March 26, 2006
'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS
Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.
Reprinted from the Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times
BOOKS
Algren's 'Wild Side' still rocks
March 26, 2006
By JAN HERMAN
Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, A Walk on the Wild Side. The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.
When it first appeared, in 1956, the literary critics mostly told Algren to take a hike, and for the many years since, they've mostly ignored him and it. Now the British have brought out a 50th anniversary edition of Walk. Richard Flanagan, a formidable novelist himself, recently noted in the (London) Telegraph that it "made a mockery of the American dream. Set among the pimps, whores and con men of New Orleans, it was a brave --- and prescient -- expose of the nation's contempt for its own people." Small wonder the lit crits of the '50s dismissed it.
"It's the 'kill the messenger' syndrome, I suppose, for the news that Algren's work brings us is not good news," another remarkable novelist, Russell Banks, has written.
Apparently the British -- not to mention the Australians (Flanagan is one) -- don't mind reading Algren's bad news. Last year the Brits brought out a new edition of an earlier Algren novel, The Man With the Golden Arm, the one that made him famous for a while. But if they have a history of appreciating Algren, so do savvy Americans. Although Walk and Arm have both been out of print from time to time on this side of the pond, they're available these days in trade paperback editions. (Walk has a foreword by Banks, and Arm has memoirs by Studs Terkel and Kurt Vonnegut, as well as essays and appreciations by Mike Royko and others.) Seven Stories Press has also re-issued a handful of other Algren titles.
A savage work of tragicomic satire, Walk is tenderized by the sympathy Algren feels for an illiterate Texas drifter at its center, Dove Linkhorn, a big, dumb, freckled naif "who could not remember a time, a place nor a single person, house cat or hound dog that had sought his affection." Dove's innocence is turned upside down when he rapes the first woman who, by seducing him, shows him any feeling. And he loses whatever innocence is left when he becomes a New Orleans peep-show stud after failing as a door-to-door salesman of French Dripolator coffee pots and counterfeit certificates for a "free finger wave and shampoo at the Madam Dewberry Beauty Shop."
Algren's compassion extends even to the least likable of the creatures in Walk. Depression-era vagrants all: Dove's father, for instance, a mean, Bible-spouting drunk who preaches anti-Catholic screed and hellfire warnings about "the doc-treen of evolution" from the courthouse steps of Arroyo (population 955) in the Rio Grande Valley.
But as the novel's very first sentence tells us: "'He's just a pore lonesome wife-left feller,' the more understanding said of Fritz Linkhorn, 'losin' his wife is what crazied him.'' It goes deeper than that, of course, and further back. The elder Linkhorn "came of a shambling race," we learn. "That gander-necked clan from which Calhoun and Jackson sprang. Jesse James' and Jeff Davis' people. Lincoln's people. Forest solitaries spare and swart, left landless in sandland and Hooverville now the time of the forests had passed."
Few critics had the slightest inkling, much less an understanding, of characters such as Fritz Linkhorn (they somehow managed to forget Huck Finn's Pappy) or the oddballs who surround Dove -- Kitty Twist, Legless Schmidt, Oliver Finnerty, Reba, Hallie -- people Algren called "the broken men and breaking ones; wingies, dingies, zanies and lop-sided kukes; cokies and queers and threadbare whores," as Flanagan reminds us. And, Flanagan adds, all of them are "in search of America, only for the reader to discover that they are America."
The literary historian Maxwell Geismar was an exception, according to Algren biographer Bettina Drew. Reviewing Walk in the Nation, a leftist weekly, Geismar praised it as a "surrealist comedy of life in the gutter." But the establishment critics dismissed it. In the New York Times Book Review, Drew notes, Alfred Kazin wrote, "I do not think it has anything real about it whatsoever. ... It is just picaresque." The Times' daily reviewer, Orville Prescott, piled on, calling it overwritten as well as unreal. And in the left-wing Partisan Review, where Algren might have expected a sympathetic hearing, the academician Leslie Fiedler insulted him as "the bard of the stumblebum."
Following the failure of Walk, Algren's life "took an increasingly tragic turn," Flanagan points out. That's exactly right. As Vonnegut has written: "Like James Joyce, he had become an exile from his homeland after writing that his neighbors were perhaps not as noble and intelligent and kindly as they liked to think they were." Furthermore, Vonnegut has promoted him whenever he could in literary quarters that Algren spurned out of contempt and humiliation; he has also paid homage to Algren as his literary superior, which is no small thing.
Of all Algren's writer friends, however, Terkel probably understood and appreciated him best. He knew Algren longest, shared his Chicago roots and radical sensibility, and lent him money. Lots of it. He still held an IOU for $3,000 when Algren died, in 1981. Terkel was bemused when he told me the heirs to Algren's estate had declined to pay it off because it wasn't notarized. Why, he wanted to know, would a man who didn't bother to make a will have bothered to notarize an IOU? It was, Terkel added, the final irony of Algren's funny, sad, glorious, tragicomic life.
Jan Herman, a former Sun-Times reporter, blogs at artsjournal.com. He is the author of A Talent for Trouble, a biography of Hollywood director William Wyler.
Posted by jherman at 09:22 AM
May 05, 2005
BUSTER KEATON REVISITED
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.Reprinted from the Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times
BOOKS
Buster Keaton Revisited
May 8, 2005
By JAN HERMAN
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
Like Welles, though in an earlier time and on a different scale, Keaton was a master filmmaker whose creativity was leached out of him by small-minded producers who at first recognized his genius, then proceeded to undermine him by jealously forcing him to conform to a studio system dominated by businessmen uninterested in his art. It's a familiar story, common to any number of Hollywood's great filmmakers from Erich von Stroheim to Francis Ford Coppola. But Keaton's story is particularly affecting because of the size and versatility of his achievement, and how far he fell from his peak of success.
Between 1920 and 1929, he conceived, wrote, directed, edited and starred in a dozen full-length silent features and 19 two-reel shorts that rivaled, some would say transcended, Chaplin's in their comic artistry. Marvels of precision engineering and high-risk pratfalls that Keaton always performed himself, his films were notable as well for visual gags attained through the so-called "camera magic" of trick shots. The stories, filmed on location in realistic settings, often contained surreal dream sequences and, unlike Chaplin's, were usually devoid of sentimentality.
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BUSTER KEATON:
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Keaton gained worldwide fame and made millions of dollars. But with the arrival of talkies, he was largely forgotten. For almost 30 years, he became a nobody. He went broke, sank into alcoholism and depression, was divorced twice, and finally landed a small career in television. It wasn't until the late 1950s that his peerless silents -- among them "The General," "The Navigator" and "Sherlock Jr." -- were rediscovered and his reputation as a great artist resurrected.
McPherson has done his research. He retells the legend of Keaton's origins in vaudeville. Born in Kansas in 1896, Joseph Francis Keaton made his first appearance as a performer at 9 months of age, unbidden, when he crawled out on stage and tugged his father's leg to the vast amusement of the crowd. Harry Houdini, who had an act in the same traveling medicine show as Keaton's parents, dubbed him Buster (a vaudeville term for a pratfall) after little Joe, as a toddler of 18 months, fell down a flight of stairs and wasn't hurt. Buster, resilient and unsmiling, was soon being tossed around by his father like a medicine ball.
Billed as "The Human Mop," he played an insolent, seemingly indestructible hellion "whose many uses," McPherson writes, "included mopping the floor and getting thrown through backdrops, into the orchestra pit and off the stage." By age 10, Buster was a major attraction of the Three Keatons, which toured the country, bedeviled at times by the crusading Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which claimed he was being abused.
For all his research, however, McPherson has done no original reporting beyond seeing Keaton's films and describing their plot summaries, gags, set designs and characterizations in what becomes a catalog of many unnecessary details. Yet he avoid essentials. "'The General' is the kind of film," he writes, "that begs for maps, drawings, and diagrams (none of which I will include)." Why not? He relies almost exclusively on secondary sources for his facts and, surprisingly often, for opinions. This is deadly in a fan whose publisher wants him to be taken seriously, even if he himself wants to be taken lightly.
McPherson says he prefers to avoid the "psychoanalytical quagmire" of "the thesis-laden biographer" who sees "an interpretive Rorschach" in Keaton's trademark stone face. Similarly, he wants nothing to do with attempts by "many critics to fixate on [Keaton's] 'stoicism,' to make him over as a sort of existential hero, or weep for him as a bruised and battered soul." Fair enough. But he borrows too many insights from the very scholars, critics and biographers who've done the original reporting, for him to be so disdainful.
As far as I can tell, Tempest in a Flat Hat pretty much reiterates what has been said before by Keaton biographers Rudi Blesh, Tom Dardis and Marion Meade (whom McPherson acknowledges as sources), along with others, like film historian Kevin Brownlow, Keaton himself from a posthumously published memoir, My Wonderful World of Slapstick, co-written by Charles Samuels, and a memoir by his daughter.
Most unfortunately, McPherson writes potted prose. It is sometimes too painful to read. The cliches, mixed metaphors, nonsequiturs, anachronisms and general sloppiness make you wonder if an editor ever read the manuscript.
For example, "the economic razor of a Keaton plot takes no unnecessary detour." As for the collaborative process, McPherson writes, "Cross-pollination was the rule; you pulled any weight that came your way." Describing the 1920s, he notes, "Cars were mainly open-topped, often hand-cranked, and irrevocably transforming relations between the unwed sexes. ... Charles A. Lindbergh didn't yet know how to fly, though the transatlantic gauntlet had been tossed. ... Society roared along to the visceral virtuosity of a blaring new tune."
The writing also makes you wonder what facts to believe. A 1917 silent short is called a "Richard Lester-like homage." Lester wasn't born until 1932 and didn't direct a film until the 1960s. Simple facts are inconsistent or questionable. Keaton is 5 feet 4 inches tall on one page, 5 feet 6 on another. Hollywood in 1919 "found itself to be a international capital -- 80 percent of the movies in the world were being made in Southern California." The percentage is right, but Hollywood was no international capital then or for decades to come. It was a provincial company town.
Finally, the least a devoted Keaton fan could do is provide a filmography. For whatever reason, Tempest in a Flat Hat doesn't have one.
Posted by mclennan at 06:28 PM
February 27, 2005
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.Reprinted from the Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times
BOOKS
Lauren Bacall, Still Salty at 80
February 27, 2005
By JAN HERMAN
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
But Bacall, who is one of a kind, always made the most of what she had, as this memoir proves for the second time. The first time was more than a quarter century ago, when By Myself was originally published to much praise, including a National Book Award.
