Books posts

“I envy those people who derive solace from the belief that the work they created will live on and be much discussed and somehow, like the Catholic with his afterlife, so the artist's ‘legacy’ will make him immortal. The catch here is that all the people discussing the legacy are alive and ordering pastrami, and the artist is somewhere in an urn or underground in Queens. All the people standing over Shakespeare's grave and singing his praises means a big goose egg to the Bard, and a day will come—a far-off day, but be sure it definitely is coming—when all Shakespeare's plays, for all their brilliant plots and hoity-toity iambic pentameter, and every dot of Seurat's will be gone along with each atom in the universe. In fact, the universe will be gone and there will be no place to have your hat blocked. After all, we are an accident of physics. And an awkward accident at that. Not the product of intelligent design but, if anything, the work of a crass bungler.”

— Woody Allen in his memoir “Appropos of Nothing.” Recommended. If you‘re a fan you’ll hear echoes from all of his movies.

“How [my father] loved that life. Fancy clothes, a big per diem, sexy women, and then somehow he meets my mother. Tilt. How he wound up with Nettie is a mystery on a par with dark matter. Two characters as mismatched as Hannah Arendt and Nathan Detroit, they disagreed on every single issue except Hitler and my report cards.”

— Woody Allen in his memoir, “Appropos of Nothing,” which I'm currently reading. It's zippy and funny. Right now his complaints are childhood complaints about family; will be interesting to see how far he goes into his life and what those complaints become.

“Hachette read the book and loved it and despite me being a toxic pariah and menace to society, they vowed to stand firm should things hit the fan. When actual flak did arrive they thoughtfully reassessed their position, concluding that perhaps courage was not the virtue it was cracked up to be and there was a lot to be said for cowering.”

— Woody Allen in a postscript to his autobiography “Apropos of Nothing,” which I need to get around to reading one of these days 

“[Near the end of her life, Joan Blondell] had a small role in the ABC-TV movie Death at Love House, directed by Here Come the Brides' director and friend E. W. Swackhamer. Wearing one of her own Day-Glo caftans, Joan played the president of a movie-star fan club, but the actress was in pain. Her rheumatoid arthritis was not mollified by fistfuls of Percodan. When it became unendurable, she admitted herself to St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica. ... Marlon Brando was there on a crash diet just before leaving for Manila to shoot Apocalypse Now. When he found out Joan was in the hospital, he sent her a floral tower with a note: ‘To a woman I’ve always loved.'”

— from “Joan Blondell: A Life between Takes,” by Matthew Kennedy

“What is it like to be a movie star? 

”Or, now, in my case, what was it like to be a movie star?

“If you like adulation, deference, the best tables, autograph hunters, and lots of money, it is absolutely wonderful. If you like it so much that tomorrow you feel it will be taken away from you, it is terrifying. 

”Impermanent it is, and shaky; and if you become obsessed with retaining it, you acquire some of the basest qualities in man.“

— Edward G. Robinson, from ”All My Yesterdays: An Autobiography," 1973

Merrill (left) and Davis, about to have a bumpier night than the night they arrived in the cabin in Maine for their honeymoon.

“The cabin [in Maine where I was staying during the blacklist] was owned by an old Communist who owned another primitive cabin just across the creek. This came in handy when I received a telegram from an actor friend, Gary Merrill. We had been together, he as actor, I as publicist, in This Is the Army, when he introduced me to boilermakers. Gary liked to drink more than he liked to act, but he was a good actor who had scored a success on Broadway in Born Yesterday and had then gone to Hollywood with a contract at Twentieth Century-Fox. He had recently been in a movie called All About Eve, playing opposite Bette Davis. They had fallen in love and now they were married and on their honeymoon, driving East from California. The telegram asked if I could find them a place to stay for a week or two. They were both New Englanders and used to discomfort and any place would do so long as it was on water. I wired back that I had found the perfect place for them. The landlord was amenable and I rowed over to check out the other cabin. It was just like mine, with the same lack of amenities, but it also had a bookcase full of the collected works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. I decided this was not exactly movie star reading, at least not in that day and age, and stuck the books in a closet and stacked firewood in front so they wouldn't be seen.

