carolinians probably view as akin to Sodom and Gomorrah--after his experiments with social media turned him into a national joke. How unlike the big, fat wet electoral kiss South Carolina voters just bestowed on Gingrich!

Predictably, Gingrich has lambasted the media for dredging up a matter more than a decade old and not concentrating on real issues. Many people are going to find that a bit odd coming from the same politician who brought up a matter nearly a half century old--i.e., his speculation that the “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior” that President Obama inherited from his father is “the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”

Gingrich has called Marianne Gingrich’s claim about the open marriage “false,” but he is saying this on the stump. Were he to be hauled into court on the matter, he might be forced into an admission to the contrary (as Bill Clinton was, five years after denying any involvement with Gennifer Flowers), or run the risk of having a jury weigh his ex-’s truthfulness versus his own. Based on his past admitted adulteries and his reprimand for violating House ethics rules, such a test is hardly a slam dunk for Gingrich.

Like Clinton--so like him in his academic leanings outside of politics, his baby-boomer background, his outsized ambition and ego, and his difficulties with marriage vows--Gingrich has become a marker in the culture wars. Some, in fact, might find him a bizarre cross between Clinton and Edwards, then somehow squared--a serial philanderer who cheated not just on one wife, but two--wives, be it noted, who were about to experience severe health crises.

Photo of the Day: View From Central Park West

2012-01-20T23:29:00.000-08:00

I’m much taken with views toward a river. So I couldn’t help pulling out my camera, while standing at Naturalists’ Gate on Central Park West, and shooting this street scene of the view west. Off, far in the distance, even beyond the shaft of light at the vanishing point of this shot, looms New Jersey, where I live.

Quote of the Day (Richard Henry Lee, With an Early Blow for American Liberty)

2012-01-20T23:14:00.000-08:00

“As the Stamp Act does absolutely direct the property of the people to be taken from them without their consent expressed by their representatives and as in many cases it deprives the British American Subject of his right to trial by jury; we do determine, at every hazard, and paying no regard to danger or to death, we will exert every faculty, to prevent the execution of the said Stamp Act in any instance whatsoever within this Colony. And every abandoned wretch, who shall be so lost to virtue and public good, as wickedly to contribute to the introduction or fixture of the Stamp Act in this Colony, by using stampt paper, or by any other means, we will, with the utmost expedition, convince all such profligates that immediate danger and disgrace shall attend their prostitute purposes.”--From the Leedstown (or Westmoreland) Resolves, co-authored by Richard Henry Lee, February 27, 1766

The half-century relationship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson is so overwhelming that it practically sucks the air out of all remaining discussion of politics in the Continental Congress. You’d think they were the only important allies in the struggle to declare American independence. But not only were they not the only allies in Independence Hall in 1776, but Jefferson probably wasn’t even Adams’ key partner in the Virginia delegation.

It might have been Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence, but it was fellow Virginian Richard Henry Lee—born on this day in 1732—who introduced the blockbuster resolution “that these united Colonies are, and ought to be, free and independent States” (language that Jefferson incorporated as the climax of his document).

Revolutionary War historian Pauline Maier (American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence) has gone so far as to state, to American Heritage magazine, that Jefferson was “the most overrated person in American history." That might be stretching matters, but there’s no doubt that the Sage of Monticello benefited from founding one of America’s two enduring parties and from his prolific, superb writing.

In contrast, Lee’s image in the popular imagination has been shaped disproportionately by the musical 1776, where, in his big number, he acts, in the words of historian-novelist Thomas Fleming, in an essay contributed to Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, like “a giggling buffoon“ for whom “the idea of independence would never have occurred to him in a million years [without Adams and Ben Franklin]" before he "rides wildly off to do their bidding.” Adams, predictably, can’t wait to see the last of this galoot.

That scene might be the biggest departure from fact in the musical. The reality, as Fleming observes, is that Lee was, “after Adams, the most powerful orator in Congress.” (Certainly more so than Jefferson, who, throughout his long public career, could barely manage to make himself audible.)

Adams found few delegates outside of New England so congenial, in politics and temperament, as Lee:

* The latter’s deep, classics-based education gave him a common background and frame of reference as the Harvard graduate;

* His austerity made him, in Fleming’s words, a kind of “Virginia puritan”;

* His first bill in the House of Burgesses in 1759, proposing an end to the trafficking in slavery in Virginia, would have appealed to the deeply antislavery Adams;

* As a Virginian, Lee could be listened to in a way denied to John and cousin Samuel Adams, who were widely regarded as representatives of a hotbed of radicalism in Massachusetts;

* His bitterness toward corrupt elites (even though he himself was from a longstanding colonial aristocracy) in his state mirrored that of the rising Massachusetts lawyer-farmer; and

* His speeches on behalf of independence were exceeded only by the Adams cousins in number and fire.

That last quality is important. The American Revolution has frequently been contrasted with the French and Russian Revolutions as supposedly “conservative.” But that notion is deeply misguided, as Gordon S. Wood demonstrated in his brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning study, The Radicalism of the American Revolution. You can sense just how mistaken it is by re-reading the quote that started this post--or, better yet, by reading the Westmoreland Resolves in their entirety.

Lee and the other signers of this document are not merely announcing their opposition to the controversial Stamp Act, or even that they will act against those who aim to collect it. No, they are threatening “immediate danger and disgrace” even to anyone who uses the hated stamps. Few other pre-Revolutionary documents bristle so much with ferocity.

There is a sequel to this story about the alliance between Adams and Lee. I’m not speaking here merely of the praise the aged Declaration signer and President heaped on his old colleague when Lee’s grandson wrote him in 1821 about the Virginian’s contribution to independence. (“As a public speaker, he [Lee] had a fluency as easy and graceful as it was melodious”).

No, I mean what happened on January 19, 1907--the centennial of the birth of Robert E. Lee, Richard’s great-nephew. The guest speaker for the celebration in Lexington, Va., at Washington and Lee University was Charles Francis Adams Jr.--great-grandson of John Adams.

A Union colonel during the Civil War who had fought against Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg, Adams had come to appreciate the Confederate’s refusal to obey Jefferson Davis’ desire for a guerrilla campaign at the end of the war, as well as the general’s personal qualities. Adams’ Lexington address had an extraordinary impact, raising the reputation of Lee in the North (where, until then, something of the odor of treason still clung to him) to match its nearly demigod level in the South.

Paul Nagel, a biographer of both the Adams and Lee clans, summed up the effect of Adams’ speech in The Lees of Virginia: “An old warrior himself, Adams had converted a Confederate general into civilization’s hope by arguing that Lee’s gentle, loving, selfless virtues must somehow recapture America.”

More than a century and a quarter after the summer of independence in Philadelphia, the Adams family of Massachusetts had, in its way, returned the favor to their Virginia allies and friends, the Lees.

Photo of the Day: Mr. T at the Central Park T

2012-01-19T21:47:00.000-08:00

The Mr. T of the headline is not the massivepersonality of the big and small screen but the CEO of this blog. The “CentralPark T” is near Naturalist’s Gate, across from the New-York Historical Society.This particular landscape configuration so caught my eye that I had to take theaccompanying picture.

