Archives for September 2014

Almanac: Neil Welliver on color and the painter

September 3, 2014 by Terry Teachout

Q. Sometimes you don’t actually get the color you’re looking at, but the color that reminds you of that color. 

A. I never try to get the color I’m looking at. I never copy the color I see. NEVER.

“Neil Welliver in Conversation with Edwin Denby” (Jacket, Feb. 2003)

Two to a customer

September 2, 2014 by Terry Teachout

When I was a boy, my family went to the SEMO District Fair in Cape Girardeau every September without fail. It was one of the supreme treats of a happy childhood, my annual opportunity to ride the thrilling giant double Ferris wheel, eat my fill of Malone’s State Fair Taffy Candy, gorge on the Trinity Lutheran Men’s Club’s incomparably greasy and flavorful cheeseburgers, and—on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion—wander off all by myself and get hopelessly and predictably lost.

The last time I went to the SEMO District Fair, or any other fair, was in 2001, a couple of days after 9/11. I recalled the occasion in this space a decade ago:

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.

Since then I’d assumed that my fairgoing days were over. But Mrs. T pointed out a few weeks ago that the Woodstock Fair isn’t far from our place in Connecticut, and she suggested that we go there this year. That struck me as a wonderful idea, so we jumped in the car on Saturday and drove to Woodstock, where we spent a balmy afternoon eating corndogs and cotton candy, inspecting pumpkins, melons, chickens, rabbits, and farm machinery, and (best of all!) riding the Ferris wheel and bumper cars. We even brought home a sack of taffy.

I doubt you’ll be surprised to learn that our trip put me in mind yet again of Walking Distance, the 1959 episode of The Twilight Zone in which Martin Sloan, a harried advertising executive from New York, visits Homewood, the small town where he grew up, one fine summer day. He notices that nothing about the town has changed and in short order realizes that the clock has somehow been mysteriously turned back and that he is in the Homewood of his youth, where the carousel still turns and the calliope still plays.

The way Martin Sloan felt on that mysterious day in Homewood was the way I felt, more or less, when I returned to Smalltown for a visit shortly after my brother began to remodel the house in which we’d grown up together and in which he and his wife now live. He started, logically enough, by stripping my old, long-unoccupied bedroom to the walls, and I was briefly but thoroughly nonplussed when I entered the room and found it bare:

The bed I’d slept in, the bookshelf that once held my burgeoning library of paperbacks, the chest of drawers in which I placed my neatly folded clothes–all had vanished. Even the carpet was gone….

I stepped inside and was no less startled by how small the room looked. Could I really have grown up in this cramped chamber? Was this the place in which I dreamed my youthful dreams of glory? It was—or, rather, it had been. Now it was an empty, memory-free space waiting to be brought to life once more.

Going to the Woodstock Fair, on the other hand, made me feel, if only fleetingly, that Martin Sloan’s father was wrong to warn his son that you can’t go home again: “We only get one chance. Maybe there’s only one summer to every customer.” Maybe so, but you couldn’t have proved it by me on Saturday. Most of the sights, sounds, and smells of the Woodstock Fair proved to be all but indistinguishable from what I’d seen, heard, and smelled in Cape Girardeau a half-century ago, and I found it unexpectedly easy to relax my grip on the present and revel for a couple of blissful hours in the simple joys of an old-fashioned midway. All that mattered was the perfect moment in which I was suspended, and the presence of the loving and beloved companion with whom I shared it. If only for the space of a single blessed August afternoon, time had been regained and the carousel still turned.

* * *

The epilogue of “Walking Distance,” a 1959 episode of The Twilight Zone written and narrated by Rod Serling. The score is by Bernard Herrmann:

Jo Stafford, Rosemary Clooney, Mel Tormé, and Edd Byrnes sing “County Fair” (by Tormé and Robert Wells) on The Jo Stafford Show, a 1961 TV special:

Lookback: on being a late adopter of information technology

September 2, 2014 by Terry Teachout

From 2004:

For some reason I seem to have a knack for intuiting the large-scale cultural effects of technologies I have yet to adopt. I understood what digital downloading would do to the recording industry years before I downloaded my first piece of iMusic. Yet I wish I were more comfortable with those technologies, which may simply be another way of saying that I wish I were ten years younger. Or perhaps not: I’ve always known that part of me is inclined by temperament to live in the past, and the fact that I don’t never fails to strike me as something of a minor miracle….

