A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews
A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews
"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
People sometimes wonder what movie producers do, and the best answer I've ever heard to the question is: Anything they can get their hands on. Today's producers are usually more like committees, largely concerned with the problems of funding and distribution. That's why you'll see a phalanx of them storm the stage when the best picture Oscar is announced. They tend to be M.B.A.s and investment banker types.
In the old days, the Age of the Moguls, they were rugged individualists: tough old dudes who started out as scrap metal dealers and glove salesmen, and worked their way into the fledgling industry of motion pictures. And none of them better epitomized the type than Samuel Goldwyn. He won only one Oscar but he made his mark on Hollywood, even founding a minor Hollywood dynasty: His son, Samuel Jr., is a producer, as is his grandson John Goldwyn, while another grandson, Tony Goldwyn, is an actor best known as the villain in Ghost and the voice of Disney's Tarzan.
This review of A. Scott Berg's fine biography of Sam Goldwyn ran in the Mercury News in 1989. The book is out of print, which is a shame, but you can still find copies of it for sale online and in used book stores. Anyone interested in so-called "Golden Age" Hollywood should read it.
GOLDWYN: A Biography By A. Scott Berg Riverhead, 579 pp., out of print but available
Why does Sam Goldwyn deserve a 500-plus-page biography?
That would have been a silly question 60 years ago, when the glow cast by his Oscar-winning film, The Best Years of Our Lives, still lingered, and people -- or at least press agents -- spoke admiringly of "the Goldwyn touch."
But today, if he's remembered at all, it's for the malaprop gems known as "Goldwynisms": "Include me out," "Directors always bite the hand that lays the golden egg" and so on. Or else people assume he was one of the heads of the most famous movie studio of them all, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
But although Sam Goldwyn almost certainly uttered a few genuine Goldwynisms, most of them were invented by Hollywood gag writers and publicists. And Goldwyn never had anything to do with MGM. That company was created by a merger in 1924 of Metro Pictures with a studio run by Louis B. Mayer and the studio Goldwyn had founded. But he had been ruthlessly elbowed out of Goldwyn Pictures two years earlier.
Those may be the central ironies of Goldwyn's life. He wanted to be remembered as a man of taste, but he lingers in popular history as a buffoon. And he wanted to leave a legacy in his name, but that name was appropriated by a more powerful institution. And irony upon irony, it wasn't even his name to start with, and he had to fight to keep it.
He was born Schmuel Gelbfisz, in Warsaw, probably in 1879. He became Samuel Goldfish when he left Poland for England in 1895. The name Goldwyn wasn't created until 20 years later in America, when Sam Goldfish formed a partnership with Edgar and Archibald Selwyn. As A. Scott Berg explains, "The partners realized that several portmanteau words could be formed from the names Goldfish and Selwyn. . . . In 1916 Goldwyn Pictures was incorporated. . . . For years, show business wags joked about the abandoned syllables of their surnames."
Just as Selfish Pictures wouldn't do, the appellation Sam Goldfish also failed to inspire the respect the company's head wanted. Those of us born to relatively euphonious names can laugh, but it makes perfect sense to me that, when a man named Goldfish receives mail and phone calls for "Samuel Goldwyn," he should decide to make it his legal name.
So in 1918, Goldfish became Goldwyn. Five years later, after he was ousted from Goldwyn Pictures, Sam Goldwyn tried to form a company called Samuel Goldwyn, Inc. Goldwyn Pictures Corp. protested that he had no right to the name, which had been the company's before it was his own. Eventually, Judge Learned Hand (who certainly must have known what's in a name) ruled: "A self-made man may prefer a self-made name."
And that ruling suggests why Sam Goldwyn is worth a biography -- and one by a writer who earlier won the American Book Award for his life of editor Maxwell Perkins. For there's no more quintessentially American tale than that of the rise of Sam Goldwyn, the epitome of the self-made man. It's a story that would have Horatio Alger goggling. Born in the poverty and despair of the Eastern European ghetto, through pluck and luck Goldwyn amassed an estate that was worth more than $16 million when he died in 1974. And he did it all in an industry that didn't exist -- was undreamed-of -- when he was born.
He was almost present at the creation: He produced the first feature-length film made in Hollywood, The Squaw Man, in 1913. He made his last film, Porgy and Bess, 46 years later. Without having a bit of education, talent or taste, he produced a long string of movies noted for their literacy, skill and finesse. Of course, he knew how to use the education, talent and taste of others -- up to a limit. It's that limit that makes Goldwyn's story so interesting.
Berg tells his story well, having been given access to several vaults full of the intimate details of Goldwyn's life. His portrait of Frances Goldwyn, who provided her husband whatever touches of class would stick, is particularly fine. Among other things, we learn that the first love of Frances' life was director George Cukor, who would never have made a satisfactory husband because he was gay. Frances' mother, who was quite mad, loathed Sam, and once tellingly gave her son-in-law a set of bookplates inscribed "Ex libris: George Goldwyn." When Cukor died, he was buried in the Goldwyn family crypt alongside Frances, Sam and Frances' mother.