Quote of the Day (Meryl Streep, on Pretending)

2012-01-19T02:31:00.000-08:00

“Pretending is a very valuable life skill.”—Meryl Streep, quoted in “Quotes,” Reader’s Digest, October 2011

Easy for you to say, Meryl, what with that new Golden Globe (for Iron Lady) to go with your Oscars and who knows how many other awards? But what if someone’s not ready for stage or screen?

Then, as they say, it depends.

If you pretend to be a police officer, for instance, you may wind up in court. If you pretend to have clients’ money when you don’t, same thing. If you pretend to be an honest, competent steward of the public trust…

Well, then you might run for President.

Movie Quote of the Day (Oliver Hardy, on ‘Another NICE Mess’)

2012-01-18T04:03:00.000-08:00

Ollie (played by Oliver Hardy): "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into."--The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case (1930), written by H.M. Walker, directed by James Parrott

For years, I’ve operated under the assumption that Oliver Hardy--born on this date in 1892 in Harlem, Ga.--used the word “fine” rather than “nice.” Not really so, though the reason for the misunderstanding is understandable.

Hardy and rubber-faced British foil Stan Laurel did make a movie from 1930 called Another Fine Mess, but the famous phrase was never actually used in that film, or any other. Instead, the operative word--in that movie, as well as another 15 stretching from 1930 to 1951--was nice.

Okay, it may be nice--or fine--that we’ve cleared that up. But here’s the really remarkable thing about the careers of Stan and rotund Ollie: of the movie comics chronicled in Walter Kerr’s seminal analysis The Silent Clowns, only this comedy duo not only maintained the level of their popularity into the sound era, but even raised it, to the point where many regarded the pair as the greatest film comedy team of all time.

This Day in Exploration History (Scott Loses Race to South Pole, Then His Life)

2012-01-17T20:54:00.000-08:00

January 17, 1912—Captain Robert Falcon Scott, reached one of the last Holy Grails of the Age of Exploration, the South Pole, only to find it a hollow victory. Not only had Norwegian rival Roald Amundsen beaten him in the race to the Pole, but now the 43-old British explorer and his crew found themselves in the vast reaches of the desolate Antarctic facing bitter weather that was worsening—and dwindling supplies.

“Great God!” Scott wrote in his journal. “This is an awful place, and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”

Two and a half months later, Scott and his men would perish. If he hadn’t achieved the goal to which he had committed the last dozen years of his life, though, he had won a place in the hearts of his countrymen, with his posthumously published journal acclaimed as an example of the kind of stiff-upper-lip resolve that had given truth to the line that “the sun never sets on the British Empire.”

In his last log entry, the explorer wrote: “Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman."

In 1948, the film world produced its own account of his last voyage, Scott of the Antarctic, with Scott‘s log and personal effects of his crew loaned by the British Museum to enhance the near-documentary feeling of the movie. Ralph Vaughan Williams’ intense score only added to the mood of impending tragedy.

Nearly four decades later, Masterpiece Theatre would offer a rather less romanticized take on the expedition in The Last Place on Earth. The PBS miniseries, based on a comparative account of the Amundsen and Scott expeditions by Roland Huntford, presented a much less idealized version of the British explorer. Amundsen’s meticulousness in planning every detail was contrasted with Scott’s style of winging it, and the Norwegian’s willingness to learn from native peoples of the polar regions on proper clothing and the best animal to use for the polar push (hardy sled dogs) with Scott, so caught up in national chauvinism to appreciate these same insights.

Even Scott’s onetime crew member (on the 1901-04 Discovery expedition) and later polar rival, Ernest Shackleton, is coming in for greater respect now. Which one is getting the TV hero treatment? (See Kenneth Branagh in Shackleton.) Which is having papers written about him at Wharton, and even becoming the subject of extended learning plans on leadership? Which is being voted the greater polar explorer in a BBC poll?

Scott, even despite the compliment paid to him in the following quote from another British explorer, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, would have bristled at the conclusion: “For a joint scientific and geographical piece of organization, give me Scott; for a Winter Journey, Wilson; for a dash to the Pole and nothing else, Amundsen: and if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time.”

Photo of the Day: Icy Premonition

2012-01-17T03:05:00.000-08:00

Yet another photo I took on Saturday while in the largely empty field in Overpeck County Park, near where I live in Bergen County, N.J.

Last night, before going to bed, I saw more than ice on the ground--there was evidence of the white stuff. Now, I know that both the absence of cold temperatures and snow has been rather unusual so far this winter, but I still get concerned at the prospect, no matter how remote, of serious snow shoveling, so I was glad this morning to find no evidence of what I saw last night, except for a thin film of ice. (Which, come to think of it, is still unwelcome, as I’d have to walk in it later.)

Quote of the Day (Bill Cosby, on His Awful College Team)

2012-01-17T02:17:00.000-08:00

"Every school - the name had a 'berg' at the end of it. Muhlenberg, Gettysburg, Shippensburg. We lost to all of them.”—Bill Cosby, on his college football opponents at Temple University, quoted in Neil Genzlinger, “CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK: Mining Cosby’s Golden Past,” The New York Times, January 11, 2012

Well, according to an earlier Times story on the legendary comic and actor, Cosby exaggerated his team’s ineptitude--somewhat (5-11-2, in two seasons). It still sounds as if he rues not having listened to his grandfather’s advice when he was a young: “Do. Not. Play. Football.” The reason? “Your. Bones. Are. Not. Set. Yet.”

Quite a few professional football mastodons--including members of the 28 teams who won’t be going to the Super Bowl this year--are dealing with aching bones, or worse, this morning, undoubtedly wishing they had better sense than to get involved with the game.

Quote of the Day (Martin Luther King Jr., on Nonviolence and What Is ‘Worth Dying For’)

2012-01-16T07:24:00.000-08:00

“This method [nonviolence] has a way of disarming the opponent. It exposes his moral defenses. It weakens his morale, and at the same time it works on his conscience, and he just doesn’t know what to do. If he doesn’t beat you, wonderful. If he beats you, you develop the quiet courage of accepting blows without retaliating. If he doesn’t put you in jail, wonderful. Nobody with any sense likes to go to jail. But if he puts you in jail, you go in that jail and transform it from a dungeon of shame to a haven of freedom and human dignity. And even if he tries to kill you, you’ll develop the inner conviction that there are some things so dear, some things so precious, some things so eternally true, that they are worth dying for. And I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Speech at the Great March on Detroit,” June 23, 1963

Photo of the Day: Icy Web

2012-01-15T23:13:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, even with temperatures plunging dramatically and the wind picking up, I still felt the need for air and exercise outside. While walking the largely empty field in Overpeck County Park, near where I live in Bergen County, N.J., I took this close-up of a cracked frozen patch.

