Catholic, Misanthrope or Both?

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By Ray Schultz

I’m usually wary when I open books by religious converts. Will they be sentimental or dogmatic, or worse, will they attempt to proselytize me? This is especially trying in the case of Evelyn Waugh. It’s clear from ferocious novels like Scoop, Black Mischief and Decline and Fall. that he did not like the human race.

Waugh became a Roman Catholic as a young man, but there was little sign of it in his work until he reached middle age, and started writing Catholic-themed novels like Brideshead Revisited and Helena. They are fine books, but the Catholic angle is most vivid for me in Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy, which follows a middle-aged man named Guy Grouchback through World War II.

Crouchback is a born Catholic, not a convert. Yet Waugh does not portray a joyous religion. Mostly, it seems to consist of obligations that outsiders might find hard to understand. He throws in some history of Catholicism in England (not a happy story). Then there’s this theme, which comes right out of the great Rabbinic teachings: That a single deed or mitzvah can redeem even the worst of us.

Guy’s wife Virginia has cuckolded and divorced him. This divorce, of course, is not recognized by the church, so Crouchback is unable to remarry. It’s a heavy burden, but he obeys. Years later, as the war draws to a close, the ex-wife returns, pregnant with another man’s child. Guy has lost all feeling for her. But he agrees to remarry her, and to say that the child is his. He names the boy Gervase, after his father. The boy will inherit the Crouchback estate. And he will be a Catholic.

A mutual friend who has soured on Virginia confronts Guy when he is recovering from an injury. “Oh, come off it, Guy. You’re forty years old. Can’t you see how ridiculous you will look playing the knight-errant? Ian thinks you are insane, literally. Can you tell me any sane reason for doing this thing?

Guy regarded Kerstie from his bed. The question she asked was not new to him. He had posed it and answered it some days ago. “Knights-errant,” he said, “used to go out looking for noble deeds. I don’t think I’ve ever in my life done a single positively unselfish action. I certainly haven’t gone out of my way to find opportunities. Here was something most unwelcome, put into my hands; something which I believe the Americans describe as ‘beyond the call of duty’; not the normal behavior of an officer and a gentleman; something they’ll laugh about in Bellamy’s.  

“Of course Virginia is tough. She would have survived somehow. I shant’t be changing her by what I’m doing. I know all that. But you see there’s another”—and he was going to say “soul”; then realized that this word would mean little to Kerstie for all her granite propriety – “there’s another life to consider. What sort of life do you think her child would have, born unwanted in 1944?”

“It’s no business of yours.”

“It was made my business by being offered.”  

“My dear Guy, the world is full of unwanted children. Half the population of Europe are homeless—refugees and prisoners. What is one child more or less in all the misery?”

“I can’t do anything about all these others. This is just one case where I can help. And only I, really. I was Virginia’s last resort. So I couldn’t do anything else. Don’t you see?”

She doesn’t. Nor might she understand his effort to help the Jews of Yugoslavia as the war winds down. The man has a sense of responsibility.

Don’t think that these matters take up all of the trilogy. There are tales of heroism, cowardice, bureaucracy and madness in war theaters like Crete, that are perhaps not so familiar to American readers.

It has fantastic Characters like Jumbo Trotter, a retired Colonel who simply returns to barracks when war is declared and tries to make himself useful, when not sleeping or eating, the crazed Brigadier Richie-Hook,  and Gervase, Guy’s noble father. And, as in the Waugh novels of old, there are savage portraits of characters like the Scottish Laird who owns the Isle of Mugg.

The books are not likely to convert anyone to Catholicism or anything else. But Waugh, a great artist, found a way to explain some challenging ideas, and to integrate them into the story of a man’s daily life—probably the greatest service he could have performed for the reader or the church to which he belonged.

The Grace of Gay Talese

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By Ray Schultz

Corry. John Corry. A name easily remembered, easily forgotten.

Forgive me if I’ve gotten a single word of that wrong, but I read it decades ago. It’s the opening of a profile of John Corry, a New York Times reporter who covered the Kennedy-William Manchester book affair in 1967, by America’s nonfiction master: Gay Talese.

At that time, I could quote many such leads by Gay Talese, and I suspect I wasn’t the only one who could. He developed a flowing narrative style that resembled fiction but wasn’t, and left a permanent imprint on journalism.

Take his 1964 book, The Bridge, about the building of the Verrazano-Narrows bridge in New York. It was reissued last year. Far from being an engineering treatise, The Bridge is a classic about the men who built the structure: Courageous, hard-drinking itinerants known as boomers.

Talese follows them everywhere. In one chapter, Danny Montour races up the New York State Thruway at 90 miles an hour on a Friday night, on his way to a Native American reservation near Montreal. He’s sipping gin, and has already had several drinks in a bar. Talese presents this in a style similar to cinema verite. If he has any fear in the car, he does not reveal it, for he is there as an observer, not as a character in the story.

In another chapter, Talese gives a heart-rending account of Gerald McKee’s fall into the Narrows. My family distantly knew the McKees, and was horrified as I read this passage aloud. As Talese writes of the boomers, “All have seen death.” Yet he also captures the poetry and romance of the boomer’s life:

The boomer’s child might live in forty states and attend a dozen high schools before he graduates, if he graduates, and though the father swears he wants no boomer for a son, he usually gets one. He gets one, possibly, because he really wanted one, and maybe that is why boomers brag so much at home on weekends, creating a wondrous world with whiskey words, a world no son can resist because this world seems to have everything: adventure, big cars, big money and gambling on rainy days when the bridge is slippery, and booming around the country with Indians who are sure-footed as spiders, with Newfoundlanders as shifty as the sea they come from, with roaming Rebel riveters escaping the poverty of their small Southern towns, all of them building something big and permanent, something that can be revisited years later and pointed to and said of: “See that bridge over, there, son—well one day, when I was younger, I drove twelve hundred rivets into that goddamned thing. “

Talese wrote that while still a reporter at The New York Times, but he soon left to write profiles for Esquire, like his famous 1966 piece: Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.