Berg's book is full of such wonderful information. What it lacks is a coherent critical point of view. Berg says that when Sam Goldwyn Jr. read the manuscript of the biography, he "limited his comments to the correction of facts, not the shaping of opinions." But someone should have shaped Berg's opinions, for the book never comes to terms with the central fact of Goldwyn's career: that he was never as great as he wanted to be.
As an independent producer in the heyday of the great studios, Goldwyn challenged enormous odds. Until 1947, when the Supreme Court made them sell off their theaters, Paramount, Loew's (MGM's parent company), Warner Bros., Twentieth Century- Fox and RKO owned 70 percent of the first-run theaters in the nation's largest cities. This gave them an obvious advantage: an easy outlet for their own films. Independents such as Goldwyn had to wheel and deal to get their films distributed, and to secure the services of big stars, good directors and technicians, and the rights to plays and novels.
Goldwyn played this game longer than anyone else, and he played it better than everyone except, perhaps, David O. Selznick. Unlike Selznick, Goldwyn never produced a Gone With the Wind, never discovered a star of the magnitude of Ingrid Bergman or a director of the stature of Alfred Hitchcock. On the other hand, Selznick, 20 years younger than Goldwyn and the son of industry pioneer Lewis Selznick, got his start in the big studios before going independent. He also died, a burnt-out case, nearly a decade before Goldwyn.
And even Selznick didn't achieve "the Goldwyn touch," the reputation for excellence that his best films -- Dodsworth, WutheringHeights and The Best Years of Our Lives -- deserve. Goldwyn did it largely by hounding and driving the people who worked for him, demanding precision and clarity in their films -- and by hiring director William Wyler, who was as persnickety as Goldwyn, often driving actors to tears and rage with his perfectionism.
''Tell me," Wyler asked in 1980, "which pictures have 'the Goldwyn touch' that I didn't direct?" But the Goldwyn touch was also cinematographer Gregg Toland's and set designer Richard Day's and composer Alfred Newman's. The debt Goldwyn owed to them was never acknowledged. Once Goldwyn overheard someone referring to a Goldwyn production as a Wyler film. "I made 'WitheringHeights,' " Goldwyn retorted, mispronouncing the title as usual. "Wyler only directed it."
The trouble is, the Goldwyn touch hasn't worn well. His best films are still watchable, but they don't speak to us the way the greatest Hollywood movies do. Dodsworth is an absorbing, literate film, but a minor delight, a second-order classic like a novel by Trollope. Wuthering Heights grabs us with the sheer physical beauty of the young Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, but it never scales the demonic heights of Emily Brontë's great mad novel. The Best Years of Our Lives profoundly captured the experience of the generation that fought World War II, but one has to make an imaginative connection with its first audiences to enjoy it today.
What's lacking in Goldwyn's polished, glossy films is personality, the spark that brings to life the great Hollywood movies. They lack the gargantuan egotism of Orson Welles, the lively gregariousness of Howard Hawks, the spacious humanity of John Ford, the delicious perversity of Alfred Hitchcock, the slapstick cynicism of Billy Wilder, the loopy bumptiousness of Preston Sturges. Goldwyn's films try too hard to be perfect.
Goldwyn's perfectionism was of the kind that shades over into paranoia, a fear that underlings, unless they are watched and hounded constantly, will goof off -- or worse, intentionally screw up to embarrass the boss. In The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes a studio head "with a suspiciousness developed like a muscle." I can believe that he had Goldwyn in mind, for as Berg points out, Fitzgerald was brought in to labor on a Goldwyn film, and observed in his notes for The Last Tycoon: "You always knew where you stood with Goldwyn -- nowhere."
But more damaging in the long run is that Goldwyn couldn't trust himself. The self-made man can never go back to what he was before, a child of ghetto poverty, an illegal-immigrant glove salesman, a show-business hustler. Those who knew Goldwyn early were frequently surprised at what he became. His daughter, Ruth, estranged from him after his first marriage disintegrated, observed when she met him some years later that "he seemed almost manufactured." Ben Hecht caricatured him as an almost machine-like assemblage: "The yellow, billiard-ball head, the nutcracker jaws, the flossy tailoring, high-priced cologne, yodeling voice and barricaded eyes that were Sam Goldwyn greeted us en masse." What was barricaded behind those eyes? Perhaps a man whose experiences, whose energy, whose drive, if he had allowed them to be unleashed, could have made better pictures.
Berg provides a revealing anecdote about the making of the film Dead End. Sidney Kingsley's play, set in a New York street that divided elegant apartments from squalid tenements, was the kind of "prestigious" Broadway production Goldwyn could hardly resist. But when filming began, he was enraged when he found the set littered with garbage. The director, William Wyler, patiently explained that the picture was set in a slum. Goldwyn persisted in having it cleaned up. It's certainly not that Goldwyn didn't know what a real slum looked like. Realism was not the issue: "His pictures had a distinctive look about them -- a feel that was always tasteful, even in an East Side slum," Berg notes.
