stumbling virtue

Over and Out

I had sworn that I wouldn’t read John Feinstein’s Living on the Black. Yes, I was interested last year when I first heard about the book-- Feinstein was spending the season following around Tom Glavine and Mike Mussina, my favorite sardonic right handed pitcher? I was in. But then when it came out this year, I checked with one of the Yankee beat writers (a good superpup correspondent) and he said that the book was a mess—lots of factual errors, typos, etc. So I said thanks for the tip, I’m not reading that one, if for no other reason than to stand up against books by big-time authors that get cranked out without any copyediting or fact-checking. I should at least strike a blow for good books.

But alas, I am weak, and when I saw it on one of those $10 tables on the street, and I knew I had a lot of train rides coming up over the next few days, and none of my reserve books were in at the library, well, I gave in. Hey, at least I didn’t pay full price. Let’s say I struck a small blow. A really small one. And to further exact revenge, I will now write way, way more about it than it deserves.

The premise of the book is to follow two aging pitchers during one season to see how they adjust and work during what is undoubtedly the twilight of their careers, particularly under the hot lights of the New York media. Glavine went into the season in pursuit of his 300th win and a World Series ring with the Mets, who had missed winning the NL pennant by one game last year. Mussina was approaching his 250th win, and a World Series appearance is always the expectation for the Yankees.

Both got the win number they had aimed for, but in other ways the year went horribly awry. Glavine pitched well most of the year, though he lost a number of potential wins due to a shaky bullpen. Then what had been a smooth, easy season turned into a nightmare, with the Mets collapsing down the stretch. They blew their lead in the division and missed their last chance at the playoffs when Glavine turned in one of his career’s worst performances during the season’s final game; he then compounded the error by not seeming upset enough for Mets fans and thus earning himself their eternal, everlasting hatred.

Unlike Glavine, Mussina struggled throughout the year. In 2006, he had had one of his best year’s as a Yankee, good enough to be offered a new two-year contract. But that immediately looked like a bad move, as he didn’t get a win in April, went on the DL, and pitched in and out of trouble all season, alternating good stretches with disastrous ones. The Yankees had a hard time, too, getting off to a terrible start, at one point dropping 14 ½ games behind the AL East leading Red Sox. As the team fought for a playoff spot, Mussina’s inconsistencies became too much, and for the first time in his career he was sent to the bullpen (that didn’t last long as injuries to other starters sent him back to the rotation).  In the end the Yankees made the playoffs, thanks to a blisteringly hot winning streak in the second half of the season, but were knocked out in the first round, leading to a managerial change and many questions as 2007 ended.

(I realize that anyone who would be interested in this book is familiar with these stories, but I feel that I would not be a good little amateur book reviewer if I didn’t include some type of summary.)

The tip I got about the book was dead on—names are misspelled, names are just wrong, teams are mixed up (one sentence refers to the Washington Nationals as the team tied for first in the NL East with the Mets at the end of the season rather than the Phillies…take a good long look at that sentence as you’re not going to see that for a long time). Little details that fans know aren’t caught. Yes, it’s an incredibly small thing to know that Phil Hughes doesn’t like to be referred to as “Philip” but if all the rest of us average every day people who just get all their info from newspapers and blogs know that, shouldn’t someone who’s in the clubhouse almost every day know it? Didn’t anyone familiar with the team read the manuscript (then again, if anyone had, they probably would have been concerned with more obvious facts, such as the Trenton Thunder being incorrectly identified as the Yankees Triple A team rather than the Double A team)? And for every Yankee mistake I caught, I’m sure there is an equal number of Met ones that would make their close watchers cringe.

Acknowledging those flaws, there still is some value in this book. The most interesting parts are when they talk about pitching—how to solve problems, what went wrong in a game, who offered what kind of advice. At this stage in their careers, Glavine and Mussina are similar pitchers, soft-tossers who rely more on guile than on power. But they both have different approaches, and both do things differently. Mussina had a lot more problems during the year, of course—in many ways, he goes through what Glavine went through a few years earlier, that is how to change when what you’ve been doing your whole life isn’t working anymore. Glavine never was a hard thrower; his adjustment came when baseball instituted the Questech system that graded umpires calls during games and made them stop calling strikes for pitches that Glavine had gotten away with throughout his career. Mussina threw harder than Glavine but never was a flamethrower. Still, even within the last few years (2005? 2006?) he had ranked in at least the top ten in strikeouts in the AL (I spend way too much time looking at stats, I think). With his velocity dropping in 2007, both due to injury and age, he had to try to learn that you don’t  have to strike everyone out, that contact can be okay—there are eight other players behind you who can catch the ball when that happens. But understanding something intellectually and actually convincing yourself at any given moment to take that step and do it are two very different things.

The two pitchers personalities couldn’t be more different. Glavine comes across as a nice, friendly, easygoing guy who tries to be helpful. He probably was the kid the teacher would ask to show the new student around the school. Throughout the book he sounds like he is trying to convince himself that he’s used to New York but never really is quite able to separate himself from the Braves; I don’t know if he would ever say it was a mistake to leave Atlanta, but it’s hard not to think that he feels that way. Judging by how his personality plays in the book, though, I would guess that he would mostly the positives of his time here.

Feinstein sums up the difference between Glavine and Mussina in his intro to the book when he discusses their different reactions to his suggestion of the project. Glavine’s immediate response was, “Sure, okay,” while Mussina more or less negotiated the exact terms of what would be involved: how much of a time commitment it would be, how would it affect the other team members, and other fine points, all boiling down to “be exact and tell me what you really want. This is not unfamiliar to anyone who’s seen a Mussina postgame press conference, particularly the ones early in his Yankee tenure; any reporter back then who made the mistake of asking a vague, general question (“What went wrong today?”) would be rewarded by a long silence and a “Do you actually get paid to ask this kind of junk?” stare. At other times he’ll debate the semantics of a question (“Hey Mike, can I have a minute?” “You know this can’t possibly take a minute.”); he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. He does, though, have a dust dry wit, that has made him one of the NY reporters favorites in the Yankee locker room—once they got used to him. Feinstein said he can irritate people because he can come off as the smartest guy in the room, but the reality is that he often is (not a tough task in a MLB team locker room, which isn’t typically stacked with geniuses). Either you like him because he seems like a smirky smart mouth, or you can’t stand him because he seems like a smirky smart mouth. This divide is highly visible on any forum for Yankee fans where those who hate him never seem to remember the good things he’s done for the team and those who do like him have to jump to his defense (and to be fair, when it comes to long-term contracts that have been handed out to pitchers in the last decade, his initial six year deal with the Yankees has turned out to be one of the best buys).

But being able to provide a sarcastic quote doesn’t help much when things are going badly (though I did appreciate his riff on what was good about life when he was demoted to the bullpen, “I’m getting paid to do nothing…I get to go to Kansas City for free…I get to go to Canada for free.”). Fans get angry when players do badly because they only see the results, not the process. Sometimes this anger comes out as a belief that the player isn’t trying hard, or isn’t aware that he’s doing badly, or, as many fans often claim, just don’t care as long as he’s getting paid. In this book, though, you see how hard Mussina worked while trying to figure out his puzzling sudden slump (Glavine too when he ran into problems, though as noted, he really had a comparatively smooth year). It’s both surprising, strange, and maybe a little comforting to see how easily these multimillion dollar athletes, with a lifetime of success behind them can lose confidence. Over and over, teammates, coaches, and family members observe that Mussina’s problem became after a while just a belief that he couldn’t get anyone out anymore. It seems incredible that anyone who has gotten out too many batters to remember over a lifetime of pitching can suddenly feel like he has no idea what he’s doing, but it happens. If you’ve ever really sucked at anything you’ve ever done or lost confidence in your own work, well, it helps a little to see those at the top of their professions go through it too (as long as I’ve been freelance writing, I still feel like every project I ever do is the world’s worst work and I’ll never be hired by anyone again. I keep reminding myself that I must be doing something right, but I don’t really believe it).

 

Sometimes nothing works. 