Quote of the Day (Fr. John Courtney Murray, on the ‘Spectacle of a Civil Society’)

2012-01-15T13:35:00.000-08:00

“We face a crisis that is new in history. We would do well to face it with a new cleanliness of imagination, in the realization that internecine strife, beyond some inevitable human measure, is a luxury we can no longer afford. … Perhaps the time has come when we should endeavor to dissolve the structure of war that underlies the pluralistic society, and erect the more civilized structure of the dialogue. It would be no less sharply pluralistic, but rather more so, since the real pluralisms would be clarified out of their present confusion. And amid the pluralism a unity would be discernible—the unity of an orderly conversation. The pattern would not be that of ignorant armies clashing by night but of informed men locked together in argument in the full light of a new dialectical day. Thus we might present to a ‘candid world’ the spectacle of a civil society.”—John Courtney Murray, S.J. (1904-1967), We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (1960)

Quote of the Day (Alistair Cooke on Bogie, ‘Saved and Soured by Time’)

2012-01-14T20:01:00.000-08:00

“It is fair to guess that far back in the Coward- Lonsdale era, [Humphrey] Bogart was always his own man. He no doubt stood in the wings in his blazer chuckling acidly over the asininities on stage, and he would have been the first man to question that youth ever deposited its bloom on him. But for a long time it obscured, in a sleek complexion, bold eyes and a lid of black hair, his essential and very individual character and its marvelous adaptability to one of the more glamorous neuroses of the incoming day and age: that of the hard-bitten ‘private eye,’ the neutral sceptic in a world exploding with crusades and the treachery they invite. He probably had no notion, in his endless strolls across the stage drawing-rooms of the Twenties, he was being saved and soured by Time to become the romantic democratic answer to Hitler’s new order. “—Alistair Cooke, “Humphrey Bogart: Epitaph for a Tough Guy,” in Six Men: Charlie Chaplin, Edward VIII, H. L. Mencken, Humphrey Bogart, Adlai Stevenson, Bertrand Russell (1977)

A cigarette never seemed far from the lips of Humphrey Bogart in his films, and on this date in 1957 it finally caught up with him, as he succumbed to cancer. Death concluded a career in which he became one of Hollywood’s most honored actors, but it hardly ended the public’s fascination with his persona.

That voice, one of the most distinctive of the sound era in Hollywood, epitomized the word “snarl.” It seemed redolent not merely of all the cigarettes that a Bogart character (or the actor himself) smoked, but of all the booze he consumed. It captured what mystery novelist Raymond Chandler meant when he observed that the actor could be “tough without a gun.”

It was a distinct surprise for me to learn, then, that Bogart’s beginnings were far more benign. Oh, I knew the odd bit of trivia that onstage, he had made famous the eternal cry of preppies: “Tennis, anyone?” But I hadn’t realized, until I visited the Ernest Hemingway Museum in Oak Park, Illinois, that Bogart’s mother, a prominent commercial illustrator, used her baby boy as a model for a baby food ad. (I wrote about this in a prior post.)

As you might expect, Bogart had a sour wisecrack about this: “There was a period in American history when you couldn’t pick up a goddamned magazine without seeing my kisser on it.” But with time, I’ve come to wonder about deeper affinities between Hemingway and Bogart.

In the Quote of the Day, one phrase from Cooke (who got to know Bogie and his last wife, Lauren Bacall, while covering the first Presidential campaign of Adlai Stevenson, whom the two actors backed) really strikes me: the part about a “neutral sceptic in a world exploding with crusades and the treasury they invite.” Actually, it hints at more than the Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe roles that Bogart played in classic film noir. It’s also the essence of the early, and best, Ernest Hemingway fiction.

Gary Cooper might be the actor most identified with the closest thing to successful adaptations of Hemingway that Hollywood ever made (i.e., the original Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls). His looks made him a natural for those works by the novelist featuring a love story, and his love of the outdoors made him a boon comrade to the novelist.

In contrast, Bogart was identified with what might have been the loosest adaptation of a Hemingway novel that Hollywood ever made: To Have and Have Not. I can’t imagine him competing with Cooper in the great outdoors. But in attitude, Bogie, rather than Coop, might be best regarded as the disillusioned but proud Hemingway Hero.

Consider what might be the key line of that novel, from its hero, Harry Morgan: "No matter how, a man alone ain't got no bloody fucking chance." It speaks of a too-deep knowledge of the world. Optimism is for chumps.

Lack of illusion might make you street-smart and tough, but it also makes you weary and sad—qualities that, I think, come through in the image accompanying this post. Like Hemingway's Jake Barnes, not to mention the later Frederic Henry, the Bogie hero is an outsider, no matter which side of the law from which he operates.

But, as the fascist threat loomed larger on the verge of WWII, Hemingway moved his protagonists—still doomed—to a recognition of collective action. War was a dirty business, but sometimes, as when facing a Hitler, there might not be any alternative, and in that case you’d better get it done and over with.

Bogart’s success with The Maltese Falcon moved him into a position where he could become Warner Brothers’ embodiment of America as reluctant—but, in the event, all the more effective—warrior and ally. Casablanca was only the most obvious example of how the actor became, to use Cooke’s formulation, “the romantic democratic answer to Hitler’s new order." There’s also his felicitously named character Sgt. Joe Gunn, leader of a polyglot American tank crew, hopelessly outnumbered against Nazis in North Africa, in the 1943 film Sahara.

More intriguingly, there’s Key Largo, in 1948—superficially an opportunity to bring together two of the iconic actors associated with the gangster picture, Bogart and Edward G. Robinson. In reality, it’s a political allegory of the fight against fascism.

“I had hopes once, but I gave them up,” Bogart’s war vet, Frank McCloud says.

“Hopes for what?” asks Robinson’s crime kingpin, Johnny Rocco.

“A world in which there's no place for Johnny Rocco.”

McCloud’s decision to act against Rocco parallels long-isolationist America’s entrance into the war. The actor who played the reluctant hero became such a symbol of his nation’s cool resolve that Nobel Prize-winning novelist Albert Camus--himself a member of his country’s Resistance--effected, with his cigarette and trench coat, the style of Bogart.

For an interesting take on the actor and his persona--not to mention the Stefan Kanfer recent bio, Tough Without a Gun--see this post from the classic-film blog “Out of the Past” from its creator, Raquelle.

This Day in Baseball History (First Lady Ump Wins First Legal Round)

2012-01-13T23:01:00.000-08:00

January 13, 1972— The New York Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Bernice Gera in her attempt to become the first female professional umpire. The victory was short-lived, however, as five months later, the former housewife was subjected to such abuse from players and fans--and lack of support from male umpires--that she quit after her first game.

I first came across the story of Gera in a marvelous essay collection by Nora Ephron, Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women. Forget about her derivative, often snaky work as screenwriter and director: Ephron’s real calling is as an essayist. Her January 1973 piece one on Gera, written shortly after the latter’s failed attempt at breaking into the game, is shadowed by irony: I.e., the would-be feminist icon that somehow failed the movement. Yet, for all Ephron’s wishes that everything would have turned out differently for Gera and women’ s liberation, you can’t help but like this baseball lover.

Four decades later--and two decades after Gera’s death--it’s even harder not to feel sympathy for her. Reading her story, you might wish that she had succeeded as a rule-breaking pioneer, but then might have been glad that she did not, when you consider the physical and psychic toll that prolonged disrespect might have exacted on her.

What Gera was facing was probably best described by a later woman who got closer--but still didn’t fulfill--her dream of becoming a major-league umpire, Pam Postema. “Almost all of the people in the baseball community don’t want anyone interrupting their little male-dominated way of life.,“ she wrote in her 1992 memoir, You’ve Got to Have Balls to Make It in This League. “They want big, fat male umpires. They want those macho, tobacco-chewing, sleazy sort of borderline alcoholics.”

