Archives for October 7, 2004

Regular readers of this blog know I’m addicted to What’s My Line?, the prime-time TV game show that ran on CBS from 1950 to 1967 and can now be seen early each morning on the Game Show Network. The final episode of What’s My Line? aired two weeks ago, and there’d been some talk that the show would be dropped from the schedule thereafter. Instead, GSN is now replaying the very first episodes, originally seen at the dawn of network television, back in the impossibly distant days when Harry Truman was president and Milton Berle was TV’s brightest star. My interest in these ancient kinescopes can’t properly be described as nostalgic–they predate me by six years–but I still find them endlessly fascinating, not merely for their entertainment value but as time capsules crammed full of fading souvenirs of a long-lost era.

On the same day I watched the first episode of What’s My Line?, I received a small package from my brother in Smalltown, U.S.A. He hadn’t told me what was in it, but I knew without peeking that it would contain a box of vanilla taffy purchased at the SEMO District Fair. (Back where I come from, “SEMO” stands for “southeast Missouri.”) My family has been bringing taffy home from the SEMO District Fair ever since I was a small boy. Four decades later, it still comes in the same red-and-white cardboard boxes whose lids inform the happy buyer that he’s eating Malone’s State Fair Taffy Candy, manufactured by the Malone’s Candy Co. of Marion, Illinois, and sold exclusively at seven fairs: “Du Quoin, Ill. Tulsa, Okla. Little Rock, Ark. Indianapolis, Ind. Jackson, Miss. Shreveport, La. Cape Girardeau, Mo.” Each chunk is wrapped in wax paper, is as sticky as flypaper in August, and tastes like…well, like what it felt like for a wide-eyed child to go to the fair on a September night, ride on the double Ferris wheel, eat corn dogs, and cart home a box of State Fair Taffy and a helium-filled balloon.

The last time I went to the fair was three years ago, a couple of days after 9/11. I was stranded in Smalltown, U.S.A., waiting for the planes to start flying again so that I could make my way back to Manhattan. Though all of us in Smalltown were stunned by the horrors that had just played out on our TV screens, we knew we needed a break from reality, so I drove up to the fair with my mother, my brother, and his family, and we bought taffy and rode the rides. Alas, the double Ferris wheel was long gone–no doubt it had proved too tame for a generation of thrill-seeking youngsters raised on modern-day theme-park roller coasters–but the taffy hadn’t changed a bit. Though I suppose it isn’t the very best taffy in the world (that honor belongs to Smoky Mountain Taffy Logs, made and sold in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the resort town where the Teachout family spent some of its most memorable summer vacations), it was still pretty darn good. Since then my brother has made a point of sending a box to me every year. I always swear that I’ll dole it out to myself one piece at a time, making it last until October or November, and I always end up polishing off the whole box in two days flat, the same way I did when I was eight years old. When it comes to taffy, I’ve never been very good at deferred gratification.

It occurred to me this year that I could go on line and buy my own taffy, but no sooner did I get the idea than I realized how wrong it would be to do so. Malone’s State Fair Taffy Candy is meant to be eaten only once a year, at the short-lived moment when summer starts to give way to fall and the night air shows the first signs of growing crisp and clear. To eat it at any other time would be an unforgivable affront to the spirit of nostalgia. Nevertheless, I Googled “Malone’s State Fair Taffy Candy” earlier today–just to see what I could find out about its history, you understand–and do you know what I learned? Nothing whatsoever. It seems the Malone’s Candy Co. of Marion, Illinois has yet to make its way into the information age.

I’m strangely grateful that this should be so, though I’m no less grateful that the Game Show Network and my trusty digital video recorder have made it possible for me to watch What’s My Line? as often as I want, and call my mother on my cellphone to tell her who yesterday’s Mystery Guest was. (I saw Artie Shaw on the program the other day, and marveled at the scarcely believable fact that he’s still alive, the last surviving bandleader of the Swing Era.) One of the underappreciated pleasures of modern technology is the power it has to bring us closer to our memories. Yet it also pleases me that the Malone’s Candy Co. prefers to remain shrouded in mystery, and that its stalwart employees continue to set up their old-fashioned candy stands in Du Quoin, Little Rock, and Cape Girardeau, where they make a ton or two of taffy, wrap each sticky piece in a slick square of wax paper, scoop it into cardboard boxes, and sell it to fairgoers, one of whom brings a box home and sends it to his hungry brother on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

By such unearned acts of familial grace do middle-aged wanderers who have strayed far from home and its ways recapture the past, if only for two tasty days at a time.