 

I don’t know exactly how Feinstein wrote this book. Considering that the story essentially ended last October and the book came out in May, I’m guessing that he did an interview after each game, then took that, wrote it into a section, and then pieced them together (there are biographical pieces at the beginning for each pitcher, and presumably those were done before the season started). This is a positive in that it gives each game account a sense of immediacy—there’s no sense as each player speaks of what lies ahead. If you’re a reader who’s familiar with the 2007 season, it’s weirdly fascinating to see how upbeat and positive things are as Glavine talks throughout the book when you know how badly it’s going to end. It’s like when you’re watching a movie and the director shows the audience that there’s a waterfall ahead but the rafters don’t know it. You feel this a little less with Mussina, as well, his season just went from bad to worse, and the resurgence of the Yankees from their awful start doesn’t get much time.

That’s the downside of this almost article-per-game approach (which, as I said, is only what I’m guessing happened). Readers get the game by game details, but little sense of the big picture. While other teammates are occasionally quoted, readers never really get a sense of the turmoil that swirled around both teams during the season. The book is supposed to be partially about what it’s like to perform under the glare of the New York spotlight, but we rarely get a sense of that. One problem after another was not just back page of the tabloid news for these teams during the season, but often front page news. I understand that the story was supposed to be about just Glavine and Mussina and their years, but a large part of the Yankees troubled year also included the focus on whether Joe Torre would be fired during the season, whether Alex Rodriguez would leave at the end of the season (not to mention all the other mini firestorms that always seemed to follow A-Rod), and the problems other players had. These are touched on by Feinstein, particularly Mussina’s belief that Torre was being unfairly blamed for the team’s problems, but he never captures how big they were; they must have affected the team somehow. The deteriorating relations between members of the Mets and their management, and the anger of their fans as the season falls apart never comes through. The book is factual, to the point and contains good and interesting quotes from Glavine and Mussina (particularly Mussina—look, I know I’m biased, but he’s just funnier), but it never really evokes the frantic nature of the season as the fortunes of both teams rise and fall.

The writing is workmanlike and doesn’t sweep you away into the atmosphere of a game or locker room or anything like that. Aside from the errors mentioned previously, I’m sure there are sentences Feinstein would like back or at least could use an editor’s touch, but I guess there just wasn’t time (I know, I shouldn’t be criticizing anyone’s writing, but hey, I don’t have editors and since no one is reading this but me, I don’t feel a real need to spend my own time polishing it. I am already bored enough with myself). Also, while it mostly is a neutral third person narrator, at times he’ll throw in an opinion or an aside that feels jarring. It doesn’t happen enough to make him a participant as a narrator, so instead it just feels like a lapse, which it probably is.

Despite all that, though, it’s quick and readable, even at 500 pages. It’s hard to say who this book is for. Obviously it would appeal to fans of either pitcher. Yankee fans might like it, but I think Mets fans’ anger at Glavine is too much for them to tolerate it. The best audience would probably be for people who want to know more about what it’s like to be inside the mind of a major league pitcher. Aside from that value, though, it certainly wouldn’t rank anywhere on my personal “best baseball books I’ve read list” (and you know we don’t want to get into that…not like you need me to cite the list anyway).

 

Pitching is like auditioning, in many ways. When you pitch a game, you’re judged on that day’s performance; your past doesn’t contribute to the win or loss. At an audition, what you did in your last show doesn’t matter, just how you do in those three minutes that you have. In both cases, you need to keep in mind what you may have had problems with the last time out and work to correct them, but you also can’t let yourself be paralyzed by the memory of past failures. Both actors and pitchers can get off to a bad start and then find themselves scrambling to recover. They can get in trouble by overthinking (I made a bad song choice at an audition last week for no other reason than that I was trying to both outwit everyone else auditioning and was trying too hard to impress the casting director; I went with something because it was unusual, not because it showed my singing off to the best advantage, and that’s a mistake). Both can do well and not get the win (bullpen blows it, the team doesn’t hit) or the role (you’re not pretty enough, you’re too short, you don’t look like the person who would be playing a family member). And in both cases you’re out there alone, hoping to do your best, hoping you can remember how to do your best, and hoping everyone can see that you’re trying to do your best.

2008 has to be better...doesn't it?

 

Indy Film

Irina Spalko confounds Indiana Jones with the power of her inappropriate hairstyle. 

Imagine that the big movie opening this weekend was just called The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. There is no Raiders, no Temple of Doom, and no Last Crusade. We've never met Indiana Jones before and don't know what he did in World War II. Marion Williams is just an ex-girlfriend of an aged hero. How would you judge this movie if you didn't have a sentimental attachment to the other movies and characters? How does it look if you don't have the other movies to compare it to?

As a straightforward action movie, I think it works just fine. The action sequences, are, well, full of action. Some of them go on too long (the chase through the jungle), but anytime a movie comes in under two hours, I'm not going to complain too much. The story isn't the most connected, logical piece of work you'll ever see, but a certain level of silliness is tolerated in action adventure movies (and btw, the people who have been complaining about the aliens/UFO storyline in this movie as just another instance of Steven Spielberg working out his obsessions should take note of how that was a major theme in many '50s films). There are passages of clunky dialogue and bits of exposition that could be handled more gracefully (Aren't there dialogue writers anymore? Did this go to a script doctor at all? Did George Lucas write some of the lines? And I don't mean to pile on Lucas, but the prairie dogs and monkeys smacked a little too much of the dreaded Ewoks for me). But if you saw this movie without any knowledge of the other Indy films and enjoy a lot of action and big set pieces, you'd walk out satisfied.

The reason, though, why we should care about this movie at all is because of our familiarity with the characters and their stories. Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and screenwriter David Koepp (and Frank Darabont, however much he contributed to the actual final product) have constructed a film that elicits whatever charm it has, what makes it different than any other big summer movie, through a reliance on audience members' knowledge of the characters and their pasts. Yes, you can follow the plot of this movie without seeing the others, but many of the little jokes and moments come from what we've learned before--the snakes, the Marion-Indy bickering, the tendency for Indiana Jones to often have his derring-do go slightly awry (which was, as you may remember way, way back when Raiders first appeared, a comic riff upon the way heroes of the long-ago B-movie serials always had the most improbable exploits work without any bumps, injuries or miscues), not least the iconography of the hat and the whip. 

If you're rating the movie this way, as a continuation of the series than as just another movie, then Harrison Ford is its saving grace. He wears his age well, and his wry, world weary, how-did-I-get-myself-into-this demeanor is part of what we've always loved about the character. He's unlike the action heroes of the past, who always know what to do next, who have no fears or weaknesses; he's unlike the action heroes of the day who are cynical and more interested in irony than sincerity.

This is a film that is about the use and abuse of knowledge. Much of Indiana Jones's success has always relied on the fact that he's not just an adventurer, but also a teacher with an unshakeable belief in the power of knowledge. He doesn't just bust open doors and knock out bad guys with a kick and a punch--he can decode ancient symbols. He knows the mythologies of long-dead tribes and the right dialect to communicate with the living ones. His role as a teacher is, appropriately, more emphasized than ever in this film (note his giving instruction to the student in the library, the dissertation on sandpits vs. quicksand, his admonishment to Mutt Williams to go to school). For Jones, knowledge is a way of understanding people and the past. Knowledge should help us make the world better by avoiding the mistakes that history teaches us. He understands the meaning of the Crystal Skull and knows that it must be returned to its proper place; it has knowledge to offer us, but that doesn't mean we should take it. There's a difference between understanding and grave robbing. His enemies in this film don't get this. Mac, his avaricious turncoat associate, suffers because he sees uncovering the past as a way of materially profiting.  Irina Spalko, the KGB  officer, wants to take from the Crystal Skull; she wants the knowledge that can be obtained from it as a means of power and for controlling others. In the end, that covetousness destroys her. Knowledge is important, but the intent behind the desire for it is just as crucial.

Most of the other characters work reasonably well in this movie. Karen Allen is a welcome sight, still reliably spunky, if a bit manic at times. And aside from her past history with Indy, it's also refreshing to see an age appropriate love interest for an action hero (pairing a twenty year old tart with sixty-something Ford would have been too much). Winstone fills his typical role well enough. Considering the amount of words he had to speak, John Hurt picked up one of the easiest paychecks ever, but then again, Oxley is one of those parts that only Hurt could play. 