Talese never interviewed Sinatra, but he managed to reconstruct the period in the singer’s life when he was turning 50. He observed Sinatra filming, recording, taping a TV show with a cold, cavorting in Vegas with the Rat Pack and confronting the writer Harlan Ellison over his attire in a private club.

But Talese also witnessed the effect of Sinatra’s work on people, as in this scene in which Sinatra’s record, In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, is playing on the stereo in the club:

It is a lovely ballad that he first recorded ten years ago, and it now inspired many young couples who had been sitting, tired of twisting, to get up and move slowly around the dance floor, holding one another very close. Sinatra’s intonation, precisely clipped, yet full and flowing, gave a deeper meaning to the simple lyrics – “In the wee small hours of the morning/while the whole wide world is fast asleep/you lie awake, and think about the girl….” — it was like so many of his classics, a song that evoked loneliness and sensuality, and when blended with the dim light and the alcohol and nicotine and late-night needs, it became a kind of airy aphrodisiac.

That is justly ranked as one of the best magazine articles ever written. But it wasn’t easy getting so much on a reluctant subject like Sinatra. To do it, Talese had to hang out, spend time with people and conduct saturation reporting, habits that are in short supply these days, he complained in an interview with Dan Rather:

“When you go into a newspaper now, everybody’s behind a screen,” he said.“ And too much of their reporting is obtained through the communications, they can Google their way through the day almost, these people. And they’re not getting outdoors enough. They’re relying too much on the vantage point of the world that is the parameters of the laptop screen.”

Rather observed that Talese was of the school that depended on the telephone and shoe leather.

“… The phone? In the early 1950s when I came out of college and got a job [at the Times], the phone was the new technology, and those old timers said, ‘Never use the phone. You have to go there, you have to be there, you have see these people, you have to look at their faces, study their expression, their gestures, it’ll tell you more than just what comes out of their mouth.’ I believe there’s truth in that to this day, and I have adhered to that.”

Yes, he has, especially for books like The Kingdom and the Power, Honor Thy Father, and Thy Neighbor’s Wife. But he broadened his approach with his 1992 masterpiece, Unto the Sons, adding scholarship and family memory to his literary skill set. To call this work a memoir is to trivialize it. It’s a history of Italy, from ancient times through the Risorgimento and the two world wars, and in it we encounter figures from Garibaldi to Mussolini, and a raft of Taleses who live in the Calabrian town of Maida.

Some of these family members escape their lives in Southern Italy. Talese’s father Joseph joins a cousin in Paris, works with him as a tailor, then relocates to America and takes over a tailor’s shop in Ocean City, New Jersey. where he starts a family.

Talese, whose humor has always been subtle at best, pokes fun at himself here to great comedic effect. In one scene, he describes his clumsiness as an altar boy, in another his botching of a test in school. And there are more laughs when his father tries to get him to wind spaghetti on a fork without using a spoon (and Gay gets validation in his own mind from an unexpected source).

But this is a serious book, written with a rare depth and grace. We end up caring very much about the Talese family, and understanding things that could not have been easy for Talese to express—for example, his father’s complex feelings toward Mussolini. While not a Fascist, Joseph takes Il Duce’s side in late-night arguments with a cousin in Brooklyn, when the children are drowsing and the younger wives are washing dishes.

What could Joseph possibly see in Mussolini, a Northern Italian who was reviled in the south of Italy?

 …Pride and defensiveness about his Italian origins made him resentful of those who debunked Italy—which, at long last, was now trying to rise above its reputation as an unmilitaristic nation of bad soldiers, retreaters, and imboscati shirkers. What a relief to have an Italian leader who invaded other nations for a change, as opposed to remaining at home and hiding in the hills waiting to surrender to yet another conqueror of Italian soil.

Young Gay Talese was more Americanized, and there is a shocking scene between father and son after the Allied bombing of Monte Cassino in Southern Italy. It’s the climax of this powerful book.

How is Gay Talese holding up in his 80s? Pretty well, judging by his articles in the New Yorker. He captures Tony Bennett recording with Lady Gaga, and describes how faith helped fuel the baseball career of New York Yankee manager Joe Girardi.

In his Sinatra profile, Talese observed, “Many Italo-American boys of his generation were then shooting for the same star — they were strong with song, weak with words, not a big novelist among them: no O’Hara, no Bellow, no Cheever, nor Shaw; yet they could communicate bel canto.”

That’s the only thing on which I’ve ever disagreed with Gay Talese. What about Mario Puzo, whose pre-Godfather novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, has been compared to Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep? What about John Fante?

For that matter, what about Gay Talese? True, he’s of a younger generation, and has specialized in nonfiction, but for me, he’s in the same rarefied class as Cheever and O’Hara. How fitting that he found his way to The New Yorker.

 

The Man From Mars

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By Ray Schultz

Scientists believe that life may exist on some of the ice-covered moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and many say that it may have once been present on Mars.

Here’s a hint that could help prove their case. In the 1950s, Time magazine wrote that a Martian visited Earth.

Wait—let me qualify that. It wasn’t the magazine that said it, but a direct mail piece sent to prospective subscribers. Either way, this may have important consequences for the human race, so I here reproduce the letter:

This is His Excellency, the Ambassador from Mars.