That memoir ended with the early 1980s, half a dozen years after her return to New York from abroad and a decade after her divorce from her second husband, Jason Robards Jr. She had married Robards after the death of her first husband, Humphrey Bogart, and a post-Bogie love affair with Frank Sinatra, who'd asked her to marry him but suddenly "chickened out" (her term) when his proposal made the gossip columns. Not that we're keeping score, but let's face it -- Bacall certainly has -- her serial love life is one of the most fascinating aspects of her career.
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BY MYSELF AND THEN SOME By Lauren BacallHarperEntertainment. $26.95.
EXCERPT Lauren Bacall's only Oscar nomination came in 1997, for best supporting actress in "The Mirror Has Two Faces." Here she describes the awards ceremony in this excerpt from By Myself and Then Some: The evening began with Master of Ceremonies Billy Crystal. I did my best - trying to look relaxed as though I was enjoying myself. I doubt that I was very convincing. The truth is, I wanted to win. No matter how you rationalize it, to be nominated is fine - chosen by your peers, etc. - but it's better to win. In any contest, that is the goal. The first award - wouldn't you know - Best Supporting Actress. Kevin Spacey came out with the envelope in his hand, announced the nominees, looked at me and smiled, opened the envelope - "And the winner is ..." He was so sure [I'd win] - my heart was pounding so loud, I thought I would faint, Steve [Bacall and Bogart's son] was squeezing my hand - [Kevin's] voice dropped. "The winner is Juliette Binoche, 'The English Patient. ' ... We got through the rest of the program and headed for the great dinner - chocolate Oscars at every place. I felt very alone. Kevin Spacey was there. He came over and invited me onto the dance floor, thank heaven. It's not a good thing to be a shoo-in. |
Indeed, we'd be remiss if we didn't point out that in the final pages of By Myself she bids a sad farewell to a long, post-Robards affair with her "Applause" co-star Len Cariou and to an intense, post-Cariou affair with an unnamed, married Englishman that left her feeling devastated when it ended. Nor should we omit to mention her serious crushes on Kirk Douglas and, much later, Adlai Stevenson, the two-time Democratic candidate for president. Both men returned her affection (but were not bedded).
So what happened on Bacall's return to New York? In 77 pages of new material she kick-starts a dormant screen career with "On the Orient Express," stars on Broadway again -- this time in "Woman of the Year," and wins her second Tony ("Applause" was her first). Now that her three children are grown, she sails into the '90s determined to work, work, work. It turns out the '90s were "surprisingly good and productive years," despite the jolt she gets when looking in the mirror and seeing someone much older than she feels.
"Upon reaching your seventieth year," writes Bacall, who was born in 1924 and is now 80, "life begins to shift. First comes the shock of it -- my God, am I really seventy? I don't feel that different. But I sure as hell am." Some sadness is inevitable, she admits, but there's plenty of laughter, too, because "in my cockeyed way I think life is a joke." You can take Lauren Bacall out of Hollywood, but you can't take the Bronx-born, Brooklyn-bred Betty Joan Perske out of Lauren Bacall.
Hardly a page goes by in which Bacall does not marvel at her fate. In spite of her parents' early divorce and an ever-absent father, her great good luck as a Jewish girl growing up during the Depression was to have a mother and a pair of uncles so devoted to her she never lacked for love or support. And when she ultimately slips into the jet stream of fame and fortune, she never forgets her origins.
"It's hard to believe," she writes, "I was a theater usher living in Greenwich Village and sharing a bed with my mother in the entry hall of our small apartment at the time I was offered a screen test by Howard Hawks that would send me to California and the opening chapters of my fairy tale life."
Renowned for her early film-noir stardom -- she was launched by Hawks in "To Have and Have Not," her remarkable screen debut at 19, opposite Bogart, who was 44 -- the Bacall of And Then Some says she usually does not dwell on the past. But time brings the death of many old friends -- Roddy McDowall, John Gielgud, Gregory Peck, Katharine Hepburn, Adolph Green and Alec Guinness, to name a few -- and many fond goodbyes in the form of anecdotal sketches and thumbnail portraits, all breezily written and wonderfully readable. So even as Bacall updates us about her more recent doings (film work with Barbra Streisand or Nicole Kidman, for example), she can't help immersing us again in Hollywood's Golden Age. For which this reader, at least, is grateful.
(It's worth noting, since the 77th annual Academy Awards are being held tonight, that Bacall, who has made more than 50 feature films, has never won an Oscar. She was nominated only once, in 1997, for a satirical supporting role as Streisand's self-absorbed, overbearing mother in "The Mirror Has Two Faces.")
Although Bacall waxes sentimental about others, especially her children and her latest companion, a toy Papillon named Sophie, she's a tough-minded realist about herself, her failures and her successes. More than that, she sums up the new pages in this volume with a political opinion guaranteed to make her enemies.
Given her history as a liberal Democrat, it's no surprise the America she's proud of is Franklin Roosevelt's and John and Robert Kennedys' and the America she's ashamed of is George W. Bush's. "I do not love the administration of now," she writes, citing "Bush buddies," "oil secrecy," "anti-gun lobbying," "anti-immigration corporations," even Texas itself. But the greatest shame, she believes, is that the administration is "all wrapped up in the American flag, making this a pure Aryan (sound familiar?) country -- a Christian country."