As Spalko, Cate Blanchett is cold enough for the Cold War, but I was taken out of the film somewhat by her inexplicable costume and hairstyle. The jumpsuit/mechanics overalls style outfit that she wears at the beginning of the film seems appropriately Soviet, but then why does she change into a uniform that is more appropriate for Stalin circa 1919? Did he leave it to her when he died in 1953? And I cannot for the life of me think of a reason why a KGB officer in 1957 would sport the signature hairstyle of a glamorous silent movie star (Louise Brooks). This is the most puzzling hairstyle since Drew Barrymore in the '80s-set The Wedding Singer sported hair that no one in the '80s would even have been able to imagine. Then again, George Lucas, the man behind many of filmdom's worst hairstyle choices, was involved, so perhaps that's the best explanation.

Mutt Williams, played by Shia LaBeouf, was a disappointment to me, mostly in that I didn't feel his character was terribly clear. He's introduced on his motorcycle and in a leather jacket, in a painfully obvious reference to Marlon Brando in The Wild One. The problem, though, is that LaBeouf just doesn't come off as that tough. He looks like he's playing at being a greaser and a tough guy, rather than really being one. He'd never be, like Brando, the leader of a gang of wild teens rebelling against whatever you've got; he'd be the hanger on in the gang who fetched and carried for Brando and tried to copy (unsuccessfully) his every move. So my question is whether that's who his character is supposed to be--a tough guy wannabe? Or is he actually supposed to be the tough guy? If the former, they weren't clear enough about this; if the latter, it's a piece of miscasting. There's a reason why LaBeouf has typically played the guy who's trying to do the right thing. He's not reform school material, he's organizer of the prom committee (btw, the friend I saw the movie with pointed out, quite reasonably, that considering the incestuous world of archaeology professors and academia presented in these films, where everyone seems to know each other, it's hard to ask us to believe that Jones wouldn't know that Mutt is his son, or at the very least that Marion had married and had a son. I didn't care enough about Mutt to worry about that).

Not quite a character, but almost as important is the actual Crystal Skull, and I found it a little disappointing. It looked like it was made of lucite, not crystal. Same with the skeletons in the temple at the end. Couldn't they have come up with something that looked a little more mystical and otherworldly? Or at least shinier? It should have been something that makes audiences ooh and aah, or react somehow when they see it, but I wasn't impressed. It's a minor point, but like I said, with a movie of this budget, it's not wrong to ask to be awed by the title prop.

Some of the negative reviews I read seemed to be asking too much of this film. I read reviews that complained that there was too much frenetic action, too much obvious theme park prep material, and not enough character development. Well, it's a summer popcorn movie--how much do you really ask of it? The worst crime attributed to it is the accusation that it somehow diminishes the other films ("I'm running home right now to watch Raiders to forget this!" "Why did they have to make this movie?!" "Thanks for raping my childhood memories!"). I don't understand this--whether you loved it, hated it, or fell somewhere in between, how could this movie affect what you feel about the others? That doesn't make sense. Rating it as part of the series, no, I don't believe it is out of place--it's not as good as Raiders, but that's impossible, if for no other reason than that Raiders seemed so fresh and different from other action adventure movies when it was released. But the familiar Indiana Jones character makes a decent return and reminds us why we liked him in the first place. It's on par with the other two Indy films in that it has some good moments, some bad moments, some great action, some tiresome action. It's not great, it's not awful. It's worth your summer movie time and ticket, because it has enough good moments and great action to withstand the bad moments and tiresome action. And it is under two hours. If for nothing else, let us thank Steven Spielberg for giving us a summer movie that gets us out in time to still enjoy a summer night.

It Can Happen to You

Doris Day's outfit looks worse in Technicolor.

There was a Sunday night a few months ago, when the weather was cold, winter seemed longer than ever, and I didn’t want to see anything that wasn’t a big Hollywood movie made somewhere between 1930 and 1960. So I put on Turner Classic and prepared to take whatever they would give me. That turned out to be the 1955 movie Young at Heart. When this movie came on TCM again last week, I found myself drawn to it again, mainly because of some of the performances in the otherwise somewhat slow-paced movie.

At first this movie about the marrying off of three daughters of a music professor seems worse than cloying. It’s the type of 1950s movie that looks like it was inspired by an Easter basket. It’s all rosy pink and baby blues, set in a Connecticut of generic cuteness, with white houses, white picket fences, and a seemingly endless parade of fresh-faced, all-American blondes.

The main blondes are the Tuttle sisters—Fran (Dorothy Malone), Amy (Elizabeth Fraser), and Laurie (Doris Day).  The movie opens with Fran accepting the proposal of a remarkably dull rich boy played by Alan Hale, Jr. This prompts Laurie and Amy to ponder their own futures; Amy isn’t keen on Ernie, the local fellow with an interest in her, and Laurie isn’t caught up with anyone. She proposes that she and Amy either have a double wedding someday or remain spinsters together.

Needless to say, this cues a romantic interest for Laurie, in the person of an also unusually dull Gig Young. He’s Alex Burke, a composer who’s come to Connecticut to work on a Broadway musical. He boards in the Tuttle house, which includes the girls’ father and Aunt Jessie (Ethel Barrymore, an acclaimed ingénue at the turn of the century now turned wry character actress). He falls for Laurie, and she seemingly falls for him, which is bad news for Amy, as she’s also developed a crush on him.

Things change when Frank Sinatra shows up, playing Barney Sloane, the musical arranger slated to work with Young’s character. He’s a cynic who’s led a hard luck life, and wears his born loser, permanently disgruntled persona proudly. Laurie is fascinated by Barney, who’s unlike anyone she’s ever met in their little Sunshine-ville town. Yet though the two are obviously falling for each other, she accepts Alex’s proposal.

On the day of their wedding, after she finds out about Amy’s feelings for Alex, and acknowledges that she doesn’t love Barney, Laurie and Barney elope. They move to a tiny Manhattan apartment, and Barney ekes out a living playing in piano bars. When they return to Connecticut for a holiday visit, Barney misinterprets a conversation between Laurie and Alex, and becomes convinced that she still loves him and would be happier with the more successful composer. Barney passively-aggressively decides to commit suicide by driving recklessly into a blinding snowstorm. He crashes his car, and though badly injured, survives. Laurie convinces him she loves him, she tells him she’s pregnant, he recovers and finishes a song he’s been working on…”Young at Heart.”

Young at Heart is a remake of Four Daughters, a 1938 hit that starred Claude Rains, the Lane sisters (Gale Page was sister number four), and John Garfield, in his screen debut (the original, btw, is about a half hour shorter than the ‘50s version). The daughters are all in their late teens/early twenties and look it; in Young at Heart, all the daughters look, to be honest, too old for this storyline. Today, the idea of a group of sisters in their late twenties/early thirties still single, and living with a parent wouldn’t seem like much more than another shout out to the difficulties of the economy, the housing market, and finding a marriage-minded man. In the mid-fifties, though, women of that age would have been heading for old maid-dom

Day was thirty when this movie was made, and the hairstyles and clothes of the time make her look older. In layers of jumpers, crinolines, and incredibly high-necked, buttoned-up blouses, she looks like the epitome of dull primness. She also looks, as she often did in her better films (Love Me or Leave Me, The Man Who Knew Too Much), dissatisfied and at times troubled, her cheeriness on the verge of forced. She looks like she sounds in some of her better songs—she has a lovely voice and sounds appropriately perky in upbeat numbers, but in many of her songs there is an undercurrent of melancholy. Considering what a great singer she was, I guess there’s no greater compliment you can give Day’s acting then to compare it to her singing. She’s often underrated as a dramatic actress; the series of comedies she did in the late ‘50s/early ‘60s with Rock Hudson  are what people remember most and therefore she gets slotted as a lightweight (not to imply that comic acting isn’t greater or more difficult, but those films aren’t in any way up to the standard of ‘30s comedies).