”Gary and Bette arrived in a large Cadillac convertible packed high with suitcases. They loved the cabin. Bette immediately sat down to make a shopping list. She seemed utterly familiar to me. It was as if I were finally meeting in person an old pen pal. After all, she had been part of my life since Cabin in the Cotton. I found myself searching her face for the scar from Marked Woman. She was smaller than I had imagined but formidable. Her manner was at the same time friendly and imperious. She was not stuck up, merely regal. She was a star. When she finished her list, she handed it to Gary and he and I went down to my boat and rowed across to the tiny village at the head of the creek. At the general store we bought most of what Bette had ordered. At the bottom of her list, after milk, bread and eggs, she had simply written ‘boat,’ but none was available for rental and Gary didn't think she wanted him actually to buy a boat, so we took our staples and rowed back to the cabin. We had been gone about two hours. We came back to find Bette in an apron, feeding wood to the stove. On a table were the makings for martinis and a plate of canapés she had made. A fire burned in the fireplace. I had tidied up the cabin for their arrival, but she had swept it again and polished the few pieces of furniture. She had found doilies to put on the couch. Everything gleamed. And back in the bookcase were the collected works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. ‘Guess what I found!’ she shouted at us. ‘The most wonderful books!’“

— from Walter Bernstein's “Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist.” I finished the book about two weeks ago and missed Bernstein's voice immediately. It was such a joy to read. It was like having a smart, fun, dry friend stop by every evening. 

“[My agent] paired me with a more experienced screenwriter named Ben Maddow. We were to adapt an English thriller called Kiss the Blood off My Hands. Once again it was a learning experience, only this time I did some actual writing. Maddow was a poet and, under the name of David Wolff, had written a documentary film about civil liberties called Native Land. I had liked the film and came to admire Maddow. He had a film sense that was then entirely new to me. He wrote for the eye as well as the mind, while I was still chained to the ear. He was also, like many of the New York writers I met in Hollywood, a product of the Depression. They all seemed touched with some ineffable sadness, as though the world had broken something in them that could never be entirely mended. Maddow had graduated from Columbia with a science degree in the pit of the Depression and had been unable to get any kind of job. For a year, he told me, he left his apartment only at night, roaming the city by himself until dawn. He had a taste for what was bent and melancholy. When he wrote a novel some years later, the final pages were a minute description of the garbage floating in the East River. After our collaboration he went on to write fine scripts for Intruder in the Dust and The Asphalt Jungle, and then he was blacklisted.” ...

[Bernstein then returned to New York and spent most of the 1950s on the blacklist, scrounging out work on television through fronts. Near the end of the decade, he was asked back to Hollywood—I believe to work on a project for Italian producer Carlo Ponti, who was married to Sophia Loren and didn't give a rat's ass about the blacklist.]

“While we were there, I heard that Ben Maddow was working openly again. He was at Twentieth Century-Fox, writing a movie for Elia Kazan. I found this hard to believe. It meant that he had given names. It was something I did not want to believe. I also did not understand it. Maddow had been working steadily since being blacklisted, mostly writing scripts for a writer-producer named Philip Yordan, who then placed his own name on them. He had written some very good ones, including the loopy western Johnny Guitar. Whatever he had done, he had not done because he was starving. ... 

”We met at a coffee shop and embraced. I found myself very glad to see him again and very apprehensive. We sat down and ordered two of the breakfast specials and then he said what I knew and feared he would say. He said it right away. He had testified in secret and named seven or eight or maybe ten people, he was not exactly sure how many, and now he was working again. ‘Why did you do it?’ I asked. “Why? You were working.' 'I couldn't stand going into the screening room after the lights were out,' he said. It had nothing to do with money or politics or being afraid or not able to work. He simply could no longer stand living in the shadows. ...

”I felt there was something I should feel that I was not feeling. I should feel anger or contempt or disgust. Maddow had not been forced to do what he did. He had been working, being paid well, surviving the blacklist better than most. He had gone through the worst of it. But there are no gradations of betrayal. He had sold his friends so he could come out of the dark. Now he stood in the light and he could put his name on his work, but he had sold his name as well as his friends. All I could feel was sadness."