The trouble with Goldwyn, finally, is that he didn't have the courage of his own vulgarity.
My dear friend Jo Brans published a lovely book called Feast Here Awhile: Adventures in American Eating about 15 years ago. Like (sigh) my own book, Feast Here Awhile is out of print, but it's easy to find a copy from lots of online booksellers. Just Google it.
Of course, I'm biased because Jo quotes me in the book. According to her, I said, "I was rinsing off a bunch of raspberries the other day, when it occurred to me that as a kid I always wanted two things: a machine that would play movies and enough raspberries. Now I've got both."
This is true. But I might note that Jo is more impressed with the raspberries -- which as she notes were available to us in Mississippi back when we were kids only in their frozen form -- than with the wonderful movie machine. It's the other way around for me: Though I still prefer raspberries over any other fruit on my morning cereal, it's the movie delivery systems -- first the VCR, then the DVD, and next whatever technology emerges as dominant -- that blow my mind.
I don't know how I would have survived childhood in a small Mississippi town without the movies. They were my tickets out of the place, out of small-mindedness and racism. If I had a boyhood hero, it was Gene Kelly, dancing down the street in the rain, an emblem of joyful liberation from the conventional.
My portals of escape were the ticket booths of the town's two movie theaters, the Lyric and the Ritz. They divided the film world between them: The Lyric showed films from MGM, Paramount and 20th Century Fox; the Ritz exhibited Warner Bros., RKO (which meant Disney when I was a kid), Columbia and Universal. Even as a boy, I could identify the house style, the peculiar production values of each of the studios.
I don't go to movie theaters anymore. The last film I saw in a theater -- or what passes for a theater these days, a little compartment in a multiplex that has all the charm and atmosphere of an airline terminal -- was Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. They tell me that I'm missing out on the community in the dark that's part of the mystique of movie-going. But what I'm missing out on is hearing the attention-deficient guy behind me having his girlfriend explain the plot to him. Since the completion of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, there has been no film momentous enough to draw me into the theater.
Which means, of course, that I'm behind on this year's Oscar-nominated films. (I can probably squeeze in Michael Clayton before next Sunday's awards show, since it comes out on DVD this week.) But the Oscars still excite me, for reasons I can't quite explain. (Maybe one of them is that I wrote a book about them.) Their record for singling out truly exceptional achievement is poor; they value high seriousness over originality; they reward actors for playing against type instead of for playing well; the craft awards -- cinematography, art direction, etc. -- often go to members of the clique instead of to true innovators, and so on. This week the newspapers will be full of stories about who should have won in the past and why they didn't. Next week, they will be full of stories about who should have won this year and why they didn't.
But that's part of the charm of the Oscars: Everybody knows what's wrong with them, and yet everybody wants one. Ever been to a party where someone brought an actual Oscar statuette? You've seen it happen: Everybody picks it up, cradles it, and gives a thank you speech. One year, the magazine for which I worked received a chocolate Oscar as part of a promotional package for something or other. Our office manager placed it on her desk at the entrance to the offices, and sure enough, everyone who entered picked it up, cradled it, and gave a thank you speech. Needless to say, nobody actually ate the thing after it had been handled so often.
So to celebrate Oscar week, I'm going to post some old reviews of books about the movies. Today, a 1995 review of two movie star biographies -- one of a star who never won an Oscar but probably should have, and one of a star who did win but probably shouldn't have.
GARBO: A Biography By Barry Paris University of Minnesota Press, 680 pp., $22.95 paperback
PORTRAIT OF JENNIFER: A Biography of Jennifer Jones By Edward Z. Epstein Simon & Schuster, 464 pp., out of print, but available
She was a delicious Ninotchka, a stunning Queen Christina, the definitive Lady of the Camellias, but Greta Garbo's greatest role, which she played for more than half a century, was as Enigmatic Recluse in I Want to Be Alone. As Louise Brooks put it, "Alfred Lunt said Garbo couldn't sustain a long scene. But she has probably sustained the longest scene in theatrical history, ever since 1925 -- her private life."
Garbo made her last movie, a botch called Two-Faced Woman, in 1941, when she was 35, and lived on until Easter Sunday 1990. It was an accidental retirement: From time to time, film roles were offered to her, and she agreed to play some of them, but the deals fell through for various reasons, usually financial. So she lived out her post-Hollywood life dodging paparazzi, autograph hounds, interviewers.
Barry Paris seems to be making a specialty of writing the lives of women who have no lives: He previously wrote about Louise Brooks, who retired from films in 1938 and lived in relative seclusion until her death in 1985. But where Brooks was merely a cult figure, celebrated for her performance as Lulu in the 1929 German film Pandora's Box, but otherwise not widely known outside cineaste circles, Garbo is a legend, one of the most famous women who ever lived. In fact, Paris opens his book by calling her, "The greatest phenomenon in film -- if not all twentieth-century art." (Where, one wonders, would Paris rank Chaplin, Picasso, Joyce or Stravinsky among the phenomena of 20th-century art?)