This movie catches Frank Sinatra at an interesting time in his career. When people think of Sinatra now, they tend to equate him with eternal cool and swagger, but that’s really the persona he developed in the mid-1950s and ‘60s. But when he started out he was, of course, the darling of the bobbysoxers, more of a boy than a man, who somehow had stumbled upon singing genius. When he began to make movies, he was typically cast as the shy guy who couldn’t talk to, let alone get a girl. In movies like Anchors Aweigh and On the Town, he’s the naïf who needs to be shown the ways of the world by his confident, cocky friend Gene Kelly. But he outgrew that, fashions changed, and he was on a downward slope until he revived his fortunes with an Oscar winning performance in From Here to Eternity and a new record contract that gave life to his singing career. In Young at Heart, instead of playing his traditional role of the good boy who girls want to mother, he’s now the boy your mother told you to stay away from. When he arrives at the Tuttle household, he’s quite literally a dark cloud on the blue sky of the film’s world, and a welcome note of discord, one that makes you sit up and notice. And by giving him a job as a singer in a piano bar—a perpetually thankless job where it seems like no one’s listening—he gets a chance to indulge in some reasonably downbeat (though swinging, of course) versions of songbook classics such as “Just One of Those Things” and “One for My Baby” (which many now permanently associate with Sinatra, but of course was introduced by the always-underrated-as-a-singer Fred Astaire). I’ve never been a big Sinatra fan, but I like him in this movie.

This is not a great film by any means. But luck of casting with Day and Sinatra at just the right times in their careers gives some complexities to what could be otherwise really flat characters in a candy box world. Interestingly, a TCM article about the film states that in the original, Four Daughters, the Garfield/Sinatra character dies in the self-inflicted car accident, but when approached about Young at Heart, Sinatra refused to take the role unless they rewrote it so his character lived. The producers acquiesced, because of the power Sinatra wielded with his newly re-ignited stardom, and also because it gave them a chance to add the scene at the end where Sinatra sing his hit song, “Young at Heart.” Day thought this was a mistake, as she felt there was an “inevitability” about his character that made his death the only reasonable outcome. But in a melodrama like this, the potential for redemption is an expectation, and his survival works well enough. I don’t love it, but I understand it. And if you’re in the mood for big, Technicolor ‘50s melodrama, this movie works well enough too, if you can just hold out long enough for Sinatra to show up.

Marriage Go Round

Dunne and Grant try to sort things out.

A product of the era of screwball comedies, My Favorite Wife (1940) tells the now stock tale of a man who believes his wife is dead and marries again, only to find wife number one is still alive. Surprisingly, this storyline came from a Tennyson poem, “Enoch Arden.” Read that again, because it’s probably the first and only time you’re going to find a glossy RKO production and Tennyson paired together.

 

Cary Grant plays Nicky Arden (what, you think Cary Grant is going to play someone named Enoch?), the man with too many wives and Irene Dunne plays missing-wife-come-home Ellen Arden. You can talk all you want about Katherine Hepburn and Grant or Hepburn and Tracy or any other so-called great comedy pairing, but none of them approach the brilliance of Grant and Dunne, two pros who could have performed miracles with the worst material, but generally benefited by having some of the best. Dunne once wrote that she and Grant, lifelong friends, had a lot of fun working together and she thought that came through on screen. She was absolutely right.

 

The movie also is blessed with a super supporting cast, including Gail Patrick as Bianca the beautiful but bad/snooty/mean second bride, who Nicky quickly confesses he never really loved anyway (poor Gail Patrick—so gorgeous but always cast on the losing end of audience’s affections); Granville Bates in a hilarious turn as the judge who gets to oversee the various marriages and annulments; Donald MacBride as a hotel clerk who is not sure whether he should be impressed or morally outraged by the goings-on between Grant and his wife-mistress juggle; and Randolph Scott as the man Grant discovers was shipwrecked on the island for seven years with Ellen, a genially lunkheaded stud whose poolside appearance has the ladies twittering, “Is that Johnny Weissmuller?!” The kids (Mary Lou Harrington and the immortal, tragic Scotty Beckett) are even better than the usual moppets pulled off the studio contract list, though they’re also working with better than average material. From the unintentional comedy file, this is definitely one of those movies that has one costume designer for the cast, and then one costume designer for the leading lady, who seems to be working completely on his own plan without regard for the rest of the film. Throughout, Dunne shows up in completely inappropriate outfits—in one scene, everyone else is wearing summer clothes poolside, yet she’s got on a suit with a fur cap and muff. You have to love that kind of grande dame-ness.

 

My Favorite Wife isn’t as good as The Awful Truth, but that Dunne and Grant classic sets a pretty high standard and falling a little short of that isn’t a crime; there still are laughs to be found here. The main problem with this film is just that sometimes the jokes are dragged out too long, particularly the numerous times where Grant tries and fails to inform wife 2 that wife 1 is back. They seem to think they’re showcasing Grant’s gift for physical comedy and the sort of fumbling hesitance we now associate with Hugh Grant; however, while he is indeed funny, the lengths of each bit pile on and I felt a bit like screaming, “It’s not that hard!” at some points. The getting back together scene at the end also drags a little, as it does in The Awful Truth. But these are minor quibbles.

 

Yesterday I was talking to a friend about what I should put at the top of my Netflix queue next. I couldn’t quite say what I was looking for, then finally said, “What I really want is another movie that’s just like My Favorite Wife or The Awful Truth.” If only there was such a thing.

Sabotage

Early in the morning of July 30, 1916, an explosion shook Black Tom, a small island used as a munitions depot, located in New York Harbor.  The island, nicknamed for its resemblance to an angry black cat arching its back, was located near Jersey City. All over the city, glass was blasted from windows and into the streets. A water main broke in Times Square. Shrapnel peppered the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. People, terrified but fascinated, came out of their homes to look at the conflagration in the harbor. Meanwhile, tremors from the explosion were felt as far away as Philadelphia and Maryland.

 

A 1905 map. Black tom is the island located between the words New and York.

Damage to the island, material stored there, and the surrounding area was estimated at $75,000,000. Initially it was suspected that improperly stored munitions had caused the explosion; this resulted in officials from various companies with property on the island being hauled into court to be charged with negligence. Then a man named Michael Kristoff was brought in for questioning by the Bayonne, NJ, police, but he eventually was released and not charged. The Black Tom case was not resolved until almost thirty years had passed.

Chad Millman brings this almost forgotten piece of history to light in The Detonators: The Secret Plot to Destroy America and an Epic Hunt for Justice. The first half of the book reveals the efforts of a lively network of German spies to sabotage American aid to France and Britain in the years before the US entered World War I. Made up of diplomats, German businessmen, and first and second-generation German-Americans, the saboteurs set fires and small bombs in munitions factories. One enterprising doctor inoculated horses and other animals destined for Britain and France with diseases. There were an estimated fifty acts of sabotage in the US from 1916-18; the Black Tom plot was only the loudest and biggest project (and yes, Kristoff, the man the Bayonne police let go was the one who set the explosion on Black Tom, but he was only the trigger man at the bottom of a complex, multilayered plot).

 

A New York Times article about the Black Tom explosion.

After World War I had ended and the Treaty of Versailles signed, the US made a separate pact with Germany. Versailles had been centered around British and French demands for reparations, German disarmament, and admissions of responsibility by Germany. The Treaty of Berlin, signed in 1921, was meant to resolve economic issues and claims between the US and Germany. No responsibility was assigned in the cases—the point was to award money and eliminate anger between the two countries; Germany hoped that solving these cases amicably would help them establish positive relations with the US.

The Mixed Claims Commission was formed, consisting of a German official, an American official, and an American “umpire” who would arbitrate and have the last word on cases. The MCC settled almost 20,000 claims, in amounts from $75 to thousands. In 1924 (date not definite), though, the MCC received a claim from the Lehigh Valley Railroad, suing the German government for millions in damages (not 100% sure of exact amount as I no longer have the book) related to the explosion on the island Black Tom, which the railroad had owned, as well as the depot and warehouses on it.

This time Germany didn’t want to settle. The whole point of the MCC had been to solve claims without dealing with the matter of responsibility of the war. If Germany settled with the Lehigh Valley Railroad, they would be admitting that they had attacked the United States before the US had entered the war, that they were, in fact, instigators.

The case dragged back and forth. At one point Germany was absolved of responsibility for damages caused by the Black Tom explosion. Then the case was re-opened, and the MCC umpire went the way of the US. The case was appealed, but finally the verdict stood up, and in 1941, the railroad was awarded $50 million in damages. In 1944, the last of the claims related to the case were resolved. Along the way, numerous MCC umpires died, different lawyers took over the case, the Germans and Americans almost settled, governments changed, and war broke out. The case more or less came to an end when the last most competent lawyer was standing and the events of history had overtaken the importance of who was to blame for WW I.