Speaking of Artie Shaw (some of whose best recordings are collected on an excellent new CD called Centennial Collection), here’s a piece I wrote about him for the New York Times on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday in 2000. I forgot to include it in A Terry Teachout Reader, but I like it anyway, and I thought you might enjoy reading it.

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H.L. Mencken once suggested that in a well-run universe, everybody would have two lives, “one for observing and studying the world, and the other for formulating and setting down his conclusions about it.” This is more or less the way that the clarinetist Artie Shaw, who turns 90 on Tuesday, has contrived to arrange things. In the first half of his long, spectacularly eventful life, he played jazz with Bix Beiderbecke and Mozart with Leonard Bernstein; married Lana Turner and Ava Gardner; made a movie with Fred Astaire; and was interrogated about his left-wing ties by Joe McCarthy. Then, at the age of 44, he stopped playing music and started writing fiction, eventually producing a monstrously long autobiographical novel called “The Education of Albie Snow.”

Though only a single chapter has seen print, Mr. Shaw’s magnum opus really does exist, and presumably will be published sooner or later, in some form or other. (Robert Altman says he wants to turn it into a movie, with Johnny Depp in the title role.) Still, it is unlikely that his second career as a writer will overshadow his previous career as a musician. In part because he became a pop-culture icon at the age of 28, he has never been properly acknowledged as a giant of jazz–except by his fellow musicians. Yet his recordings leave no possible doubt of his immense stature, as both virtuoso soloist and nonpareil bandleader.

Alas, much of Mr. Shaw’s achievement must now be taken on faith, for most of his records are out of print, and no label has gone to the trouble of commemorating his 90th birthday. BMG, which owns the 78s he made between 1938 and 1945, has no plans to release a retrospective boxed set, and the only tribute thus far has been the publication of Vladimir Simosko’s Artie Shaw: A Musical Biography and Discography (Scarecrow Press), a dry but thorough survey of his musical career. Mr. Shaw can hardly be surprised by this lack of interest in a legendary veteran of the swing era, since he has spent much of his life decrying the commercialism of the pop-music industry–even though he also spent the better part of three decades playing “commercial” music, and profiting handsomely by it.

Mr. Shaw’s first big band was an ensemble of unorthodox instrumentation (it included a string quartet) whose failure inspired him to change musical directions and organize what he called “the loudest goddamn band in the world.” He then struck it rich in 1938 with a crisp, incisive recording of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” that made him a superstar virtually overnight. For all his oft-expressed contempt of commercialism, he had a knack for making good music that pleased the public–a knack with which he would never come to terms–and the “Beguine” band, which featured the superlative singing of Billie Holiday and Helen Forrest, the fiery drumming of the 21-year-old Buddy Rich and a saxophone section that played with breathtaking fluidity and grace, was an incomparable dance band, by turns lyrical and galvanizingly hot.

Mr. Shaw himself wrote many of the band’s lucid, transparent arrangements, whose simplicity was deliberately intended to appeal to a mass audience, but which had the paradoxical effect of providing an ideal background for his richly elaborate improvisations. His intense, saxophone-like tone was sharply focused but never shrill, even when he was cavorting in the instrument’s highest register, and his blues solos were tinged with an exotic modal color suggestive of synagogue chant.

A self-made intellectual manqu

Seeing Bright Young Things put me on an Evelyn Waugh kick. I’ve just reread Vile Bodies and the two volumes of Martin Stannard’s biography and am now preparing to chew my way through the rest of the novels (I hadn’t looked into any of them for a few years). It also reminded me that you can listen to five audio clips from the BBC’s celebrated 1960 TV interview with Waugh by going here.

“I did not know it was possible to be so miserable & live but I am told that this is a common experience.”