It was even worse for Gera. Two and a half decades after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball, Art Williams was having a tough time becoming the first black umpire in the National League (a situation recounted in Lee Gutkind’s 1975 The Best Seat in Baseball, But You Have to Stand). If a black umpire seemed difficult for many to accept even at that late date, the concept of a female umpire was impossible.

By Gera’s own later account, she didn’t really want to be a revolutionary, or disrupt the game she had come to love so well. She would have been content to have been a goodwill ambassador for the game, serving in some sort of community relations program.

But matters took a turn for the worse when, after graduating from a Florida umpire-training school, she applied for a job with the New York-Penn League, near her Jackson Heights, N.Y. home. The league’s agreement to offer her a contract was rejected by the president of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, who unsuccessfully invoked a minimum-size requirement to try to keep her out.

The courage of Robinson, Curt Flood, and Roberto Clemente in breaking down racial, ethnic and labor barriers is not to be underestimated. Gera, however, was virtually isolated. The opposition of the male mossbacks of baseball, such as the now-justly-forgotten commissioner, General William Eckert (she would become an umpire “over my dead body, he vowed), was to be expected.

Less well known, however, was that Gera was taking her case through the courts without the help of the feminist movement, which was just then emerging as a significant political and legal force. According to a Craig Davis profile of Gera in a 1989 South Florida Sun-Sentinel article, not one women’s organization assisted her in her court battle. This made doubly ironic the later contention of many feminists that she had set back the movement when she quit her job.

Many were chagrined when Gera resigned after a single New York-Pennsylvania League game in Geneva, N.Y., in June 1972, less than six months after she won in court. It seemed as if she had one fight with a manager who didn’t like one of her calls, then threw in the towel. But it wasn’t that simple.

Gera had spent four years in court only to find that, the closer her dream was coming to fruition, the harder became the resistance to it. She continued to receive threatening letters and late-night calls, and the portents for her first game proved particularly ominous: Not only were fans taunting and abusing her, but the other umpire refused to speak to her as the game started. His behavior was startling and unprofessional, as it meant that these game partners would not know the elementary signals that would allow them to function as a working team.

That’s what happened in the sixth inning of the game, when Gera, momentarily confused by a play, immediately reversed herself. When the manager of the team suffering the reversed call rushed out to protest, Gera let him jabber on and on, feeling he had a legitimate gripe because she had initially blown the call. Finally, she felt compelled to act when he called into question her basic authority: “You made two mistakes. The first was leaving the kitchen; you should have been home peeling potatoes.” Gera ejected him, completed the last few innings, then, before the second game of the double-header, resigned.

Sportscaster Dick Schaap, echoing a comment made by an interviewee about Gera, noted, perhaps ironically, “She committed the cardinal sin of baseball--she admitted she made a mistake.” How times have changed! A year and a half ago, major-league umpire Jim Joyce manned up and admitted he had blown a call that cost a pitcher a perfect game. Even his teary greeting of the pitcher, the next time they encountered it each other, was regarded as the epitome of honesty, even a guide to politicians on how to behave after a mistake has become all too public.

In contrast, reactions to Gera at the time for similar behavior amounted to, “What do you expect?” from antediluvian crowd, and “She let down the movement” from the presumably more enlightened. And so, even though she vowed to Ephron, “Don’t count me out; I expect to be in baseball next year,” she would never umpire a professional game again.

The New York Mets have been taking it on the chin lately for the Wilpons’ financial misadventures. However, even a team that is otherwise horribly run can have real moments of grace. I’m speaking, in this case, of the Mets regime under M. Donald Grant. The team board chairman did succeed in, among many other sins, driving away star Tom Seaver and manager-to-be Whitey Herzog, but the team did during that time employ Gera for five years as part of its community relations and promotions team.

Nobody should ever have questioned the toughness of Gera, a product of a broken home in an industrialized region of Pennsylvania. Even to get to her one game umpiring, she had to endure a pioneer’s struggle, consisting, in Ephron’s words, “of the loneliness she will suffer if she gets the job, of the role she will assume as a freak, of the smarmy and inevitable questions that will be raised about her heterosexuality, of the derision and smug satisfaction that will follow if she makes a mistake, or breaks down under pressure, or quits.”

Two decades after her lawsuit and her exit from the game, Gera died after struggling against cancer, enduring at least 31 radiation treatments, medication that left her woozy, and an operation to restore the use of her right arm that only worsened matters. She was as tough and brave as they come--fully the equal of those who rejected her from the "summer game."

Quote of the Day (Tim Parks, on the ‘Excitement of Reading’)

2012-01-13T02:12:00.000-08:00

“The excitement of reading is the precarious one of being alive now.”—Tim Parks, in Stop What You’re Doing and Read This!, edited by Mark Haddon (2011)

Quote of the Day (Wolcott Gibbs, With Advice to Editors)

2012-01-12T02:27:00.000-08:00

“Try to preserve an author’s style if he is an author and has a style.”—New Yorker theater critic Wolcott Gibbs, quoted in Backward Ran Sentences: The Best of Wolcott Gibbs from the New Yorker, edited by Thomas Vinciguerra (2011)

Quote of the Day (Richard Cohen, Likening Romney to ‘Archie’s’ Reggie)

2012-01-11T18:39:00.000-08:00

"Mitt Romney is starting to get on my nerves. He reminds me of Reggie, the rich, handsome, athletic and effortlessly superficial character in the “Archie” comics. He does almost everything well, and he looks like a million bucks (leveraged for much more), but he rings hollow, like the class president who would bring glee to all of Riverdale High by slipping on a banana peel. I’d kill for that.”—Richard Cohen, “Romney’s Aw-Shucks Rhetoric Rings False,” The Washington Post, January 9, 2012

This Day in Theater History (‘Finian’s Rainbow,’ Filled with Irish Blarney, Opens)

2012-01-10T21:56:00.000-08:00

January 10, 1947--From Edward Harrigan and partner Tony Hart in the 19^th century to George M. Cohan in the first few decades of the 20^th century, Irish-Americans have made major contributions to advancing the American musical. But perhaps the one that has helped perpetuate their image of whimsy, Finian’s Rainbow, involved no Celtic songwriters at all. The creators, E.Y. “Yip” Harburg and Burton Lane, were products of the Tin Pan Alley tradition, dominated largely by descendants of immigrant Jews.

When the musical was turned into a film 20 years later, it featured three other exceptionally well-known individuals of Irish descent: Petula Clark (then at the height of her career), director Francis Ford Coppola (then beginning his), and Frederick Austerlitz, a.k.a. Fred Astaire (near the end of his, in this last musical of his).

You'll have to pardon the heavy-handed irony in the last paragraph, but in a way, it mirrors the libretto of this show, which is actually a satire on racism in the American South. The setting is an American state called Missitucky, and the show's race-baiting Senator Billboard Rawkins would, in the 1940s, have been a recognizable lampoon of Senator Theodore Bilbo. For his sins, he is turned into a black man, where he comes to see the errors of his ways.