Millman’s book is fine. It’s clear and the story moves along well. I was puzzled, okay, suspicious, when he threw in details along the lines of “he pulled up the collar of his coat against the cold breeze blowing in from the harbor as he walked to the meeting.” Really? Was that in someone’s diary or a letter, an actual mention of what the person was doing with his coat collar while walking down a street? It’s nitpicking on my part, but I’d rather not have the pretty detail if it’s just as assumption rather than an actual fact. To be fair, I didn’t check the notes at the end before I had to return this book, so maybe there is attribution for this kind of thing (several other similar instances appeared throughout the book), but if there isn’t I’m disappointed it’s included. I know, I’m no fun.

There’s nothing wrong with this book, and I’m usually a fan of finding out about a little piece of history that may not be well-known. Those little pieces are what make up the whole picture, after all. But for some reason the entire time I was reading this book, I kept having this feeling of “isn’t there something more important I should be reading?” This felt too trivial—yet it isn’t. This was a very important incident, and a reminder that terrorist attacks on this country didn’t begin in the year 2001. But no matter how much I told myself that, I just didn’t buy it. It is a short book, so I can’t say I wasted a lot of time reading it, only about two days. Yet I did feel restless and wished I was reading something else, something grander, something greater, something that would teach me more, more, more.

I’m in a bit of a post-play funk, I suppose. You get into such a routine when you are doing a show. First there are rehearsals all the time, and then it opens and you settle into a routine for performance days and off days. Then when it’s over, you find yourself at loose ends with all that structure gone. This was a particularly nice cast, too, so I’m sorry to see them go. Well, most of them—there was the one person who I just couldn’t stand and who I was paired with at many points during the play, unfortunately. The last night I told the director that if the pompous idiot tried to put a hand on me one more time, the next sound the audience heard would be Mr. Spray On Tan going down (that was one of the reasons I didn’t want him even close to me—the horrific, sweaty dripping spray on tan. The other was that I was worried that really bad acting was contagious). Other than that, though, things were often a lot of fun. Singing is always fun (okay, dancing…never fun). So now I need to find another show quickly. Or oh yeah, I could put my intricately planned avoidance tactics away and try writing something. And yes, Mr. Millman, I better make damn sure it’s important and good. I hope. Oh, I really hope.

 

Wreckage from the Black Tom explosion.

 

 

Pictures From An Exhibition

A few pictures from the play (Lysistrata, if you're interested).

You know you're off-off Broadway when...

you're in a 99 seat or less theater with no union contracts (thank you, official explanation!).

the theater is in a location where the 7 train rumbles overhead at inopportune moments.

audiences consist of only family and friends. If there is an audience.

every play is set in no particular time or place in order to avoid costumes that can't be found in someone's wardrobe or very, very cheap stores.

eighteen people, a rack of costumes, shelves, props, and personal belongings can squeeze into a 12' x 8' dressing room.

the actors are much more resourceful and undoubtedly more talented than those lazybones in posh Broadway theaters.

Which one am I? Hint: the unattractive one.

Looks like we've been rehearsing too much.

Hmmm...I may not even be in this picture...or am I?

City Upon a Hill

How do you build a city? Well, usually they just build themselves—people come to an area for various reasons—geography, money, stake out homes, run some kind of business, and hopefully other people come. A city is a city when it’s outgrown being a camp, village, or town. It takes time.

When Robert Oppenheimer was chosen to work on the atomic bomb, he saw the scientists scattered all over the US, working on various aspects of the project, and decided that the most efficient, most secure, and quickest way to create the new weapon was to assemble everyone in a secret location where they could all work together. General Leslie R. Groves, the military overseer of the project, already nervous about scientists annoying tendency to talk amongst themselves and share ideas, agreed that this was a good plan. They looked at a number of sites, and Oppenheimer chose a location on a mesa in New Mexico, not far from Santa Fe. And like that, with the era of instant everything appropriately just on the horizon, Los Alamos, New Mexico, the instant city, appeared.

Or didn’t quite appear—the secrecy of the project meant that no one outside of the project ever got up to the mesa or knew much about it until after the bomb was dropped in August 1945. People in Santa Fe knew something was going on up there, but didn’t know what. It was wartime, and everyone seemed to be much more accepting of peculiar things and strange secrets than they would be otherwise.

One person who knew almost everything that was going on up at the mesa was Dorothy McKibbin, a Santa Fe resident who was there from the beginning. McKibbin was one of the first people hired by Oppenheimer in 1943 and stayed until 1963, acting as an administrator, secretary, travel planner, construction manager, resident advisor, confidante, and just about everything. It’s mostly through McKibbin’s eyes that Jennet Conant tells the story of Los Alamos and the development of the atomic bomb in 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos.

McKibbin came from a well-off Kansas City family. With immensely good taste in colleges, she headed east to attend Smith. After graduation, she traveled with her father, until on one of those trips she came down with tuberculosis. As was common at the time, she was sent to a warm, dry climate to convalesce. She fell in love with New Mexico while staying at a sanatorium in Santa Fe, and years later, after her husband died, leaving her with a young son, she decided to start over in Santa Fe.

McKibbin got a job, built a house, raised her son, and became one of Santa Fe’s own. She was looking for a new job in 1943 when a friend told her about a mysterious opening for a secretary. He refused to give her any details and she thought the whole thing was somewhat suspicious but she decided to meet with the prospective employer anyway.

Like many others, she fell for Oppenheimer at first sight and took the job without asking any details. She moved into an office at 109 East Palace Avenue and began to try to put together housing, equipment, and supplies for the scientists and support staff that was on the way to New Mexico.

Robert Oppenheimer tended to have a powerful effect on people--both positive and negative.

Oppenheimer had spent time in New Mexico as a young man, and owned a ranch in the area; when it came time to choose a site for his lab, he had quietly found ways to eliminate the other prospective sites until the only place left was the one he wanted. The military took over a boys school located on the mesa 35 miles from Santa Fe and turned to the task of turning it into a city. The boys’ dorms provided some initial housing, but much more would have to be built. Roads weren’t nearly ready for regular army traffic, and there wasn’t enough power and water.

Los Alamos wasn’t ready for inhabitants when the first scientists arrived; one of Dorothy’s first emergencies was finding housing in hotels and camps around Santa Fe for the new residents. Housing became a never solved problem—as soon as one group was settled, the project grew and a new group arrived looking for places to live. McKibbin spent the next few years shuffling around homes for the scientists and their families.

Even when they did have housing, life was never exactly comfortable at Los Alamos. Apartments were supplied with wood burning stoves that took forever to light in the thin air, and then when working heated rooms to burning 90-100 degree temperatures. Power shortages persisted. Water at times became so short that one woman recalled routinely using the same water to first boil her baby’s bottles, then wash the dishes, then finally wash the floors. Food was bland and it was always slow and difficult to get shipments of anything up the muddied roads. People fought over the Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogues. But they put up with it, probably better than anyone today would. Again, they were aware it was war and things were different. The Depression wasn’t that long ago and having homes at all with regular food was better than what some had had as children a decade ago (only a decade for some—many of the Los Alamos residents were astonishingly young). When a contingent of British scientists arrived, the idea of sleeping through the night without listening for bombs or air raid sirens was astonishingly luxurious.

They could only complain to each other, though. Security was high. In Santa Fe, G-men patrolled the streets, looking for anyone who might be in the least suspicious. They constantly checked on Dorothy, keeping an eye on who went in and out of 109 East Palace. They listened for gossip that might indicate someone on the project was getting too careless. The city was veritably crawling with spooks, yet for all their snooping around they didn’t catch the spies who were working in Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall, and possibly others.

Scientists working on the project couldn’t tell their wives what they were working on, though they had their suspicions. Mail was read and censored. No one could tell family outside the project where they were or what they were doing. They disappeared from the world in many ways.

The tower at the Trinity test site where the first atomic bomb was detonated. No one outside the scientists involved knew what they were working on at Los Alamos.

The pressure of the job and the constant security wore on Los Alamos residents, as did the constant conflict with the military. The army wanted the place run like a barracks, while the scientists, engineers and other workers wanted lives that were as normal as possible. At one point a military overseer had a group of young engineers doing calisthenics every morning and made them spend time practicing marching and parading like a group of soldiers (this was thankfully abandoned after a change of command). McKibbin found herself organizing Sunday outings and coordinating restaurant reservations for scientists and their wives desperate to get off the mesa for at least a little while.