— from Walter Bernstein's “Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist”

“A bar mitzvah boy gone just wrong enough to enhance his appeal”

“I had met Garfield shortly after the war, when he acted in a radio play I had written for the United Jewish Appeal. He was a friendly, unintellectual man who liked being a movie star. He was also a product of the New York streets who believed the worst thing you could be was a snitch. While he was never a Communist himself, most of his friends were of the left and that was where his sympathies lay.

”Hungering for a star who could get them on the front page, the Committee on Un-American Activities subpoenaed him. Trying to keep both his career and his honor, Garfield waffled. He denounced communism while professing not to know any Communists. He lent his name to a ghostwritten magazine article called “I Was a Sucker for a Left Hook.' He was caught between John Garfield, the star, and Julius Garfinkel (his real name), the kid from the streets. He would debase himself, but he would not inform.

”He moved to New York, ostensibly to find more rewarding parts in the theater but really to feel rooted again, to plant himself in earth less treacherous than Hollywood. He needed to find some kind of purchase; he was still a boy who needed his neighborhood. He played the title roles in Peer Gynt and a revival of Golden Boy, getting bad reviews for the first (‘literal and casual,’ said the Times) and good ones for the second (‘brilliant and satisfying,’ said the Post). He had been turned down for the lead part in Golden Boy when it was first performed by the Group Theater in 1937. The director, Harold Clurman, thought he lacked ‘the inner torment’ for the part and gave him a lesser, comic role. He had the torment now, whether he wanted it or not.

“I saw Garfield briefly during this torturous time. His face was lined and drawn, and he was drinking. He always had the face of a bar mitzvah boy gone just wrong enough to enhance his appeal. Now he seemed old without having grown into it. He still saw his friends, no matter their politics. He was loyal to what he still believed. As an actor he had been best at playing the rebel, the angry young man at odds with the system. Now the system had him by the throat. Dissatisfied with his testimony, the committee turned the matter over to the FBI, seeking grounds for a charge of perjury. Some of his lawyers advised cooperation, others resistance. Cooperation, of course, meant giving names. Resistance could possibly mean jail and certainly an end to his career. But Garfield found a way to preserve his honor, although at terminal cost. He thwarted them all by dying. His heart gave out on a visit to a woman friend to whom he had gone for solace.”

— from Walter Bernstein's “Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist”

“By then I had been going to the movies for some time. The first one I was permitted to see was [the 1928 silent feature] The Noose, starring Richard Barthelmess. I was five or perhaps six. I have little memory of the film except of being frightened by the villain, an actor named Montagu Love. He was the first in a long line of movie villains who I always knew were indestructible. If the hero won, it was a fluke. The game had been fixed. There was no way in how I saw the world that any hero, crippled by sensitivity and honor, could prevail against such confident villainy...

”My grandmother liked going to the movies in the afternoon, when she had finished cleaning her house and preparing dinner, and she didn't care what was playing; all she wanted was an hour or two of undisturbed rest. She would settle down in the dark theater and go to sleep, lulled by the music and the silent figures on the screen. But she returned home one day upset and angry. She was finished with movies. The figures on the screen were keeping her awake. They were talking out loud. She felt betrayed and never went again.“

— Walter Bernstein, in his book ”Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist.” Other movies Bernstein mentions: The Patent Leather Kid, with Richard Barthelmess; Corsair, starring Chester Morris; and Jack Holt and Ralph Graves in Dirigible. I‘ve seen none of these, nor any movie with Graves or Holt—at least, not that I’m aware of. Bernstein has an unabashed love of movies throughout his memoir. There's just no place he'd rather be than a movie house.