You’ve probably never heard of his unexpected visit to America, for it was a very hushed-up affair. (But just don’t be surprised anymore when you see, or hear of, flying saucers. Don’t even be surprised if you should bump into a Martian on the street.)

His Excellency arrived in Washington one evening recently, in a shiny flying saucer that put down on the Mall near the Lincoln Memorial. His mission was to find out as much as possible about the Earth people: whether they were friendly or unfriendly, barbaric or reasonable civilized, and so forth. And since the atmospheric pressure here wasn’t really suitable for a Martian, he had to get all this important information in just a few hours.

But he didn’t have much luck, right from the start!

He rushed over to the Pentagon to learn about carrier jets and atomic subs, tanks and super bombers and grand strategies (and also to invite a few of the officers for a ride in his saucer), but the sentry thought he was a newspaperman playing a joke, and wouldn’t pay any attention to him – or even let him talk to a general on the phone.

He ran to the State Department to ask about treaties and tariffs and the United Nations, but a brusque young charge-d’affairs told him to come back after Easter … and the guards wouldn’t even let him near the White House.

So he walked into the National Art Gallery looking for the paintings and statues and frescoes and tapestries that have delighted art lovers for centuries, but the doorman said he wasn’t properly dressed and wouldn’t let him in.

And so it went, everywhere he turned. On the Hill everyone was too busy to be bothered . . . the British Ambassador was out of town … the Russian representative simply said, “Nyet” … and even one of the city’s most famous scientists was reluctant to have him pay a visit without a clearance.

Soon, his Excellence became discouraged. He wasn’t angry at the situation; he just realized that he had come down a century too soon. For cabinet members, protocol experts, admirals and even science-fiction writers were simply too startled for words.

Reluctantly, the Ambassador trudged his way back to his waiting flying saucer – his mission unaccomplished. Suddenly, something happened that made all the difference in the … ah … universe! He picked up a battered, thumbed-through copy of a weekly news-magazine called TIME that was lying in the grass just in front of his saucer. And, glancing quickly through its pages, he became so excited that he shouted “Eureka” – and roared off into the sky. And all the way up to Mars he had one of the most thrilling rides he’d ever taken, reading about …

… the ups and downs of the President’s program on its way through Congress … about great industrial plant that built cars and planes and things called refrigerators and washing machines …

… about the problems in Europe, and the restlessness in the Middle East, trouble from a vast nation called Russia, and battles going on in a small country called Indo-China, a boom going on in a large country called Canada …

… and about books and plays and wide-eyed movies and color television, and about all the strange and wonderful, generous and greedy, good and bad people who were doing and saying the things that other people wanted to know about.

He learned so much about the people and governments and problems and opportunities on the Earth that by the time his saucer had reached Mars, he was able to turn in a full and revealing report on the things that were going on in our world.

* * *

Now, just because I am enclosing with this little story a return card which entitles you to receive TIME at a special introductory rate it does not mean that I think you don’t know much about the news – or that reading TIME will assure you of becoming an Ambassador Extraordinary the way his Excellency eventually did.

But it does mean – that you’ll find TIME as valuable and interesting as do the more than 1,000,000 American families who wouldn’t miss their copy of TIME for the … ah … world.

And that after a few issues you will understand what actor Charles Laughton meant when he said:

“When I open TIME and read about anything whatever, I know that you have certainly been into the subject and found out all about it inside out, upside down, back, front and sideways.”

So because TIME can be especially helpful to you in the news-filled days ahead, won’t you give TIME a trial and accept this special invitation to try TiME for:

27 weeks for only $1.97

–eight cents for a world of information and enlightenment every week.

No need to send money now – we’ll gladly bill you later. But this is the only time I can offer you this reduced Introductory Rate, so please sign the enclosed card and mail it back to me at our expense today.

 Cordially,

Bernard M. Auer

Circulation Director

It’s not clear who wrote this direct mail piece, or what the exact date was. I suspect it was 1954 or 1955, since that $1.97 offer then dominated in prospecting pieces.

But the Time team tried to update it later, and penciled in changes on the copy I Xeroxed. Atomic subs were changed to nuclear, tanks to missiles and super bombers to rockets. At the end of that paragraph, in which the Ambassador is spurned by everyone, someone wrote, “And NASA wouldn’t give him any lunar trips.”

Further down, the British Ambassador who was out of town was changed to the Chinese Ambassador who wouldn’t speak to a non-Marxist, famous scientists became newscasters and a clearance became a press pass. Admirals were changed to Congressmen. Wide-eyed movies became professional football. And the 1,000,000 American families was increased to 4,450,000 families.

I’m not sure if these copy changes hit the mails, or if the Martian Ambassador ever returned to Earth.

More on Hiroshima Mon Amour

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

I was afraid this would happen. A few weeks ago, I did an item about Time Inc sending a small strip of film from the movie Hiroshima Mon Amour in a mailing. A friend in the circ business asked for the actual letter.

I couldn’t find it at first–I wrote the original piece from memory–but I have since located a Xerox in a cardboard box. So here’s the original 1960 copy from Time. The envelope had a light green panel featuring many small Time logos, and a line saying, “Film Enclosed.” Handwriting on the envelope identifies the piece as “Hiroshima Mon Amour 1960.”

* * *

Dear Reader:

These six frames of film are from the much-discussed French film, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour”, directed by Alain Resnais and described by TIME as “the acknowledged masterpiece of the New Wave of Gallic moviemakers.”