Bacall sees a "corporate America" where "money, buying power, greed" are paramount. "It's all so cold, so humorless, so dead." Having just described her Manhattan apartment in the exclusive Dakota overlooking Central Park, Bacall adds, "Yes, money bought me my apartment, but it was money that came from years of work, hard work." In other words, she wasn't born with a silver spoon in her mouth. "I like money as much as most people -- more," she concedes, "because ... as long as I keep working [it] enables me to live here and go where I wish."
Well, she can forget going to the White House for a while, even if she wished. No more invitations for her. It's a good thing she's already received Kennedy Center Honors.
Jan Herman, a former Sun-Times reporter, writes a daily blog for ArtsJournal.com and is the author of A Talent for Trouble, a biography of Hollywood director William Wyler.
Posted by mclennan at 05:57 PM
September 12, 2004
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.Reprinted from the Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times.
BOOKS
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH
September 12, 2004
By JAN HERMAN
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us of just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes. Rather, it introduces the collection's main theme: "the essential paradox about actors," as Bogdanovich puts it.
This involves the peculiar authority of some personalities to stamp the screen with an indelible imprint of innocence and vulnerability even when playing nasty roles. Think of James Cagney as the psychopathic gangster in "White Heat," or Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster, or John Wayne as the surly old cowboy in "Red River," which set the template for which he's remembered. "The particular quality in a star that makes audiences instantly suspend their disbelief -- something men like Wayne or Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda naturally bring with them when they enter a scene -- is an achievement which normally goes so unnoticed that most people don't even think of it as acting at all," Bogdanovich writes.
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WHO THE HELL'S IN IT:
PORTRAITS AND CONVERSATIONS
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He could also have mentioned others in the book like Cary Grant, who "became universally accepted as some kind of an American even though he never remotely sounded like one," or Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, Charlie Chaplin, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra and, yes, Jerry Lewis, all of whom combined their personalities with their screen roles so believably that they attained iconic status. Bogdanovich gives each a chapter, along with Jack Lemmon, Sidney Poitier, Anthony Perkins, Montgomery Clift, even Dean Martin, among 26 stars in all. If some careers -- Wayne's, for example -- were based on playing mere variations of the same character, Bogdanovich takes that as further proof of the audience's suspension of disbelief.
He does not ignore Hollywood's female stars, though he writes about only six, among them Marlene Dietrich, Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe. Hollywood has never been a woman's world. Lauren Bacall's interview, which runs to 69 pages (second longest in the book), makes that clear. And it's the most entertaining because of her savvy personality, salty language and provocative opinions (sometimes questionable but always candid). Here she is on director Howard Hawks: "He had a fantasy of being a real Svengali. He wanted to own me, he wanted to go to bed with me. ... Then when Bogart took over, he could not bear it."
Despite her reputation for frankness -- see her memoirs By Myself and Now -- Bacall would not have let down her hair for just any interviewer. She does it for Bogdanovich because he's an insider. She knows him, as have most of his subjects. But he's also more than just an insider. He's a man with a calling, a rare Hollywood polymath: Oscar-nominated director and screenwriter; veteran actor; precocious film critic; extraordinary film buff (for 18 years he kept a file of index cards detailing every movie he ever saw -- 5,316, including repeat viewings -- from the time he was 12); and serious film scholar who's published a dozen well-written, highly praised books and monographs.
He's even a celebrity whose own Svengali relationships with beautiful women made him a prime target of the tabloid press. First there was the actress Cybill Shepherd, then Dorothy Stratten, the 1980 Playboy Playmate of the Year who at age 20 was murdered by her husband, and then her younger sister, Louise, whom Bogdanovich married (they're now divorced) and for whom he arranged plastic surgery to redesign her face in Dorothy's image.
But his greatest talent may be literary. Bogdanovich's writing is pungent, his insights smart and penetrating. While it can be argued he's been too influenced as a director by his idols, notably Welles, Hawks and John Ford -- which has kept him from matching their originality even in his most successful films ("The Last Picture Show," "What's Up Doc" and "Paper Moon") -- as an author he surpasses them all.
In his splendid profile on Bogart, the only star in the collection he did not know or meet, Bogdanovich offers a poignant glimpse of him on his deathbed after a long battle with throat cancer. It shows how much the man had become the myth. Elsewhere he points out that sometimes the myth and the man have less in common than you'd expect. Jimmy Stewart played the shy, retiring type on screen. In life, he was a wolf, which, Bogdanovich tells us, "was known only among a few."
The writing can be stylishly clever, too, including a first-class parody that apes the prose of John Dos Passos and mimicry that captures verbal mannerisms on the silent page: Stewart's drawl, Grant's odd inflections, and easier, Cagney's legendary gangster tics. But it's the unexpected insights most of all that make Who the Hell's in It so engaging.
John Wayne, for instance, is shown to be modest and thoughtful. It is Wayne who voices some of the book's wisest, most knowledgeable advice about movie acting. Ford, he says, "taught me that a reaction is the most valuable thing you can have on a picture." Reaction shots "become very important throughout a picture, they build your part. They always say I'm in action pictures, but it's in reaction pictures that they remember me."