In contrast, the primary image of the Irish in this musical is similar to what historian Terry Golway, author of The Irish in America, a companion volume to the PBS documentary series The Long Voyage Home, called “Hollywood's idea of acceptably Irish movies": i.e., "affable blarney that spoke to sentiment, not reality.” Finian's Rainbow premiered at a point when Ireland, though untouched by WWII (in which it stayed neutral), was also an economic backwater of Europe--in fact, still a year away from, at last, formally declaring independence from Great Britain. The rather dour aspects of the time were chronicled memorably in Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Angela's Ashes.

Okay, so what if, as Wilfred Sheed wrote in his once-over-easy survey of the Great American Songbook, The House That George Built: "Although Harburg loved the idea of Ireland, his lyrics never really got out of the harbor [New York's, that is], or all that far from McSorley's Wonderful Saloon either."

Well, I suppose that the sly leprechuans and redheaded colleens of Finian's Rainbow are far better stereotypes than drunks, which represents a far more pervasive--and enduring--image.

Moreover, I’m not sure that other non-Irish songwriters would have made a better job of this show. Harburg and Lane, at least, had an essentially sunny vision of life (“Look to the Rainbow”). In contrast, given the opportunity, Stephen Sondheim, I think, would have adapted Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, which would have made an appropriate Celtic bookend to his British-set musical bloodbath Sweeney Todd.

One trait that the public frequently associates with Irish-Americans is the gift of the gab. Ironically, Harburg and Lane did not possess this, at least with each other throughout much of the production of this show, which premiered on this date at the 46^th Street Theatre. A silly wisecrack made to cast members by lyricist and co-librettist Harburg about his partner ("Don't listen to him; he's only the piano player") on the first day of rehearsals led Lane to stop speaking to his friend throughout much of the musical’s 725-performance run. It's probably just as well, then, that none of the three Tony Awards the show earned in that initial run--for orchestra conductor, featured actor and choreography--involved the songwriting team, as it would have made for some awkward moments onstage.

Well, it didn't matter, I guess. The two collaborators, both Hollywood pros (Harburg wrote the dazzlingly witty lyrics to The Wizard of Oz), were thoroughgoing professionals who created a whole raft of songs so imperishable that they've even survived the libretto, now commonly regarded as blunt and anachronistic. Many of the 11 songs became standards, including "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?", "Old Devil Moon," "Necessity," "When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich,"
"Look to the Rainbow," "If This Isn't Love," and "When I'm Not Near the Girl I Love."

The current Broadway season, as outlined in a New York Times article from the other day about composer estates authorizing revised librettos, proves that faulty "books" such as this one are no obstacle to re-mounting shows with such glorious tunes. Even New York's fine Irish Repertory Theater, despite the musical's Celtic stereotypes, staged a revival not that long ago with Melissa Errico. Broadway witnessed a 2009 production with Cheyenne Jackson. I myself saw a very, very fine version performed in Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theater back in the fall of 2005.

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

2012-01-10T21:39:00.000-08:00

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 “homosexual,” 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).

its Audiences never really took to the show, and critics pointed out, rightly, how much its premise—a conservative father barely tolerates 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 correct 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

2012-01-09T21:26:00.000-08:00

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)

2012-01-09T02:48:00.000-08:00

“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

2012-01-08T20:27:00.000-08:00

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’)

2012-01-08T10:36:00.001-08:00

“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)

2012-01-07T20:58:00.000-08:00

“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)

2012-01-06T04:02:00.000-08:00

“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.)

Photo of the Day: Pedicabs, Central Park-Style

2012-01-06T02:13:00.000-08:00

Here is another photo I took while enjoying the balmy weather last Friday in Central Park. After a couple of days of the wintry sort of blast we normally get this time of year, it sounds as if we’ll get something of a return to last Friday’s weather this weekend. I think I’ll take it.

This Day in Classical Music History (One-Armed WWI Vet Aces Ravel Piano Piece)

2012-01-05T21:32:00.000-08:00

January 5, 1932—In Vienna, Paul Wittgenstein (pictured), a piano virtuoso who lost his right arm because of wounds incurred during World War I service, performed in the world premiere of Piano Concerto for Left Hand, a composition he had commissioned.

My headline states that Wittgenstein "aced" this work, and for most people in addition to me, the idea of a person with only one arm performing anything as technical as a classical composition is itself extraordinary. But one person--really, the one, besides Wittgenstein, most concerned with this work--woulud have begged to differ.

Composer Maurice Ravel—best known to modern audiences for Bolero, the Spanish-flavored orchestral composition that, in the Bo Derek film 10, became inextricably associated with sensuality—did not attend the performance, as he was only nine days from the Paris premiere of another one of his compositions, Concerto en sol. He did not, then, see the audience’s reaction to Wittgenstein, but it is unlikely that this would have changed his opinion of the interpretation.

Wittgenstein’s initial tepid reaction, upon first listening to the music, had disheartened Ravel. In turn, when Ravel finally heard what Wittgenstein had done with his composition, he demanded that the Austrian leave it alone. That insistence meant that it would be another year before the composer would witness, in Paris, a performance of the work that satisfied him.

The premiere marked the collaboration of two intelligent, brave--and, perhaps underlying the latter quality, stubborn--musicians whose experiences in the Great War seared them for the rest of their lives. Ravel, acclaimed as the greatest postwar French classical music composer, had volunteered for service. Only five feet two inches tall, the 39-year-old composer (exempted from military service nearly 20 years before because of a hernia and general weakness), enlisted as a truck driver--a particularly hazardous duty in 1916, when he had to drive behind the front lines at Verdun, with shells exploding to the left and right of him, according to New Yorker critic Alex Ross’ account in The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Arbie Orenstein’s Ravel: Man and Musician includes a revealing postcard the composer wrote at this time, telling a friend about “the center of this city which rests in a sinister sleep.”

For all his physical fearlessness, Ravel also demonstrated significant moral courage. Despite the presence of 80 signatures of French musicians, he refused to back a proposed ban by the National League for the Defense of French Music on music by German and Austrian composers, arguing that without exposure to foreign colleagues, the nation’s musical art “would soon degenerate, becoming isolated by its academic formulas.”

During the conflict, Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin would pay tribute, in each of the piano suite’s six pieces, to the memory of a different comrade struck down in the fighting.

On the opposite side of the war, Wittgenstein just barely escaped being one of these casualties. Three days after arriving on the Russian Front with Austrian forces, he was shot in the right elbow. It was bad enough that doctors performed a clumsy amputation operation in a field hospital, but he then was confined for months in a freezing Russian prisoner-of-war camp.

Yet Wittgenstein refused to abandon the desire to perform again. After drawing a picture of a piano keyboard on an empty crate in the camp, he took, according to Alexander Waugh’s The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War, to “tapping his freezing fingers on the wooden box, listening intently to the imagined music sounding in his head and creating, in the corner of a crowded festering invalids’ ward, a tragicomic spectacle that aroused the sympathy and curiosity of his fellow prisoners and all the hospital staff."