They didn’t need any help with the most popular form of recreation: parties with lots and lots and lots of drinking (yes, the atomic bomb was developed and built under one huge hangover, it seems). The demand for alcohol was constant and desperate. One scientist, able to leave for a short trip, took orders from many people to pick up their favorites. He dutifully shopped, packed his car with the many bottles, and headed back. Unfortunately he drove off the road into a small lake. He was retrieved with some injuries, but found to his chagrin that more people were concerned with the fate of their orders than him.

The other popular pastime was sex. Amongst the army personnel, there were scandalous whispers about WACs (Women’s Army Corps) turning tricks with the young soldiers stationed on the mesa (this was never proved but the rumors persisted). There weren’t many single women working on the project, but some of the unmarried young scientists managed to start romances with those that were part of the support staff. McKibbin’s home became the default marriage location for many couples.

Then there were the babies. Lots and lots of babies. With not much to do after dark, many young couples looking to start families got right to it, especially with the excellent medical care available at Los Alamos (word at one point that the obstetrician was going to be shipped out caused near hysteria). So many babies were born that the mesa hospital became overwhelmed. An irate General Groves ordered Oppeheimer to do something about it, but Oppenheimer couldn’t really say much, as his own wife was pregnant.

Pregnant or not, life was difficult for the wives of the scientists working on the atomic bomb project. Their husbands worked long hours and when they came home, couldn’t talk about their work. They didn’t have contact with their families or outside friends. They were stuck in a small town where it was easy to gossip and start small wars over things like supplies, who had a bathtub and who didn’t, who got a maid and who didn’t. There were cliques and a caste system, ruled by the wives of the higher ranking scientists and those who were in the first group to arrive at Los Alamos. Kitty Oppenheimer was particularly difficult to get along with—she was a snob, a terror, and a drinker, who would make friends with someone and then randomly drop that person from her set, leaving the latest victim cut out from parties and events. It was like junior high school but with liquid lunches and late afternoon cocktails (then again, maybe that’s exactly what junior highs are like now—who knows what those crazy kids are up to?). The wives who had skills that allowed them to work in the labs or administration were by far the luckiest ones.

Conant based her book on interviews, published materials, and McKibben’s unpublished memoir. The details from the participants about everyday life at Los Alamos make the most interesting parts of the book, and, as it happens, pretty much what I was looking for—I was actually sitting around thinking, “What was everyday life at Los Alamos like?”, did some searching, and found this book (that’s also how I found Conant’s other book, Tuxedo Park and read that—I am often overly enthusiastic, so when I reserved 109 East Palace, I impulsively reserved the other, thinking that it was always best to keep my reserve queue at the library filled as much as possible). In the whole story of the atomic bomb, all the science and innovation that went into its development, and the moral choices that were agonized over and made, questions about things like how did people do their laundry, and what was housing like are pretty small. Nevertheless, they are part of the picture, and of interest to those like me who always want to know what it was like to live in another place and time.

There is less in the way of full portraits of the participants—even those who are heavily quoted are just quoted with little information about their background, their lives, or how they got there. Many of those interviewed by Conant are the wives of scientists, who arrived at Los Alamos in the early years of their marriages. I would have like to know more about them in order to put their experiences into context. What kind of education did they have? How much did they know or understand about their husband’s work (after all, not everyone there had McKibbin’s Smith degree)? What were their expectations for their lives? How did they feel when their husband’s told them that they were moving to a mysterious place to take part in an undisclosed project? As for the scientists themselves, I suppose their stories are best found in the biographies that have been written about many of them (I have a Richard Feynman biography on deck; I snuck a look at the preface and didn’t much care for it, but I’ll stick with it and see what happens).

The two people who get the most attention are Dorothy McKibbin and Oppenheimer. McKibbin was undoubtedly an important figure in the history of Los Alamos (never, never, never underestimate the value of a good manager), but the quotes Conant gathers about her tend to be far too much of the “I don’t know how we ever got along without her,” “no one but Dorothy could do it,” “Thank god for Dorothy,” “We never would have made it without Dorothy” variety. I found myself longing for a story where McKibbin made a mistake or got in an argument with someone.

Oppenheimer gets the same worshipful treatment. He seemed to have had an enormously powerful effect on people, both positive and negative. Groves, when asked by his secretary what Oppenheimer was like after they first met, said, “He has the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen.” David Lilienthal, who was assigned after the war to work with Oppenheimer on the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, said after meeting him: “He is worth living a lifetime just to know mankind has been able to produce such a being. We may have to wait another hundred years for the second one to come off the line.” Yikes. McKibbin, who may or may not have had a crush on him, or perhaps a maternal feeling for the always-frail looking Oppenheimer, wrote to him when he was being investigated as a security risk after the war: “There stand you, the beautiful Robert, the open mind, and your thoughts and suggestions which would quiet the din and still all hatred. Stand Robert, with the clarity and courage the world aches for. You speak, with the power of poetry and music.” Oh my. McKibbin’s musings on Oppenheimer from her unpublished memoir all tend to be in this vein, serves to remind us all of a valuable lesson: some things you feel should never be committed to print and crushes are one of them. Trust me on this.

The hagiography doesn’t do the complex Oppenheimer a great service, but a full biography of the man isn’t the intent of this book, so that’s to be forgiven. The biggest problem that this book suffers from, both when it comes to Oppenheimer and the big picture of the development of the atomic bomb, is the comparison to the Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, which is easily one of the best biographies I’ve ever read (throughout reading this book, I kept thinking how much I would like to re-read American Prometheus). Again, though, I understand that these two books (published unfortunately the same year) don’t have the same intent and shouldn’t be compared. 109 East Palace is valuable in the details it provides, and while it shouldn’t be relied on as a sole source of information to the topic of Los Alamos, it makes a nice addition to more expansive works, the story of the construction of a city devoted to the creation of tools to destroy others.

Black Tie

I feel really bad about this. Really I do. I don’t like not liking a book. I start off every book wanting to not be able to put it down, to miss my train stop because I’m so into it, to fall in love with it. When I don’t like a book—especially one that has been really well reviewed—I tend to blame myself more than the author. I usually think that if the book was good enough to be published, it must be good, so if I have trouble with it, then there must be something wrong with me.

I say all this because after reading Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II, by Jennet Conant, I went back and reread the NY Times review, which was very positive and had alerted me to the book in the first place. I had read the review when the book was published in 2002, thought it sounded like something I would want to read, then forgot about it until I stumbled upon the title again a few weeks ago while looking for something else. I was glad to find it, but am sorry to say that it didn’t live up to the billing. For me at least (there I go with the qualifiers).

Alfred Lee Loomis always loved science, but dutifully became a lawyer in order to take care of his family after his father died. During World War I, he was assigned to a ballistics unit where he was able to use his science skills to develop a chronograph that provided accurate measurements of bullets’ velocity and striking power. After the war, he quit the law and went into investment banking with his brother-in-law, with an eye on making enough money to allow him to pursue science.

He succeeded. Loomis and his partner made a killing on utilities throughout the 1920s, and were savvy enough to get their money out of the market before it crashed. While still working at the bank, Loomis bought a mansion in Tuxedo Park, a gated community of the very, very rich and very, very proper, not far from New York City. He built a lab and began to pursue amateur science projects. He employed lab assistants, invited scientists for conferences, and gave money and lab space to scientists whose projects he thought were worth pursuing.

Alfred Lee Loomis

Loomis soon became known in scientific circles as not just a rich dilettante, but someone with serious ideas and serious money to investigate them. His own work in the lab included studies of brain waves, sound waves, and time measurement. He became good friends with Ernest Lawrence and helped finance his cyclotron at Berkeley; with his financial savvy and big business connections, Loomis helped many other scientists find money or sponsorships.

With World War II approaching, Loomis became convinced that science and new weapons technology would win the war over sheer force or manpower. He helped organize and run the National Defense Research Committee, an organization that brought private sector scientists together to work for the military. The NDRC worked on a number of projects, most notably radar; their work on creating practical, portable radar equipment was crucial to Britain especially in the early part of the war. The NDRC also worked on the initial stages of what eventually became its most famous work, the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb (the prominence of which many felt overshadowed the importance of radar; Physicist Lee DuBridge summed it up thusly: “Radar won the war; the atomic bomb finished it.”).