After you have held the strip up to the light and caught the spirit of this “intense original and ambitious piece of cinema”, you may or may not decide to see the film. (The locale shifts between France and Japan; the sub-titles are in English). We think you’d find it an interesting experience.

But the real reason for this letter is to tell you how to get more out of every new movie you see, every new book you read, every new place you visit, and just about every conversation you find yourself taking part in —

— by giving yourself the extra advantage of becoming a regular reader of TIME.

For people who read TIME can’t help but bring to every activity the background and insight they’ve gained from following the wonderfully varied story of the news and the people who make it.

In the case of this film, for example – you would start out several laps ahead – with a firm grasp of the new goals and the new techniques that imaginative movie directors are exploring now…with a sharp awareness of the current unrest in Japan, the spoken and unspoken attitudes that underlie the actions of the characters you watch. And the same point applies to almost every else you do. Just think about it…

Are you planning a trip? Going to the theater? Following the election campaign? Helping a youngster to choose the right school?

As a TIME reader, you’ll have bases for comparison…facts to bolster your private judgments…and easy familiarity with the whole broad subject, whether it’s music or books or business, science or sport or the arts.

Just because of what it is, TIME enhances, enriches and adds meaning to almost all your experience. It truly equips the Twentieth Century citizen to get more out of all the ways of life that are open to him in this infinitely complex world.

So if you are not now reading TIME as a subscriber with the continuity and flow that can only come from reading it every week, I hope you’d like to start now.

The enclosed card will bring you TIME for 27 weeks (a full six months) for only $1.97 – a saving of $1.66 under the regular subscription price and $4.78 under the newsstand price. If you will simply sign it and mail it, we will start your subscription promptly and bill you later, after your first copies arrive.

Cordially,

Rhett Austell

Circulation Manager

 

 

Sex, Lies and Edward Albee

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

In 1967, I bought a hardcover copy of Edward Albee’s play, A Delicate Balance in Boston, and with great anticipation started reading it on a train to Rhode Island. Unfortunately, my copy was misprinted and several pages transposed. I had to jump from page 4 to 48, double back to 16 and then move forward to page 28. But I did, and formed a lifelong admiration for the prose and humor. So what if it took a little work?

I mention this because A Delicate Balance is enjoying a revival on Broadway, featuring Glenn Close in the role of the matriarch Agnes. The play itself has gotten mostly good reviews, despite some misgivings about the production.

In 1966, critic Walter Kerr panned the play, complaining that hollowness is “offered to us on an elegantly lacquered empty platter the moment the curtain goes up.” Harry and Edna, best friends of the Agnes and Tobias, show up on their doorstep, suffering from an undefined terror: Kerr found it an unconvincing device. He was also put off by the ornate language.

But Kerr missed the comedy in the situation. Agnes’ and Tobias’ 36 year-old daughter also returns from her fourth marital debacle. People are crowding like they do in the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera. How will the seemingly dominant Agnes and the ineffectual Tobias maintain their control (or balance, if you will)?

Yes, it’s talky, but the talk is bathed in acid. At one point, Tobias asks Agnes if she should apologize to her alcoholic sister Claire (who also lives there) for something she said to her.

AGNES:

 I have spent my adult life apologizing for her; I will not double my humiliation by apologizing to her.

Moments later, it’s Claire who seems contrite.

CLAIRE:

 I must apologize, Agnes; I’m…very sorry.

 AGNES:

 But what are you sorry for, Claire?

 CLAIRE:

 I apologize that my nature is such to bring out in you the full force of your brutality.

In the end, the play examines the rights and obligations of friends and family. And it is truly moving as the wealthy but clueless Wasp couple grapples with these issues and others.

Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1967, A Delicate Balance never got its critical due until it was revived on Broadway in 1996 with Rosemary Harris, George Grizzard and Elaine Stritch, and ran longer than it had in 1966-67. And this was all too typical for Albee.

Which is why I’ve long thought that the narrative of Albee’s career should be altered. Conventional wisdom has it that he lost his way after the early success of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, that ferocious drama, and that his writing became self-conscious. Flop followed flop, until he couldn’t get arrested on Broadway. Then, as the story goes, he came back in his 60s with Three Tall Women, about his adoptive mother. It opened in Vienna, then snuck into New York for a long run. Honors were heaped on him, including his third Pulitzer.

It’s a nice myth, but based too much on box office success. In his heyday, Albee was dismissed by critics, and savaged by homophobes who argued that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, perhaps his most famous play, was written about four gay men, not two heterosexual couples.

Yet Albee was a protean author, coming out with roughly a play a year, maybe more. He wrote experimental plays like Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, chamber pieces like Counting the Ways, adaptations like The Ballad of the Sad Café (from the novel by Carson McCullers), and major dramas that should have been more celebrated in their time—and later were.

Take All Over, which lasted for only 40 performances in 1971 A powerful man is dying, and the family holds a death watch. The wife and the mistress establish a strange rapport, even as the wife spurns her son and daughter.

WIFE:

 You’ve neither of you had children, thank God, children that I’ve known of.

 I hope you never marry…either of you!

 Let the line end where it is…at its zenith.

Then there’s The Lady from Dubuque, an even more powerful look at the end of life, that ran for 12 performances in 1980. As Jo nears her demise from cancer, we realize what an impossible position her husband Sam is in, especially when Elizabeth, the Lady from Dubuque (the Angel of Death?) arrives to ease Jo’s way out.

SAM:

Do you want this? Hunh?

 Is this what you want!? Yes!?

 …Because if this is what you want, I’m not any part of it; you’ve locked me out. I…don’t exist. I…I don’t exist. Just…just tell me.