The success of Paris' biographies is in inverse proportion to the celebrity of his subjects: The Brooks biography is fascinating, a vivid portrait of a gifted, witty but ultimately tragic figure -- a woman whose potential was never fully realized. In Garbo, Paris almost busts a rhetorical gut in an attempt to recapture the magic we feel watching her die in Camille ("perhaps the most memorable death scene on-screen . . . executed in an aura of sublime and ravishing tranquillity") or say goodbye to her son in Anna Karenina ("in their bedside nimbus, the mutual adoration of mother and child is something greater than the passion of man and woman"). But those images speak louder than his words, so the Garbo biography becomes merely a compendium of everything that can be known about the woman, down to her shoe size (7AA, according to Ferragamo). God may be in the details, but Garbo isn't. The more we know about her, the less interesting she becomes: Do we care that she kept a collection of plastic trolls under a sofa, or that she loved to watch Paul Lynde on "Hollywood Squares"?
The obligatory material of contemporary biography is sex, particularly movie star biographies, which typically revel in such matters as the alleged affair of Laurence Olivier and Danny Kaye. But Paris isn't much interested in Garbo's sex life, because -- and this may be the most shocking revelation about a Hollywood star ever made -- she wasn't much interested in it. "Garbo was technically bisexual, predominantly lesbian, and increasingly asexual as the years went by," writes Paris.
Most of what he has to tell us has been told before: She never married, and the one grand heterosexual passion of her life, with John Gilbert, flared for only a few years in the late '20s. She had a relationship with Mercedes de Acosta, a writer who later moved on to Marlene Dietrich. But de Acosta was "one of the great celebrity collectors of the century," in Paris' words, and her own purple-prosey account of the affair suggests that de Acosta's infatuation was unrequited. The best-documented sexual relationship of Garbo's life was with Cecil Beaton, the English photographer-designer, who told all in his published diaries. But Beaton's orientation was predominantly homosexual, and Paris suggests that the diary accounts have an element of fantasy.
Throughout most of Garbo's later life, her relationships with both men and women were predicated on how much she could trust them to maintain her privacy, and not on sex. One such relationship was with New York art dealer Sam Green, who telephoned and walked with her daily, and recalls taking a curious Garbo into a Parisian sex shop in the 1970s. After gazing around, she said, "Ah, the sex thing. I'm glad that part of my life is over."
As for Garbo's celebrated reclusiveness, the fuss she made over wanting to be alone was perhaps the only thing that alleviated the boredom of nearly 50 years of doing nothing after her film career ended. True recluses don't subscribe to clipping services, or accept invitations to dinner at the White House, even when the dinner is kept secret, as one arranged by Jacqueline Kennedy was. Garbo tested out the Lincoln bed, but didn't spend the night in it -- or with JFK. (She apparently did, however, turn down an invitation to tea at BuckinghamPalace that bore a handwritten note, "You will be alone, ER," with the excuse that she didn't have a dress to wear.)
If Garbo had been a true recluse, she would have found a hideaway in Sweden or Switzerland, not at 450 East 52nd St. in Manhattan. With her millions, she could, like Marlon Brando, have bought her own South Pacific island. (Brando was, for a while, the male equivalent of Garbo, but in his later years he seemed to have tired of the game. Can one imagine Garbo kissing Larry King?) But with various walking companions such as Sam Green, she made daily excursions through the streets of New York, devising elaborate escape plans whenever she would encounter "customers" -- her word for those who would invade her privacy.
Given Garbo's apparent lack of interest in sex, she might well have made a marriage of convenience -- both Beaton and Gayelord Hauser, who were gay, proposed one to her -- that would have given her a life of quietly luxurious seclusion. But one suspects Garbo would have found life as a trophy wife far more boring than the daily game of dodge-the-customers.
Occasionally, she was unsettled by evidence that she had played the game too well. Once, in an antique shop, a companion suggested that the notoriously stingy Garbo might get a discount on something she wanted if the owner recognized her. But when Garbo asked the owner, "Do you know who I am?" and he said no, she was shocked.
The photographer Clarence Sinclair Bull once printed up an image of Garbo's face superimposed on the body of the Sphinx, and it suggests more than anything else in Paris' book what an icon Garbo became. She was the 20th century's Mona Lisa, older than the rock stars among whom she sat. The intriguing thing is that it takes more than beauty and acting talent to achieve that status.
Jennifer Jones, for example, had beauty and talent, and yet she's nearly forgotten today. "Who's Jennifer Jones?" asked my Gen-X daughter, who was brought up on old movies and is familiar with such contemporaries of Jennifer Jones as Ingrid Bergman, Olivia de Havilland and Lauren Bacall. I was hard-pressed to think of a Jennifer Jones film she might have seen.
