Archives for February 16, 2009

I recently went to a nightclub to hear a musician whom I know and like. The next morning I got an e-mail from my musician friend, who asked whether I’d recognized the woman who waited on me. The waitress, it seemed, was an actress whom I’d praised in my Wall Street Journal drama column on more than one occasion. “I am totally embarrassed,” I replied. “It was the context–and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her offstage.” To which my friend responded as follows:

She didn’t mind–she said she preferred that you not see her in her Clark Kent guise. That would be like someone in the business catching me in secretary mode. We all have to do our time in the trenches, don’t you know.

I do know, very much so. Many years ago I worked as a teller in a downtown Kansas City bank, a job that allowed me to pay the rent while simultaneously playing jazz and writing concert reviews for the Kansas City Star on the side. It was one of the most painful experiences of my life, and the only thing that made it tolerable was that for some inexplicable reason, the people whom I knew in my “real” life as a writer and musician almost never came into the bank to do business. Had they done so, it would have broken my heart.

I wrote about this experience eight years after it finally came to an end, when my feelings about it were still fresh and raw:

At night I was a writer, on weekends a jazz musician. During the day, though, I was a servant. My nameplate was displayed for the world to see, and strangers, seeing it, called me by my first name. I despised them for their casual familiarity, but I despired myself even more. Once I had been a young man of unlimited promise. My teachers had predicted great things for me. Now I spent my days making change. My promise was running dry, my great expectations turning sour. I was sure I had gone as far as I could go. I expected to spend the rest of my life punching a clock.

So yes, I know how it is–which is one of the reasons why I now spend so much of my middle-aged energy seeking out memorable performances in tiny theaters far from Times Square. I know what Orson Welles meant when he told Peter Bogdanovich that artists “need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves.” As long as I live, I’ll never forget how much I needed it once upon a time.

Alexander Woollcott, the kingpin of the Algonquin Round Table, was the real-life model for Sheridan Whiteside, the appallingly ill-mannered central character of The Man Who Came to Dinner, and Waldo Lydecker, the venomously campy critic-boulevardier played by Clifton Webb in Laura. The caricatures, as sometimes happens, outlived the man: Woollcott’s writings are no longer read, not even his drama criticism, though in his day he was one of Manhattan’s most powerful and influential men on the aisle and a regular contributor to The New Yorker. (The “Shouts and Murmurs” column in the present-day New Yorker was originally created for and written by Woollcott.)

Least of all is Woollcott remembered in his capacity as a radio personality. Yet The Town Crier, the series on which he held forth each week, trumpeting his opinions of everything from new books to celebrated murders, was immensely popular throughout the Thirties, so much so that it figures prominently in both Laura and The Man Who Came to Dinner. Sic transit!
Only one recording of a Town Crier broadcast is known to survive. It originally aired in 1933. You can listen to it here. Woollcott’s rambling, nostalgic musings offer a fascinating glimpse into the long-lost middlebrow culture of America in the Thirties.

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Read more about Woollcott’s radio career here.

“Fame sometimes hath created something out of nothing. She hath made whole countries more than nature ever did, especially near the poles, and then hath peopled them likewise with inhabitants of her own invention, pigmies, giants, and amazons: yea, fame is sometimes like unto a mushroom, which Pliny recounts to be the greatest miracle in nature, because growing and having no root, as fame no ground of her reports.”
Thomas Fuller, The Holy State