As you can see, I’ve long been a member of the Edward Albee fan club. It started at age 17 when I read his first play, The Zoo Story, in The Evergreen Review, and was stunned without really comprehending it.

Adopted when he was 18 days old by a rich but cold Larchmont family (“They bought me. They paid $113.33”), Albee left home at 18 and found his calling in Greenwich Village. He didn’t see his adoptive mother for 17 years.

That indeed led to one of his best and most personal plays: Three Tall Women. Critic Linda Winer called it “a devastating look at a certain kind of woman’s life to the end.”

In the second act, as the 92 year-old woman lays there dying, three versions of her younger self compare the stages of life. The youngest, C, age 26, learns more than she wants about her future. I’ll never become you—either of you. But she will. And she will find that Prince Charming has the morals of a sewer rat, and that their son has quit the family: He packed up his attitudes and he left! At some point, C. and B. discuss what they think are the happiest moments. A., the eldest, brings them up short.

You’re both such children. The happiest moment of all? Really? The happiest moment? Coming to the end of it, I think, when all the waves cause the greatest woes to subside, leaving breathing space, time to concentrate on the greatest woe of all—that blessed one—the end of it.

Yes, that’s the happiest moment: When it’s all done. When we stop. When we can stop.

Not that Edward Albee has: He’s still writing at 86.

 

For Adults Only

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Time Inc. was always known for producing fairly mainstream products. But it occasionally showed its avant garde side in its direct mail.

For example, in 1959 it sent a small film strip with half a dozen frames from the movie Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Of course, the publisher sent many doo-dads and items to drive engagement in those days, including its famous red pencils. But the Hiroshima piece was daring, given the subject matter of the movie directed by Alain Resnais and written by Marguerite Duras.

My vague memory of seeing it decades ago—we walked in late—was that it was about an unnamed Japanese architect trying to seduce an unnamed French actress as they wander the eerie, neon-lit nightscape of Hiroshima 14 years after the atomic bombing.

As I learned recently after seeing it again, it’s not about that at all. Actually, the pair has already commenced a relationship. The question is: Will it go on from there, or will the woman played by Emmanuelle Riva return to France as planned?

At bottom, the film is about attraction, and some say about memory. But it is layered with moral ambiguity, even as it starts. As we view horrific film footage of the aftermath, the women talks about her visits to Hiroshima’s Peace Museum and her knowledge of the devastation.

“You saw nothing in Hiroshima,” the man played by Eiji Okada repeats, almost as a litany.

Of course she hasn’t. Even the man wasn’t there—he was in the army when the bomb was dropped—although his family was.

But the woman has had her own wartime experience in the French town of Nevers. She fell in love with a German soldier. He was killed, and she was shamed after the Germans were driven out by having her hair cut off in public.

By order of her parents, she snuck out of town and arrived in Paris just as the news about Hiroshima was breaking. People were happy: It meant the end of World War II.

Not so well understood at that time were the consequences for the residents of Hiroshima and the rest of the human race.

“Does the night never end in Hiroshima?” she asks.

“It never ends in Hiroshima,” he answers.

Rivas’ performance is especially shattering. At times, she seems to mistake the man in Hiroshima for her German soldier. But both characters are in turmoil.

Assuming they are separated, how will the two lovers, both of whom have spouses, remember each other? Will they at all? And if so, what will they call each other?

Alain Resnais, who also directed classics like Last Year in Marianbad, recently died. Eiji Okada, who starred in other great films like Woman in the Dunes, died in 1995. Rivas, at age 85, gave another stunning performance in Michael Haneke’s 2012 film Amour.

And Time Inc? Around the time of Hiroshima Mon Amour, it also sent several pages from Alan Drury’s novel Advise and Consent. It’s not clear whether these efforts pulled, or which of its great copywriters were involved. The company was not afraid to try.

Move Over, Ayn Rand

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Looking for a novel about a businessman unbound by the rules and fears of mortals? Here are three, and they’re not by that conservative icon Ayn Rand, but by the alleged one-time Communist Theodore Dreiser.

Yes, Dreiser wrote a somewhat admiring portrait of Frank A. Cowperwood, a thinly fictionalized version of the robber baron Charles T. Yerkes, in three monumental volumes: The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1946). Later, they were repackaged as the Trilogy of Desire.

Granted, these aren’t the first books I’d recommend by Dreiser. His finest works are his first two novels: Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt (1911). In these heartbreaking tales, he described poverty, the kind he experienced as a child, and how Carrie and Jennie emerge from it (a lesson that drew fire from moralists of the time). He combined awe and compassion with a newsman’s eye for detail, as H.L. Mencken would observe. That said, anyone interested in finance would do well to work through their way through the Trilogy.

The Financier traces Cowperwood’s early success on the Philadelphia stock exchange—and an early failure. The city treasurer has been illegally floating loans to him, and Cowpoerwood is unable to cover them when the Chicago Fire of 1871 causes a panic.

Cowperwood exhorts the sniveling treasurer to hold on, that the run on the banks will be temporary. But it’s too late. Both are indicted, and sent to jail.

Don’t think Cowperwood is broken by it: As Dreiser depicts him, he is a sort of Nietzschean superman, utterly fearless (which may be the whole point, assuming it needs a point). Cowperwood emerges, and walks right in to the real panic—of 1873. And he recoups his fortune by buying and selling short while others lose everything.

The Titan follows him to Chicago, where he builds and runs part of the elevated train system (yes, public transit was built by private enterprise in those days). Some men he breaks, others he pulls in to share his success. And he makes enemies—many of them.