The one I finally came up with, The Towering Inferno, was Jones' last, and she's billed eighth (between Richard Chamberlain and O.J. Simpson) in that fricassee of superstars. The film for which Jones won an Oscar, The Song of Bernadette, isn't much seen today, its Hollywood high-gloss religiosity (Linda Darnell plays the Virgin Mary!) having long gone out of favor. Her other big ones include Duel in the Sun, an overblown, campy Western known to wags as "Lust in the Dust"; Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, a high-'50s soap in which she's a Eurasian woman in love with William Holden, and which is best remembered for the title tune and the brief vogue it caused for the cheong-sam; and several flawed adaptations of literary classics: Carrie (the 1952 film version of Dreiser's Sister Carrie, not the Steven King/Brian De Palma shocker), Madame Bovary (see clip below), A Farewell to Arms and Tender Is the Night. Some would add John Huston's wacky 1954 adventure spoof Beat the Devil, a famous flop that has become a cult favorite over the years. In it Jones, wearing a blond wig, plays a conniving airhead and is absolutely hilarious -- it may be her best performance, but it's not the stuff of which film legends are made.
Still, Jones and Garbo have a few things in common. Both came from provincial backgrounds -- Sweden and Oklahoma -- and made a few obscure movies (Garbo was in some Swedish industrial films, Jones had a contract with Republic and made Westerns and a Dick Tracy serial) before shooting to stardom. Both were "discovered" by powerful film makers -- Garbo by Mauritz Stiller and later by Louis B. Mayer, Jones by David O. Selznick. And both were temperamentally unsuited to the fame that befell them: Jones, said her friend and co-star Joseph Cotten, was "painfully shy. Compared with her, Garbo would seem a screaming extrovert. I can't imagine how it ever occurred to her to become an actress." The important difference between Garbo and Jones, however, seems to be that Garbo knew who she was and what she wanted and was very good at getting it. Garbo's niece is quoted as characterizing her as "one of the early feminists -- when you think of someone coming over at 19 and taking on the studio, and not getting into drugs or alcohol." Garbo won her battles with MGM so decisively that Cole Porter could include "Garbo's salary" in a catalog of superlatives in "You're the Top." And she left movies while she was still the top.
Jones, on the other hand, was so self-effacing that she is in danger of disappearing from her own biography: Edward Z. Epstein spends almost as much time writing about Jones' husbands -- actor Robert Walker, producer Selznick, billionaire Norton Simon -- as he does on the life of his ostensible subject. Did Jones' ambition drive her into the arms of Selznick, or did she passively succumb to his desire for a protégée who would give him a triumph that would surpass his achievement on Gone With the Wind? Epstein sheds little light on this central passage in Jones' life, though it precipitated all sorts of misery: She and Walker, who had married while they were both starving young actors and were the parents of two small boys, split up. Walker had a promising career, but drink, drugs and mental illness -- which some, like Epstein, blame on the breakup of the marriage -- precipitated his early death. Selznick and his wife, Irene, the daughter of Louis B. Mayer, also broke up -- marking the lives of their two young sons. And Selznick became obsessive about Jones' career -- forever searching for the perfect property, and constantly harassing the producers and directors to whom he loaned her. The results damaged both his career and Jones'.
After Selznick's death in 1965, Jones' career came to a shuddering halt. In 1969, she made an unfortunate attempt to restart it with a cheesy exploitation flick, Angel, Angel, Down We Go, in which she played a former porn star. When that flopped, she settled for a life as trophy wife to Norton Simon, becoming the crown jewel of his famous art collection. She emerged from retirement for The Towering Inferno, but Hollywood is a cruel place for middle-aged women. Still planning a comeback, she bought the rights to a novel she admired, planning to play the leading role. But producer James L. Brooks wanted the same property, so he bought it from her and made Terms of Endearment, which won an Oscar for Shirley MacLaine.
Epstein is a former flack for Universal who has parlayed his contacts with celebs into a string of books on Mia Farrow, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Jane Wyman, Rita Hayworth, Marlon Brando, Lucille Ball and Lana Turner. Most of these are "unauthorized," as is Portrait of Jennifer, which was made without Jones' cooperation, and they draw on Hollywood gossip rather than on Paris' brand of painstaking research. Because Paris is a careful, thorough biographer and Epstein isn't, Garbo, the celebrated enigma, comes across as less enigmatic than Jones, the celebrated girl-next-door.
Apparently unable to find a focus for his biography, Epstein fills it with irrelevant quotes and outlandish speculation. Robert Walker's death, for example, seems to have been a medical mishap -- the wrong drug administered to a man already full of pills and alcohol -- but Epstein tries to hype it into a murder mystery, fingering Selznick and director John Ford as possible culprits. When he can't get inside of what Jones was experiencing, he relies on irrelevant analogies from other celebrities: For example, Jones' feelings on the suicide of her daughter are "illuminated" by a quote from Eydie Gorme about losing her own child. The result of this name-dropping and pasting-together of quotes can be called a portrait of Jennifer, but the medium is decoupage.