The NDRC was eventually folded into another committee, and the Radiation Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Loomis and his team did most of their work was dissolved by the end of the war. Loomis went on to do many other things, including divorcing his sickly wife of thirty some years and marrying his lab assistant’s much younger wife, scandalizing New York society. He also….

Sorry, here is where things get foggy. Actually they began to cloud up quite a while ago. See, I found the first 100-150 pages of this book quite interesting. This was the part where we learn who Loomis is, his interest in science, how he made his money, and how he built his lab and became a private, millionaire scientist, all of which is rather Bruce Wayne like. But somewhere around the beginning of the war section, the book lost me. This is quite odd, because as you know, I am quite fond of military history. Throw in a hush hush, clandestine operation, some science and I’m usually overjoyed. But in this case, I could not for the life of me pay attention or get interested in anything on the page; I read the last 150 pages or so of this book, but have almost zero memory of them. I dutifully read the words but the whole time my mind was wandering: “What if Indy 4 isn’t any good?...Why do I keep blowing that line at the beginning of the second act…It really hurts that editors don’t like dreaded novel’s main character…Do I need to stop at the grocery store?...I need to start that song at the end of the play on a higher note…” And of course, that little four word sentence that is always insistently running through my head.

I found myself thinking of other things while trying to read Tuxedo Park.

Conant has a personal connection to the material—her grandfather, James Conant, was president of Harvard, and very heavily involved in the development of the Manhattan Project. Her great-uncle worked in Loomis’s lab at Tuxedo Park; he committed suicide, but left behind a novel and short stories that were obviously very thinly disguised accounts of life in the lab. Conant introduces that information at the beginning of the book, and occasionally calls on it in other places to make a point or support a guess, but it doesn't seem to deliver the kind of expose you (or at least I) expect from its dramatic intro on page one. The rest of the book, especially once we get into the NDRC and Radiation Lab section, lacks any kind of personal feeling or characteristic; I guess this may be the result of material being classified or destroyed. It all read to me (as little as I noticed) like a blur of, “And then they went here. Loomis raised the money to do this. Then they worked on this. Loomis called these people and set up that. Maybe behind the scenes there was more going on—rivalries, friendships, stories, suspicion, humor, I don’t know. But it didn’t come through here and I missed that something something.

Again, though, I am reluctant to say my experience with this book is the same others would have. I would not tell anyone to absolutely skip it. Maybe someone else would be absolutely enchanted by it. Maybe I was just not in the mood, or going through some kind of phase, or just too busy thinking about other things to read well. Whatever the cause, though, I was not enchanted, and that is always my hope whenever I turn to the first page of any book.

Terror in the Aisles

"We, in the United States, are fortunate to have a school system that is a tribute to our communities and to our faith in American youth. Today we are concerned with juvenile delinquency-its causes-and its effects. We are especially concerned when this delinquency boils over into our schools. The scenes and incidents depicted here are fictional. However, we believe that public awareness is a first step toward a remedy for any problem. It is in this spirit and with this faith that Blackboard Jungle was produced."

The 1955 movie Blackboard Jungle begins with this text shown in plain black and white while the now familiar drum beat of Bill Haley & the Comets “Rock Around the Clock,” plays in the background. The drums get louder and louder, until the song bursts out in full, now with scenes of teenagers dancing to it in a schoolyard. Reportedly at screenings of the movie, teens jumped out of their seats and danced along, with the crowds and frenzy sometimes leading to vandalism and violence.

At that time, rock music became one of the bugaboos of adults, a reason for why teens misbehave and indulged in dangerous behavior. That lasted for a while. Then it was TV shows, then video games and the Internet, with any kind of music (punk, metal, hip hop) handily jumping in to fill the spaces in between. But just as Blackboard Jungle, The Wild One, and Rebel Without a Cause were bringing the terror of leather-jacketed violent teens (usually played by actors in their twenties) to giant life on the big screen, the scourge of America was not music, movies, or Communism—it was comic books.

In The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America, David Hajdu tells the story of the rise of comic books through the first half of the twentieth century and how they fell (temporarily) to the forces of angry adults who didn’t understand them, or the children who read them. Using interviews with many of the artists and writers who survived the purge of the 1950s, Hajdu more than adequately covers another little slice of history that seems ludicrous now, but was of deathly importance at the time.

Comic strips had arrived in the early twentieth century, as part of color Sunday supplements that were aimed at recent immigrants who might not be able to read English well. The strips featured ethnic stereotypes who spoke in broken English, scrapping around immigrant enclaves such as the Lower East Side of New York. The heroes of these comics, such as the Yellow Kid and the Katzenjammer kids, flouted authority and mocked society with glee, which of course meant that snooty critics looked down on them and bemoaned the low culture they represented.

By the late 1920s and early 1930s, the comic strips began to draw upon the pulp and detective magazines, creating stories told in daily strips such as Dick Tracy, Tarzan, and Flash Gordon. A generation that had grown up reading the Sunday comic strips and copying the drawings flooded newspaper syndicates with new ideas for their own strips. One entrepreneur got the idea to take strips that hadn’t found a publisher and package them in a cheap magazine that kids could afford. Will Eisner, who had sold some of his own stories to the new magazines, joined forces with Jerry Iger to create a studio where writers and artists could work together to crank out the new comic books for publishers who wouldn’t want to build their own staffs could buy and sell. An industry was born.

Other studios hastily formed and began to put out new stories as quickly as possible. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman became a huge hit, spawning many imitators (including the Bob Kane creation Batman). Stories of superheroes who protected the weak and defenseless had a huge appeal for Depression era audiences who felt powerless. Hajdu points out that many of the comic writers and artists were first generation Americans or recent immigrants, for whom the fighter for justice in a confusing, unfair world was a kind of wish fulfillment; and like the immigrant writers and readers, the heroes themselves were often outcasts or strangers in a strange land.

The peculiarly unhelpful Aquaman was a byproduct of Superman's success.

Throughout the 1940s, comics grew beyond men in tights with superpowers. Will Eisner, who believed that comics should be treated as an art form, created The Spirit, a mysterious crime fighter, who spent less time solving crimes than exploring a noir world where good and bad weren’t mutually exclusive. Crime comics, where the emphasis was on action and gaudy violence rather than careful justice, became big sellers (the point of the stories was made in one series, Crime Does Not Pay, in which the cover showed the word Crime in heavy block letters two and a half inches tall and the rest of the title in letters 5/16th of an inch). Romance comics, heavy on stories about good girls falling for bad boys and with just enough scenes of girls changing clothes to keep male audiences interested, also became popular for a while.

Crime may not pay, but it sells.

Romance comics were popular for a while. Uh oh, I think Jane's got trouble.

During World War II, many of the superheroes evolved into Nazi fighters and protectors of the American way of life. Yet it was in this time period that the first round was fired in the comic book war. In 1940, a Midwestern newspaper columnist, Sterling North, wrote a column decrying these “lurid publications [that] depend for their appeal upon mayhem, murder, torture and abduction—often with a child as the victim. Superman heroics, voluptuous females in scanty attire, blazing machine guns, hooded “justice” and cheap political propaganda were to be found on almost every page.” North also complained that the comics were badly drawn, badly written and badly printed; they overstimulated children and putting a strain on their eyes.

The campaign against comics continued throughout the war. Catholic Church publications began to publish anti-comic articles. In 1944, “Parents Must Control the Comics,” an article in St. Anthony Messenger complained about the “half-naked” and “tightly clad” superheroes, who not only gave kids ideas about sex, but were also fascist propaganda. The idea of a “private person” taking over fighting crime and handing out justice was seen as a parallel to Hitler’s ability to take over Germany. In “The Case Against Comics,” published by the Catechistical Guild, comics were said to represent an anarchical spirit that glorified vigilantism and Gestapo methods that were un-American.

After the war, some cities and states began to try to crack down on comic book sales, charging stores that sold “objectionable material.” A New York State law dating from 1884 was used in 1947 to charge a book seller whose store sold true crime comics for possessing, with an intent to sell obscene materials. The book seller, Murray Winters, objected on the grounds of the First Amendment. He appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court, where the verdict against Murray was overturned, but the Court made it clear that they were overturning it mostly because of the vagueness of the 1884 law; the opinion stated that states and Congress had a duty to punish those circulating objectionable material, and do their part in “eliminating evils to which, in their judgment, such publications give rise.” The authorities just needed to be more specific.