For example, the blue-chip bankers of Chicago, all of whom despise him, create a scheme to call in Cowperwood’s loans. Their goal? To save themselves from an impending corporate failure. Here’s the scene:

As he entered the home of Arneel, he was a picturesque and truly representative figure of his day. In a light summer suit of cream and gray twill, with a straw hat ornamented by a blue-and-white band, and wearing yellow quarter-shoes of the softest leather, he appeared very model of trig, well-groomed self-sufficiency. As he was ushered into the room he gazed about him in a brave, leonine way.

 “A fine night for a conference, gentlemen,” he said, walking toward a chair indicated by Mr. Arneel. “I must say I never saw so many straw hats at a funeral before. I understand that my obsequies are contemplated. What can I do?”

He beamed in a genial, sufficient way, which in any one else would have brought a smile to the faces of the company. In him it was an implication of basic power which secretly enraged and envenomed nearly all those present.

 The bankers lay it out. They need cash to avoid a calamity, and “your loans are the largest and the most available. Do you think you can find the means to pay them back in the morning?”

“I can meet my loans,” he replied easily. “But I would not advise you or any of the gentlemen present to call them.” His voice, for all its lightness, had an ominous ring.

 “Why not?” inquired Hand, grimly and heavily, turning squarely about and facing him. “It doesn’t appear that you have extended any particular courtesy to Hull or Stockpole.” [Men losing everything in the failure]. His face was red and scowling

 “Because,” replied Cowperwood, smiling…“I know why this meeting was called. I know that these gentlemen here, who are not saying a word, are mere catspaws and rubber stamps for you and Mr. Schryhart and Mr. Arneel and Mr. Merrill. I know how you four gentlemen have been gambling in this stock, and what your probable losses are, and that it is to save yourselves from further loss that you have decided to make me the scapegoat. I want to tell you here”—and he got up–“you can’t do it.”

The bankers are stunned by his confidence, and even more by what he says next:

 “If you open the day by calling a single one of my loans before I am ready to pay it, I’ll gut every bank from here to the river. You’ll have panic, all the panic you want. Good evening, gentlemen.”

I don’t know about you, but that scene always makes me want to cheer.

Running in tandem with his business exploits is Cowperwood’s womanizing (a pursuit enjoyed by Dreiser himself). He ignores conventional pieties in this area just as he does in commerce.

Having brought Cowperwood this far, Dreiser abandoned him to focus on novels like The Genius (1915) and An American Tragedy (1925). Finally, he took him up again in his old age. In the third volume, The Stoic, Cowperwood is in London, building part of the Underground. His health and powers are declining (as are Dreiser’s): Thus, The Stoic is not quite as robust as the earlier books. But published a year after Dreiser’s death, it was a fine ending to the series. As with Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, I reread the Trilogy every few years.

Thinking of curling up with an Ayn Rand book at the beach? Try the Trilogy of Desire. It covered some of the same ground in a much more powerful way.

The Jubilee Hitchhiker

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Richard Brautigan’s life is just as hard to fathom as some of his more obscure writing. But Williams Hjortsberg takes a stab at it in his excellent literary biography: Jubilee Hitchhiker, the life and times of Richard Brautigan.

Brautigan, for those who don’t know, was an American author with a huge following and a style that nobody could imitate. He was an iconic figure—tall, blond, with a walrus mustache and granny glasses, and he always had on a western hat.

His first novel, Trout Fishing in America, consisted of a series of  seemingly disjointed chapters linked by the narrative voice, and by the fact that Trout Fishing in America is a phenomenon with a thought process of its own. Here’s a sample:

As a child when did I first hear about trout fishing in America? From whom? I guess it was a stepfather of mine.

Summer of 1942.

The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal.

Silver is not a good adjective to describe what I felt when he told me about trout fishing.

I’d like to get it right.

Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout. The clear snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat.

Imagine Pittsburgh.

A steel that comes from trout, used to make buildings, trains and tunnels.

The Andrew Carnegie of Trout!

The Reply of Trout Fishing in America:

I remember with particular amusement people with three-cornered hats fishing in the dawn.

Did I say sample? That was the entire chapter.

For all its whimsy and humor, the book also had a tinge of melancholy. Some critics thought it was too cute by half. But it took off, selling 2 million copies. Everybody read it, just as many later read Brautigan’s other novels: A Confederate General from Big Sur, In Watermelon Sugar, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 and several poetry books.

“Just as the shining promise of the sixties gave way to the Nixon years, Richard Brautigan’s own star ascended,” Hjortsberg writes. “Work done in obscure poverty during the hippie decade now cast its golden light upon him. Money, previously in short supply, came in abundance.”

Yes, and he was as much of a celebrity in San Francisco as R. Crumb, the Grateful Dead or any of the Beats.

***
The time was November 1973. A woman I knew invited Brautigan and a few other people to a five-flight Greenwich Village walkup for a nightcap. Along with Brautigan came Charles Gaines, author of several books about bodybuilding, and a literary agent whose name I don’t remember. What was I doing there? I bought the wine while they were on their way—cheap red wine with twist-off caps instead of corks.

Brautigan had just finished a novel, which he didn’t tell us anything about. But he admitted: “When I finish a book, I like to go out to lunch for a month.”

The big shots sat on the bed, a mattress on the floor, while the rest of us gathered around the mattress. Brautigan asked Gaines about the bodybuilding craze.

‘I have one question, Charles: Why?”

Then Brautigan sounded off on Leonard Gardner, the author of Fat City: “How can he call himself a writer when he’s only written one book?”

I asked Brautigan what he thought of Nelson Algren. I felt he had been disrespectful to Algren in Trout Fishing in America, in a chapter titled, “The Shipping of Trout Fishing in America Shorty to Nelson Algren.”