I've had deadlines stacked up like planes over O'Hare this week, so I'm behind in my postings. But hey, I've gotta pay the bills. Will try to do better next week.
THE COMMONER By John Burnham Schwartz Talese/Doubleday, 351 pp., $24.95
They lived happily ever after, all those Disney princesses swept off to the castle by their golden coaches and flying carpets. But real-world princesses are not always so happy. One word: Diana.
The ill-fated princess of Wales was probably on John Burnham Schwartz’s mind as he wrote his terrific new novel, “The Commoner,” but uppermost on it were two other princesses: the one who became the current empress of Japan, the former Michiko Shoda, and her daughter-in-law, the current crown princess, who was born Masako Owada. In the novel, which is transparently based on their lives, the former is named Haruko Endo, the latter Keiko Mori.
Like the real Empress Michiko, Haruko is the daughter of a wealthy businessman. An intelligent, pretty, athletic young woman, educated at SacredHeartUniversity, she is invited to play tennis with the crown prince. People are shocked when she doesn’t let him win. They are more shocked when he falls in love with her and proposes marriage. Haruko has misgivings: She would have to leave her friends and family behind forever. She would give up any hope of independence. She would be forced into a regimented, ritualistic life at a time when Japanese women – the marriage takes place in 1959 – are beginning to discover their freedoms.
But she accepts his proposal, and becomes the first commoner to marry into the imperial line. Her one and only task is to produce an heir, which she does. She loves the boy, Yasuhito, but as Mrs. Oshima, her chief lady-in-waiting (and spy for the empress), icily reminds her, “He may be yours, but he does not belong to you.” And as the full knowledge of the hopeless emptiness of her life bears down on her, Haruko sinks into a clinical depression that robs her of speech.
Haruko recovers, only to see her own story recapitulated when Yasuhito grows up and falls in love with Keiko, a brilliantly accomplished woman with a promising career as a diplomat. Keiko has known more of the world than Haruko was privileged to know, and she turns down Yasuhito’s proposal. But Haruko herself persuades Keiko to accept – and then endures the pain of guilt when Keiko’s fate proves even more crushing than her own. For Keiko is unable to produce an heir. And she, too, falls into depression and withdraws from public view.
The secrets of the Japanese royal family are fiercely guarded, and Schwartz has based his novel on what little has leaked out from the imperial palace: that the Empress Michiko did in fact go mute for a while when she was crown princess, and that Crown Princess Masako has disappeared from sight after giving birth to a girl – reportedly conceived in vitro. But this is no tawdry, tattling roman à clef. It’s a subtle, finely wrought fiction that evokes Jane Austen.
The novel’s milieu, like that of Austen’s novels, is an island of custom and ritual in the middle of a world in change; after all, Austen’s country houses and their decorum-conscious residents existed in the eye of a hurricane: the Napoleonic wars. It’s the young – attracted to change, subjected to tradition – who must wager a choice between the burden of the past and the temptation of the future.
Some of the characters in “The Commoner” would have been at home in the Jane Austen world. The vaguely ineffective Emperor, modeled on the impotent postwar Hirohito, evokes the passive-aggressive fathers in her novels, such as Mr. Bennet and Mr. Woodhouse. Even some of the dialogue in “The Commoner” could have come, with only minor changes, from an Austen novel, such as this exchange between Haruko and the Empress:
“ ‘That must of course be right,’ I said. ‘But it’s rather confusing how nearly every time one picks up a newspaper of late one finds oneself reading the opinion that Japan has entered the age of progress and technology and must not, cannot, turn back. I wonder what one is to make of such statements.’
“ ‘You should consider reading less,’ my mother-in-law said.”
Schwartz has followed up his highly praised novel “Reservation Road” with a tour de force; the creation of a wholly convincing Japanese heroine by a male American writer reflects the triumph of imagination over experience. But it’s more than that, for the stories of Haruko and Keiko embody an essential and perdurable tragedy: the stifling of a human being’s potential.
They don’t live happily ever after. Maybe they never did.
My friend Fran Smith, a Hillary supporter, and I, a late convert to Obamaism, recently had an e-mail debate that to my mind encapsulates the dilemma that many of us face today. Fran has kindly given me permission to reprint our dialogue.
Fran: I actually don't know what kind of leader Obama would be. All I know is what kind of a speaker he is. What am I missing? Besides a drink of the Kool Aid...
Me: Good point, and I don't have an answer -- that Kool Aid is mighty tasty. I guess it really comes down to my sense that I know what kind of leader Hillary would be: Enormously competent but freighted with sixteen years of history. Obama promises at least initially to give us a break from that history. If it were just Hillary, I'd be more enthusiastic. But I'm just not sure I want to put up with four to eight years more of Bill Clinton, who will be there no matter what she can do to control him.