I read both of these passages the other night and they felt sadly familiar. First, there was this general overview of our culture:

While the cultural climate turned blandly inoffensive, the political climate kept turning mean and intolerant. There seemed no bottom to its meanness. ... X was big-time show business. Television, the new arbiter of discourse, loved him. He combined two elements that had always brought shows high ratings: he was a gangster in a soap opera. He lay over the country like one of those disease-ridden blankets that white settlers had given the Indians. He sickened the body politic. The few voices against him were weak and ineffectual. X went his brutal, demagogic way, swinging his sockful of shit ... Unreason ruled the land.

Then the writer describes how all of this affected him:

My life revolved around those friendships. They were almost entirely with other X people; we had circled the wagons and it was dangerous to go outside the perimeter. In the morning I tried to write—speculative scripts or articles or the occasional short story, but they were desultory, lacking conviction. I seemed to need a validation I could not produce from myself alone. The days were aimless, as they had been when I was waiting to be drafted. I felt suspended; my real life was somewhere else, on hold, waiting to be resurrected when the country came to its senses.

The writer is Walter Bernstein in his 1995 book “Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist.” In the first passage above, the X is represented by Sen. Joseph McCarthy but it might as well be Pres. Donald Trump, who, of course, was taught by McCarthy's right-hand man: Roy Cohn, perpetual cretin. 

In the second passage above, the X is represented by the blacklist. The line is: “other blacklisted people.” But it also seems like being a Democrat, or a sane Republican, during the Trump era—not to mentioin all of us during the Covid era: circling the wagons, real life on hold, waiting to be resurrected. Sadly, the Covid era is taking place during the Trump era, so instead of real leadership—how to get through these tough times and then get business and real life moving again in a safe and rational way, and hey, how about a hand for the front-line workers, the doctors and nurses and EMTs, as well as mayor and governors making tough decisions—Trump lies and misinforms, politicizes and avoids responsibility and casts blame. Did he really just suggest people inject disinfectant to try to kill the virus? (He did.) Then that becomes the topic, Trump's absurd proclamation, rather than our collective path out. He makes it all about him. 

The Covid pandemic is like the blacklist except this time we‘re all on it. Which makes me think of Billy Bragg’s great song, “Waiting for the Great Leap Forward”:

Here comes the future and you can't run from it
If you‘ve got a blacklist I want to be on it

Bernstein’s book is recommended. As is Bragg's song. 

“[As a correspondent for Yank Magazine during WWII], I did not write about cowardice or doubt or the mistakes of generals or the killing of prisoners or the alliance with the Mafia in the towns we took. Or about the corruption that always follows war. Or about my own fear or the shame I felt when I refused the chance to go with a unit stringing wire under heavy bombardment, knowing the casualties it would take. No one forced me to go anywhere; these men were the ones who had no choice.

”But then, as if to demonstrate the murderous indifference of war, that particular bombardment reached back to the command headquarters where I stayed, forcing everyone to leap for cover. I dived into a ravine and cowered while shells fell with a gleeful lack of discrimination. A man wearing a correspondent's patch and three cameras around his neck jumped in beside me. Instead of cowering, he stood and smiled at me. He ignored the death raining around us. It seemed not to be worth his attention. There was something very graceful about him. Even in this bedlam of artillery fire, he had an air of delicacy and tact. He noticed my fright—not difficult to do—and started gently talking to me. He wanted to know if I had read much Tolstoy. He made it seem as though given the circumstances, the question was entirely natural. I have no memory of how I answered, but he eased me through my terror. When the bombardment finally stopped and there were only the shouts and groans of the wounded, he smiled at me again and climbed nimbly out of the ravine. Afterward I found out his name was Robert Capa. I remembered his photographs of the Spanish Civil War. I never saw him again and was saddened, but not surprised, when years later I heard that he had been blown up covering the war in Vietnam.“

— Walter Bernstein, in his book ”Inside Out: a Memoir of the Blacklist"

More notes from Walter Bernstein's book “Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist,” which is recommended. Bernstein's a great writer: straightforward and graceful, with self-effacing wit and no wasted words. And still alive at 100? Wow. Good for him. 