He looked surprised, and repeated the question as a declarative statement: “What do I think of Nelson Algren.”

I never got an answer, but the subject came up of what I did. I told them I was a reporter and had spent several months doing research on Hasidic Jews. This was a few weeks after the Yom Kippur war. Brautigan raised an eyebrow.

“What do you think they should do with the occupied territories?” he asked me.

This felt like a trap. I was a Zionist in my heart, but wary about  being outwitted by a famous author. I fudged my answer.

“I think they should give them back.”

“You do?”

“With proper security guarantees.”

Now I’m deeply ashamed of my response. I don’t know what Brautigan thought privately, but his work seemed apolitical, and he never showed any animosity toward any group of people. I should have just unloaded with the anxiety many of us felt at that time.

The conversation lightened up, and Brautigan showed the wry laid-back charm that endeared him to people. By the time the party ended, I liked him a great deal and decided I would make it my business to read his new novel when it came out.

Nine months went by, and the book appeared: The Hawkline Monster, A Gothic Western. I bought it on day one and started reading it:

They crouched with their rifles in the pineapple field, watching a man teach his son how to ride a horse. It was the summer of 1902 in Hawaii.

They hadn’t said anything for a long time. They just crouched there watching the man and the boy and the horse. What they saw did not make them happy.

“I can’t do it,” Greer said.

“It’s a bastard all right,” Cameron said.

“I can’t shoot a man when he’s teaching his kid how to ride a horse.” Greer said. “I’m not made that way.’

Thus began the story of a pair of professional killers who are hired to kill a monster in the Hawkline mansion in Eastern Oregon. They travel there with the woman who hired them, an apparent Native American named Magic Child.

They reach a town called Billy, and meet the town marshal, a no-nonsense lawman named Jack Williams who seems to know Magic Child and has “a tremendous respect for her quick lean body.”

“These are my friends,’ she said, making the introductions. “I want you to meet them. This is Greer and this is Cameron. I want you to meet Jack Williams. He’s the town marshal.

Greer and Cameron were smiling softly at the intensity of Magic Child’s and Jack Williams’ greeting.

“Howdy,” Jack Williams said, shaking their hands.”What are you boys up to?”

“Come on now,” Magic Child said. “these are my friends.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack Williams said, laughing. “I’m sorry, boys. I own a saloon here. Any time you want there’s a drink waiting over there for you and it’s on me.”

He was a fair man and people respected him for it.

A couple of chapters later, the trio is riding through the Dead Hills, giving rise to this line:

Finally they came across something human. It was a grave.

In 1974, I found the book infuriatingly slight. But it was also very funny, and when I read it again recently, it didn’t seem slight at all: It’s just a splendid piece of entertainment. And it was a commercial success.

“By November 1976, Hawkline had sold 49,211 hardbound copies in America and an additional 73,750 in quality paperback,” Hjortsberg writes. (I like biographers who address the business side of things). “The mass-market paperback, released in September, had already reached 160,085 copies in sales. These figures were not lost on Hal Ashby, who planned to move ahead (with a movie) with Jack Nicholson.”

The movie was never made, but Brautigan was hot—again. Starting with the Hawkline Monster, he came out with a “genre” novel every fall for four years, the others being Willard and his Bowling Trophies, Sombrero Fallout and Dreaming of Babylon. I enjoyed them all, although none more than The Hawkline Monster.

Brautigan had one more commercial success, The Tokyo-Montana Express, in 1980. But he was sliding out of fashion. His sales nadir was the 1982 novel So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away. In 1984, at age 49, he blew his brains out in Bolinas, California.

Like many fans, I asked the same one-word question Brautigan had asked Charles Gaines: Why? Was it depression over his declining fortunes? Other writers have experienced all that, and managed to come back—look at Edward Albee. But here’s one clue: As Hjortsberg vividly portrays, Brautigan was an alcoholic, a falling-down drunk. He could be terribly cruel when ossified. And he enjoyed shooting up his kitchen with a gun.

But he continued writing. A new novel appeared years after his death: An Unfortunate Woman, about a dead woman whom we never meet and is never seen. It definitely has Brautigan’s tone—a subdued version of it. It’s one of the saddest books I’ve read. If there’s anything sadder, it’s You Can’t Catch Death, a memoir written by Brautigan’s daughter Ianthe. She loved him fiercely, although he wasn’t much of a father.

It’s too bad about his drinking. There was help available, and it might have saved Brautigan, but that’s easy to say from the outside. Artists are entitled to be complex. And as I enjoy these novels once more, I am reminded of just what an artist Richard Brautigan was.

Sunday Night at Nine: Harpo’s Wild Ride

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Marx Brothers fans tend to have favorites from different periods. Some like The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, Broadway hits shot on a sound stage in Astoria in 1929 and ‘30. Others prefer the wacky Paramount comedies made in Hollywood from 1931 to ’33—Monkey Business, Horsefeathers and the anti-war Duck Soup. And some favor the lavish yet very funny MGM musicals developed by Irving Thalberg: A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races. But few would choose Love Happy, the final film made by the Marxes, despite the fact that it was Marilyn Monroe’s first.

Initially, the 1949 flick was a vehicle for Harpo Marx, the silent, harp-playing brother. But he had to enlist Groucho and Chico to get backing, and their parts were hastily written into the script.