Fran: Yes, I get that about Bill and Hill and the baggage. But a lot of the "divisiveness" and "polarization" of Bill's administration that I keep reading about came from the mad-dog right-wing smear machine. Yes, the Clintons provided plenty of ammunition, but none of their sins comes close to what we've witnessed and endured and pretty quietly put up with these past eight years. Monica vs. Iraq? Hillary's clumsy health care efforts vs. torture, White House secrecy and the war on civil liberties? I think it's revisionist history -- and a delusion -- to think that the attacks and divisions were about the Clintons, and not first and foremost about the Republicans, and that Obama could somehow float above the partisan nastiness. If the Dems win, it may take the Republicans a while to regroup, and that would be an excellent thing. But if and when they do, they will go after whoever holds that office, with the cynical, vicious, deceitful win-at-any-cost tactics that are their M.O. At least with Hill, we know we have a fighter and survivor.
Me: You get no argument from me on the basic point that Republican nastiness (and incompetence and lust for power and so on) is to blame for what we've endured. Or that it won't resurface whatever Democrat is in the White House. But given a choice between two competent and attractive candidates (Hillary and Obama), I have to go with the one who has the better chance of giving us at least a brief respite from the brutality of right-wing attacks. The Republican Party is in disarray right now, but I fear that nominating Hillary will give them a point to rally around. Nor do I see any sign that Obama is any less capable of fighting and surviving whatever the right-wing attack machine may throw at him. He's already had to deal with the "Barack Hussein Osama" nonsense and the e-mails about his being a covert Muslim and so on. It's the enthusiasm I sense from younger voters and his ability to inspire -- even if it's only rhetoric, which can only take you so far -- that I think will help him along. It's why people remember JFK so fondly, even though he really wasn't a very good president. You felt something at the time that gave you a sense of promise. I feel it with Obama. With Hillary, I just feel the tug back into the Clintonian past -- and even though that past was better than the Bush years, I just don't much want to go back there.
Fran: You get no argument from me on your basic points, either. We agree on pretty much everything except which way to vote today! Kind of like Clinton and Obama....
Me: And may whoever it is win, and win big, in November.
Critical Mass, the National Book Critics Circle's blog, has a regular feature it calls Good Reads. It surveys the membership as well as some eminent authors to come up with a list of top choices in fiction, nonfiction and poetry among the current books. Their current picks are these:
*There was a tie for fourth in nonfiction, and for second in poetry
I can endorse the list, even though I've read only one of the titles (Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food). My own choices, which didn't make the final cut, were:
The following review ran today (in a version very nicely edited for space) in the Dallas Morning News. This is the unedited version.
COALRIVER By Michael Shnayerson Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 321 pp., $25
Court cases thread through Michael Shnayerson’s new book like veins of coal through an Appalachian hillside. In discussing one of them, he observes that that the judge made “a small point, like a caveat buried near the end of a book review.”
So let’s not bury our caveats, the most important one being: “CoalRiver” will make you angry.
It will make you angry especially if you’re disturbed by the Bush administration’s radically pro-business approach to energy policy and the environment. Of course, if you’re an admirer and a beneficiary of those policies, Mr. Shnayerson’s evident bias against them will also make you angry.
For while his book is billed as the story of a handful of people in the hills of West Virginia who protested the damage being done by a coal company to the mountains where they and their ancestors had lived, Mr. Shnayerson has turned it into an indictment of government policy, of power-hungry politicians and businesspeople, of bureaucratic inertia, of Wall Street’s obsession with fattening the bottom line, and of the callousness with which the poor have been treated for generations. The people of West Virginia, he writes, “are for the most part too poor and too cowed after a century of harsh treatment by King Coal to think they can stop their world from being blasted away.”
He means “blasted away” literally. “CoalRiver” focuses on the practice of mountaintop removal – the blasting away of the tops of mountains to get at the rich veins of coal beneath. It is a practice that became more common after Don Blankenship became chairman, president and CEO of Massey Energy, a company whose ruthlessness was a byword in the state. It was a ruthlessness that went unchecked, Mr. Shnayerson asserts, “The coal companies could set those blasts as close to homes as they liked, damaging foundations and walls, ruining wells. No law governed them in that regard.”
The result was visible and lasting damage to the environment. After the blasting began, one woman “was astonished to see the hollow’s entire animal population come foraging right by her house in the valley: bobcats and bears, squirrels and possums. … When she fed them, they hung around for more, pets whether she wanted them or not.” And environmentalists argued that the burning of coal, however obtained, “was the single greatest cause” of the looming calamities of global warming.