Bernstein is one of the first guys I‘ve read who goes into the origins of Red Channels, the blacklist for television. Turns out it was three simple steps:

1. “Back in 1947 three ex-FBI agents had formed American Business Consultants (ABC), bankrolled by a businessman named Alfred Kohlberg, best known as a lobbyist for Nationalist China. The ’Business' part referred to radio and television networks and the advertising agencies that controlled the casting for the network shows. The ‘Consultants’ determined, for a fee, whether these casts were free of Communist taint.”
2. “ABC also published a newsletter called Counterattack that pointed out which tainted performers were appearing on what shows. It gave the names and addresses of the programs' sponsors and urged its readers to help defeat communism by writing in protest to these sponsors.”
3. “Later ABC published a booklet called Red Channels, subtitled The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. ... Red Channels became the bible of the blacklist movement. There were eight listings for me, all of them true. I had written for the New Masses and Mainstream, both Communist publications; had joined organizations in support of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War; had joined another organization to demand more rights for black veterans of World War Two; and had been active for Soviet-American friendship and Russian War Relief. I would have felt insulted if I had not been included.”*

* This line has a real “Here comes the future and you can't run from it/ If you‘ve got a blacklist I want to be on it” vibe. 

The three ex-FBI agents who started it were, according to Wiki, John G. Keenan (co. president; businessman); Kenneth M. Bierly (later a consultant to Columbia Pictures); and Theodore C. Kirkpatrick (managing editor of Counterattack, group spokesman). Francis J. McNamara was the editor of Counterattack. He was a former Army intelligence major.

It’s tough to find out much about these guys. The New York Times lists nothing for any of them, for example. Or, more oddly, you‘ll find nothing under “Theodore C. Kirkpatrick” or “Theodore Kirkpatrick” but if you search for “Kirkpatrick ’Red Channels'” you‘ll get half a dozen from 1950, all of which inclulde some reference to “Theodore Kirkpatrick.” The articles began in late August and ended in late September and most focused on an actress named Jean Muir, who worked at Warner Bros. in the 1930s, returned to the stage, and was a regular on an early TV show, “The Aldrich Family,” playing Mrs. Aldrich. She was fired that fall for being a “controversial person.” Why? Because for six months in 1946 she’d been a member of the “Congress of American Women,” which had been started by progressive Elinor S. Gimbel (yes, of Gimbels dept. store), but which was apparently affiliated with a Soviet organization as well. That's why she was named in Red Channels and why she lost her job when a couple dozen people complained to NBC. From her 1996 obit:

“I am not a Communist, have never been one, and believe that the Communists represent a vicious and destructive force, and I am opposed to them,” she said after being dismissed from “The Aldrich Family.” General Foods said it had no opinion on the accuracy of the charges against Ms. Muir but that it had no choice but to dismiss her because the accusations made her “a controversial personality.” Ms. Muir did not work in television again until 1958.

Again, this is why any current cries of a “blacklist” against right-wing actors, writers and directors is absolute bullshit. Are ex-FBI agents creating organizations to investigate conservatives and right-wingers in Hollywood—to see what right-leaning organizations they belong to or might've belonged to in the past? Whose names they print up in a booklet that encourages phone-calling and letter-writing campaigns to put these conservatives out of work? All while Democrats on a U.S. House subcommittee investigate same? And even jail people for not answering charges?

If anything like that begins to happen, please drop a line. 

“The Hollywood Ten were summoned before the House committee, but the [HUAC] committee members seemed only stupid; I understood their bigotry but not their power. Who, really, could be on their side? I also knew the Communist Party was no menace. After all, I belonged to it. The charge that we wanted to overthrow the government by force and violence was ludicrous. Nothing I had ever done or intended or even thought was designed for that. No one I knew in the Party even dreamed of it. Our meetings might have been less boring if they had. I took for granted that I could be both radical and accepted, since that had always been the case.”

— Walter Berstein, “Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist.” It's a great read because Bernstein is a great writer: straightforward, with a dry wit, and a slight shrug about the way of the world. The above reminds me of current Democratic complacency: “I understood their bigotry but not their power” and “Who could be on their side?” I'm also reminded of assumptions about the pre- and post-Covid worlds: “I took for granted [X], since that had always been the case.” One wonders what we took for granted on Jan. 1 that will no longer be the case on Dec. 31. 