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Elmore Leonard on the secret of a happy life

September 2, 2014 by Terry Teachout

“Carl said his dad knew how to live; he watched the world go by but only paid attention to certain parts.”

Elmore Leonard, The Hot Kid

Entry from an unkept diary

September 1, 2014 by Terry Teachout

• I’ve been rereading Jeanine Basinger’s The Star Machine, one of the smartest and most illuminating books ever written about studio-era Hollywood. It contains an especially good chapter about Mickey Rooney in which Basinger tells the fascinating story of how A Family Affair, the first Andy Hardy movie, made him a child star in 1937. It wasn’t intended to do any such thing: MGM was grooming another actor in the film, Eric Linden, for stardom. But the public, as is so often the case, drew its own conclusions, which Basinger sums up in two pointed sentences: “Today, no one has heard of Eric Linden. Everybody knows Mickey Rooney.”

Well…yes and no. Rooney was a big, big star until he joined the Army in 1944, but when he returned to Hollywood two years later, it was all over. While he continued to work to the very end of his long life—his last film, Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, will be released in December, seven months after he died at the age of ninety-three—he never again played a leading role in a movie of any great distinction. Nor were very many of his supporting parts noteworthy, though Rooney did manage to transform himself into a character actor of no small accomplishment, as can be seen in the 1962 film version of Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight. And while his obituaries were both lengthy and respectful, I suspect that their length was more a matter of his longevity (he was one of the last survivors of the studio system) than anything else. Wonderful though he was in them, scarcely anybody now watches the movies that Rooney made in the Thirties and early Forties, not even the fluffy let’s-put-on-a-show musicals in which he co-starred with Judy Garland, and I can’t imagine that very many people under the age of sixty have more than a vague idea of who he was, much less why it mattered.

Even more interesting to me, however, was something that I learned from the Rooney chapter in The Star Machine, which is that one of his co-stars in A Family Affair was Julie Haydon, who played his sister. Unless you know a lot about the history of Broadway, you won’t recognize Haydon’s name, for she appeared in only a handful of films, none of them particularly noteworthy. It was as a stage actress that she made her name, such as it was, and she is now best known to history for having been the longtime girlfriend and eventual wife of George Jean Nathan, the stiletto-tongued drama critic who co-founded the American Mercury with H.L. Mencken and was the real-life model for Addison DeWitt, the venomous critic played by George Sanders in All About Eve. (For the record, Lillian Gish preceded her in Nathan’s bed.)

It was widely taken for granted on Broadway that Haydon got cast in plays because of her relationship with Nathan, which was an open secret, so much so that Damon Runyon is said to have had them in mind when he created the characters of Miss Adelaide and Nathan Detroit in the short story that Abe Burrows and Frank Loesser later turned into into Guys and Dolls.

On the other hand, she received reviews that were much more than merely respectful throughout her comparatively brief stage career, and she also created the role of Laura Wingfield in the original production of The Glass Menagerie. No matter whom she knew, it’s hard to imagine that she would have landed that demanding part had she not been competent enough to play opposite Laurette Taylor, the first Amanda, who gave what is universally regarded as one of the greatest performances in the history of the American stage. As for Haydon, no less qualified an observer than Stark Young, that toughest and most knowing of critical customers, wrote in The New Republic that she gave “one of her translucent performances of a dreaming, wounded, half-out-of-this-world young girl.”

Haydon got a much shorter New York Times obituary of her own when she died in 1994. It decorously overlooked the precise nature of her relationship with Nathan, and devoted one sentence to her film career. And that was that: now she belongs to the ages, and the ages don’t seem to care much for her. Or for Mickey Rooney, sad to say. Nostalgia only lasts as long as the people who feel it are still alive, and its value depreciates with fearful velocity. Few things are more ephemeral than the fame of a movie star who didn’t make any great movies—unless it’s the reputation of a stage actor who didn’t play any great film roles. Try though she might, not even a historian as fine as Jeanine Basinger can do much of anything about that.