Once demobilized, Wittgenstein pursued with a will his dream of performing as a one-armed pianist. He possessed several advantages in his attempt:

* Even before the war, his skill with his left hand had been remarked upon;

* Plugged into an extensive network of fellow musicians, he knew about the work of Leopold Godowsky, director of piano studies at Vienna’s Imperial Academy of Music, who had created a small but significant set of works specifically for the left hand; and

* The wealth of his prominent family (younger brother Ludwig became a famous philosopher) enabled him to commission new pieces for the left hand.

The latter proved especially helpful, as, over the next couple of decades, Wittgenstein played pieces written especially for him by Richard Strauss, Paul Hindemith, Benjamin Britten, Erich Maria Korngold, and Sergei Prokofiev.

This was the background when Ravel began writing his concerto with Wittgenstein in mind. Some have suggested that the composer was already aware of the difficult relationships his client had developed with prior composers. Wittgenstein’s preference for 19^th century music instead of the more avant-garde variety being created in the postwar, his desire to highlight his own playing, and his lack of diplomacy frequently annoyed collaborators. Prokokiev, for example, complained that without his disability, Wittgenstein “would not have stood out from a crowd of mediocre pianists." Moreover, because of the musician’s insistence on exclusive performing rights, he could effectively kill a piece that didn’t meet his demands--which is what happened to Paul Hindemith’s composition, which remained undiscovered in a drawer until 2003, four decades after the composer’s death.

After nine months of concentrated effort in which he put aside work on the two-handed Concerto en sol , Ravel played for his client his composition for the left hand. Characteristically, Wittgenstein made no effort to hide his feelings: “He [Ravel] was not an outstanding pianist," he recalled later, "and I wasn't overwhelmed by the composition. It always takes me a while to grow into a difficult work. I suppose Ravel was disappointed, and I was sorry, but I had never learned to pretend. Only much later, after I'd studied the concerto for months, did I become fascinated by it and realise what a great work it was.”

After the 1932 Vienna performance, an epistolary battle ensued between Ravel and Wittgenstein centering on the former’s insistence that the piece not be tinkered with. After considerable rancor, Wittgenstein finally was able to placate Ravel enough so that the composer agreed to lead the pianist and the Orchestra Symphonique de Paris in a performance of the piece, a little more than a year later. It couldn’t have come at a better time for Ravel, who had been involved in a taxi collision in the city only three months before--an incident that began an inexorable downward spiral in his health.

Critics raved about the concerto, marveling at its “sumptuous richness” and “astonishing variety.” Indeed, perhaps by this time it had finally penetrated even the prickly personality of Wittgenstein that the piece really allowed an interpreter such as himself to shine, providing at times more work than even two hands could normally handle.

Wittgenstein's ego was formidable even by the standards of creative artists, but that should not blind us to the magnitude of his achievement in this case. Far too many people, faced with staggering odds against ever appearing again on the concert stage, would have simply given up. Wittgenstein refused to accept the limits of despair, and by so doing he opened up the world of music in ways that the physically challenged can only appreciate now.

Quote of the Day (Dorothy Parker, Sizing Up--or Down--a ‘Writer of Power’)

2012-01-05T02:08:00.000-08:00

“He is beyond question a writer of power; and his power lies in his ability to make sex so thoroughly, graphically, and aggressively unattractive that one is fairly shaken to ponder how little one has been missing.”—Dorothy Parker, reviewing the novel An American Girl by Tiffany Thayer, in The New Yorker, March 18, 1933, reprinted in The Portable Dorothy Parker

TV Quote of the Day ('The Avengers,' With Typical Peel-Steed Banter)

2012-01-04T03:05:00.000-08:00

Emma Peel (played by Diana Rigg) (surveying an antique bed): “I've always rather fancied myself in one of these."

John Steed (played by Patrick Macnee): “So have I—I mean, I have, too."—The Avengers, Episode 83, “Too Many Christmas Trees,” U.K. airdate December 23, 1965, U.S. airdate August 11, 1966, written by Tony Williamson, directed by Roy Baker

When I Googled “The Avengers,” the overwhelming number of initial hits concerned a summer 2012 movie gathering together Marvel Comics superheroes. (Sigh): If Google forgets all about the tongue-in-cheek British spy-fi series of the same name, the technology that changed the world not only has no memory, but no conscience.

As a young boy in the mid-to-late Sixties, when The Avengers first aired stateside, innuendo-rich dialogue such as the above flew right over my head (or, if you prefer another cliché, under the radar). Ditto for those knowing smirks between oh-so-dashing Steed and “Mrs. Peel.”

(Question: Who was Mr. Peel? More to the point, where was he, when his wife went around saving Great Britain and Western civilization from the world’s oddest bunch of baddies—that is, when she wasn’t flirting like crazy with her bowler-attired male partner from the cryptically named “Ministry”?)

But one thing did make an impression on me: Emma Peel was not to be messed with. Steed, already middle aged, preferred foiling supervillains with his hat, umbrella, or some stratagem. Emma wasn’t averse to using her brain, but she was younger and far more athletic than Steed, who seemed positively delighted when she handled the rougher stuff.

That black-leather suit of hers radiated power from every pore, in a way it never did on Barbara Gordon, a.k.a. Batgirl on Batman, the campy American show to which I gave allegiance during these years. Batgirl was a sideshow to the Dynamic Duo, a librarian out for a little fun in fighting bad guys under the nose of her crime-fighting Gotham dad.

In contrast, any guy who dared to do something stupid with Mrs. Peel risked dismemberment at her hands. And that was only one part of its quirky appeal. As noted by blogger Tansy Rayner Roberts: “the joy of the show is in the banter, the dialogue, the beautifully tailored clothes, and the odd not-quite-speculative-fiction crimes and mysteries to be solved.”

More than a decade later, I watched Diana Rigg in a TV special in which she played Regan, one of the two evil daughters to Laurence Olivier’s King Lear. So lasting—and glorious—was the impression she made from years before that I half expected her to karate-chop the poor, foolish monarch.

Oh, sharper than a serpent’s tooth, to be done in by the ex-Mrs. Peel! What a way to go!

Photo of the Day: Raven on Broadway

2012-01-03T21:40:00.000-08:00

As I was crossing Broadway on 79^th Streetlast Friday, my eye was caught by this bronze statue, Raven on Three Great Apples. Created by Peter Woytuk, it is one ofseveral of his sculptures at various locations on Broadway.

Quote of the Day (Oscar Wilde, Impressing America Right Away)

2012-01-03T02:06:00.000-08:00

“Nothing but my genius.”—Playwright Oscar Wilde, stepping foot on American soil, responding to the usual custom agent inquiry if he had anything to declare, quoted in Arthur Ransome, Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study (1912)

In researching this famous—no, make that unforgettable—quote from Oscar Wilde, I found that sources were equally divided on whether it occurred January 2 or 3 of 1882. More astonishing to me, a post from John Cooper from the Oscar Wilde Society of America raises the dismaying but legitimate question of whether these words were uttered at all. (Recall painter-wag James McNeill Whistler’s wicked response upon hearing Wilde say, after someone else's witticism, “I wish I had said that”: “You will, Oscar, you will.”)