Why is there no Clint Eastwood or Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman or Warren Beatty, Robert Redford or Barbra Streisand? Maybe Bogdanovich is saving them for another volume; then again, maybe not. He regards today's stars largely as "a mixed bag" tainted by TV and "straining for size," while serious actors of "considerable talent and appeal like Robert De Niro, Al Pacino or Tom Hanks have preferred versatility to the old kind of picture stardom."
"Only a few other actors today" -- namely Nicholson -- "and one politician (Bill Clinton) have the really personal identity of the original movie stars with which this book deals," Bogdanovich asserts. Yet he includes chapters on John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara and River Phoenix, not to mention the offbeat Sal Mineo. They're hardly towering figures. But Bogdanovich is a sentimentalist with a deep personal connection to each of them. If he wants to tout them, he's earned the right.
Posted by mclennan at 06:29 PM
April 11, 2004
HERMAN WOUK'S LATEST
It's hard to say which comes off worse in Herman Wouk's latest novel, his first in a decade: the U.S. Congress or the American press. "A Hole in Texas" offers the choice between two emblematic stereotypes: a red-faced opportunist who heads the House Armed Services Committee and a mustachioed investigative reporter for the Washington Post.Posted by mclennan at 06:31 PM
October 21, 2003
"TAKING ON THE VIENNA PHILHARMONIC"
Here's something I wrote for the highbrows, who will probably disagree: "The Vienna Philharmonic's discriminatory practices against women and people of color cast such a pall over its considerable artistic achievement that the orchestra has turned out to be the shame, not the pride, of Western civilization.In "Art Is Just an Excuse," the first of several seminal essays, American composer and musicologist William Osborne contended that the Vienna Philharmonic's belief in male supremacy -- rooted in a historical rationale of national identity and cultural purity -- was gender bias of the worst sort.
With this argument, Osborne ignited a global debate in cyberspace. Classical music fans from New Zealand to Costa Rica traded thousands of e-mail messages, for and against; some suggested further action (a boycott of Vienna Philharmonic recordings by music libraries, for instance), while others dismissed the concern over gender bias as kowtowing to political correctness. The intensity of the debate was as striking as it was widespread.
Posted by mclennan at 05:57 PM
October 20, 2003
KITTY KELLEY, SINATRA & ME
For a professional snoop, Kitty Kelley harbors a remarkably decorous feeling about her work. The least suggestion that she takes a certain pleasure in exposing the sexual peccadillos of her high and mighty targets brings an intense glare to her china-blue eyes.Reprinted from the German edition of LUI, Nr. 11, November 1986, where it appeared in German translation as "Des Sängers Fluch."
For a professional snoop, Kitty Kelley harbors a remarkably decorous feeling about her work. The least suggestion that she takes a certain pleasure in exposing the sexual peccadillos of her high and mighty targets brings an intense glare to her china-blue eyes.
Maybe it's because she wants to convey the idea that she suffers for her work. The mere supposition that she enjoys tattling about the drug addictions and the desperate boozing of the rich and famous -- worse, that she has become a millionaire by holding their private tragedies up to public ridicule -- puts a wounded expression on her face and a solemn tone in her voice.
"Take pleasure?" she asks, hardly able to contain her sense of injury. "I don't do that kind of thing in my writing. I've established a reputation as an unauthorized biographer, but that doesn't give me license. I have to be very fair. And I have to abide by the laws of libel, which I do. I let the reader make up his mind."
By now Kelley has a small, tight smile on her face. Not content with this rather academic defense, the 44-year-old author of "Jackie Oh!," "Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star," and "His Way," swivels her body on the loveseat in her Georgetown living room like a petite artillery gun.
"When I revealed that the Kennedys had a prefrontal lobotomy performed on their retarded child, Rosemary, in 1942," she says, "I didn't write how I felt about it. I didn't even say the Kennedys were racked by guilt because of it. I didn't exploit that fact. I just presented it. I don't take a point of view in my writing. I don't put a value judgment on these things at all.
A pity really -- and open to debate, of course -- for Kitty Kelley overflows in conversation with feisty opinions about everything. From the American bombiing of Libya ("We looked like such bullies") to her Catholic-school education ("All it ever did for me was turn me into a cheerleader") to the idle rich ("They're so miserable you begin to develop a sympathy for them"), no subject escapes her withering, flippant scorn. Nor does she lack a biting sense of irony that feeds on getting the last cynical laugh.
The office where she wrote her biography of Sinatra, for instance, is dominated by a huge photo enlargement of ol' Blue Eyes, in which he is trying to fend off the paparazzi with the palm of his hand. Candid in the extreme, it is not a pretty picture. Sinatra looks thoroughly flustered by the ambush -- not only startled and discombobulated, but torn-up angry and vulnerable. Kelley, righteously mindful of his objections to "His Way," has placed this picture on the wall so that Sinatra seems to be veering in horror from the spectacle covering the office floor: row on row of meticulous files that she compiled on him during her four years of research for the biography.
"The man sued me before I wrote a word," Kelley says. "He claimed, one, that he and he alone was authorized to write this book or someone he anointed, and, two, that I had misrepresented myself as his official biographer to people I interviewed. Well, those claims just didn't stand up legally. He withdrew his suit after a year, but not before tryng some very underhanded tricks."