Bernstein went on to write “The Front,” starring Woody Allen. The memoir is available in hardover, paperback, and on Kindle for only $4.99.

Here's a killer lede to Jacob Bacharach's review of David Brooks' new book, “The Second Mountain.”

David Brooks is an easy character to dislike. In the wake of the 2000 presidential election, he concocted ethnographies of the habits of conservative voters to tell a story about cultural divisions and the red-blue divide that just so happened to confirm everything his readership already believed. His specialty as a columnist is to identify some just-so failure of the “welfare state” in order to promote the kind of “entrepreneur” whose semi-private innovations are austerity by another name. He loudly supported the war in Iraq. He taught a course on “Humility” at Yale that prominently featured his own works. Although it is his job to interpret the currents of American culture for an audience of millions in the pages of TheNew York Times, he has never been good at looking beyond his own instincts and experience.

A defining experience came when, in 2013, Brooks divorced his first wife, Sarah, and several years later married his much younger research assistant, Anne, whom he met while writing a book called The Road to Character.

Ouch. And truer words. The piece is called “David Brooks's Moral Journey,” and it's often good, but—caveat—there's a lot of Brooks quotes to slog through. I came across it because Brooks wrote another idiot column for the Times today that trended on Twitter, and which I didn't read because I have work to do. 

While on vacation in Belgium, I read Adam Hochschild's excellent “King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa,” which is a little like reading “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” while seeing the sights and drinking beer in Germany.

The book is all about how the Belgian king, Leopold II, realizing he needed a colony or colonies to accrue the riches he desired, and without an army to do so, stealthily carved out a huge chunk of Africa from under the noses of his European counterparts and made it his own. In the process, he destroyed civilizations, cultures, lives. An estimated 10 million people were killed during his reign of terror. While being held up as a paragon of liberal virtues, he was actually reintroducing the slave trade to Africa. And even when others began to condemn him, including such international names as Mark Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle, it took years before his grip on the continent was loosened. 

The book, published in 1998, is much-recommended, and there's a lot to quote from it, but probably nothing as relevant to my country and my time as the following.

Background: Whenever the voices of Leopold's critics grew louder and louder, the King would bankroll, or have cronies bankroll, a sham “investigation” into the charges, which would inevitably clear him. He did so in the 1890s and again in the first decade of the 20th century. But the latter investigation backfired. 

... one of the judges, while listening to a succession of witnesses with atrocity stories, had broken down and wept. It was now obvious to the king that the process had backfired: to his horror what was intended to be a sham investigation had slipped out of his control and become a real one.

So what did Leopold do? This. It will seem very similar to anyone who's been paying attention to American politics in the Trump era:

With his modern sense of public relations, the king understood brilliantly that what matters, often, is less the substance of a political event than how the public perceives it. If you control the perception, you control the event. He also knew that journalists dread having to digest a long official report when writing against a tight deadline—all the more so when the material is in a foreign language.

On November 3, 1905, the day before the Commission of Inquiry report was scheduled for release, every major paper in England received a document with a cover letter explaining that it was a “complete and authentic résumé of the report.” This timely and helpful summary came from the West African Missionary Association, which surely sounded reliable. Missionaries, after all, had been among the Congo state's most consistent critics. Most conveniently of all, the summary was in English. Delighted, nearly all the British newspapers published the summary, thinking they were getting a one-day jump on the big news of the week. The Associated Press transmitted the summary to the United States, where it was also picked up by major newspapers. Only during the next few days, as reporters and editors had time to read the full text of the report in French, did they realize that the so-called summary had little to do with the report. Again and again it took major points in the report and “summarized” them beyond recognition.

Right. Leopold is Trump, the West African Missionary Association is Attorney General William Barr, and the press hasn't changed.

When I got home I checked to see if Hochschild had written on this sad historical similarity but couldn't find anything. BTW: I assume Trump doesn't know this history. He didn't look at Leopold and said, “Let's do that.” He just has a similar sense of marketing and morality.