Whatever the exact circumstances, it remains a fact that America took quickly to the flamboyant Anglo-Irish aesthete. According to contemporary accounts, he does really seem to have expressed "disappointment in the Atlantic." By the time he was done with his visit, he had served notice that a brilliant new presence was indeed on the literary scene. But it would be fully a decade before he really did offer proof—and for such a short period before folly and catastrophe overtook him—of the genius he is reputed to have declared.

Photo of the Day: Park, Lake and City

2012-01-02T20:58:00.000-08:00

Friday, on my last day in New York City for 2011, Ipaused before visiting the New-York Historical Society to enjoy theunseasonably mild late-December weather in Central Park. Hundreds of other peoplehad the same idea, including this group I photographed by the 20-acre man-made lake—thesecond-largest in this entire majestic urban park—near the Ladies’ Pavilion.

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, with a Thought to Ponder After Seasonal Revelries)

2012-01-02T08:32:00.000-08:00

“Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with, that it's compounding a felony.”--Humorist Robert Benchley, quoted in The New Speaker's Treasury of Wit and Wisdom (1958), by Herbert Victor Prochnow

Quote of the Day (G. K. Chesterton, on the New Year and the New Man)

2012-01-01T10:16:00.000-08:00

“The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards. Unless a man be born again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”—G.K. Chesterton, The G.K. Chesterton Calendar: A Quotation From the Works of G. K. Chesterton for Every Day in the Year (1921)

This Day in Presidential History (Lincoln Fends Off Critics)

2011-12-31T23:44:00.001-08:00

December 31, 1861— As the first year of his administration drew to a close, President Abraham Lincoln sought to ease the concerns of a small group of meddlesome but highly influential Congressmen that the direction of the effort to crush the Confederacy needed to be changed quickly. Seldom has the Clausewitz dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means been demonstrated so much as in Lincoln’s attempt to maintain unity between the nation’s representatives and its armed forces, as well as among the states.

The postwar public deification of Lincoln should not blind us to the fact that, well into his administration, he had neither a master plan to win the Civil War nor the extensive military experience that provided instant credibility for George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower on national-security issues. His was, inescapably, a reactive Presidency: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me,” Lincoln wrote in a letter in April 1864.

The subject of this letter was the measures Lincoln had adopted to advance the Union effort. His observation that “indispensable necessity” had guided him throughout, despite seeming policy changes, can be seen nowhere more vividly than with the slavery issue.

As much as he had felt a bone-deep hatred for "the peculiar institution" since a trip down the Mississippi to Louisiana in the early 1830s, Lincoln felt that he had to tread cautiously in stamping it out, and not only because that action would break a campaign promise only to limit its spread, not to interfere where it curently operated. Use of slaves to crush the Confederacy by force might only lead border states such as Kentucky and Missouri to throw in their lot with their secessionist sisters farther south. The President preferred colonization and/or compensation emancipation for slaveholders. The failure of these proposals, along with reverses in the eastern theater of the war, led him to conclude later in 1862 that necessity required “military emancipation.”

But Lincoln had not reached this point when he and his Cabinet met with the Joint Select Committee on the Conduct of the War on the last day of 1861. Only appointed by the House and Senate less than two weeks before, the Republican majority on this group were already giving the President severe agita, and much more would come from them by war’s end. While well-meaning and capable of performing useful investigations (on such matters as military supply abuses, the Fort Pillow massacre, and Union troop deaths in Confederate prisons), they were also already driving the President crazy with their preference for state militias over West Point-trained soldiers, as well as their relentless urging to take Richmond, never mind the preparedness of Union troops for doing so.

Now in their sights was the Army of the Potomac’s new commander, General George B. McClellan. “Little Mac” had long put off any move toward invading Virginia, claiming that the less than two months he had had since being appointed commander was hardly enough time to train, provision, and organize his 100,000 troops. But discussions with other military commanders led the committee to believe that the general could have moved far sooner. This added to their initial grievances against him: his Democratic leanings and his stand against interfering in any way with slavery.

Even McClellan’s latest claim to Lincoln--that he was in bed with typhoid--cut the general little slack with the group. Senator Benjamin Wade from Ohio, the committee chairman whose lack of diplomacy led a reporter to call him "grim as a bear in ill health," got right to the point: “Mr. President, you are murdering your country by inches in consequence of the inactivity of the military and the want of a distinct policy in regard to slavery.”

This put Lincoln in a bind. He did not want to undercut the man he had chosen to succeed General Winfield Scott as America’s leading soldier. At the same time, unlike Confederate President Jefferson Davis—not only a West Point graduate, but also a hero of the Mexican-American War and Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce—Lincoln had no sterling military credentials. Not only had he made himself conspicuous by opposing the conflict that started Davis’ upward trajectory, but he liked to joke about the limits of his own service record—three months in the Illinois militia in the Black Hawk War of 1832.

And so, the President chose, when he wasn't cheerleading the war effort, to bring the committee's Republicans and his balky general closer together. On New Year’s Day, Lincoln wrote McClellan to put aside his "uneasiness" about the joint committee's "doings": "You may be entirely relieved . . . The gentlemen of the Committee were with me an hour and a half last night; and I found them in a perfectly good mood. As their investigation brings them acquainted with facts, they are rapidly coming to think of the whole case as all sensible men woud."

Had Lincoln lived in the 21st century, it’s unlikely that this letter, however well-intentioned, would have done him any good. Just imagine this, a scenario repeated, with only slight variations, in recent years: lack of progress in the war leads the Democrats to regain control of Congress. When Lincoln removes McClellan from command, the Senate investigates. McClellan, called to testify, produces the President’s letter. “Honest Abe” ends up looking like a spinmeister, The Great Dissembler rather than the Great Railsplitter.

Over the next two weeks, the joint committee grew increasingly outspoken about the President's trust in his commander. Indiana's George Julian was stunned to find that the President and his Cabinet had no information on any of McClellan's plans, and that "Mr. Lincoln himself did not think he had any right to know, but that, as he was not a military man, it was his duty to defer to General McClellan."

Even at the time, Lincoln’s trust in his general didn’t sit well with several people, not just the Joint Committee. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase made it plain even during the meeting that he agreed with the Congressmen and Senators.

More influential was Attorney-General Edward Bates. He, like Chase and Secretary of State William H. Seward, had battled Lincoln for the Republican nomination as President, but, with instincts more conservative than Chase’s, could not be written off as a radical abolitionist.

In his diary, Bates confided his dismay over what he had just witnessed: "The Prest. is an excellent man, and in the main wise; but he lacks will and purpose, and I greatly fear he, has not the power to command." In dealing one on one with the President, however, he was far more diplomatic, able to couch his tough love in legal arguments that Lincoln would find compelling.

It would not do for Lincoln to defer so often to McClellan, Bates claimed. The Constitution had explicitly vested in him power as Commander in Chief. Thus, Lincoln should "organize a Staff of his own, and assume to be in fact, what he is in law."

Lincoln was motivated enough by Bates' claims that he took out a book on military strategy from the Library of Congress. He became increasingly wedded to the idea of simultaneous attacks by Northern forces to prevent Confederate troop movements. While he continued to find the committee bothersome, they had shaken him enough that, from this point on, he challenged "Little Mac" more often to take the fight to the enemy.