With obvious relish, Kelley begins to tick them off on her fingers. Let's see ...
First there was the Peter Lawford affidavits. Before Lawford died, Sinatra got him to declare that Kelley had bamboozled him into believing she was writing a book on John F. Kennedy. "Poor Lawford, may he rest in peace," she says. "I had nine hours of interviews with him."
Next came an affidavit from Nelson Riddle, the orchestra leader and Sinatra's long-time musical collaborater, also now deceased. "Poor Riddle," she says, "may he rest in peace. I had three and a half hours with him, and he spoke quite openly."
Dead men don't talk -- and can't be cross-examiined. Kelley, on the other hand, had a live witness to the Lawford sessions who was willing to testify for her. The Riddle affidavit was more easily parried, she says, because it acknowledged that he knew she was writing "a tough book" on Sinatra "from the questions I asked." No deception there.
Then came Sinatra's lawyer, Mickey Rudin, with "incontrovertible proof" at last that she was a scheming liar from top to bottom, who misrepresented herself, her book, her interest in Sinatra, virtually everything but the color of her toenails. The evidence was a tape recording of one of her phone inquiries.
"So all the lawyers descended on me," Kelley recounts. "Sinatra's battery of attorneys, my lawyer, the publisher's. It looked like a convention of the bar. And we sat down to listen to this tape. Well, it sounded like Boy George. It was a phoney. An out-and-out fake. Now that was frightening, that they would go to that length to stop me."
Frightening perhaps, but flattering. It meant Sinatra took her seriously. And if there is anything Kelley appears to enjoy more than trashing her celebrated subjects, it is being taken seriously by them. "He said I was 'a potent force to deal with.' Those are his words," Kelley notes proudly, "and he didn't want to have to deal with me. This was before I'd written a word."
If the press hadn't come to her aid, in fact, he might have succeeded in intimidating her. "There is an undercurrent of violence in his life," she says darkly. She was grateful for the editors who proclaimed -- correctly -- that Sinatra was trying to violate her right of free speech. Had he succeeded, it would have been an instance of "prior restraint," they declared, something not even Richard Nixon could achieve in trying to block publication of "The Pentagon Papers."
Let it be duly noted that Kelley showed her gratitude to her defenders by contributing one of her $5,000 speaking fees to the American Society of Authors and Journalists. So while ol' Blue Eyes veers in horror on her office wall, let it not be said that she lacks charity.
Indeed, compared with the framed caricature of Elizabeth Taylor that Kelley keeps outside her office, the Sinatra photo is a mild rebuke. Taylor is pictured in a way so devastating it defies apt description. A great fat hog, she is seen crashing over a fence in Virginia's horsey countryside while her seventh husand, John Warner, is saddled to her back as though riding to hounds.
Not surprisingly, the caricature -- by editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant -- is a brilliantly vicious reminder of one of Kelley's typical non-value judgments, namely that by the time Taylor married Warner (a pretentious country squire), she was so dumpy and desperate for a husband that she gladly let him exploit her celebrity in his U.S. Senate election campaign and awkwardly carried him to victory.
"Many women who thronged to her appearances," Kelley wrote, "went away feeling better once they saw for themselves that the woman heralded as the most beautiful in the world was so hefty she could no longer camouflage herself in tunics, caftans, and capes." This was followed by a half-dozen of Kelley's favorite "Elizabeth Taylor fat jokes," which gives one pause to wonder what she might have written had she taken pleasure in target practice.
At least she doesn't back off now, when confronted with Taylor's new, slim, rejuvenated image. Kelley still skews her like a piece of shish kebab. "Elizabeth Taylor was born beautiful and became an absolute narcissist," she scoffs. She delivers the words like a pronouncement from the Vatican. It brooks no contradiction.
Of course, Kelley will also tell you she has barrels and barrels of admiration for Liz the Survivor, Liz the Power Player, Liz the Tough, and yes, the highest accolade of all, the Liz the Piece of History. But that's just what she says about Jackie and Frank. It's the language of book promotion.
By the time Kelley finished writing "His Way," she'd done 857 interviews -- her own count -- twice the number for the Taylor biography. Like Taylor and Onassis before her, Sinatra refused to grant Kelley an interview. No problem, she says, folding her hands in her lap: "I interviewed everybody I possibly could have who has been in love with him, who has been to bed with him, who lived with him, who lived near him, who worked for him, who sang with him."
OK Kitty, let's really dish the dirt. Have you counted up the women who flung themselves at him? Better yet, whom did he take a fling with?
"Oh, please!" she says. "Finding every woman Sinatra has had is like finding every diner you've eaten in."
Did Sinatra jilt more women than Taylor jilted men?
"Are you kidding? No contest."
The key to understanding Sinatra, according to Kelley, is that he was an only child.
Come on, Kitty.
"Look," she insists, "Frank Sinatra likes to say he was a poor boy and he grew up rough. But he was a pampered baby and he grew up spoiled and indulged."
Then Kelley reminds me of our little agreement.
Ah, the agreement.
While Kitty Kelley fumes about Sinatra trying to keep her from writing his biography, she doesn't mind engaging in a bit of prior restraint herself. Before publication, "His Way" was treated by Kelley, her agent, and her American publisher like a state secret. The press even circulated one report -- untrue, it turns out -- that her manuscript had been delivered in an armored car.