Now entering their dotage, the Marx Brothers had not appeared on screen together since A Night in Casablanca in 1946, and the film before that was The Big Store, circa 1941. Fearing it had a turkey on its hands, United Artists pulled out. But producer Lester Cowen was resourceful: He went to several brands and “solicited paid advertising just to get the movie completed,” according to The Marx Brothers, by Mark Bego (Pocket Essentials, 2001). In other words, it was an early example of product placement.

These were squeezed into a memorable Times Square chase sequence, in which Harpo scampers on rooftops with neon signs flashing around him. The brands? Kool Cigarettes and Bulova Watches. But the climactic moment belonged to Mobil Gas. Cornered by his pursuers, Harpo mounts the Socony Mobil winged horse and rides the neon Pegasus into the sky. Stoned-out hippies later cheered that scene.

Meanwhile, back on earth, private eye Groucho is approached by a dark-haired Marilyn Monroe.

“Some men are following me,” she says.

“Really?” Groucho says. “I can’t imagine why.”

But that was the best of it. The movie tanked at the box office, and Groucho turned his attention to You Bet Your Life, his popular TV show. And yet, true Marx fans sob with gratitude when they get a glimpse of Love Happy on TV. Maybe it’s not their favorite, but there were only 13 Marx Brothers films after all, and each one was special in its way.

Winchell in Runyonland

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By Ray Schultz

No reporter of a certain age can pass up a book about Walter Winchell and Damon Runyon, least of all one that promises to tell “The True Untold Story.”

Granted, there isn’t much left to be said about this duo. Winchell, the gossip columnist and radio star, has been picked apart by biographers; so has Runyon, whose stories inspired Guys and Dolls. Still, I sprang for Trustin Howard’s Winchell and Runyon: The Untold Story, because I’ll read anything I can get my hands on about them.

They were an unlikely pair, given their backgrounds. Winchell, Jewish, grew up on the Lower East Side. Runyon, a lapsed Protestant, was born in Manhattan, Kansas, and he was almost 20 years older than Winchell.

But those differences were outweighed by their similarities. Both were famous, both had come up the hard way. They loved the night life. And Runyon seemed to wish he was Jewish. He would go into Ratner’s, the dairy restaurant, and for breakfast order “Half a grapefruit, a big bowl of vegetables and sour cream, a big slab of boiled white fish, a bowl of kasha, an order of blintzes, a big piece of coffee cake and coffee as fast as you can refill my cup,” according to The Damon Runyon Story by Ed Weiner.

Howard is a TV comedy writer who started with Joey Bishop. He’s no historian. The book is slight, amateurish in spots. And precision isn’t his strong suit.

To hear him tell it, Runyon and Winchell became friends just before World War II. But Runyon used Winchell as a model for his character Waldo Winchester a decade before that.

And unless I’m misreading it, Howard seems to imply Runyon got drunk with Winchell at Texas Guinan’s in the 1940s. In 1913, as several biographers have reported, Runyon woke up on a train without knowing how he got there and never took another drink.

Finally, it isn’t quite accurate to say that Franklin Roosevelt “took to the airwaves to declare war on Japan”—he spoke before both houses of Congress, and Congress issued a declaration that Roosevelt signed. But let’s cut Howard some slack: He’s not trying to be Robert Caro. What he’s done here is present scenes—vignettes, almost—that he says have eluded formal biographers.

There’s Runyon’s account of how he lost a bundle on a race at Saratoga. (The male horse he’d bet on stopped to romance a female horse). There’s Runyon telling Winchell he’s right about “that little German asshole” (Hitler).

There are their jaunts around the city on the so-called dawn patrol. There’s Winchell consoling Runyon over his failed marriage. “We’re complicated guys, Damon,” he reportedly says. “Our work is our life.”

The anecdotes are believable, even without sources. And Howard doesn’t try to mimic Runyon’s style, a weakness of many writers who tackle Runyon as a subject: He’s got a voice of his own.

That’s All?

All too soon, we get to the story of Runyon’s visit to the vet with his cocker spaniel Nubbin. (Howard calls her Nubbins, but I’ll stick with the version that Runyon used in his column).

Nubbin needed a tonsillectomy. And Runyon confessed that his own throat was bothering him. The vet offered to take a look. What he saw alarmed him.

It turned out that Runyon had throat cancer. Doctors removed his voice box, but it was only a temporary reprieve. Winchell’s knees buckled when he heard the news, Howard writes.

Winchell was said to be a hard man—willing to ruin people. But he attended to his dying friend for nearly two years.

“The two of them truly become inseparable,” Howard writes. “And as Winchell promised a very sick Runyon, they are constantly at the track, the ball parks, the theatres, the nightclubs, just anywhere they can find some kind of action.”

The voiceless Runyon communicated by passing notes to Winchell. They exchanged good-natured insults. “I do not mind awaiting daylight in some pleasant deadfall but walking around is no good for me and Walter cannot show me that it is of any benefit to him, either,” Runyon wrote in his column. “Because while he walks around a heap, he always has a beef about not feeling any too well, and he gets balder by the minute.”

Runyon covered FDR’s funeral in April 1945, attended by a nurse, and continued turning out his column. “He writes on instinct,” Winchell said, according to Howard. “And no matter what he’s going through—his words never lose that edge.”

But Runyon was running out of time. He died in December 1946, at age 66, and Winchell honored him by starting the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund. As Howard tells it, mob boss Frank Costello donated $25,000 and cons in prison sent whatever they could. Winchell and Runyon’s children dropped his ashes over Manhattan from a plane. And Winchell opened a note that Runyon had left him: “I found that an irresponsible reporter in front of a typewriter can do more damage than a drunken surgeon in an operating room.” What an epitaph. The book ends, and at this point I will pay Howard the greatest compliment any writer can get: “That’s all?”