In 1948, an article called “Horror in the Nursery,” featured a psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham, who connected comics to juvenile delinquency. While the article talked about Wertham’s research and his findings, in truth he hadn’t really conducted any solid research or conducted anything that could be called a scientific study. Wertham used mostly anecdotal evidence, and picked and chose that which would best support his conclusions. Nevertheless, Wertham’s ideas quickly caught on.

With the Supreme Court ruling in mind, cities and towns began to try to find other ways to get kids away from reading comics that wouldn’t lead to a lawsuit. Hajdu tells the story of one boy in a small West Virginia town who was persuaded by a teacher to lead a student charge against comics. The boy, who seemed more than anything flattered to be considered such an influencer, encouraged other students to collect comics and burn them at a bonfire. The incident caught national attention and other schools followed. In one upstate New York town, a student at a Catholic school, St. Patrick’s, led his fellow students in a boycott of comics, going so far as to post student guards outside a store that sold comics to make sure no one from their school entered. That boycott culminated in a bonfire as well.

Not everyone agreed with these protests; after all, in 1948, 80-100 million comics were being sold each month. One student, David Wigransky, wrote a letter in response to a Wertham “comics are evil” article that argued that adults read material that was just as vulgar and depraved, if not worse, than anything in comics, and that kids should be allowed to make their own judgments about what to read. Wigransky stated that comics helped children understand the real world and that overprotective adults who tried to hide the truth from them would leave kids unprepared to deal with adult problems and questions.

More than a few columnists or opinion page editors commented on the distasteful image of book burning, so soon after World War II. One of the students who had participated in the St. Patrick’s boycott and bonfire, became increasingly uncomfortable with the whole movement, saying that by Christmas, the sight of stockings hung in front of a fireplace made him think of the bonfire and got him angry as he thought of all the books burned. He vowed never to do it again and during the holiday break went to the store that had been boycotted by the students and bought a comic book.

In the early 1950s, Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee senator, conducted a series of hearings investigating organized crime. The success of these hearings—that is the positive response Kefauver received from the public who, riveted to their TV sets just as television was beginning to catch on, perceived him as a do-gooding crimefighter—prompted Robert Hendrickson, a senator from New Jersey, to conduct a series of hearings on juvenile delinquency. In April, 1954, the hearings focused on the comic book industry. Frederic Wertham, whose book about the perils of comic books, Seduction of the Innocent, had recently been published, was glad to testify. On the stand, he again asserted that comic books were connected to juvenile behavior, but as in his book (which a few reviewers did note), his conclusions were not based on any comprehensive studies nor any serious evidence.

William Gaines, the head of EC Comics had volunteered to testify on behalf of the comics industry. EC was best known for the line of horror comics they’d developed, including titles such as The Crypt of Terror, The Vault of Horror, and Weird Science. They also had had a lot of success with a satirical comic called Mad that they’d started in 1952.

Gaines’s testimony was a debacle. He immediately got into trouble by following up his opening statement about how his comics were just entertainment, harmless thrills and didn’t really affect anyone, with a protest against one of Wertham’s characterizations of one of his comics as racist. Gaines pointed out that the racist term that Wertham had pulled out of context was actually part of an anti-racism lesson in the story and that many of his comics taught lessons about topics such as racism, the dangers of drug addiction, and mob violence. A committee member pointed out that Gaines had just said that the comics were nothing more than entertainment—if that was true, how could they teach lessons or have any positive effect? Gaines stumbled with a shaky explanation about how information given in different types of captions meant different things to readers. It didn’t help that Gaines began to crash during his testimony as the Dexedrine he’d been taking wore off.

The part of the testimony that stuck with everyone was when Estes Kefauver presented a cover from EC’s Crime SuspenStories, and tried to get Gaines to explain it:

Senator KEFAUVER. Here is your May 22 issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman's head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste? Mr. GAINES. Yes, sir; I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody. Senator KEFAUVER. You have blood coming out of her mouth. Mr. GAINES. A little. Senator KEFAUVER. Here is blood on the ax. I think most adults are shocked by that.

See? It could have been worse.

In the aftermath of the testimony (the entire transcript is available here), it turns out that many adults were shocked by Gaines’ explanation. The comic book industry began to panic. They put together the Comics Magazine Association of America, whose goals included setting “standards” for comic books, with an overseer to enforce them. They offered the position to Frederic Wertham. Words such as “terror,” “horror,” and “weird” were banned from titles. Gaines promptly held a press conference to announce the end of their horror line.

The CMAA code watered down comics, but that wasn’t enough for many. Cities, towns, and PTAs took action against them. Newspapers wrote “exposes” about their dangers. More burnings took place. Artists and writers who worked in the business found that people now responded with disgust when they learned what they did for a living. The industry shrank and, according to Hajdu, more than eight hundred people who had worked in comics at the beginning of the 1950s were out of the business as a result of the crackdown.

Hajdu’s book tells this whole story in much more detail than I have. I am not a comics expert (I’m not cool enough to go into a comics store), and sometimes the number of names and titles Hajdu tosses out can be a little overwhelming if you’re not familiar with them (Wait, who was that? What title did he create? Who drew that?). It’s still readable, understandable, and enjoyable for the non-aficionado, but probably does have an extra layer of meaning for the type of person who can be found every Wednesday at their local comics store, picking up the latest releases.

I had one huge problem with this book, though—there’s only a small section of photos, and about half of those are pictures of people involved in the story, the hearings, and kids burning books. Those are great and absolutely necessary, but throughout the book, Hajdu gives descriptions of various comics’ covers or individual panels that he thinks are important. His descriptions are fine; however, not being able to actually see the art he describes in order to understand fully the point he is making really hurts the experience. I’m guessing the reason for this is that it would have been either too expensive to add so much art to the pages, even in black and white non-glossy form. Or maybe the copyrights were too difficult or cost too much. But Hajdu isn’t some unknown writer published by a small independent press—he’s written several other well-known books and he’s published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. It’s obviously meant to be a big release, so it seems odd that it doesn’t have more artwork to support Hajdu’s writing. It’s a book about illustration without illustrations, and I think that lessens the effect.

The early 1950s sometimes seem like a time of incomprehensible fear and skittishness, where anything or anyone who stepped even slightly out of line was seen as a threat. The difference, though, as Hajdu points out, is that unlike many of the unfortunate people who were caught up in the Red Scare and lost their jobs, or even their lives due to that crackdown, the comic book makers weren’t accused of spying or committing treason or plotting against America—they were essentially accused of having bad taste, and of creating a form of entertainment that was unfamiliar to many adults.

But kids always create their own things and adults who don’t understand them or don’t know them fear what kids create. They get frustrated at not being able to enter the world the kids have made, forgetting that they once had their own things that in their time seemed like a rebellion, but now are part of the mainstream. One of the appeals for kids of extreme sports is that their parents don’t know anything about them, haven’t done them, and can’t boss the kids around or tell them how to do them. It’s the same thing with video games. Kids need their own places, ideas, games, and creations, something that is theirs and not something given to them or defined by adults. I don’t know why so many adults find this so hard to remember.

Star Turn

In Millenium Actress (2001), a documentary filmmaker goes to interview an aging actress as the studio where she spent her career is torn down. Her story begins when she was a schoolgirl and she meets an artist/political activist who is on the run. She helps him hide, but then he disappears. She vows to find him again, taking up the offer to star in a film when she finds out it is being filmed in the area where she believes he's gone. As she tells her story, the real life pursuit of the mysterious man and her roles in movies intertwine and meld together, as she cycles through trends from Japanese movies of the post World War II era: historical romances, monster movies, space movies.

My description doesn't do this movie any kind of justice. Let me just say that I absolutely loved it. There's a circularity (I know, I'm inventing words) about the story that's fantastic, as images from the actress's real life become scenes in her films. The animation is as glorious as you would expect. It's unabashedly romantic but not sentimental, if that makes any sense. And it's short. I can't ask for anything more.

(The play opened last night, btw--no disasters and a tight, under two hour runtime. Now all we need is an audience. Off-off Broadway on a Thursday night--that's a tough sell. Sigh. Hopefully the weekend will help.)