What is true, however, is that Kelley and her advisers have an obsessive need to stage manage. To them, the arrival of "His Way" is the greatest event in publishing history since Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments.
Consequently, because this interview took place before the book came out, I had to sign a contract prohibiting me from reading the manuscript; revealing anything from it even if Kelley did; and, what is truly mind-boggling, disclosing for four months the mere fact that our meeting took place at all. Otherwise, no interview.
So here we are in secret at Kelley's ante-bellum Southern mansion, sipping diet Coca-Cola -- not mint juleps -- on a sun-baked afternoon in early August. It is an imposing house. The freshly painted black window shutters are immaculate against the tan siding. The slate roof, with many peaks and chimneys, looks like something out of a fairy tale. An American flag hangs on a pole set at a rakish angle over the front porch.
In the front yard, set back from Dunbarton Street, behind a vine-covered wall in the heart of très chic Georgetown, Matthew, the Caribbean gardner, is clipping the shrubbery beneath a towering magnolia tree. Around the side and back of the house is a vast, red-brick patio dotted with white, wrought-iron garden chairs and tables. A block beyond the wood fence is the brick steeple of the Episcopal Church, whose chimes announce God's presence every Sunday morning.
"I love to listen, but I don't go," says Kelley.
It is a distinguished house. U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan lived here for 25 years. Kelley still gets mail for him.
It is also a divided house. The other half of it , with a separate entrance, is occupied by J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery of Art in nearby Washington, D.C. His friendship with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis has more or less ensured cool relations between him and Kelley. She moved in seven years ago, not long after "Jackie Oh!" appeared. Neighbors report that Brown and his wife monitor the staircase to the street, which they share with Kelley, so as to avoid running into her.
"I think he'd die if he saw the art I have," Kelley says. [Brown has died since this interview took place, but his death had nothing to do with her art.]
Indeed, nothing on the outside of the house prepares you for the inside. A sculpted, horn-blowing cherub, à la Chagall, greets you from a wall in the living room, which is overseen by a devilish, green-faced Balinese idol with rainbow-colored wings. It sits on a brass sea chest across the room from a 7-foot giraffe, also brass, which stands in the parlor near two Chinese Fu dogs perched on a windowsill. Meanwhile, a veritable Noah's Ark of miniature crystal animals crowd the coffee table, and an elaborate stash of giant starfish fossils fill the shelves by the fireplace.
What Brown might die of, however, is Kelley's insatiable taste for big colors: blue walls for the living room, where the dark wood floor is polished to a glossy sheen and the white throw rug matches the trim white molding; red for the flower-patterned loveseats, where we are sitting; red for the foyer with the white Victorian armoire; red again for the parlor and the carpet on the stairway leading upstairs; yellow for the dining room, a cheerful sort of breakfast nook with toy parrots hanging from the ceiling; and green for the kitchen, where Kelley's living pets, two striped alley cats named Darling and Runt, like to hang out. ("I'd have a burro in the backyard if I could," she says.)
Poor Brown, may he rest in peace. The decor is nothing less than drop-dead breathtaking and -- dare we say it? -- suggests the aggressive, overproduced attractiveness of a really first-class bordello.
Yet Kelley communicates scarcely a hint of the courtesan in her blue slacks and three-colored sweater (yes, red, white and green). With her glasses propped on top of her dye-blond hair and no makeup or lipstick on, she seems like she has just finished her grocery list. There is something almost school marmish about her. And, in fact, Kelley began her career wanting to become an English professor.
The eldest of seven children -- one brother among them -- Kelley was born on April 4, 1942, in Spokane, Wash., and grew up privileged. Her family had land as well as money. "We were blessed on both fronts," she says. Kelley's father, who came from New York, was a highly successful litigator and became a senior partner in Washington state's largest and most powerful law firm. Her mother, who died in 1978, came from an old Spokane family that for generations has owned a 5,000-acre ranch in the heart of one of the Northwest's richest wheat valleys.
"My father still lives in the home I grew up in," Kelley says. "I adore him. If you asked me whom I admired most in this world, it would be my father."
After high school at Holy Names Academy, Kelley decided not to go East to college, as her father had hoped. She entered the University of Washington instead and as a graduate student "went to teach in what they euphemistically described as a culturally deprived neighborhood," she recounts. That changed her mind about teaching so quickly that she decided to take up her father's travel offer. She got herself a job as a VIP hostess at the 1964 New York World's Fair.
"The money was phenomenally good, and all we did was spend it," Kelley remembers.
By 1966, "fascinated with the power and politics" of the dignitaries she met, Kelley left for Washington, D.C. "I just wanted to see what it was like to work on Capitol Hill," she says. Through a fluke, she landed a temporary job sorting Sen. Eugene McCarthy's foreign relations mail, and shortly found herself working as a press assistant. "Within six weeks he asked me to stay on," she says.
Kelley stayed on for almost four years -- and saw the clash of power and politics at white heat. It was the period of the Vietnam War. McCarthy, the U.S. Senate's leading dove, challenged President Lyndon Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination. A maverick liberal, McCarthy humiliated Johnson in the first primary in New Hampshire and forced the president not to seek re-election. He also forced a change in Johnson's war policy. But McCarthy eventually lost the nomination to George McGovern, who proceeded to lose the general election by a landslide to the Republican hawk Richard Nixon.