Those who protested mountaintop removal, who argued for laws and regulations, often found themselves outcasts in their own communities, where people who had jobs feared losing them – or that Massey would retaliate against friends and relatives who worked there. The mountain culture is “libertarian,” as Mr. Shnayerson puts it – distrustful of outsiders and collective efforts. And after years of being worn down, they simply doubted that anything could or would be done. As one of the protesters put it, “The way they’ve done it is by dehumanizing us, so that the rest of America doesn’t care about us. That’s how they got away with slavery for so long. When they say, ‘Don’t go to West Virginia or Kentucky, those people are ignorant and inbred,’ then who cares if my grandson is sleeping nights in his clothes because he’s worried there’ll be a flood or mudslide?”
Mr. Shnayerson has found an easy villain for his book in Don Blankenship, who would seem on the face of it to be the very emblem of corporate greed, a man who received “roughly $27 million in pay and perks for 2006 – despite a 30 percent decline in the company’s stock for the year.” But Mr. Shnayerson humanizes Blankenship, describing his hardscrabble childhood in the hills he was now blasting away. “CoalRiver” is not a simple diatribe, but rather a carefully reported and compellingly written account of a complex and intricate economic, political, social and environmental problem with no easy solutions or quick fixes.
Most of all, the book is a remarkable piece of the sort of investigative journalism that has grown sadly more rare as newspapers retrench and reshape themselves. Mr. Shnayerson is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine, where much of the material in the book originally appeared. It’s a fine irony that a publication known for its celebration of glitz and glamour, fattened with ads for luxury goods, should also be the source of such an incisive and sympathetic portrait of the exploited poor.
The Mercury News today had one of those perfectly obvious "news" stories on its front page, about how Obama, Clinton/Romney, and McCain represent three generations: Gen-X, the Baby Boomers, and the Silent Generation. My first reaction was, Well, duh. But my second was to feel my old gray hackles rise at the labeling of my own cohort as the "Silent Generation."
The article defines the "Silent Generation" as those people born between 1925 and 1942, and claims that it "was overshadowed by the 'GI Generation' that preceded them and fought World War II, and the baby boomers who came after them."
Well, first of all, a lot of people born in 1925 and 1926 also fought in World War II and Korea. And the baby boom is usually dated from 1946, when GIs came home and started raising families.
But even taking the article on its own terms, the inappropriateness of the label "Silent Generation" is obvious. There's a chart that goes with the story (the Merc loves charts) headed "Generations compared" that lists, among other things, "Prominent contemporaries" for each of the generations. And the prominent contemporaries of the "Silent Generation" include Martin Luther King Jr. and Bob Dylan. If those guys were "overshadowed" by anyone in either the preceding or following generations, I'd like to know who.
I suspect that the "Silent Generation" label was coined by a baby boomer, a member of a generation that loves to celebrate itself. Baby boomers seem to believe that they changed the world, when most of the work was done for them by the generations that preceded theirs.
Take for example the famous baby boom triad of "sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll." That there was a sexual revolution there can be no doubt. But the groundwork for it was laid by Alfred Kinsey -- who was born in 1894. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was published in 1948, and the followup on human females in 1953. It was the Silent Generation that made them bestsellers. As for drugs, it was Timothy Leary (born 1923) and Richard Alpert (aka Baba Ram Dass, born 1931), who ushered in the psychedelic era.
Oh, and where to start with rock 'n' roll? The article has already spotted us Bob Dylan (1941), but there would have been no good rockin' tonight without Chuck Berry (1926), Fats Domino (1928), Ray Charles (1930), Little Richard (1932), James Brown (1933), Elvis Presley (1935), Jerry Lee Lewis (1935), and Buddy Holly (1936). Not to mention a couple of Brits: John Lennon (1940) and Paul McCartney (1942).
In fact, almost everything the boomers claim as their own has its origins in the previous generation.
Feminism? Gloria Steinem (1934) and Germaine Greer (1939) built on the work of members of the generations before them, such as Betty Friedan (1921) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908).
Anti-war protest? Not one of the Chicago Seven was a baby boomer. Abbie Hoffman was born in 1936, Jerry Rubin in 1938, Tom Hayden in 1939, and so on.
Civil rights? Think Martin Luther King Jr. (1929) and Malcolm X (1925), James Meredith (1935), Eldridge Cleaver (1935), John Lewis (1940) and Julian Bond (1940). Rosa Parks was born in 1913.
Campus protest? Mario Savio of the Berkeley Free Speech movement was born in 1942.
The Merc article lists as the baby boom's "prominent contemporaries" George W. Bush, Madonna and Bill Gates. I think I'll stick with my contemporaries.
In the old days, the Age of the Moguls, they were rugged individualists: tough old dudes who started out as scrap metal dealers and glove salesmen, and worked their way into the fledgling industry of motion pictures. And none of them better epitomized the type than Samuel Goldwyn. He won only one Oscar but he made his mark on Hollywood, even founding a minor Hollywood dynasty: His son, Samuel Jr., is a producer, as is his grandson John Goldwyn, while another grandson, Tony Goldwyn, is an actor best known as the villain in Ghost and the voice of Disney's Tarzan.