As for the Joint Committee: They should be given due credit for recognizing early that McClellan was unsuited for his job and that emancipation was not only moral thing to do, but a weapon to destroy the Confederacy. But their thinking on other matters was terribly flawed. Their military favorites were leaders such as John Pope, Ambrose Burnside and Joseph Hooker--commanders hardly better than McClellan.

Their thinking about Lincoln was as myopic as it was cruel. After his assassination, several members were delighted that the President's successor, their former Democratic colleague, Andrew Johnson, would be far more vengeful against the South. By the end of Johnson's term, as he opposed one Reconstruction measure after another, Wade and company would have abundant reason to understand how wrong they had been about Lincoln, who, for all his seeming slowness, had embraced emancipation while eventually finding the commander who would put his strategy for dismembering the Confederacy into action.

Flashback, December 1941: Wartime Film Short Marks Ford-Hepburn Affair

2011-12-31T22:02:00.000-08:00

A little more than two weeks after Pearl Harbor, Hollywood swung into action behind the war effort with Women in Defense, a short documentary directed by John Ford and narrated by Katharine Hepburn (pictured). Their relationship had led Ford, then Hollywood’s hottest director (two consecutive Best Director Oscars), to a painful moral dilemma and, more recently, a surprising resolution.

Hollywood’s gung-ho attitude toward the war might seem hard to believe nowadays, but there was surprisingly little anti-war dissent in the film community, for these reasons:

* The U.S. had suffered a surprise attack by the Japanese, so there was no question who was the aggressor;

* As the children of immigrants--or even immigrants themselves--Hollywood’s studio moguls, a heavily Jewish group, were understandably anxious to demonstrate patriotism to a public that still evinced all too much anti-Semitism;

* The moguls also wanted to defeat Hitler, whose mistreatment of Jews in both his country and lands conquered by his forces was already manifest (even if the Holocaust was only barely beginning);

* The most leftist elements in Hollywood--Communists and fellow-travelers--switched from opposition to support of the war following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

As my friend, fellow blogger Dennis Brady, noted in a recent post about the 8^th Army Air Force, a number of Hollywood stars, notably including Clark Gable and James Stewart, served with distinction in the war.

Writers and directors presented special cases. Their talents consisted of presenting stories and crafting images were deemed crucially important in creating films for a mass audience. Over the next four years, Ford, Frank Capra, John Huston, George Stevens, and William Wyler would cooperate with the War Department, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marine Corps, the Army Pictorial Services, the Army Educational Program, the American Armed Forces First Motion Picture Unit, and other units in explaining, both to servicemen and their worried families, “Why We Fight” (to use the title of Capra’s seven-film series). They would counter the black art of propaganda, as practiced by Josef Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl, with a more benign variety.

Women in Defense, released on Christmas Eve, was a good case in point. The 10-minute film, with a script by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, depicted women as instrumental in preparing for the coming war, working in scientific, industrial, and voluntary-services activities such as sewing parachutes in silk, testing chemicals on mice as part of health programs, shaping bullets and other munitions, and giving out blood that might be used later with wounded soldiers.

Viewers caught up in aspects of the film that would seem familiar to them—Hepburn’s upper-crust diction, Ford’s homey images of communities coming together—would not know at the time that the relationship between the star and her onetime director contained its own love, longing, and pain, tried by circumstance and the passage of time.

Five years before, shortly after filming concluded of their flop Mary of Scotland, Hepburn and Ford seemed on the brink of marriage, particularly following their idyllic trip to her family home, Fenwick. But the devoutly Catholic Ford interpreted the death of his father immediately afterward as a divine judgment on their illicit relationship, and Hepburn’s offer to his wife Mary--$150,000, in return for ending the marriage and granting him access to his beloved daughter Barbara—only hardened Mary’s opposition to their union. “Jack is very religious, he’ll never divorce me,” Mary predicted confidently. “He’ll never have grounds to divorce me. I’m going to be Mrs. John Ford until I die.”

That is how it turned out, but for the next five years, the Ford-Hepburn affair had a curious half-life. They never spoke of marriage again, and by 1938 Hepburn had decamped for the East Coast while Ford stayed in Hollywood. But they remained fond of each other, and, even as the actress was pursued by billionaire aviator Howard Hughes, the possibility of a permanent union between the two seemed out of the question so long as Ford figured in the background.

Then, in 1941, several developments changed the nature of the relationship between Ford and Hepburn for good:

* Ford’s sense of betrayal over Hepburn’s affair with Spencer Tracy. Ford gave Spencer Tracy his first break in Hollywood with Up the River (1930), but relations between the two cooled after the actor rejected the lead in Ford’s adaptation of The Plough and the Stars. Within a week of the start of production of Hepburn’s first film with Tracy, Woman of the Year, as industry insiders began to gossip about the possibility of an affair between the two MGM stars, Ford traveled cross-country to Washington, D.C., where he would begin serving as part of what later became the Field Photographic Unit under William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services. Cast and crew members on his films, long given to interpreting what his sometimes mysterious actions (or even lack of them) betokened, had no doubt that this was his way of registering disapproval.

* The death of Mary’s first husband. Though Ford and Mary had married in 1920, it had not been a Catholic ceremony, because the bride was divorced and Protestant. By 1941, Mary’s ex-husband had died. Her conversion to Catholicism removed the only obstacle to the religious ceremony that Ford had long wanted.

* Pearl Harbor. Mary, complaining of loneliness, had traveled to DC to see her husband off to his new naval job when the Japanese attack on December 7 occurred. Perhaps the prospect of death in a war now at hand decided John. Before the month was out, the couple was at last married by a Catholic priest in the National Cathedral in Washington.

Ford, who would be promoted to Captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve by war’s end, continued to create films of distinction while n the armed forces. He won two more Oscars, this time for Best Documentary, with The Battle of Midway (1942) and December 7^th (1943). (At Midway, where he was wounded in the shoulder and elbow so badly that he was temporarily knocked unconscious, he is said, while filming in an exposed watertower at the height of the battle, to have yelled “at the attacking Zeroes to swing left or right--and curs[ed] them out when they disobeyed directions.”)

Ford’s World War II works, concluding with the fictional full-length feature They Were Expendable (1945), depict the conflict less as a matter of glory than as sacrifice for an ideal. That might also characterize his relationship with Hepburn. Given his devotion to Catholicism, marriage to the star, at least while his wife was alive, was out of the question.

But the great director, crusty to cast and crew to the point of abusiveness, still carried a noticeable soft spot for the actress. His rollicking 1952 valentine to Ireland, The Quiet Man, featured a chief female character named Mary Kate Dannaher. It’s impossible not to read those the first and middle names without thinking of the two most important women in his life. When Hepburn came to visit, as he was dying in March 1973, he threw her off-balance first by telling her she was beautiful, then by asking if she knew that he loved her.

It is one of the curiosities of Hollywood biography that unconventional, freethinking Connecticut Yankee Kate Hepburn gave her heart to two Irish-American Catholics unwilling to divorce their wives and bent on self-destruction: Ford and Tracy. The only way that I can begin to understand this is by thinking that each relationship began with admiration for two film professionals who had virtually no equals at their craft, then passed into an understanding and love for the sensitivity that these men hid as much from themselves as from the world.