Kelley couldn't have had a better ringside seat. And when Mccarthy decided to write his account of those events, "The Year of the People," she helped do the research. To this day, she says, they remain friends. McCarthy still comes to her house for Christmas. But her cordiality doesn't extend to his current views. "They are quixotic," she says. "He endorsed Ronald Reagan, you know."
Her next stop was The Washington Post, where she says she worked for two years
as a researcher on the editorial page. "The best job I ever had," she says -- to the everlasting chagrin of Post editor Ben Bradlee. He has said, "What she doesn't say is she was a secretary here, and she was fired."
In any case, the Post job launched her. "After two years of watching writers," she recalls, "I thought being one was the most intellectually stimulating way to live your life that I could imagine."
Kelly's first major piece of intellectual stimulation turned out to be "The Glamour Spa." Published in 1975, it was a book-length exposé of 13 exclusive fat farms. She wanted to do for the health-and-beauty industry what Jessica Mitford did for the funderal industry in "The American Way of Death."
"I was fascinated by people who spent money at these places," Kelley says. "I'd thought they just went to lose weight. I soon learned they went for other reasons -- alcoholism, drugs, loneliness, sex."
Dah-dah-dah-dum.
One day at The Golden Door in Escondido, California, her investigation came to a head as she was sitting disconsolately in the dining room after a feeble, 600-calorie lunch. Kelley grins at the memory. "I was the last to leave the table and I was so tired," she recounts. "The chef came over to me and said, 'Would you like a leetle zumzing?' And I thought he meant a second helping. I said, 'Of course!' And he said he would bring it to my room. And I said, 'No, I'll have it right here.' I thought it was going to be more of their dietetic tunafish. And he looked at me with new-found respect. Because he said he didn't sleep with the women on top of the table. He did it in the bedroom. Well, I started laughing."
In no time she had all the details of how the upper crust paid for sex at the spa, and how movie stars paid for pot, and so on. The reading public was not impressed, however. "I sold two copies, both to my mother," Kelley says. The book reviewers were equally indifferent. Somehow none of them noticed she was trying to do a Jessica Mitford.
It took "Jackie Oh!" in 1978 to snap them to attention. Ironically, the publisher had to convince her to accept the assignment. "I thought everything had already been said about her." Not knowing where to begin, she called in an old IOU from New York gossip columnist Liz Smith, who had given up her own attempt to write a Jackie biography because of too many closed doors and frosty no-comments. "She opened all her files to me," says Kelley, "so I went to New York to read them with Mike."
Michael Edgley, that is. Her husband. They've been married a decade. Kelley had met him at the World's Fair, but they lost touch and met again years later in the Capitol. Yes, he's her first and only husband. [They're no longer married. Her second husband is a physician, Jonathan Zucker. They've been married for more than 10 years.] Mike is a fiction writer. No, his fiction hasn't been published. Yes, he's away. In California. Kelley speaks of him with affection. Her voice sounds warm. Yet you can't help noticing that he falls into the "Poor Mike" category. As in, "Poor Mike, he lost his dressing room to Sinatra, file by file."
Iron Butterlies are not notably sentimental, and Kelley, who seems made of cast iron, is no exception. You look in vain for a picture of Mike. It is not among the bric-a-brac and coffee-table kitsch.
Upstairs there's a photo of Kelley making a screwball face behind Elizabeth Taylor's back at some Washington cocktail party. There's another of Kelley on the White House lawn helping a long-time friend (and reputed lover) take a photo of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. But no Mike.
Sinatra, meanwhile "mesmerizes" her. That's her word for it. "He's the most fascinating man in the world," she purrs. A sex object? Kelley frowns. "I don't have a sex object. I am not a man. I don't mean to be coy, but it takes other stimuli for a woman to be excited."
We're on touchy ground here. What are you referring to Kitty, power?
"Well, Henry Kissinger felt power is an aphrodisiac," she says. "But I'm attracted to men who make me feel good about myself. I like to laugh. I think a sense of humor is a very attractive quality in a man."
Apparently humor is something Sinatra lacks. "He has it in limited doses," Kelley says. "He takes himself very seriously."
So. She finds him unattractive, but she's mesmerized. Poor Frank.
Posted by mclennan at 06:57 PM
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish—indeed his lifelong effort—to be white.Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish—indeed his lifelong effort—to be white.
The irony, of course, is that Davis had been steeped from childhood in the traditional heritage of black entertainment. Born in Harlem in 1925, he was raised on the chitlin circuit by his father and Will Mastin, tap-dance performers in black vaudeville. Davis never went to school a day in his life. His only education was standing in the wings and joining them onstage, for the first time at the age of four. Self-trained, he was shaped by a cultural inheritance handed down from the minstrel tradition of the 19th century. More than any other black performer of his generation, he had mastered its art and was himself the last great link to consummate black vaudevillians like Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.
Read the complete review of Wil Haygood's "In Black and White" (Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95) and Gary Fishgall's "Gonna Do Great Things" (A Lisa Drew Book / Scribner, $26).
Posted by mclennan at 06:32 PM
