Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Melvin Purvis, who led the team of FBI agents that shot and killed John Dillinger in 1934, appears as the mystery guest on To Tell the Truth, hosted by Bud Collyer. This episode was originally telecast by CBS on September 17, 1957. The panelists were Polly Bergen, Ralph Bellamy, Kitty Carlisle, and Hy Gardner:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.”
John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs
From 2008:
I belong to the first generation of biographers whose work was shaped by the invention of the personal computer. Not only did I write The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken on a computer, but I bought my first laptop in order to transcribe material from the Mencken Collection, which is housed in Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library. So far as I know, I was the first person ever to bring a laptop into the Mencken Room, whose contents include, among other fascinating things, the ancient Corona portable typewriter on which Mencken banged out most of his books and other published writings. I like to think that he would have appreciated this fact, but I wouldn’t bet on it….
Read the whole thing here.
“Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: It was somebody’s name, or he happened to be there at the time, or, it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life
I’ve been so preoccupied with the demands of my day job of late that I’m only just getting around to announcing the arrival of the latest addition to the Teachout Museum, a pencil-signed 1992 lithograph of Duke Ellington drawn by Al Hirschfeld.
I am, needless to say, a great admirer of Hirschfeld, whose 1990 lithograph of Louis Armstrong has been on display in our New York apartment ever since Mrs. T and I bought it in 2014, a month after Satchmo at the Waldorf opened off Broadway. Just as I made a special point of reproducing “Satchmo!” in Pops, my Armstrong biography, so can this caricature—or, rather, an earlier version of it, about which more in a moment—be found in Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington. It stands to reason, then, that I also hoped someday to acquire a copy of “Duke Ellington,” not merely for sentimental reasons but because I believe it to be an exceptionally choice example of Hirschfeld’s work, a portrait as elegant and sly as Ellington himself.
Thereby hangs a tale, one that I told rather too briefly in Duke. It seems that Hirschfeld’s original caricature of Ellington, which now belongs to the National Portrait Gallery and on which he based this lithograph, was itself a new version of a much older drawing now known only to Ellington scholars, one that he had made in 1931 at the behest of Irving Mills, his manager.
As I explained in Duke:
Mills commissioned the jazz-loving theatrical cartoonist to draw a sketch that could be published by newspapers whose editors were unwilling to run photos of a black person—even one who, like Ellington, was an international celebrity. This witty (and respectful) art-deco caricature was included in one of the advertising manuals sent out by the Mills office.
To read that manual today is—to put it very, very mildly—an eye-opening experience, especially if you’re too young to recall the days when racial segregation was taken for granted throughout much of America. The anonymous author carefully explains to potential promoters that the Ellington band is “an attraction which may be just a little different than those you have handled previously. You may encounter some difficulty in planting photographs in newspapers, for example….Little objection ever has been voiced by amusement editors or radio editors to the use of this caricature in their columns. Many of the greatest metropolitan dailies in the country have used it.” And Mills’ subterfuge worked like a charm: Hirschfeld’s drawing appeared in papers all over the country, the Deep South included.
I have no trouble understanding why Hirschfeld chose to redraw his very first Ellington caricature six decades after the fact (the original by then having long since vanished) and turn it into a limited-edition lithograph. To be sure, his portraits of Ellington in middle and old age are both charming and characteristic, but this one, made right around the time that he was turning out such early masterpieces as “Creole Rhapsody,” “Mood Indigo,” and “Rockin’ in Rhythm,” is something more than that. It is, above all, a portrait of the artist as a young man, pensive and—at least to my biographer’s eye—guarded, a man who poured his innermost feelings into his music but otherwise preferred to keep them hidden from the world.
The Ellington of this caricature is the same one whose complex personality I endeavored to suggest in my biography. It pleases me greatly that so handsome and revealing a work of art will now hang in the room where I wrote most of Duke.
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To read more about Al Hirschfeld’s 1931 and 1992 caricatures of Duke Ellington, go here.
Duke Ellington plays a solo piano version of his “African Flower” (also known as “Fleurette Africaine”). This performance was taped on July 2, 1970, for broadcast on French TV:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“No one I met at this time—doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients—failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.”
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the last two shows of the 2017-18 season, the off-Broadway premiere of Mlima’s Tale and Summer: The Donna Summer Musical. Here’s an excerpt.
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Lynn Nottage frequently writes dramas “about” a topic or historical subject that’s in or near the news: blue-collar unemployment, prostitution in Central Africa, the Great Migration. Sober, earnest stuff, in other words, the kind of thing that tends not to engage me—and yet she’s one of my half-dozen favorite living playwrights, among the very few whose latest show I’ll go to see knowing only that she wrote it….
“Mlima’s Tale,” Ms. Nottage’s new play, was inspired by a magazine article about how wild elephants are illegally hunted down by “contract poachers” and their ivory tusks smuggled out of Africa and sold for profit. The results should by all rights have been preachy in the extreme. Instead, “Mlima’s Tale” turns out to be an enthralling piece of theater that tells a fascinating story in a daringly original way…
Part of what makes “Mlima’s Tale” so fine is its bold craftsmanship. Architecturally speaking, Ms. Nottage pays tribute to Arthur Schnitzler’s “La Ronde,” but she has made Schnitzler’s daisy-chain structure entirely her own. Using just four actors on a near-bare stage—one of whom plays the title character, an elephant—she transports us step by step from a savannah in Kenya to a cocktail party in Beijing. Along the way we learn how the tusks of Mlima (he’s the elephant) are stripped from his corpse and turned into sculptures for the newly monied Chinese leisure class….
Instead of pounding the pulpit, she portrays her characters not as political-cartoon symbols of good and evil but as men and women whose motives, as is almost always true in real life, are mixed. Most memorable of all is the master sculptor into whose hands Mlima’s tusks are consigned. Corrupted by his own connoisseurship, he knows but will not admit to himself that they have been procured illegally. “I’m a Buddhist. I could not conscience killing for my craft,” he claims. Yet he cannot resist the chance to make “something singular” out of them—something for which, needless to say, he will be well paid….
“Summer,” the last new musical of the 2017-18 Broadway season, is a comic book set to top-40 tunes. It tells the story of Donna Summer, the Disco Queen who brought you “Hot Stuff” and “She Works Hard for the Money,” and it does so in a way so vacuous that I was reduced to helpless giggling almost before I got settled in my aisle seat….
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To read my review of Mlima’s Tale, go here. (This is the complete version—the print version is shorter.)
To read my review of Summer, go here.
The trailer for Mlima’s Tale: