December 4, 2007
The Expert Behind the Fedora and Cigar: An Interview with Bert Randolph Sugar (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 08:45 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. Angelo Dundee, with whom you wrote My View From the Corner, is probably the best-known trainer in boxing history. Someone, maybe you, once described the trainer’s job as “a chess master who plays with live pieces.” Is there another boxing trainer would you say was Angelo’s equal as a chess master? In our book, Angelo describes a trainer’s job as one where “you’ve got to combine certain qualities belonging to a doctor, an engineer, a psychologist, and sometimes an actor, in addition to knowing your specific art well. The job also comes with a lot of headaches, which aren’t included in the job specs. In short, the very word “trainer” is a catchall covering a complex job; there are more sides to being a trainer than in a Rubik’s Cube. But there was one area Angie never involved himself in: a boxer’s personal life. In the book he explains that he learned his lesson very early when he had a four-round fighter who “came to me one day and said, ‘That wife of mine, what a pain in the ass she is.’” Distracted, Angie told him, “Well, you know how women are . . .” and left it at that. As Angie tells it, “Wouldn’t you know it, the fighter went home and told his wife, ‘Angie thinks you’re wrong . . .’ and I lost him. So whenever a fighter tries to say something to me about his private life, I just say, ‘look, do me a favor, will ya? Go over and hit the light bag.’” Angie learned at the knees of so many famous trainers, trainers like Chickie Ferrara, Ray Arcel, Charlie Goldman, Freddie Brown, and so many others who lit the way for him and on whose shoulders he stood. He shared their corners, their methods, and their stories and captures them all in the book. One of those he was especially fond of was Ray Arcel, from whom he learned many of the trainer’s “tricks of the trade.“ Especially Arcel’s work in the corner during a fight. Arcel had, according to Angie, “One little trick of cleaning off his fighter, wiping his gloves, greasing him nice and smooth and putting his hair back in place before sending him out of the corner for the next round. Now the opponent figures ‘What the hell’s going on? I thought I was beating the bejabbers out of this guy, and he looks like he’s stepping out of the pages of GQ magazine.’” Another of Arcel’s “tricks” that Angie picked up on was something he learned “watching Arcel one night when his fighter hit his opponent with a shot to the chops and the opponent went down with a thud. The referee started the count, tolling off the numbers at a snail’s pace. As the count finally reached a torturous and prolonged “five,” Arcel showed up at the top of the steps, robe in hand, and put it on his kid, inspiring the ref to quickly pick up the count and count the opponent out. And wouldn’t you know it, Angie used the same trick with his fighter one night at Madison Square Garden, and the ref turns around, sees Angie with the robe in hand, and gave the fallen opponent a quick count. As Angie says, “You learn from watching other people.” And he had the best to watch. Every time I see an estimate of how many books you’ve written, the number seems to change. Here it is, December 5, and as of today how many have you written? Like the woman under oath who, when asked her age, replied, “I’m 39 and a few months,” and in the follow-up answer to the question, “How many months are ‘and a few’?” said, “24,” the answer to how many books I’ve written is subject to the same “and a few” calculation. It all depends on what’s being counted. Is it the books I’ve written or those I’ve complied? Or those books that originally came out under one title and were later reissued under another title? Or updated versions of already published works? Or books I’ve worked on with other authors? My best guess—counting my latest book, My View from the Corner, with Angelo Dundee—is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50—and counting. But, then again, I’m writing ’em, not counting ’em. So, like Jack Benny, all I can do is say that the number is 39 “and a few.” You can fill in the blank for “and a few.” For a couple decades now, people have identified you from your TV appearances—the fedora and the cigar. Yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen that cigar lit. What’s the story there? Almost every thumbnail bio on me starts, “With his trademark fedora and cigar . . .” It’s gotten so I’ve come to believe that without the fedora and cigar I could probably enter the Federal Witness Protection Program and not be recognized. The cigar, however, is more than just a trademark. It is something I enjoy. Call it a habit, a practice or a convention if you wish—sometimes chomping on them, sometimes smoking them, and sometimes, as on television, wearing them. I also hold onto them, because at my age it gives me something to hold on to in case I’m falling down. Yes, I more than occasionally light one up. To me a good cigar is more than just a smoke. It’s a pleasurable way of living. Others have found cigar smoking a pleasurable way of living as well, including Mark Twain, who is quoted as saying, “If I cannot smoke cigars in heaven then I shall not go.” And he lived life to its fullest, as did Grouch Marx, Milton Berle, and George Burns, a happy group of mummers who, to listen to those antismoking folks, undoubtedly were killed by cigars at the average age of 89. Damn the P.C.-ers and do-gooders who would have me call homeless people “urban outdoorsmen” and hookers “human relations specialists.” The pursuit of happiness is one of our basic freedoms, and I'm free to smoke cigars whenever and wherever I want—just not in television studios.
December 4, 2007
The Expert Behind the Fedora and Cigar: An Interview with Bert Randolph Sugar (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 06:40 PM EST If Bert Randolph Sugar did not exist, it would have required Damon Runyan to invent him. A former editor of both The Ring and Boxing Illustrated magazines, the author and editor of more then 80 books, and sometime TV and film actor (including an appearance in Night and The City with Robert De Niro), Sugar can be seen on virtually any ESPN program on the history of boxing. He is instantly identifiable by his trademark fedora (black after Labor Day) and cigar. He was elected to the International Boxing Hal of Fame in January 2005. Sugar’s latest book is My View From the Corner (McGraw-Hill, 336 pages, $24.95), a collaboration with Angelo Dundee, the legendary boxing trainer of Muhammad Ali, to name just one of his many champions. Sugar answered these questions for us from his home in Chappaqua, New York. The interview is appearing in two parts. I suppose you’ve been asked this question more than any other, but who is the greatest fighter at any weight that you ever saw? Give us your top three. The word “greatest” takes on different meanings to different people. To be great you had to meet and beat great; you have to consider who a particular boxer faced—the quality of his opponents. Add to that his record, durability, boxing and punching prowess, peak years, reputation at the time, and on and on and on. You have to pretend all the fighters in your comparison are the same size—in modern terminology, ”best pound-for-pound” at any weight, any time. And here, aided and abetted by several fingers of truth serum at my neighborhood pub, are my top three picks of all time: One: Any and all descriptions for greatness can be applied to Sugar Ray Robinson, but no single description is adequate. He was boxing’s version of Rashomon; everyone saw something different. He could deliver a knockout blow going backward. He was seamless, with no fault lines. His left hand, held ever at the ready, was poetry in motion, his footwork was superior to any that had been seen in boxing up to that time; his hand speed and leverage were unmatchable. Robinson was unbeaten, untied, and unscored upon in his first 40 fights. It wasn’t until his forty-first, against Jake LaMotta, that he was beaten, losing a ten-round decision. It was a decision he would reverse five times. He was indeed the sweetest practitioner of “The Sweet Science.“ Two: Henry Armstrong, a physical loan shark who adopted General Clausewitz’s theory that the winning general is the one who can impose his will upon his enemy. No one who ever saw this fighter, known as “Hammerin’ Hank” or “Homicide Hank” or “Hurricane Hank,” will ever forget him: a nonstop punching machine, his style more rhythmic than headlong, his matchstick legs akimbo, his arms crossed in front of his face, racing the clock with each punch, and each punch punctuated with a grunt. A perpetual motion machine, Armstrong won 181 bouts, 101 of those by knockout, including winning the featherweight, welterweight, and lightweight championships, in that order, and holding all three titles simultaneously, the only man ever to do so. Three: Willie Pep was boxing’s version of the three-card monte player: Now you see him, now you don’t. His movements, which had the look of tap dancing with gloves on, left his opponents to speculate on their meaning and his fans to listen for accompanying music. Many of his opponents likened fighting the “Will o’ the Wisp” to battling a man in the hall of mirrors, unable to cope with an opponent they couldn’t find, let alone hit. Others compared the experience to catching moonbeams in a jar or chasing a shadow. Kid Campeche said after a fight in which Willie had pitched a no-hitter, “Fighting Willie Pep is like trying to stamp out a grass fire.“ Willie Pep’s long 22-year career was, in reality, two careers. In his first, Pep outclassed and outraced 109 of his 111 opponents, losing only to the grabbing, double-clutching Sammy Angott in a ten-round draw, and winning the featherweight crown at the ripe old age of 20. Then in February 1947 Pep suffered near-fatal injuries in an airplane crash. His career, if not his ability to walk, was thought to be over. But miraculously, less than six months later, he came back not only to walk, but to fight and win. Beaten by matchstick-thin Sandy Saddler for his title in 1948, he reversed the outcome in 1949 in as great a fight as the division has ever seen. The name Willie Pep will forever be remembered by fight fans as a name put to melody and symphony, a balletic will to grace and an ability to evade punches. The mixed martial arts type of fighting as exemplified by the pay-per-view success of the Ultimate Fighting Championship events has caused some people to say that boxing is now old-fashioned. How would you respond to that? Called by the Washington Post “gruesome junk” and by Senator John McCain “human cock fighting,” mixed martial “arts” is little more than glorified bar fighting without broken beer bottles, one step short of bomb throwing. Nevertheless, in our current culture of violence it seems to appeal to that 18- to 34-year-old segment of the market that has been weaned on violent video games and professional wrestling—substituting the cartoon violence of pro wrestling for the real violence of mixed martial “arts.“ All of which appeals to a viewing audience that possesses the attention span equal to the life of a mayfly. Hopefully it will go the way of demolition derbies, back to where it belongs: the bars. However, that doesn’t fully answer the question of whether boxing is “old-fashioned.” In a sense it is. For back in its salad days, that being for the first half and more of the twentieth century, boxing was one of the three major sports, along with baseball and horse racing. (Remember: this was before the 1958 Colts–Giants championship game elevated pro football to the higher echelon of sports!) Back in those days boxing was BIG and big news as well, The New York Times devoting five of its six front-page columns and three banner headlines to events like the Tunney–Dempsey fights. But following pro football, other sports soon began to take their place at the main sports table, courtesy of television, including pro and college basketball, college football, NASCAR, etc., etc., etc.; the et ceteras going on for about four or five pages or more. Hell, to watch ESPN and other channels, you’d think Texas Hold-’Em was a sport. Back in the late 1950s, just after the mob scandals came to light, Dan Parker of the New York Mirror wrote, “I’ve been at its bedside for 40 years waiting for boxing to die “ Well, here it is more than a half century later and boxing is still there. And will be there for many more years, all reports of its death—and even of its becoming “old-fashioned”—as exaggerated as those reports were of Mark Twain’s death. It’s too great of a sport not to be. Retract the obituaries, please! This interview concludes here.
November 20, 2007
Who Was the Real Buffalo Bill Cody? An Interview with Robert E. Bonner (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 01:30 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. How did Buffalo Bill get along in his declining years? And why has the memory of his colossal business failures been erased from our national memory? Assuming his declining years would be his sixties (he died just before his seventy-first birthday), we are talking about 1906 to 1917. In Wyoming those were not especially hard years. He did suffer the final loss of all his development prospects and had to endure the ignominy of being sued by everyone who farmed under the Cody Canal, but he probably did not lose any more money. His show continued to bring in reasonably good money until 1912, but he got involved in a gold mine in Arizona where an unscrupulous partner bilked him of just about every dollar he earned. In 1913 he fell prey to Henry Tammen, publisher of the Denver Post, who broke up his show and took Cody into a kind of debt peonage that had him riding into arenas every summer for the rest of his life, no matter how sick or exhausted he became. He came back to Cody every winter and enjoyed his time in town and at the ranch. The town would hold big parties for him whenever he returned, but he had very little to do with its growing or running. Sometime after 1910 his wife, Louisa, returned to him and lived with him when he was in Cody. She also, as I pointed out in the book, became the owner of his ranch and the Irma Hotel, to protect them from being seized for debt. There were occasional bursts of the old energy, and he was never living in actual poverty, but he was obviously fading out. As for the second question, I am not sure the national consciousness ever grasped how seriously he had failed as an entrepreneur. He continued to advertise the town of Cody in the Wild West and promote Yellowstone tourism. He kept his face before the public, and by that time he had built such a triumphal myth around himself that there was probably little room for people in general to attach any idea of these failures to his familiar form on horseback. He had made a place for himself in a comfortable version of American history. Nobody wanted to have their visions of him complicated by facts that might have pointed elsewhere. Our modern-day experience of Ronald Reagan might be somewhat similar. In your conclusion you write that Cody was “a complex and conflicted man, one who failed to realize his imperial ambitions in Wyoming but who nevertheless left an enduring mark on the country. His legacy is as complex as his personality.” Who, then, would you say is the real William Cody—the performer and Wild West impresario or the ambitious but failed businessman? If you don’t mind, I will expand the choices a bit, because in my mind he is not finally either of these. Louis Warren (author of Buffalo Bill’s America) thought that the real Buffalo Bill was the performer, and given the point and scope of his book, that makes sense. He was also, on the strength of my own research, an ambitious but failed capitalist. I came to think in the course of my work, however, that he was most himself when he was out hunting, or taking other people out hunting, in the mountains above his ranch or along the eastern border of Yellowstone Park. The life of the performer, while he wore it well as a young man, came increasingly to drag him down. His venture into the world of business and development seemed to have chastened him. His hunting trips were refuges from those things, where he could turn his mind back to his youth and happier times. They also showed him (and others) that there was money to be made in tourism, particularly tourism based on hunting and the outdoor life of those up-country ranches. I think tourism as Cody saw it was continuous with his Wild West shows, in that it was presenting to people from the East a packaged vision of life in the West. The venue had shifted from Eastern arenas to Western ranches, but the goal was the same. I think I would say that the real Bill Cody was the genial host who presided over the meeting of East and West.
November 20, 2007
Who Was the Real Buffalo Bill Cody? An Interview with Robert E. Bonner (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 11:55 AM EST The trail blazed by William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody has been traveled by so many biographers, historians, and debunkers that there wouldn’t seem to be anything new signposts on it. Robert E. Bonner’s William F. Cody’s Wyoming Empire: The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows (University of Oklahoma Press, 318 pages, $32.95) examines an important part of the Buffalo Bill story that has been virtually forgotten, Cody’s attempt at becoming a Western land developer and town promoter in Wyoming. Bonner, a professor of history emeritus at Carleton College, answered these questions for us from his home in Northfield, Minnesota. The interview is appearing in two parts It would be hard to find a figure of the frontier west more mythologized than William F. Cody. There have been several books on him this decade alone, including Joy S. Casson’s Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Larry McMurtry’s The Colonel and Little Missie. What’s the essential difference between William F. Cody’s Wyoming Empire and those books? The first and most fundamental difference is that both Kasson and McMurtry look at Buffalo Bill through the lens of the Wild West show. Both of them are concerned with his self-creation through that medium and—Kasson to a greater extent than McMurtry—the effect his celebrity had on ideas of the West and American history in general. I have tried, insofar as it is possible, to keep the Wild West out of my account. Obviously the show was the source of most of the money that went into Cody’s Wyoming ventures, and his need to appear every summer in arenas away from Wyoming affected the way he did or did not attend to business there, but I am not concerned with what he did in the Wild West, and they are. The fact that he was a great celebrity I take as given, and I attempt to understand how that celebrity played out in his enterprises in Wyoming. McMurtry appears not to be interested at all in what Bill Cody did when he was not the star of the Wild West. He mentions some of the things Cody did in Wyoming more or less in passing, but it is the show and the relationship with Annie Oakley that occupy most of his time. He locates Buffalo Bill’s Wyoming life entirely in Sheridan, where he spent one or two off seasons before the Cody venture got going, and more or less ignores his work around the town of Cody. Kasson is not especially interested in his work in Wyoming either. Both of them have interesting things to say about Cody as a celebrity guide and hunter, but mostly as a young man prior to the Wild West. I have chosen to concentrate on his work in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin, because it is there that we can see the man off his horse and on the ground, working (or not working) with other men to build something more substantial than an entertainment. How did Cody use his fame from the Wild West shows to promote his business interests? Was he shy about his own celebrity? In the first instance, he used his celebrity to horn in on the big irrigation project that George Beck and Horace Alger, two Sheridan businessmen, were planning. As Beck said later, Cody came to them and asked to join in, and, as they knew he was the “best advertised man in the world,” they not only let him in, they made him president of the company. Celebrity was perhaps more to the fore in his dealings with officials of the government of the state of Wyoming. He presented to them the prospect of having their state advertised across the nation by the most popular man in America, and they went out of their way to accommodate him. Cody patronized Elwood Mead, the state engineer, to smooth the way not only for the Cody Canal but for several other projects he conceived. Mead was not quite an errand boy for Buffalo Bill, but he took care of just about anything Cody wanted, and he ultimately certified the Cody Canal as completed when it would not reliably hold water, because he had hitched his wagon to Cody’s star. Cody employed his small army of press agents to fill newspapers in Wyoming with glowing descriptions of his plans for the Big Horn Basin. He dropped the names of Theodore Roosevelt and General Nelson Miles whenever he had a chance, to remind governors and others just who they were dealing with. He was never shy about reminding people in Wyoming how well-connected he was in the East. He was so full of himself that he identified the state’s interests with his own, and important state officers came to accept this identification. You write that “William Cody, addicted to the spotlight, seemed to choose undertakings with at least one eye on reputation. He also attempted to use the weight of the reputation he had earned in the Wild West arena to swing money and authority his way in economic transactions in Wyoming. He had convinced himself of the truth of his ‘frontier imposture’ and built fame and fortune on it.” Did Cody really see himself as on a par with the great capitalist businessmen and political leaders of his era, or was he simply a confidence artist on a colossal scale? I don’t believe he thought for a minute he was in the same league with Rockefeller, Carnegie, Frick, or those guys. He did rub shoulders with wealthy capitalists of somewhat lesser rank in clubs in New York like the Rocky Mountain Club, and he cultivated relationships with people like George Perkins of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. He made personal calls on Presidents Cleveland and Roosevelt, and hosted Generals Nelson Miles and Leonard Wood in Wyoming. I think he thought he belonged in the company of wealthy men and political leaders on terms other than those of a visiting showman, and he expected his undertakings in Wyoming to gain him that status. Unfortunately, the tools he found at hand for this job were the tools of show business, and as a result he became vulnerable to the charge that he was only a large-scale con artist. I developed the term “capitalist imposture” as a more polite way of pointing to that. The entire story of his second land development in the Big Horn Basin, the Cody-Salsbury project, reveals this most painfully, but the cold-eyed observations of the Burlington’s men in the field regarding the conduct and prospects of the Shoshone Irrigation Company on the Cody Canal show how real businessmen regarded him. This interview concludes here.
November 2, 2007
The Genius of Raymond Chandler: An Interview with Judith Freeman (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 01:00 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. So many fine actors have played Philip Marlowe over the years—Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Montgomery, James Garner, Robert Mitchum, Powers Boothe, and James Caan in TV productions, even Elliott Gould. Chandler, who died in 1959, lived long enough to see Powell, Bogey, and Montgomery play the part. Which was his favorite, and who else would he liked to have seen play Marlowe? And—I presume you’ve seen most of the Marlowes—who is your own favorite? Chandler initially had Cary Grant in mind as the actor he felt was suited to the role of Marlowe, but that was probably Chandler projecting his own image of himself as the well-dressed, good-looking debonair guy—and as a young man Chandler was that. He looks incredibly elegant and handsome in a picture taken in L.A. in the twenties showing him standing under a tree in profile. Cary Grant never played Marlowe, and given the Marlowes we’ve seen, it’s kind of hard to imagine him in the role of hard-boiled dick. As far as I know, Chandler never weighed in on Robert Montgomery’s performance for the record. He is on record as saying that he thought Dick Powell (in Murder My Sweet, an adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely) made the best Marlowe, but I’m a little uncertain about when exactly he made that comment—before or after he saw Bogart in The Big Sleep. (The Big Sleep came out in 1946, two years after Murder, My Sweet.) He definitely appreciated Bogart’s performance, though to my knowledge he never actually said he thought Bogart was the best Marlowe. What he said was that Bogart was “the genuine article”—so much better than any other tough-guy actors that he made bums of the Ladds and the Powells, and perhaps that can be interpreted as crowning him as the ultimate Marlowe. Or it could be an indication of Chandler’s appreciation of a film performance. Bogart, he said, could be tough without a gun, which Powell never could. But I think Chandler was really talking about Bogart’s acting ability, that he was the genuine article as an actor. He recognized that Bogart was a great, better than Powell, and he brought a charged quality to the role, even though he was quite wrong physically for the part. It was the quality of Bogart’s performance, that sense of humor that contained a grating, rather misogynistic undertone of contempt, especially for the women in the story, that Chandler found compelling. All that Bogart had to do to dominate a scene, he said, was to enter it. In contrast, Dick Powell was a much softer guy, more ordinary, a less cynical, less harsh and jaded Marlowe. He seems more human in many ways, more vulnerable, and you see this in his scenes with women. He doesn’t snarl at Claire Trevor, who plays Mrs. Grayle (alias Velma), or try to outwit her with force, but sort of bats the ball around with her, sometimes uncertainly plays cat and mouse, and he almost gets a naughty schoolboy-caught-in-the-act look on his face when he’s caught staring at her legs. He was closer, I think, to the true Marlowe, to the spirit of the man that Chandler created on the page and who arose out of his own fantasies. But I can understand how he’d be seduced by the brilliant Marlowe that Bogart created. It’s a tough call for me as to which Marlowe I prefer, but I’d have to say that the Dick Powell Marlowe is my favorite because I feel he’s the truest, closest incarnation of the literary Marlowe, though I loved Bogart in The Big Sleep and laughed out loud in scene after scene and was mesmerized by his acting. I also loved Robert Mitchum in a later adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely, not because he convinced me he was Marlowe but because he was Robert Mitchum, filling the screen with his great brooding presence. The Marlowe I least liked was Robert Montgomery, in Lady in the Lake, who, even though he may have been the father of that perky Bewitched Elizabeth Montgomery, made a really nasty Marlowe, so snarling and misogynistic I could hardly watch him. I thought Elliott Gould was great, the first actor to capture that sense of Marlowe’s sexual ambivalence, but he never became Marlowe for me, he was always Elliott Gould, and the completely changed ending of the movie had him behaving in ways Marlowe never would. It’ll be interesting to see what Clive Owen does with the role, in an adaptation of Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business, to be directed by Frank Miller. In any case, it’s clear that Marlowe will never die, and that he provides a very malleable suit of armor for an actor to slip into. Chandler once wrote a letter to the effect that “Over there [England] I’m an author, over here just a writer of mysteries.” Why do you suppose it was that British critics discovered Chandler so much earlier than their America counterparts? The rest of that quote in the letter is “Don’t know why,” meaning Chandler himself couldn’t figure out why he was viewed so differently in England from America. And I don’t know why either. He knew a lot more about England than I do, and he couldn’t figure it out. But it’s possible that Americans felt defensive about how their society was being portrayed, didn’t like the fact that those early Chandler novels depicted a pretty corrupt culture, from cops to politicians, whereas the British were fascinated by the sordidness of that sun-filled world that had been so hyped. It could also be the puritanical streak coming out: Some American critics talked about the “nastiness” of the characters, how no one except Marlowe was decent, and the language was so bad. Even the critic for The New York Times complained that the publisher had to resort to the dash in The Big Sleep, so degenerate was the language, and complained that Chandler had created a world of moral defectives—pornographers and blackmailers and homosexuals and gangsters. This sounds so prudish now, but then Americans are kind of prudish compared with Europeans. Can you imagine a European politician draping a nude statue before he’d stand in front of it for a press conference? Could be the British were just so much more curious about these remarkable books, so uninvested in a self-serving image, more interested in the otherness of the settings, and more willing to be amused by a really brilliant writer.
You introduce an idea about Chandler that few have ever dared to investigate, namely the possibility that he was homosexual. No doubt this is going to enrage a great many of his long-time fans, but I think your case is well made. Can you summarize? Actually I’m not the first to raise the question of homosexuality in connection with both Chandler and his work, and specifically Philip Marlowe. The subject came up in both Frank McShane’s and Tom Hiney’s biographies, and also in essays written before and after Chandler’s death, including a very moving one by his close friend Natasha Spender, wife of the poet Stephen Spender, who knew him very well at the end of his life and whom I interviewed for my book. But you are right in saying that I look at the subject more closely than others have, because I felt it had a place in the discussion of his marriage. The truth is we’ll never know if Chandler harbored homosexual inclinations. I found nothing in my research to indicate he ever had a relationship with a man. What is clearer is that both Chandler and his creation Marlowe harbored very complex feelings when it came to women (and men) and their sexuality. There’s an anxiety, a feeling they are sliding along a slippery slope of attraction and repulsion, mistrust and anxiety, a kind of boyish prurience as well as an impossibly strict code of morality, in a world where women are the villains and men long for friendship. I’m not going to repeat all the arguments I make in the book, or the discoveries that came from my readings and interviews; they’re there for the reader to discover. Any discussion of an iconic hard-boiled writer, and an iconic male literary figure, that even dares to bring up the question of homosexuality is bound to raise certain hackles, but I like to believe that I handle the subject with a certain sensitivity and respect, and I stress that there’s no clear answer to the question.
November 2, 2007
The Genius of Raymond Chandler: An Interview with Judith Freeman (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 10:00 AM EST Raymond Chandler is the most influential mystery writer since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His leading advocates, including W. H. Auden, Clive James, and even, grudgingly, Edmund Wilson, have argued that he transcends the genre of detective fiction and that his books should be simply considered literature. No one denies that Chandler’s influence on popular culture has been enormous: The Big Sleep, the Bogart-Bacall vehicle directed by Howard Hawks, is still regarded (along with John Huston’s film from Dashiell Hammett’s book The Maltese Falcon) as one of the two greatest American detective movies ever made, and Chandler’s books and film scripts (most notably for Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train) helped define the concept of film noir, which continues to influence writers as diverse as the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami and the graphic novelist Frank Miller, who is set to direct a film version of Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business. Judith Freeman’s The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, which comes out November 6 from Pantheon, is the first book to examine in depth the strange relationship between Chandler and his much older wife, Cissy, as well as their peripatetic life together in and around Los Angeles. Ms. Freeman answered questions for us from her home in California. The interview is appearing in two parts. Raymond Chandler has been imitated, parodied, and practically plagiarized for so long that his style of detective story has practically become a cliché. Yet somehow the work not only survives but stays fresh. Just about all his books have been in print continuously since they were published. What do you think it is about Chandler that endures? The short answer is his brilliance, which is a multi-faceted thing. There’s his humor for starters. As Christopher Isherwood observed, There’s fun in Chandler. He’s an immensely amusing writer, and readers connect with that wit. And yet he says some profound things about American society and the corruption in its institutions, how we’re a big, rough, rich, appetent society, and crime is the price we pay for our gluttony. His books contain that quality he most valued in writing, namely vitality, and it is a hard thing to fake if you don’t have it, which is why so many imitators fail. But in the end I think it’s Marlowe that gives the books their real staying power. Philip Marlowe is an enigma. He says so himself at one point. He’s vulnerable, like us, and we feel his sad good-naturedness. He’s an iconic America male, just as Marilyn Monroe was an iconic American female. And this is interesting because Chandler once said that only he and Marilyn Monroe had managed to reach all the brows—high-brow, middle-brow, and low-brow. This is another reason why Chandler endures. He reaches across the intellectual spectrum with stories that still seem fresh in their telling. When I was at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival two years ago the writer whose name was evoked most often when taking about L.A. was Raymond Chandler. This is odd because Chandler certainly had mixed feelings about Southern California in general and Los Angeles in particular. I think one of his most famous putdowns was that L.A. had “all the personality of a paper cup.” Yet he had many opportunities to move and never did. How would you sum up his strange on-again, off-again affair with the City of Angels? He had a definite love-hate relationship with L.A. I think he loved it when he first arrived, in 1913, and it must have been a pretty idyllic place then, very different from London, the city where he’d spent much of his childhood. He really took to driving and loved automobiles. But L.A. was a place that got despoiled quite rapidly, and the banality and lack of taste in a population composed increasingly of transplanted Midwesterners—the so called hog-and-hominy crowd—began to disgust him. On the one hand, you had religious nuts of every stripe, and on the other, you had bunko artists bilking the ignorant rubes, as well as gangsters, bad cops, and corrupt politicians. Smog arrived, and stupid fads, and objects with built-in obsolescence. After a while L.A became Paradise Despoiled for him, a grotesque and impossible place to live. California, he said, was the department store state—everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else. He lost it as a place to set his fiction, because he had to either love a city or hate it to write about it, or maybe both, he said, “like a woman.” Eventually L.A. bored him. It became “just a tired old whore” to him. Still, he put it on the literary map. His relationship with L.A. was very symbiotic. The city gave him his material, and in return he gave it a lasting identity. No one wrote better about L.A. or captured more of its unique essence. What were Cissy’s feelings about her husband’s writing? Was she supportive or did she feel, as many of Chandler’s contemporaries did, that he should try to write something more “serious”? Chandler claimed his wife never liked what he wrote. He said her advice to him was to quit writing out of the corner of his mouth. What did she mean by that? I think she meant, drop that tough-guy stuff. Loose the slang and prison talk and violence, write a story that depicts a softer, more romantic world, not one filled with gangsters and crooks and rotten blondes. We should be glad he didn’t take her advice.
October 10, 2007
The Bear Bryant I Knew: An Interview with John Underwood (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 04:30 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. Probably the most famous coach–quarterback relationship in history was the one between Bear Bryant and Joe Namath.On the surface, they seemed to be total opposites—Bryant growing up dirt poor in an Arkansas town so small it wasn’t on the map, while Namath, the son of immigrant parents, grew up in a Pennsylvania steel mill town. Bryant was the full-time authoritarian, while Namath was supremely rebellious. Yet, they clicked, or at least they learned to. Why do you think they worked together so well?
The easy answer would be that Bryant, in his own words, considered Namath “the best athlete I ever saw,” and why wouldn’t a smart coach make every effort to get along with such a player? Bryant said he would have been a “damn fool” not to make such an accommodation. But it was a lot more complicated than that, and to understand the strength of the relationship (and the depth of it), you need to read Bryant’s account of one of the greatest “gut checks” he ever had—the time he suspended Namath from the Alabama team for the last two games of the 1963 season, both on national television. Even his coaches tried to talk him out of it. (Namath’s offense, having to do with team off-campus-conduct rules, was relatively minor by today’s standards.) But Bryant understood Namath’s background and his need for benevolent discipline. After a face-to-face confrontation, Joe supported the punishment, and the next year he was allowed back and quarterbacked Alabama to another national championship. Bryant then got him legal help in negotiating what at the time was the biggest pro contract in NFL history, a $400,000 deal with the New York Jets (Bryant’s salary, he liked to point out, was $12,000 that year). I think it revealing to note that they grew closer after Namath left school. He returned to the Alabama campus whenever he could, which usually meant getting on the blackboard with Bryant to discuss football tactics. They played golf together (Bryant, ever competitive, said he found ways to beat Namath with strokes), and when offered the Dolphins job, Bear purposely sought Namath’s advice. Namath even helped him recruit players. Bryant told of Joe talking one hotshot candidate out of a school that, among other things, offered him a new car. Namath told him playing for Bryant was more valuable.
Bear Bryant had a power to intimidate strong men—George Blanda, for instance, as you pointed out, and just about every sportswriter he encountered. Did you ever feel that he was trying to intimidate you? What was your initial reaction? And did your opinion of him change in the course of doing the book? The short answer, again, is no, he never intimidated me, but I qualify that by saying I don’t think he ever tried. For reasons I never examined (probably because our relationship was always so gratifying), he granted me a kind of familial respect,like one might a beloved if erratic younger sibling. I certainly saw the difference, though, and once even dared criticize it. I was in Tuscaloosa for a game and after a Wednesday practice walked with him into the press room to confront about a dozen journalists, dutifully huddled around an empty chair. Bryant, smoking a cigarette, sat down, and without looking at or acknowledging anyone, smoked it down to the butt, the ashes coagulating, intact. Total silence. Finally, Bear spoke: “Good practice today.” The writers scribbled, audibly, on their notepads. “Defensive backs need better coaching.” More scribbling. “Big game Saturday.” Scribble, scribble. And so it went. All told, I doubt more than five questions were asked from the floor. Finally Bryant said, “Anything else, men?” Nope. He thanked them and got up, and as we walked out together I said, “You call that a press conference?” He grinned. “That’s the way we do things in Alabama.” For sure, that kind of awe could be called intimidation. But I saw the other side, too—how candid he was with those he knew well enough to trust, writers like Benny Marshall and Fred Russell and Mickey Herskowitz and Alf Van Hoose. For me it came to a head with the partnership we forged in telling his story. He never refused an answer, never dodged an issue, never let a subject go unexamined. To use his words, that’s the way he did things in Alabama. At least when I knew him.
October 10, 2007
The Bear Bryant I Knew: An Interview with John Underwood (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 03:15 PM EST Paul W. “Bear” Bryant, who died in January 1983, was by most reckonings the greatest college football coach of all time. To many Americans, though, he was more than that: He defined the ethos of a time long gone when college football existed for the good of coaches, players, and schools and not as an appendage to the professional game. Bryant’s 1974 autobiography, Bear: My Hard Life & Good Times as Alabama’s Head Coach, co-written with Sports Illustrated’s John Underwood (who also co-wrote the autobiography of another great American icon, Ted Williams, My Turn at Bat), is regarded as a modern sports classic of candid observations and gruff good humor. Bear has recently been republished by Triumph Books with a new introduction from Underwood and a CD of an interview with Bryant. Underwood spoke to us from his home in Florida about his relationship with Bryant and their collaboration on Bear. The interview is appearing in two parts. Bear Bryant seems to loom larger in college football today than he did a couple of years after his death in 1983. His image has grown stronger while that of his contemporaries such as Bud Wilkinson and Woody Hayes has faded. What do you think accounts for this? It’s difficult to summarize such an attribute, but I would have to say that what set Bryant apart from all the others (in any field) that I knew, know, or know of, was a presence that fairly demanded not just attention and respect but outright awe. He was tall, imposing, ruggedly handsome, and amazingly erudite in that countrified growl of a voice, and he filled any room that he walked into and any field of play that he graced. The effect was universal. Years after he quarterbacked for Bryant at Kentucky, George Blanda wrote that on seeing him for the first time he thought, “This must be what God looks like.” Blanda said when Bryant walked into a room, you wanted to stand up and applaud. In the new introduction I wrote for the book, I recalled a time when Bryant invited me to live with the Alabama team for a story I was doing for Sports Illustrated. It was before an important road game, and at the pregame breakfast on Saturday I sat next to an Alabama professor and department head who had also been invited along. (Bryant curried faculty support by doing smart things like that.) When he made his talk to the team, he barely spoke above the growl of a whisper that he activated whenever he wanted your utmost attention. The players leaned forward in their seats, eager to hear, and in so doing one accidentally tipped over a glass of water. The spill hitting the floor sounded like Niagara Falls. When Bryant finished, the professor turned to me and said, “If I could reach my students like that, I’d teach for nothing.” Bear Bryant and Vince Lombardi were practically exact contemporaries, with both ruling their respective worlds of college and professional football. But Lombardi left no disciples behind, while Bryant produced more successful coaches and assistant coaches than anyone in football history. Why do you think he was so successful at turning out acolytes? Respect, deeply felt and almost religiously applied on his coaches’ part, and an equal willingness on his to let them spread their wings (within reason, and within the context of staff unity). I write in the introduction of a time Dude Hennessey told of when practice had gone sour and a disgusted Bryant ordered his staff to meet in his office “first thing” the next morning. Not being sure what “first thing” meant, and not daring to ask, Hennessey slept on his office floor that night. Consistent, too, with his coaches was that they always seemed to enjoy going the extra mile, I suspect because Bryant disdained anything less. And despite what has been accurately characterized (even by him) as his own large ego, he appreciated them. I was driving with him across campus late one night after we’d been to dinner in Tuscaloosa, and as we passed the athletic offices he noticed a light on in an upstairs window. Matter-of-factly, without turning in my direction, he muttered, “It’s that damn Howard Schnellenberger up there making me look like a genius.” I heard him say almost the same thing another time about another lighted window of another assistant coach, Ken Donahue. I think they knew he felt that way, and learned from it. I think it made a huge difference.
October 2, 2007
Abraham Lincoln, Southern Conservative: An Interview with Orville Vernon Burton (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 07:00 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. “The Populists,” you write, “were the last of Lincoln’s people, the last whose concerns for racial justice and millennial perfection were based on faith in the goodness of the common man.” Were the Populists a mere fringe group, or did they have lasting impact on the government’s racial and social policies? The Populists were not a fringe group but a viable third party. I painted the Populists with a broad brush, but I found in them real potential for continued strength—except for the seemingly inevitable politics of division. Divisions existed among the various coalitions composing the movement. Midwestern and Western Populists were very different from those of the former Confederacy. Race relations among Populists continued to be very divisive. The goals of industrial labor could clash with the goals of small farmers. It is ironic that when urbanization and industrialization were growing at such a rapid pace and revolutionizing the country, the momentous political protest movement began with farmers who were being left behind. Just as America was becoming decidedly more urban and industrial, abandoning its Jeffersonian heritage of the independent farmer, it was those very farmers who launched the most significant third-party protest. And yet, very much like Lincoln, all Populist groups believed that people, rural and urban, black and white, should be rewarded for hard work. Also, like Lincoln, they believed in the rule of law and a fair system, especially a fair economic system. I use Lincoln as a fulcrum to understand the period of history after the Age of Jackson. During the Age of Lincoln, family, community, and church were responsible for morality; henceforth, government became the conservator of moral order. In one of Lincoln’s wonderful stories, from an 1859 letter, he tells how two drunks in long overcoats got in a fight and afterwards discovered that in the tussle they had ended up exchanging overcoats. Lincoln argued that the party of Jefferson and Jackson had done just that with his own Republican Party. Republicans were “for both the man and the dollar, but in cases of conflict, the man before the dollar.” The Populists were the last group to place the man before the dollar. The Populists were also the last political party before the modern civil rights movement that centered much of its energy on the question of African-American polity, one of the issues that defined the Age of Lincoln. I end this period with the demise of the Populist Movement, because that marked a fundamental change in attitude between government and citizenry. Also changed forever was the world of mass politics. Whereas Abraham Lincoln addressed his audiences at length as one concerned citizen to another, politics became more professional. The barbecues, parades, and rallies for the entire community, where speakers educated, entertained, and established a real personal bond with their electorate, passed away with the Populists. Government became more businesslike and bureaucratic. More and more Americans seemed increasingly content to leave government to the legislators and education to the new universities. As social problems grew ever more complex, public officials and private citizens grew to rely upon a range of new professional organizations for information, guidance, regulation, and policy. A new faith in science and experts replaced millennial idealism and belief in the common citizens’ ability to solve problems. Having been driven to the excess of civil war by religious fervor to rid society of its sins, now experts would regulate those excesses. The end of the Populists signaled the end of power for a yeoman class who sought to extend the personal, virtuous, face-to-face social relations they had grown up with as rural, evangelical Protestants. With the party’s demise went the hope of restructuring the American economic system along more egalitarian lines. Future reform efforts would take a less millennial approach. New reformers would not trust and encourage the spark of God in the spirit of the common man. Whether the Progressives of the early twentieth century or the New Dealers of the 1930s, reformers would seek to control and rein in both the masses and the magnates. Whereas Populists wanted fair elections so that all could vote, including African-Americans, modern reformers looked to a bureaucratic state to regulate and to control, not trusting the instincts of the common folks but only of the “best people.” Nationwide, reformers were obsessed with lower orders (immigrants, African-Americans, poor workers) voting. Reforms in the electoral process purposefully entrenched ruling elites. Disfranchisement, or more technically franchise restriction, was the product of an attempt by the upper and middle class to restrict the franchise of those people who were most prone to vote Fusionist or Populist. Aims centered on protecting freedoms and voting rights for African-Americans, and for all citizens, lost out to expanding the interests of corporations and trusts. Today the term “populist” is sometimes used to slander a candidate, suggesting that he is provincial or appealing to the populace instead of listening to the studied experts. Sad to say, the divisions that fractured the Populist Party still reverberate today. As the historian C. Vann Woodward showed in his biography of the Populist leader Tom Watson, this idealistic agrarian reformer became a race-baiting, anti-Semitic demagogue. Yet there is no evidence in the scholarship or in the Populist literature itself that Populists were any more anti-Semitic, anti-black, or anti-foreign than any other group in the society at the time, and there is some evidence that they were less so. Populist ideals also still reverberate. Just as in the Age of Lincoln, moral choice, democratic citizenship, and equality still mingle. “Determine that the thing can and shall be done,” wrote Lincoln, “and then we shall find the way.”
October 2, 2007
Abraham Lincoln, Southern Conservative: An Interview with Orville Vernon Burton (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 04:55 PM EST Just when it seemed as if there was nothing new to say about the most written about American President, we have Orville Vernon Burton’s
The Age of Lincoln (Hill and Wang, 432 pages, $27), winner of the Chicago Tribune‘s 2007 Heartland award for nonfiction. A successor to Arthur M. Schlesinger’s classic The Age of Jackson, The Age of Lincoln shows how, in the words of James McPherson, “the ferment of religious reform merged with the dynamism of free-labor capitalism to forge a Northern political culture that triumphed over the South and slavery.” Professor Burton portrays Lincoln as a product of his time and of Southern yeoman culture, and how that shaped his political thought before and during the Civil War. Burton talked to us from his home near the University of Illinois–Champaign, where he is a University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar. The interview is appearing in two parts. Though Lincoln was born in Kentucky, he is almost never thought of by historians as a Southerner. One of the most interesting aspects of your book is its reappraisal of Lincoln’s Southern heritage. How did this shape his views on freedom and slavery? Walt Whitman described Lincoln as belonging to all the states, “not the North only, but the South—perhaps belongs most tenderly and devoutly to the South, of all; for there, really, this man’s birth-stock. There and thence his antecedent stamp. Why should I not say that thence his manliest traits—his universality—his canny, easy ways and words upon the surface—his inflexible determination and courage at heart? Have you never realized it, my friends, that Lincoln, though grafted on the West, is essentially, in personnel and character, a South-ern contribution?” Others have also claimed Lincoln for the South. In both The Clansman in 1905 and The Southerner: A Romance of the Real Lincoln in 1913—the latter dedicated to Woodrow Wilson, “our first Southern-born president since Lincoln”—Thomas Dixon pictured Lincoln as a Southerner, but in a very different sense than I do, as a Southerner dedicated to preserving white supremacy. Dixon uses part of the Whitman quotation above as an epigram for the second book. So, why do I think this is important? Because Lincoln’s Southernness had a huge impact on his personality, ambition, sense of honor, and his views on freedom and slavery. To get away from the slavery system, the Lincoln family had moved first to Indiana and then to Illinois. Seeing slavery first-hand in Virginia and Kentucky gained Lincoln’s father, and Abraham after him, a lifelong antipathy to the institution. Decades later Lincoln recalled the sight of enslaved men chained together on a Mississippi riverboat, and he doubtless compared their grim journey to vibrant New Orleans with his own. That memory of slavery and freedom counterposed, gliding along life’s river together, was “a continual torment,” he declared. As often as he saw such scenes, they always had “the power of making me miserable.” Although he was no stranger to racial prejudice, he embraced the Golden Rule of labor’s uplift: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” Liberty for Lincoln was more than a question of enslaved or free. In 1858 the elite white Southerner James Henry Hammond explained to the U.S. Senate how every society required a laboring foundation, or “mudsill class,” if others were to attain the fruits of higher civilization. This class, according to Hammond, had little prospect of ever rising from its degraded state. The mudsill theory ran counter to Abraham Lincoln’s view of labor. Thus Lincoln as a yeoman Southerner in the northern Midwest pointed out in September 1859 that most people were neither hirelings nor capitalists. “Men, with their families—wives, sons and daughters—work for themselves, on their farms, in their houses and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand, nor of hirelings or slaves on the other.” Growing up poor, with homesteading as a way of life, he respected hardworking, less wealthy, but self-reliant Southern men and women. Lincoln here espoused a Southern ethic both conservative and radical, rooted in the deeds of men and women and in the toil they performed; he found no one “more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty.” Just as he desired to rise to a station of independence and honor by his own labors, he would not—indeed with any honesty could not—withhold that opportunity from others. As a Southern yeoman, Lincoln insisted on a new understanding of liberty: equality of opportunity in the race of life. His belief in equal opportunity would continue to evolve until he was ready to assert the still astonishing claim that race was politically inconsequential, that African-Americans were citizens and entitled to equal protection under the law and full political rights. In the more than 140 years since the Emancipation Proclamation, Americans have argued as to whether it was primarily a war measure or a justice measure. Would it be fair to say that you would regard it as both? While I definitely regard it as both, I believe it was first and foremost a war measure. Because the Constitution sanctioned slavery, the President had no legal authority to free slaves as a measure of justice. Yet as a military measure, the commander-in-chief had the authority to confiscate rebel property. It was the Confederates who insisted that slaves were property, consistent with the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. By the autumn of 1862, Lincoln was desperate for more soldiers. However moral, complex, and far-reaching this decision, he understood very well that the Emancipation Proclamation was a weapon of war. And it was an effective one. African-Americans volunteered in the Union armed services and met critical manpower needs. At the same time, Southerners had to put an even greater emphasis on controlling their enslaved population, leaving less time and money available for the war effort. Moreover, emancipation ended any question of European intervention. With Northern articulation that the war was now about the moral issue of slavery, the English and French decided that it was not in their interest to recognize the Confederacy’s independence. Although it was a war measure, I agree with Lincoln that it was a justice measure as well. He hated slavery all his life. When Lincoln addressed Congress, he spoke about how, “in giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.” He understood that emancipation dovetailed with a larger, millennial understanding of what was at stake in the war. You make a strong case for Lincoln as both a conservative and a radical. How did his vision of the United States that could emerge from the ruins of the war differ from that of his contemporaries? First, a disclaimer. If I were a prophet, I would certainly make more money than I do as a historian. Nevertheless, I do believe things would have been much different had Lincoln lived through Reconstruction. He was a careful, calculating, masterful politician. As you remember, when he answered Horace Greeley’s call for abolition, “The Prayer of Twenty Million,” Lincoln had already made the decision to issue an emancipation proclamation. When he wrote to Greeley, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that,” he was taking a brilliant political stance that calmed conservative fears while paving the way forward for what he had already determined to do. This is indicative of how he worked politically, bringing the rest of the country to positions that he had already moved to and was already acting upon. Thus, although we can really never know how his vision for America would have emerged following the war, we do have some evidence for speculation. Often as an expert witness for minorities in voting rights or discrimination cases, I have had to make what is called a “totality of circumstances” argument when there is no “smoking gun.” In the case of Lincoln, I believe that I can make a very good “totality of circumstances” case for how Lincoln’s vision would have differed from his contemporaries’ and how we would have had a different United States emerging from the Civil War. Lincoln appointed Salmon P. Chase, a rival and thorn in his side, to be Chief Justice because Chase would champion rights for African-Americans. The incorruptible William Lloyd Garrison also understood how Lincoln’s logic worked, and when he congratulated Lincoln on the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, he was confident that Lincoln’s efforts would continue: “I am sure you will consent to not compromise that which will leave a slave in his fetters.” Many have faulted Lincoln’s general amnesty plan as too lenient, but what they miss is his faith and belief in the common man, the yeoman and poor white in the South, to do the right thing, and in his own ability to convince them. His general amnesty was for those who would take an oath of loyalty to the United States and pledge to obey federal laws pertaining to slavery. He would not provide amnesty to officials and military leaders of the Confederacy. I have argued throughout The Age of Lincoln that it is a commitment to the rule of law that guided Lincoln’s thinking. That, of course, is both conservative and radical, depending on how the rule of law is used. Lincoln was conservative to believe in the rule of law, but radical to argue that the rule of law applied to all. Of course, he would not have understood the terms “radical” and “conservative”; those are the judgments of a historian. But for Lincoln the rule of law meant the enforcement of fair play, a level playing field. When white Southern extremists used the law unfairly to justify terror, as they did during Reconstruction, I believe he would not have stood for it. We see over and over again his sense of fair play and his abhorrence of extralegal violence. For example, when he was the commander of the militia company in the Black Hawk war, men in the company captured an elderly Native American and were determined to kill him. Lincoln threatened to fight anyone who injured the innocent Indian. And this master politician, this Father Abraham, savior of the Union, would have the gravitas and the cachet to lead the people in a vision of an America as a land of opportunity and fair play for all. As he so often did, he could explain to his fellow Americans, including non-elite Southern whites, how the Constitution had to ensure that personal liberty be protected by law. Lincoln claimed before the war that “those who would deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and under a just God, cannot long retain it.” Near the end of the war, he commented upon the essential need “in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom.” The goal of reconstructing government on racial equality, while far more wide-ranging, was never predestined for failure, and I believe that with Lincoln overseeing his vision it would have succeeded. His enemies agreed. When John Wilkes Booth heard Lincoln speak on April 11, 1865, Booth used what I believe was the correct logic to interpret Lincoln’s vision: “That means nigger citizenship.” We have less evidence for Lincoln’s vision of worker rights in a new industrial America. He encouraged corporate growth in order to win the war, but I prefer to think that his sense of fair play would have dictated his vision in labor relations also. The same pattern of commitment to fairness under the law, I believe, would have been applicable to the excesses of unbridled capitalism and the plight of the industrial worker.
September 14, 2007
The Golden Age of Toots Shor: An Interview with Kristi Jacobson Posted by Allen Barra at 12:05 PM EST The 1977 obituary in The New York Times for Bernard “Toots” Shor noted that New York’s mot famous saloonkeeper was “a magnet, around which flowed any of the special streams of New York’s greatness.” Those streams included athletes, movie stars, writers, and politicians—virtually anyone who was well-known and successful in New York. In the 1957 noir cult movie favorite Sweet Smell of Success, Tony Curtis’s predatory publicist, Sidney Falco, makes his important connections with Burt Lancaster’s powerful gossip columnist, J. J. Hunsecker, at Shor’s place. Kristi Jacobson, Shor’s granddaughter, has crafted a fascinating documentary portrait of Toots, tracing his life from South Philadelphia to success in New York, using film clips, TV segments, still photographs, and interviews with such luminaries as Mike Wallace, Walter Cronkite, Whitey Ford, Frank Gifford, Gay Talese, and a score of others. Her film, Toots, is not just a biography of a man but a portrait of a city, a culture, and an era. The movie opens in New York City today, and Ms. Jacobson spoke with us about it and its subject from her office in the Soho neighborhood of New York. Toots Shor has to be the most famous saloon in American history. More celebrities mingled there and rubbed elbows with each other than at any other bar in America. Why was this? What was it about Toots and his bar-restaurant that attracted the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Joe DiMaggio, and Frank Sinatra? I have asked myself the same question for years. I’ve often wondered what Toots, an uneducated “bum,” had in common with men as accomplished and disparate as Eisenhower, Hemingway, Sinatra, DiMaggio, and Hoffa. Toots had a rough-hewn charm, a straight-talking no-nonsense honesty, and a sincere love of fun. But I think ultimately the saloon’s place in history was the result of a perfect confluence of person, place, and time. The period in New York between the 1940s and 1950s was a unique time, and Toots and his saloon embodied the era—the post-Prohibition, post–World War II period when people wanted to let off steam and really have a good time. And his attitude toward life, friendship, and drinking gave people—famous and common—a place to feel at home. New York at that time was just emerging as the capital of the world, and the kinds of people who made up the fabric of New York City were a lot like Toots—tough, children of immigrants, who came to New York with little more then some loose change in their pockets and dreams of a better life. Toots’s belief that “a saloonkeeper is the most important person in a community” also played a role, in that he took the job very seriously and built not just a saloon but a community unlike any other. He was the first one there in the morning and the last to leave at night. At Toots’s, “drinking hard” was required, and loyalty, friendship, or “palship,” as he called it, was paramount. As he said to Mike Wallace in a 1959 interview, friends meant so much to him that it was “nearly a photo finish” between friends and family in his life. Since Toots took his friendships so seriously, he protected those who were celebrities, and as Peter Duchin says, “If you tried to get an autograph from someone at Toots, some waiter would break your leg!” Celebrity culture had not gotten so out of control then. His saloon also cut across class lines, since for him “class” was judged by how loyal, decent, and honest a person was, and because of his own humble background he respected above all those who, like him, came from nothing. He revered athletes and sportswriters above all, and the feeling was mutual. Toots’s was the ultimate clubhouse during a very special time in our history. Watching your film, one gets the impression that a large part of the saloon’s appeal was that it embodied the New York sports culture of the 1950s. Baseball players like Mickey Mantle, boxers like Joe Louis, football players such as Frank Gifford, they all hung out at Toots’s and seemed to feel at ease there. Do you think your grandfather was a sports fan per se, or was he more interested in the men who played sports? Both. He was definitely a diehard sports fan. He loved nothing more than a good game, or a good fight, or a good race. He felt that sports were the backbone of American life, and that any good citizen should have a devoted interest in them. He even marked events in his own life by sports. When did he open his restaurant? “I signed the lease on September 15, 1939—the day Tony Galento beat Lou Nova in Philadelphia.” His first wedding anniversary? “One of the biggest upsets in football happened that day,” he said of November 2, 1935. “Notre Dame beat Ohio State. What a game! Notre Dame scored two touchdowns in the last minute and a half of play.” But it was more than just sports fanaticism. He had tremendous respect for athletes, and I think he also strongly identified with them. As Peter Duchin says in the film, “though [Toots] loved Joe DiMaggio, who was the most famous ballplayer, as much as he possibly could, he still would love somebody else who was a great polo player. He revered the sportsmen.” I think part of that was that most athletes of that era were working-class, tough-as-nails kids who, with a good dose of talent and sheer will, scrapped their way out of their neighborhoods and into professional sports, and eventually into sports stardom. Likewise, these athletes saw a similar story in Toots, who was proud of his background and his upbringing as a street fighter in the streets of South Philadelphia. Toots made a point to talk to, and often console, both big-name athletes and younger ones who were struggling. Joe Garagiola tells a great story in the film about the time Toots came to sit with him on the stairs of his restaurant: “There was the big, famous, successful restaurateur sitting with a .220-hitting catcher, listening to my problems. There was no gain for him. He was taking care of, if I can say it now, a scared kid who didn’t know where to go.” I think it is difficult to separate the two—his love of sports and his interest in the men who played. Another story comes to mind that never made it into the film but is one of my favorites: After a game in 1945, Toots rushed back from the Polo Grounds after watching Mel Ott hit his 500th home run. He arrived at his saloon to find Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, at one of the tables. Toots introduced himself and chatted until Ott arrived, flush from his achievement. “Excuse me, Sir Fleming,” Toots said, “but I gotta leave you. Somebody important just came in.” On one remarkable occasion, Chief Justice Earl Warren was at one table and Frank Costello, perhaps the most notorious organized crime figure in America, was at another. If the account I heard is correct, they tipped their glasses and smiled at each other. What do you think it was about your grandfather’s saloon that made it a kind of neutral territory for two such people? I think the way Toots treated people in his joint had an effect on how people treated each other in the place too. It is, when I think about it, quite remarkable that among Toots’s closest friends were men who operated on such opposite sides of the law. But Toots didn’t think anything of a scene like this. To him, they were just his friends. It was another day, another coupla pals. It all made perfect sense to him, and others seemed to follow along. The tone was set by Toots that all were welcome (unless he didn’t like you, of course) and that was that. It was also a different time—some call it a magical time—when these guys, who all rose to power together from the Depression and Prohibition, respected each other in a way that’s difficult to imagine today. Everyone I interviewed for the film described Frank Costello as a dignified man who commanded an incredible amount of respect from others. I try to imagine a situation today that would be comparable, and I come up with nothing. I find it absolutely fascinating how accessible these people were then, and that a moment like this could even be possible. To celebrities like Mike Wallace, Whitey Ford, and Frank Gifford, the sale of your grandfather’s restaurant in 1961 marked the end of an era. And most of the customers never felt quite at home in the second incarnation of Toots’s saloon. What was it about the 1960s that he couldn’t quite adjust to? It seems to me that it was everything about the 1960s that Toots couldn’t, or wouldn’t, adjust to. The sixties were of course a time of great change, not just in the world and the United States, but especially in New York City. Toots had no tolerance for drugs or rock music or the excessive wealth and attitude that athletes were beginning to acquire. The downtown club scene, Studio 54, and the people who went there—these were not the crowd that Toots catered to or wanted in his saloon. People were moving to the suburbs, and TV had a huge affect on nightlife. Instead of adapting to the changes, Toots thought his attitude toward life would in the end prevail, that he could stick it out, and people would keep coming to his joint. As we know, that was not the way it worked out. Unlike the rest of us, though, this didn’t upset Toots. ”I started off broke, so I’m no worse off now,” he said with a laugh in 1975. The 1960s may have led to the demise of his restaurant, but Toots remained strong-willed until the very end.
September 12, 2007
The Game That Changed Football Forever: An Interview with Frank Maggio Posted by Allen Barra at 02:15 PM EST In today’s football, the pass rules. But there was a time when the game was largely, in Damon Runyon’s phrase, “three yards and a cloud of dust.” In the early 1900s the game became so dangerous that President Theodore Roosevelt considered banning it. Football was saved by the forward pass, putting an emphasis on speed and skill and spread the action out. It took years, though, for the pass to win acceptance among the nation’s college football coaches. In Notre Dame and the Game That Changed Football: How Jesse Harper Made the Forward Pass a Weapon and Knute Rockne a Legend, Frank Maggio tells the story of the 1913 Army–Notre Dame game, after which nothing in football would ever be the same. I discussed it with him recently. The title of your book claims that the 1913 Notre Dame–Army game actually changed the course of the game of football. That’s a mouthful, but I have to say that you justify the claim. Can you give us a brief summation of why the game is such a landmark? The game was the first time the forward pass was used in such an extensive, dramatic, and successful fashion. It was extensive in its sheer quantity and quality. Gus Dorais completed 14 of 17 passes for 243 yards, unheard of statistics for that day and age and pretty good in today’s game. Notre Dame would like to have such passing success in their games this season. It was dramatic because it was the first time that long passes—20, 30, and 40 yards—had been thrown to receivers who caught them while on a dead run. In the past, passes were thrown to stationary receivers, and until 1912 a pass could not be thrown farther than 20 yards from the spot where the quarterback was standing. It was successful because it led Notre Dame to victory and immediate national recognition—as well as awakening the football world of the possibilities of the forward pass. What was the status of the forward pass prior to that game? The forward pass in its nascent form had been incorporated into the rules of football in 1906, and coaches, especially in the Midwest and South, were quick to see its potential. Its use, however, was limited, so it didn’t become a major weapon until 1912, when the restrictions were lifted. The Notre Dame–Army game of 1913 was not the first use of the forward pass, but it was the first extensive use of the pass after the rule changes. Also, it was the first effective use in a major game between well-known schools and in a major media center, New York. Because of those two factors the game received maximum publicity, and as one writer said, it “demonstrated the devastating potential of the forward pass.” So, though this type of passing might have been used earlier than November 1, 1913, it went unnoticed. The importance of the major media center cannot be overstated. The game received national publicity, and was immediately hailed by the press as a “landmark” game. What were the national reputations the Notre Dame and Army football teams at the time of the game? In 1913 the major powers in college football were in the East. Army was well recognized as one of those major powers. Others in that day, by way of example, were Harvard, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. Army’s 1913 loss to Notre Dame was their only loss in 1913. In 1914 Army was undefeated and declared national champions. Notre Dame, on the other hand, was virtually unknown in the East, or really anywhere else, with the exception of the Midwest. They were at that time a small, financially poor Catholic men’s school. 1913 was the first year Notre Dame had a professional football coach, Jesse Harper, and the first time they ventured out on the national stage. In 1913 Notre Dame went East and played Army and Penn State and went Southwest and played the University of Texas It was the first time a college team had attempted such a national schedule. And Notre Dame was undefeated in 1913. At what point did Jesse Harper and Notre Dame decide to make the forward pass their primary offensive weapon? Had they used it much before the Army game? Why did it catch Army so off-guard? Jesse Harper was very familiar with the forward pass prior to coming to Notre Dame. He had worked with it from the time it came into the rules in 1906 and used it extensively in his last two years at Wabash College, almost beating Notre Dame with the forward pass in 1911. However, in that game a successful touchdown pass by Wabash was nullified because it was thrown more than 20 yards. When Harper arrived at Notre Dame in 1913, the numerous restrictions on the forward pass had been lifted, and the football had been changed from its original oval-like shape to a more aerodynamic “prolate spheroid.” Both of these factors greatly facilitated the use of the forward pass. Harper’s 1913 Notre Dame team immediately began using it. The summer before the 1913 season, Harper had Gus Dorias, his quarterback, and Knute Rockne, his receiver, working with the pass during their summer jobs on Lake Erie. In the practice sessions, Notre Dame worked extensively with the pass and had great success in their first three games of the 1913 season. Army was the fourth game on their schedule. Army was familiar with the forward pass. In fact, their coach, Charles Daly, had been on the 1906 committee that brought the pass into the rules of football. However, the Eastern schools had virtually ignored it, and there was little or no scouting in those days, so Army had no idea that Notre Dame knew how to throw and catch the pass. Thus Army, prepared for a titanic struggle on the offensive and defensive line with the fighting Irish runners, was completely thrown off their game. Everyone knows that Knute Rockne went on to become the most innovative coach in football history and that he died in a plane crash in 1931. What became of the other famous participants in that 1913 game? As for Army, the men playing in the 1913 game were known in West Point lore as the class “the stars fell on,” because so many of them went on to be multistar generals in World War II. The two most famous were sitting on the bench during the 1913 game, namely Dwight Eisenhower and his roommate, Omar Bradley. Both were five-star generals at the end of World War II, and Ike, of course, went on to become President of the United States.
Of the Notre Dame players, Harper, whose later years are reviewed in my book, became a cattle rancher in Kansas. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach in 1970. Rockne, of course, went on to become one of the greatest legends in the history of college football. His story is well known. Gus Dorais, the outstanding quarterback of the 1913 team, played some professional football but mostly distinguished himself as a coach. He coached college football for almost 20 years and was the head coach of the Detroit Lions from 1943 to 1947. He also was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach. Ray Eichenlaub, the powerful and very important fullback on the 1913 team, was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1972. The rest of the team I have been unable to trace, so, to my dismay, there the story ends.
September 7, 2007
The Films That Are How We Know Football: An Interview with Steve Sabol (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 04:15 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. Is it fair to say that from the very start you were self-conscious about the mythology of pro football? Absolutely. We thought of ourselves as filmmakers, romantics, and storytellers. We never used video, always film. Video is too immediate, too right now. Film has texture and context. What was the film where it all came together for you? In 1965 we did the league’s first promotional film, They Call It Pro Football. If my dad’s 1962 film of the Packers-Giants was Birth of a Nation, then They Call It Pro Football was Citizen Kane. That was the film where we first used the big background score and had John Facenda as narrator. We premiered it at Toots Shor’s restaurant in New York, and the commissioner, Pete Rozelle, said, “This isn’t a highlight film, it’s a movie. From that time on we had Pete’s full support. He never tried to curtail our creative freedom, even though what we did was sometimes a bit too avant-garde for some of the more conservative owners. The music used by NFL Films has always been distinctive. From the start you never went for the rah-rah college marching band sound. You always use a full orchestral score. Why? For as far back as I can remember, I was always captivated by orchestras. When I was a kid in Philadelphia, my friends would run home and turn on American Bandstand. I’d brag my ginger snap cookies, go to the TV, and turn on Victory at Sea. I was enthralled by Richard Rodgers’s music, and I liked big thundering sort of songs—at summer camp I used to love singing stuff like “What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?”—things like that. Marching bands sounded tinny. A lot of the NFL owners wanted John Philip Sousa–type music in the back of their films. I always loved the sound of cellos and timpani, and especially French horns. And until 1983 we had the “voice of God,” John Facenda, doing the narration. [The Philadelphia Phillies’ Harry Callas currently does the NFL Films voiceovers.] Where did you find Facenda? Twenty-four years after his death, people still ask about him. They ask, “Where in the world did you find him?” He was a local Philadelphia news anchor. Most people’s jaws drop when I tell them that he wasn’t a football fan. When I gave him the copy to read, I’d say, “Do you want to see these highlights?” or something. He’d say, “No, No, that’s okay. I don’t need to.” He actually recorded his voiceovers without seeing the images. I think the words Facenda read were as much a part of NFL Films’ style as the images and the music. Whose prose poetry was Facenda reading? I’m afraid that would be mine. As a kid, one of my favorite poets was Kipling, and one of my favorite sportswriters was Grantland Rice—you know, “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the four horsemen rode again . . .” That kind of stuff. One of my favorite NFL Film productions was a profile of Vince Lombardi. Let me read you some of the text: “Lombardi —a certain magic still lingers in the very name. It speaks of duels in the snow, in the cold November mud . . .” And here’s something from your profile of the old Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach: “His passion was football. His obsession was winning. A championship was his destiny.” Are those your words? Yes, in all their splendid pomposity. Of all the games that NFL Films has covered and all the specials you’ve produced and all the Emmys you’ve won over the decades, what would you say you’re proudest of? Of when people come up to me and say, “You know, I didn’t watch the game when John Elway went the length of the field to win the game for Denver” or “I missed that drive in the 1989 Super Bowl when Joe Montana took the ’49ers down the field in the last two minutes, but I saw them happen in your films, and I felt like I was there.”
September 7, 2007
The Films That Are How We Know Football: An Interview with Steve Sabol (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 12:15 PM EST NFL Films may not be, as the late New York Giants general manager Wellington Mara once put it, “the heart and soul of the NFL,” but it is where the heart and soul of the National Football League reside. Founded in the early 1960s by Ed Sabol, an overcoat salesman from Philadelphia who began his film career with a Bell & Howell camera he was given as a wedding gift, the company has been run by his son Steve since Ed’s retirement in 1974. Two years after Ed Sabol filmed his first NFL game, his company, Blair Productions, officially changed names when the league’s 14 teams each put up $20,000 to finance NFL Films.
 | | Steve Sabol. |
The NFL Films complex in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, cost more than $50 million to build, covers nearly 200,000 square feet, and houses uncounted thousands of miles of film of every NFL game in every season going back more than 40 years. It’s more than just a handsome showcase for over 90 Emmys; the facility features a state-of-the-art theater and motion picture and television production and postproduction studios. The corridors are a virtual history of football in sport and popular culture, replete with such iconography as the program from the first Army-Navy game in 1893 and all 22 New Yorker covers devoted to football. There are posters of football movies both famous (Jim Thorpe—All American, with Burt Lancaster) and obscure (Two Minutes to Play, with Herman Brix), and Steve Sabol’s own multimedia collages juxtapose such unlikely images as Vince Lombardi, the actress Debra Winger, and the sixteenth-century French essayist Montaigne. In addition to recording NFL games, compiling highlight films, and creating specials on legendary coaches, players, and teams, NFL Films handles projects as diverse as the football sequences from films like Rudy and Jerry Maguire and Bruce Springsteen’s MTV concert. Steve Sabol fielded our questions in a brief lull before the flurry of the 2007 season. The interview is appearing in two parts. I’m not the first one to say this, but I think most fans’ memories of the NFL come from NFL Films. I think we don’t so much remember seeing Bart Starr’s quarterback sneak against Dallas in the 1967 Ice Bowl or Dwight Clark’s catch against the Cowboys in the 1982 championship game so much as we remember seeing the replays on an NFL Films program—in slow motion, with John Facenda’s baritone providing the context. Or am I overstating the case? Well, I’d like to think that you aren’t. George Halas, who is usually credited as the founder of the league, once wrote us a letter saying “the history of pro football will forever be preserved on film and not by the written word à la baseball.” I certainly think it’s true that the history of pro football is a visual one. Before ESPN, most baseball fans knew the great moments of their game by reading about them. I think it’s fair to say that football fans have images in their minds of the NFL’s great moments, and those images come from their depiction by NFL Films. You’re coming up on an anniversary, aren’t you? Wasn’t the first game your father ever filmed the December 30, 1962, championship game between the Green Bay Packers and the New York Giants? My father bid $3,000 for the rights to film that game. He had six cameras; a couple of them froze. The game was played at Yankee Stadium, and I was there, helping my dad. I have two vivid memories from that game. One, the bitter cold and sweeping winds through Yankee Stadium, and second, the impact when the players hit that frozen, rock hard turf. I remember Jim Taylor, the great Green Bay running back, getting stitches in his lip. I remember Ray Nitschke, the Packers’ all-pro linebacker, sitting on the bench with a hood pulled over his head and blood frozen on his chin. How did that film set the tone for what your father and then the two of you would do later? My father had a genius for beaming right in on the heart of a game. He could see that Jim Taylor and the Giants’ great linebacker, Sam Huff, hated each other and went out of their way to kick and gouge every time they came together. He knew when to zoom in when a player struggled to pull himself up after a vicious hit on that frozen turf. He focused on the contrast between the Packers’ coach, Vince Lombardi, who always seemed to be on the verge of exploding, and Giants’ coach, Allie Sherman, who was much more of a cerebral type. We were lucky to have that for a first game [won by the Packers, 16–7] because there were so many legendary players—Taylor, Huff, Paul Hornung, Bart Starr, Nitschke, Frank Gifford, Y. A. Tittle. I think there were more Hall of Famers playing on the field that day than in any other game in NFL history.
August 29, 2007
Across Noir America: An Interview with Barry Gifford (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 05:00 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. You’ve worked on two films with David Lynch, Wild At Heart and Lost Highway, which had critics arguing over who was the real auteur of the films. I take it that you didn’t see the collaboration as a problem, that your vision and Lynch’s were pretty much in sync. Actually, Lynch and I have worked together on a few projects, three of which, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, and Hotel Room, were completed. I have a hard time with the auteur theory. There are very, very few filmmakers who qualify for this distinction. Lynch’s films are certainly identifiable as directed by him, but he still, at least in the past, has collaborated very well with writers, cinematographers, editors, sound technicians, composers, etc. The French went a little bit daffy with this auteur business. Isn’t it enough just to say that certain directors have a recognizable style? Let’s put Orson Welles, Buster Keaton, and a couple of others on that list. Each film fan can decide who is an auteur and who is not. Let’s just say David Lynch is a great filmmaker, and leave it at that. One of the people you dedicate The Cavalry Charges to is Matt Dillon, and one of the most interesting chapters in the book is how you two came to work together on the film Dillon directed, City of Ghosts. You finally got the film made, and Matt fulfilled his desire to shoot almost exclusively in Cambodia. The story has to do with a con artist on the lam in Cambodia, which has some plot similarities with your own novel Port Tropique. Would you summarize your travails in getting the project going? Matt first contacted me way back in the early 1980s about my novel Port Tropique, which he felt would be a great film that he could star in. He was too young at the time, and you are correct, after many years Matt and I finally did get together on a film project that contains echoes of my novel. City of Ghosts began after a trip Matt took to Southeast Asia. He wanted to set a film there that he could direct and act in. I had always loved Joseph Conrad’s novel An Outcast of the Islands and the film of it made by Carol Reed, and I suggested to Matt that that story could be an inspiration for our own. Matt and I wrote a screen story, obtained development money from a couple of French producers, and set about writing the screenplay. We worked on and off for several years, in many locations, until we finished it. At that time Matt was able to raise money for the production and was promised distribution by United Artists/MGM. He set off for Cambodia with a stellar cast that included James Caan, Stellan Skarsgard, Gerard Depardieu, and others, and with great difficulty produced it. To my mind he did a great job; it was certainly an ambitious undertaking seeing as how it was the first feature film shot in Cambodia since 1964. City of Ghosts got great reviews in most of the major newspapers and magazines, much to our delight. Of course, the film didn’t make any money, mostly because UA/MGM decided to sell it as an “art” film rather than an action-adventure film. It was certainly closer to Vera Cruz than to Lost Highway. At present Matt and I are dreaming up another film to collaborate on. You’ll probably see it in about 10 years, if we’re lucky. As a cultural critic, you’re best known for writing about books, film, and music that are—how should I say this?—under the radar. If there were a Barry Gifford Film Fest, and you could show an audience, say, three American films that they probably hadn’t seen, what would they be? And what three American novels would you have your students read in a lit course that generally aren’t taught in American schools? And what three albums would you choose as a deejay that don’t usually get played on radio? American films: Some Came Running, based on James Jones’s novel, Out of the Past, and two by John Huston, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Asphalt Jungle. There are films that are more obscure, but those are four great American movies I can watch over and over. In fact, I have a fifth that I must add, Lonely Are the Brave, starring Kirk Douglas, which most people haven’t seen, made in 1962. Three American novels: Two Serious Ladies, by Jane Bowles, The Optimist’s Daughter, by Eudora Welty, and The Town and the City, by Jack Kerouac. If the latter is not obscure enough for you, let’s throw in Masters of Atlantis, by Charles Portis. I don’t know about three albums, per se, but I would recommend music by the following three Americans: Don Covay, Earl King, and Erma Thomas. There are thousands of albums that deserve to be listened to that don’t get airplay. And I would add, along with Erma, Ann Peebles. Can’t keep it to three. Sorry.
August 29, 2007
Across Noir America: An Interview with Barry Gifford (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 11:00 AM EST According to Wikipedia, Barry Gifford—novelist, poet, critic, and screenwriter—is “known for his distinctive mix of American landscapes and film noir and Beat Generation–influenced literary madness.” Madness, perhaps, but with a method. Gifford has mastered numerous literary forms from fiction (including Wild at Heart, made into a feature film by David Lynch, and this year’s Memories from a Sinking Ship) to biography (Jack’s Book, an oral biography of Jack Kerouac), screenwriting (Lynch’s Lost Highway and City of Ghosts, directed by Matt Dillon), sportswriting (A Day At the Races: The Education of a Racetracker), memoir (A Good Man to Know, about growing up the son of a small-time gangster in Chicago), and even publisher (his Black Lizard Press led a mid-1980s revival of American pulp crime classics). He has also established a cult audience as a cultural critic in such books as Out of The Past: Adventures in Film Noir and The Devil Thumbs a Ride and Other Unforgettable Films. His latest book is The Cavalry Charges: Writings on Books, Film and Music, from Thunder’s Mouth Press. The Cavalry Charges muses on such Gifford fetishes as Artie Shaw’s music, the novels of the mysterious B. Traven, and the horror films of Val Lewton. He talked to us from his home in the Bay Area. (His website is www.barrygifford.com.) This interview is appearing in two parts. Your work has been so diverse, from fiction to memoir to film scripts, that it’s sometimes difficult to get a handle on you. The Cavalry Charges seems like a good place for a reader to jump in because it deals with so many subjects dear to your heart—most of them, if you don’t mind my saying so, way out of the vast left field of American culture. For instance, the essay on the mysterious B. Traven, the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I love the first sentence; “Does it really matter who B. Traven was?” Was he an influence on your early writing? In your essay “Read ’Em and Weep, My Favorite Novels,” you list some books I expected to see—by Nelson Algren, Raymond Chandler, Jack Kerouac—but at least one selection threw me for a loop—the Chip Hilton novels by Claire Bee. What kind of cultural stew shaped your sensibility as a writer of fiction and film? Who were the writers who shaped your own neon-noir sensibility? My formal education was scattered and brief. My reading from the very beginning was random, and later on I read whatever was recommended to me by people I respected. I still do. B. Traven was certainly an early influence, as were Jack London, Joseph Conrad, and Jack Kerouac. They inspired me in terms of a lifestyle as well as a direction in which to develop a literary style, although I don’t write like any of them. I’ve learned equally from writers as diverse as E. M. Forster, Jean Rhys, and so many others. A recent favorite of mine has been Alvaro Mutis, a neglected author in virtually any language other than his native Spanish. I write in many forms—fiction, poetry, screenplays, plays, essays—because they are all, fortunately, available to me. I began as a songwriter, and sometimes the inspiration to write something continues to express itself as a song. I particularly admire the songwriters Augustine Lara, Doc Pomus, Hoagy Carmichael, and Smokey Robinson. These composers have influenced me as much as any poet or novelist. About Clair Bee and the Chip Hilton novels, when I was very young I identified with Chip Hilton, or rather fantasized about having a life like his, in a small town with a gray-haired mother who was a telephone operator, a job as a soda jerk, and being a star athlete who helped everyone with their problems—a life almost entirely unlike my own at that time. My mother was certainly nothing like Chip Hilton’s mother. It’s disgraceful that the recent reprints of the Chip Hilton novels have been revised by a hand other than Clair Bee’s to include religious, namely Christian, instruction. This is a sacrilege, pun intended. What you call my “neon-noir” sensibility was formed from my life on the street. Writers such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett, and Jim Thompson were not so much influences as good beat reporters. Thompson, however, interested me more than the other so called genre writers because of his peculiar psychological edge. Since you mentioned Thompson, could you straighten me out on something? Your name is associated with the Jim Thompson revival of the 1980s. Before then, he was someone who many talked about but few ever read. What was your connection to Thompson’s work? I first read Jim Thompson’s novels when I was 13 or 14 years old, bought off of a wire paperback rack in a drugstore in Tampa, Florida. They made a big impression on me at the time, and I never forgot them. In 1982 I found many Thompson novels in print in France, and I bought all I could find and read them in French. Then in 1984 I founded Black Lizard Books and wound up publishing 13 Thompson novels in that series. Black Lizard ceased publishing in 1989, at which time the backlist was sold to Vintage books. The line is now called Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. I wrote the introductions to all the Thompson novels. He was virtually out of print in this country when Black Lizard began, and I was happy to have brought him to the attention of the reading public again. Several of the Black Lizard Thompson books were made into feature films.
August 21, 2007
The Great Songs of Baseball: An Interview with Jerry Silverman (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 03:45 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. You write in your introduction that your choice of material is based “on textual interest and inherent musical value (i.e., singability).” Which are your favorites among the 41 songs included? Did you uncover any that were popular in their time but are just too awful by today’s standards? I’ll start with some of the problem songs. The strangest song in the collection was originally entitled “Base Ball” when it was composed in 1914. To avoid confusion with another song with the same title written in 1908, I amended the title slightly to “Base Ball [With You],” borrowing that line from the song itself. It is a song about a woman sitting in the stands and admiring her hero on the field. It has a very nice syncopated, sentimental melody, but the lyrics were all but incomprehensible. However, I liked the tune well enough to want to include it in the collection, so I took the liberty of changing the lyrics so that would make some sense. Here are the words to the original chorus: How you take my eye,
How I love to love,
To be your never never good,
But now I’m going to try,
I am going to try.
It’s true as I am looking into your little eye.
To never lose to never
No greater game I can play
Than baseball for you. See what I mean? To find out how I translated the song into English just turn to page 159 in the book. The next problem song presented a problem of a very different nature. Despite the existence of black baseball teams with their own panoply of stars, no published songs were found that sang of this aspect of American baseball. A call to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Omaha confirmed this inexplicable absence. The only song that was mentioned was “Brother Noah Gave Out Checks for Rain” (1907), which I had already included in the collection. This song, which puts a humorous baseball interpretation on Biblical events, was written by a white composer in the so-called “Negro dialect” that composers of the period knew would draw laughs from audiences. The song is quite clever despite itself, but the sheet music cover illustration is an embarrassment to our twenty-first-century eyes. The hundred-year span from 1907 to 2007 has witnessed a slow but steady change in what we deem acceptable. The concept of political correctness didn’t exist back then. This artistic and linguistic difficulty is one that I have had to deal with often in editing my collections of Civil War songs, blues, and other songs where contemporary composers and publishers used language and images that to our present-day sensibilities may be offensive. There are no easy answers here in the balance between authenticity and sensitivity. I generally have come down on the side of authenticity, with an apologia in advance if the material is really racist). Along the same lines, but perhaps less blatant, are a number of “Irish” songs, where the Irishman in question (umpire, fan, or player) is treated in the stock vaudevillian manner as a cross between a drunkard and a buffoon. Among these songs are “Finnegan, the Umpire” (1890) and “O’Grady at the Game” (1891). Interestingly, the tune to “McGuffin’s Home Run” (1891), where the McGuffin in question is a hero, was composed by Gussie Davis, one of the late nineteenth century’s first successful African-American composers and one of the charter members of Tin Pan Alley, which came into being in New York in 1885. It probably never occurred to Davis to compose a song about a black baseball player; or if it did, he or his publishers no doubt thought it “wouldn’t sell.” Too bad. As far as my favorite songs in the collection are concerned, well, each one of them has something to recommend itself, including the aforementioned problem songs, or I wouldn’t have included it. However, there are a few that really stand out for various reasons. The very first song, “The Bat and the Ball” (1867) was composed when the wounds of the Civil War were still bleeding in the nation. It contains certain significant lines that could not have escaped notice: “We gather in numbers on the field once again . . . The contest is bloodless . . . And victors and vanquished are friends as before.” “Told Between Ticks” (1891) describes how baseball (and other) news was transmitted across the nation by ticker tape. I have vivid memories of listening to Red Barber broadcasting the away games of the Brooklyn Dodgers during the 1940s when, as the song says, “all of this news is heard between ticks.” “Who Would Doubt That I’m a Man?” (1895) is a “baseball aria” from an opera entitled “The Mormons,” in which a woman dressed in a man’s baseball uniform outhits, outruns, outcatches and generally outplays her male counterparts. This one is a real gem. Then, for complete nuttiness, there is Irving Berlin’s contribution to the repertoire: “Jake! Jake! The Yiddisher Ball-Player” (1913). The singer bets a “half a dollar” on the game, but at the critical moment Jake doesn’t come through. “Jake, I lose my half a dollar, Poison you should swallow, Jake, Jake you’re a regular fake.” I could go on and on discussing the merits of all 41 songs, but I’ll leave it right here. If you compiled a songbook from 1920 to the present, what might be on your list? Actually, I had hoped to begin the collection with this little gem, which dates historically somewhere between the high jinks expressed in “Brother Noah Gave Out Checks for Rain” and the post–Civil War “The Bat and the Ball.” The earldom of Murray, or Moray, was one of the seven original earldoms of Scotland. It dates back to about 1314, when Sir Thomas Randolph, a nephew of King Robert Bruce, was created Earl of Moray. By the fifteenth century the earldom had shifted to an illegitimate branch of the royal House of Stuart. The earldom of Huntly was established in 1449. On February 8, 1592, George Huntly, the fifth Earl of Murray, set fire to to the castle of James Stuart, “the bonnie Earl of Murray” and stabbed him to death. He was a braw gallant,
And he played at the ball.
And the bonnie Earl of Murray
Was the flower of them all. He was a braw gallant,
And he played at the glove,
And the bonnie Earl of Murray,
He was the Queen’s own love. There was a time when momentous events and exploits, such as those described in this Scottish ballad, “The Bonnie Earl of Murray,” were invariably celebrated in broadside and song. The bonnie Earl may have been adept at the ball and glove, but he was no match for the knife-wielding Huntly. One hopes that this unfortunate incident was simply a matter of rival earls duking it out over fair maidens, castles, and land rather than a bloody dispute on the ballfield. But alas and alack, my editor didn’t quite see it my way, and so this tragic tale ended up—not on the cutting room floor but eliminated with a click of the delete button. Moving right along, then, to the twenty-first century, following the chronological order of the songs in the collection (1867-1922), the next few songs that I was considering for inclusion start with “Bucky Boy” (1925), a paean to Bucky Harris, who as player-manager of the Washington Senators led his team to the World Series Championship against the Giants in 1924. His return home to Pittston, Pennsylvania, after the Series on October 29, 1924, was declared Bucky Day. There was an all-day celebration to mark the occasion. The song compares Bucky (favorably) with George Washington and Babe Ruth, and ends with “Bucky, now we’ll have to ask you one thing more,/ To do in twenty-five as you did in twenty-four.” But it was not to be. They lost to the Pirates in 1925. “The Card’nals And Mr. Hornsby” (1926): The Cardinals, with Rogers Hornsby as player-manager, defeated the Yankees in the 1926 World Series four games to three. Hornsby went 7 for 28 (.250). The sheet music was published with ukulele chord diagrams, a sign of the times. The lyrics are somewhat less than immortal: “Oh Mister Hornsby, Oh Mister Hornsby, You’ve got the pep, you made them step . . .” “The Galloping A’s” (1929): Apparently all you had to do to get a song written about your team in the twenties was win a World Series. The Philadelphia Athletics, won the American League pennant by 18 games, with a won-lost record of 104–64, and defeated the Cubs 4–1 in the Series. To get to the Series they beat out the Yankees, and the song rubs it in: “Tho’ the Yanks were striving it did not do, For the ‘MACKS’ were wearing the old ‘HORSE SHOE.’” In capital letters and quotation marks, “MACKS” referred to owner-manager Connie Mack. There were other songs, like “It’s A Grand Old Game” (1931) and “The Baseball Blues” (1931), but that old devil copyright reared its ugly head. It turns out that 1922 is the current last year in which songs are in the public domain, so these, and, for example “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio” (1941) and “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?” (1949) were definitely out of bounds. So no collection of more recent songs. Pity.
August 21, 2007
The Great Songs of Baseball: An Interview with Jerry Silverman (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 12:35 PM EST Jerry Silverman—folksinger, guitarist, musicologist—has published over 200 books, including folk song collections, anthologies, and instructional books for guitar, banjo, and fiddle. He is also the author of The Immigrant Song Book and Of Thee I Sing: Lyrics and Music for America’s Most Patriotic Songs. His latest, The Baseball Songbook: Songs and Images from the Early Years of America’s Favorite Pastime (Alfred Publishing, 172 pages, $19.95), is a fascinating history of early baseball songs from 1867 to 1922, complete with music and lyrics, and a CD of Silverman’s renditions. You can check out his website at www.jerrysilverman.org. We spoke at such enjoyable length that this interview is running in two parts. A subtitle for your book might be “A Secret History of Baseball in Song.” College football fight songs have always been popular, but aside from those, I don’t think I could name a song for any other sport except baseball. What do you think it is about baseball that has inspired so much music? You mention college football fight songs. There are lots of those, but they only resonate on the individual campuses and are trotted out only (when they are sung at all) at games or at sentimental alumni gatherings. The lyrics to these songs seldom rise above the level of rah-rah, and the tunes, which are composed mainly by the alumni themselves, are, shall we say, less than inspiring. Sort of on the level of official state songs, and nobody sings those either. It is hard to imagine anyone in California, for example, getting inspired by a song extolling the glories of either the Yale Bulldogs or the state of Connecticut. Baseball, on the other hand, was hailed as our “National Game” as early as the 1860s. Something about the pastoral setting in which the games were played captured the imagination of the public. Indeed, the very first game played under modern rules took place in 1846 in New Jersey (yes, New Jersey!), in a pleasant outdoor recreation area just across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan called the Elysian Fields. You can’t get more pastoral than that. The song “Hurrah for Our National Game” (1869) pictures on the sheet music cover a bald eagle standing on a crag, majestically clutching two bats, an olive branch, and a shield emblazoned with the stars and stripes. And you can’t get more American than that. So we have the patriotic and the pastoral—a surefire nineteenth-century “doubleheader” image of our country. That’s all the songwriters needed to get going. And going they got! With a vengeance. Composers and lyricists, sensing a good thing churned out baseball-themed songs in the musical styles of the periods in which they were active: marches, ragtime, waltzes, two-steps, polkas, jazz, etc. They cranked out ballads, comic songs, sentimental ditties, songs about the heroes (real and imaginary) on the field, songs about killing the umpire, taking a girl to the game and proposing in the stands (trying to “get to first base” with your best girl). They tried to top the last hit song, hoping that the vaudeville and music hall stars of the day would popularize their latest effort and send the people rushing to music stores to buy the sheet music and, later, the records. The result: hundreds and hundreds of songs—some delightful and others best forgotten. Football is not the only team sport that didn’t inspire America’s songwriters and fans. Can you name one—just one—song about basketball or hockey? Fuggeddaboudit! Lacrosse? Gimme a break! Polo? Are you kidding? That leaves us (happily) with the 1869 lyric “Then hurrah for our National Game, hurrah,/ Here’s a cheer for its well-earned fame./ Success to it ever, hurrah, hurrah,/ Hurrah for our National Game.” I can think of one song about hockey, but it’s in French. Of course, the most famous song in your collection is “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” What is the story behind that? On the face of it, there is little to distinguish “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” from the many other jolly three-quarter-time songs of its period. Next year is the hundredth anniversary of its composition, in 1908, but why it has endured as the “anthem” of baseball is something of a mystery. In fact the 1906 song “It’s Great at a Baseball Game” anticipated not only the mood and meter of “Take Me Out,” but its “menu” as well. Instead of “peanuts and crackerjack” we are offered “hot buttered popcorn and peanuts.” It was composed by two giants of Tin Pan Alley of the day, Fred Fischer, “Peg o’ My Heart,” and Richard Whiting, “Sleepy Time Gal,” to name but two of their enduring hits. The tune of “It’s Great” is catchy and eminently singable, but seventh-inning stretches come and go, and nobody sings it today. Then in 1908 the celebrated songwriter and showman George M. Cohan (“Give My Regards to Broadway,” “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “Over There”) teamed up with two other well-known tunesmiths to turn out “Take Your Girl to the Ball Game,” which scans rhythmically exactly like “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” This one offers “cool lemonade” and also offers some advice in affairs of the heart. Do you see a pattern emerging here? But another strikeout. Turning our attention now to “Take Me Out,” let’s look at its composers, Albert von Tilzer and Jack Norworth. Von Tilzer was a prolific composer (“Put Your Arms Around Me Honey, Hold Me Tight, “I’ll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time”), but the key to the success of “Take Me Out” is due in great measure to the collaboration of Jack Norworth and his wife, the immensely popular vaudeville singer Nora Bayes. Together in 1903 they had composed a song that became a “standard,” “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” [Note to younger readers of this interview who may never have heard of these songs and composers: This was big-time stuff in its day, and beyond. Everybody knew these songs. —A.B.] Anyway, if you want your song to be successful, there’s nothing like having your famous wife sing it on stage. Nora introduced the song in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1910, and it was an instantaneous hit. It quickly moved from the stage to the diamond and was soon being sung in all the big-league (and other) ballparks. All the more amazing when you realize that the recording industry was in its infancy and radio broadcasting was non-existent. A new wrinkle was added to this saga 55 years later. On August 25, 2005, in honor of Jewish Heritage Day, the Jewish Peoples’ Philharmonic Chorus sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” before a Mets Game at Shea Stadium—in Yiddish!
July 25, 2007
The Clipper Ship of Today: An Interview with David Kaplan Posted by Allen Barra at 10:50 AM EST David A. Kaplan’s new book, Mine’s Bigger: Tom Perkins and the Making of the Greatest Sailing Machine Ever Built, is an exhilarating account of how Tom Perkins, the man most responsible for bankrolling Silicon Valley, created “the perfect yacht”—the biggest, fastest, riskiest, highest-tech, and most self indulgent sailboat ever: the Maltese Falcon. A modern-day version of the classic clipper ship, the Falcon is as long as a football field, more than 40 feet wide, and cost a cool $130 million to build. Kaplan, a senior editor at Newsweek, talked to us about Perkins and his amazing creation from his home in New York. First, I’ve got to tell you, I never thought a book on a sailboat could keep me so enthralled. You call Perkins’ amazing ship, the Maltese Falcon, a descendant of clipper ships. Could you give us the short form on the evolution of sailboats from clipper ship to super ship? The clipper ships, which fascinated the Americans and Brits and much of the world with their tales of speed and adventure, had their heyday for only a few decades, from the 1850s into the 1870s. They weren’t unconventionally rigged; they were multi-masted square-riggers, which had been around for centuries, but they were long and narrow and built for speed. And because they carried only light cargo, like tea, they could make the most of their large sail area. The clippers were called that because they either “clipped” off speed records or sailed “at a clip.” After the clippers faded from the scene, replaced by steam-powered vessels, sailing became recreational. The J-boats were beautiful and colossal sloops; catamarans could skim along the water and achieve great speed; the America’s Cup boats over the years experimented with new designs and materials. But the revolutionary rig of the Maltese Falcon represents the biggest advance in sailing in 150 years. Tom Perkins calls it a “clipper” because of its 15 square sails and because he aims to evoke the romance of yesteryear. But he also calls it a “yacht,” as the boat is over-the-top in luxury and high-tech materials and finish. Why revolutionary? Unlike the clippers of yore, the Falcon’s rig is automated and computerized, and there is no rigging whatsoever. The 35-ton carbon-fiber masts are freestanding—no stays or shrouds to support them—and to adjust course, the masts themselves rotate. On the old clippers, two or three-dozen deckhands had to maneuver the yardarms by pulling on ropes (sheets), in a complicated, time-consuming, and dangerous maneuver. On the Falcon, you press a button. It’s rather unbelievable. One of the interesting questions you raise is why any sane man would spend $130 million of his own money to build such a boat. Why don’t you take a crack at answering that for us? Well, it’s a lot easier if you have $500 million or so to begin with. And one certainly can rationalize that it’s a reasonable investment, given that Perkins says he’s had offers to sell the yacht for more than he paid for it. But the bigger answer is that he has spent his life on creating things—that’s part of what venture capitalists do—and this is his ultimate creation, as absurd or profligate as it might seem to some. Who are Perkins’s biggest rivals? Who’s come the closest to creating the equal to the Maltese Falcon? How close does it come to matching its performance? The Falcon has no rivals, given its unique design and that no other mono-hulled cruising boat comes close to it in speed. There are racing boats, ultra-light and stripped down, that will go faster in certain conditions, but it’s like comparing apples and elephants. And more important, from Perkins’s perspective, they’re so different as to not constitute rivals. None of that suggests that Perkins doesn’t watch what others are doing. As I discuss at much length in the book, the two other mega-yacht sailboats, both owned by Americans, were always on Perkins’s mind during the conception and construction of the Falcon. And he was on their minds, as the Falcon was built. Jim Clark, of Netscape fame, built the magnificent but plodding schooner Athena; Joe Vittoria, who made his fortune in the Avis buyout of the 1980s, built the largest sloop ever, Mirabella V. Both of those boats have their fine attributes—Athena is classic and Mirabella V can rocket upwind—but neither can match the Falcon in sustained speed. And of course, Perkins’s is bigger. The show down between the Maltese Falcon and the Mirabella V was something of a modern classic. There are those who maintain that the Mirabella V might have won or at least made a better show had she not sustained a two-foot tear in her mainsail. Can you describe their race and what it proved about the essential difference between the two ships? I think it was widely anticipated, but not quite a showdown. Not a real racecourse; more in the nature of two drag racers who saw an opening on the Interstate for a few miles. Unless you have a real racecourse, with different angles of sail and over a few hours of time, then you don’t have a real test. The breeze approached 20 knots, and both boats were really surging along. Mirabella V seemed to do better than the Falcon beating to windward. And that was to be expected, given that she’s a sloop, and no square-rigger’s going to excel upwind. When both boats bore off to the wind, the Falcon did better, also to be expected. But, alas, you didn’t have a real racecourse, with different angles of sail (which is why courses are typically triangular) over a few hours, so it wasn’t a true test. And of course, the breakdown of Mirabella V abbreviated what competition there was.
But it sure was exciting while it lasted. Two mammoth sailing machines in a stiff breeze and building seas off the coast of Monaco on a summer afternoon. Hard to imagine better nautical times! When one of the boats passed the other’s bow—heeling over, white foam rushing out from the sides—it was spectacular. One of the most interesting things about Mine’s Bigger is the information on the history and evolution of the clipper ships. I hadn’t realized that the era of the clippers was so short-lived. You write about the 1872 race by the British clippers Thermopylae and Cutty Sark from Shanghai to London, both fully loaded with more than a million pounds of tea. The Cutty Sark lost but earned the reputation as the superior ship, which it maintains to this day. Why is that? The era of the clippers was indeed short-lived. And given the rapid emergence of the steam engine and steamships, it might have been even shorter, except that the clipper ships still had value on some long runs that involved carrying light cargo.
The Cutty Sark won other loosely defined competitions. Remember, there weren’t races as such, but coincidental departures (no owner was going to keep his vessel around waiting for competitors who were likely carrying the same commercial cargo, like tea). But more than its reputation as a faster ship, I think it won over the hearts of the British, because though it lost to Thermopylae in that epic 1872 contest, its noble recovery from near catastrophe in the southern waters of the Indian Ocean seemed more worthy. And as it was, the Cutty Sark didn’t arrive in London that much later than Thermopylae.
The tragedy of the Cutty Sark is it was heavily damaged in dry dock in London a few months ago, after 50 years as a leading tourist attraction. It remains to be seen how much of the great ship will be restored. What’s the life expectancy for a great sailing machine like the Maltese Falcon? That is, given the inevitable advances in sailing technology, advances that the fame of the Falcon herself has helped push, how long is it likely to be before a bigger and better ship comes along? And in what area are the advances most likely to occur? “Bigger” could come any time some tycoon decides it needs to be. Sailboats don’t scale vertically, because most owners want to be able to fit under the major bridges of the world (Golden Gate, Verrazano, Bridge of the Americas), so the masts can’t be much taller than than the Falcon’s. If you get much longer, then you need to add additional masts. In theory, it wouldn’t be hard—just more expensive. I have heard that a well-known Mideast figure has considered a sailboat well over 400 feet, but it’s still just chatter, and in any event, that boat would most likely still be a traditional ketch or schooner. The interesting thing to me is that no other boat with this revolutionary rig, the DynaRig, or what some are calling the Falcon Rig, has yet been announced. I suspect the reasons are both economic and aesthetic. Cost worries even gazillionaires, and most yachties want a traditional-looking boat. Call Tom Perkins’s boat whatever you like—a magnificent, ultra-modern machine or a strange vessel only Darth Vader could love—but it ain’t traditional-looking. “Better”? Nobody I talk to theorizes a better mast material than carbon fiber, so I doubt you’ll see advances there any time soon. Hull material? Somebody will someday build this hull not out of steel but out of composite materials (like carbon fiber and other materials), but that will only marginally reduce weight and increase speed. Computers and fiber optics? It’s hard to see so far how the Falcon can be improved, though perhaps speed of mast rotation and sail deployment might get a little better. But sailing advances are very slow in the making, and that’s one of the reasons this boat, and its owner, so fascinated me. This “clipper yacht” represents a leap in the way megayachts are sailed—in some respects the kind of leap represented by the clipper ships of yore.
July 4, 2007
American Mythbuster: A July 4 Interview with Ray Raphael Posted by Allen Barra at 12:05 AM EST Paul Revere didn’t make that ride—except in Longfellow’s poem. Patrick Henry probably didn’t say “Give me liberty or give me death!” The words were likely put into his mouth by a biographer several decades after his death. Washington’s winter at Valley Forge really wasn’t that bad compared with other winters during the Revolution. Molly Pitcher probably never existed, and the colonies most definitely did not offer slaves their freedom to fight against the British. These are just a few examples of the misinformation corrected by Ray Raphael in his cult favorite book Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past (New Press, 368 pages, $15.95). Founding Myths doesn’t merely debunk popular stories in American History, it shows how they were created and why they persist, and why their persistence is blocking the path toward a true understanding of American history. Just in time for the Fourth of July, Mr. Raphael shot off some fireworks for us in this interview. One of the most enjoyable things about your book, Founding Myths, is that you skewer treasured legends of America history, or perhaps folklore would be a more appropriate term, while providing the context in which their stories grew. Paul Revere, for instance. Is the story of Paul Revere’s ride one that was popular after the revolution or was it a creation of a later era? The legend of Paul Revere’s ride was a long time in the making. Revere himself, in his official deposition shortly afterwards, devoted only one sentence to the ride that would someday make him famous. When he died, 43 years later, his obituary made no mention of it. Still, locals remembered this and other rides made by Paul Revere, and they played up his heroic deeds by word of mouth. This was not unusual. For generations after the Revolution, Americans told tales of their local heroes during the War for Independence. In the mid-nineteenth century, the historians George Bancroft and Benson Lossing collected over a thousand such stories, each featuring some local star. Paul Revere was among these, but only one of many. That’s where matters stood when the great American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published his famous poem 86 years after the fact, in January of 1861. The Civil War at that moment seemed imminent, and Longfellow wanted to wake up the nation to the threat, so he composed the lines that millions upon millions of American school children would have to learn and recite for the better part of a century: “Listen my children, and you shall hear/ Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” Longfellow meant well, but he gave himself so much poetic license that he distorted the ride beyond recognition. Revere never waited to see the “one if by land, two if by sea” lanterns, for instance, and there were hundreds of alarms sounded that night, not just one. Subsequent generations of Americans grew up thinking that a lone rider from Boston awakened the sleepy-eyed farmers, and this effectively suppressed the amazing, patriotic story of how those very same farmers, seven months earlier, had risen up in a body to overthrow British rule, and how they had been arming themselves and training ever since, knowing full well that the Regulars would soon march out against them. Legend, with an assist from beer commercials, has granted Sam Adams a greater role. You write: “Based on the word of his Tory foes, we have granted Samuel Adams superhuman powers. This one man, we say, set Boston all ablaze—but the historical record tells a different story.” Why has Sam Adams’s role in the conflict been overinflated? The Sam Adams story imbues the tumultuous crowd actions in Boston with design and purpose. The mythic Sam Adams, our favorite rabble-rouser and the alleged mastermind of independence, writes and directs the script, keeping the Revolution on cue. The problem is, there was no mastermind of independence. Samuel Adams (he did not answer to the name of Sam) spoke out firmly against independence until late in 1775, when many others were also starting to entertain the notion. Before that, he was fighting for the rights of British subjects living in America. That’s how he and nearly all other patriots viewed themselves for the first decade of unrest. Nor were “the body of the people” (as they preferred to call themselves) a mindless rabble, incapable of acting without orders from above. That was a Tory fabrication, because Tories did not want to believe that common people could think for themselves. Unfortunately, we buy into the Tory way of thinking every time we say that “Boston was controlled by a trained mob and Sam Adams was its keeper.” That’s a direct quote from the most influential biography of Adams written in the twentieth century. This suggests a question regarding what you term “founder chic.” You write, “Founder chic authors depict political leaders as causal agents who are personally responsible for all the major events of the times. . . . Since the importance of their stories is determined in part by the importance of their protagonists, biographies have a vested interest in endowing their subjects with as much historical significance as the record will bear—and sometimes more.” You take particular exception to David McCullough’s view of John Adams: “‘It was John Adams,’ wrote McCullough in his Pulitzer prize-winning biography, John Adams, ‘who made it [the Declaration of Independence] happen.’” What’s your main point of contention with McCullough’s view? According to McCullough, John Adams acted the role of a lonely hero, willing to buck the will of the people. If Adams had been “poll-driven,” he would have “scrapped the whole idea,” McCullough claims, since there was little popular support for independence in 1776. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Twenty-one months earlier, people throughout rural Massachusetts had declared in favor of independence, but John Adams tried to talk them out of it. Later, after Lexington and Concord, Adams came around to their opinion. But he was hardly alone. In January of 1776, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense sparked a nationwide conversation of unprecedented proportions. In every tavern and meeting house across the land, people argued the merits of the case, and by spring the results were in: an overwhelming proportion supported independence. More than 90 towns, counties, and states issued formal declarations urging Congress to take action. The largest state, Virginia, declared independence on its own. It took a while for Congress to catch up with the groundswell of popular opinion. Delegates from Maryland, for instance, were opposed, but then the county conventions met and issued specific instructions: Change your vote, they said, and do it immediately. “See the glorious effects of county instructions,” a Maryland patriot wrote to John Adams. “Our people have fire if not smothered.” The sweeping, deliberate debate over independence resulted in the most productive outpouring of patriotic sentiment in our nation’s history, but McCullough takes the honor and glory away from the people and bestows it on a single individual. Ironically, John Adams knew better, and he said so at the time. On July 3, the day after Congress voted in favor of independence, he boasted to his wife Abigail that the population at large had considered the “great question of independence . . . by discussing it in newspapers and pamphlets, by debating it in assemblies, conventions, committees of safety and inspection, in town and county meetings, as well as in private conversation,” and in the end “the whole people, in every colony of the thirteen, have adopted it as their own act.” I was crushed to hear that the famous words attributed to Patrick Henry—“I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”—were not his. You write, “Nowhere in any of his speeches, as rendered by later writers, do we see even a hint of pandering to instincts less noble than the love of liberty. His speeches, quite literally, have been whitewashed.” Can you give us a brief summation of the whitewashing of Patrick Henry’s image? Patrick Henry may or may not have said, “Give me liberty or give me death.” But if he did, it was no big deal. Patriots had been using that particular refrain ever since the Stamp Act resistance ten years earlier. It is improbable, however, that Henry delivered the 1,217-word speech that William Wirt attributed to him 42 years later. Nobody had recorded the speech, and Wirt’s sole informant provided him with distant recollections for only one fifth of it. Wirt, incidentally, was quite an orator in his own right. He delivered the official commemorative address in Washington on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. So what did Patrick Henry say in his call-to-arms that aroused such emotions on March 23, 1775? Only one firsthand account has survived, but it gives some idea of the tone: Henry called the King “a tyrant, a fool, a puppet,” and he “said there was no Englishmen, no Scots, no Britons, but a set of wretches sunk in luxury, that had lost their native courage.” In other words, Henry appealed to people’s lowest instincts by calling his enemies names and labeling them cowards. Most likely, he also played the slave card. White Virginians were terrified that British officials would soon declare freedom for all slaves who fought against their masters, and eight months later Virginia’s royal governor did just that. To recruit soldiers, Patrick Henry at that point waged an intensive propaganda campaign based on the British offer to free the slaves. Henry also speculated extensively in Western lands, and to promote his interests he of course was a rabid Indian fighter. One of his main complaints against the British was that they had closed off settlement in the West. Henry’s personal perspectives—fearing slaves, hating Indians, craving expansion—were shared by most white Virginians, and it is highly unlikely that these did not figure in his thundering speeches intended to arouse anti-British sentiment. One of the American Revolution’s most cherished myths is that of the patriotic slave. I suppose we have the Mel Gibson movie The Patriot to thank for perpetuating that myth, particularly the scene when someone reads a fictional order from George Washington that “All bound slaves who give minimum one year service in the Continental Army will be granted freedom and be paid a bounty of five shillings for each month of service.” Your comment is, “The document . . . which is seen on screen and appears visually authentic, contains more historical errors in a single sentence that at first seems possible.” Could you briefly enumerate them for us? First, George Washington regarded the presence of slaves in the Continental Army as a total embarrassment, and he did everything in his power to keep them out. One week after assuming command, he ordered that no “stroller, negro, or vagabond” be allowed to enlist. The British Army was much more welcoming. Four months after Washington’s decree, the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to all slaves who left their masters and fought against the patriots. Over the course of the war, tens of thousands of slaves fled to the British in search of their freedom, including at least 20 men and women enslaved to George Washington. Next, even if Washington had wanted to enlist slaves, he never would have offered them freedom for only one year of service. He insisted on longer enlistments, three years or the duration of the war. Had he promised freedom in return for such a short term, his recruiting officers would have been instantly overwhelmed, and the Continental Army would have become predominantly black. Further, who would have compensated the masters? To seize “property” from patriotic slave owners without compensation was unthinkable—but how could Congress afford to pay for slaves when it couldn’t even afford enough food to sustain the soldiers it had? Plus, Washington was simply not the one to do the recruiting. That was left to the individual states. Later in the war some states did permit slaves to serve as substitutes for whites who had been drafted, but even so, not all of these were granted freedom in the end. In South Carolina, the setting for The Patriot, John Laurens, the son of the president of Congress, proposed arming some slaves to fight alongside the patriots, but Washington opposed the idea, and the South Carolina government rejected it outright. This is not to say South Carolina did not make use of slaves to bolster the army. To induce whites to enlist, Southern states offered special bounties—not to slaves, but of slaves. Near the end of the war, when manpower was scarce, any white who signed on would receive a special bonus of one slave. The worst myth propagated in The Patriot is that slaves were so devoted to their masters that they would risk their lives on the battlefield. The truth is, slaves tried to use the Revolutionary War in whatever way they could to gain their own freedom. A few enslaved African-Americans in the North managed to bargain for their freedom by fighting for the patriots; a vastly greater number in the South thought their prospects were better with the British. In either case, slaves struggled to achieve freedom from a tyranny far more acute than “taxation without representation.” In your chapter “March of the American People,” you write, “The Revolutionary War looks very different if we stand on Indian lands and look back east.” This is a particularly interesting point since most Americans seem to feel that the Indian Wars really took place on the Western plains. You remind us that “the American Revolution was by far the largest Indian war in our nation’s history.” Why do you feel this very important point has been all but forgotten by writers of American history textbooks? While other conflicts between Native Americans and Euro-Americans involved only one or two Indian nations at a time, all Native peoples east of the Mississippi became directly involved in the Revolutionary War, most fighting with the British, a few with the Americans. For a decade after the Revolution, various pan-Indian confederations continued to pursue their own wars of independence. Finally, after two decades of fighting, Euro-Americans managed to expand their effective domain from east of the Appalachian Divide clear to the Mississippi. Previously, it had taken a century and a half to conquer an equivalent amount of territory along the Eastern seaboard. The American Revolution, in short, was at least in part a war of conquest, but we don’t like to view it that way. In our texts we learn about white-Indian conflict during the early settlements in the seventeenth century, and we pick up the story again with the struggles for the West in the nineteenth century, but we ignore the critical moment at the time of our nation’s founding, when the groundwork for westward expansion was established. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, for instance, is always portrayed as the crowning achievement of the Articles of Confederation, because it paved the way to the West. Rarely during our discussions of the founding era do we treat the impact on Native populations, because it’s simply too embarrassing. If we view the American Revolution as a simple conflict between the United States and its former rulers from across the seas, it’s easy to see who stands on the moral high ground. If, on the other hand, we acknowledge the persistence of white-Indian struggles, that moral high ground is quickly surrendered. We—the American nation that was created in the late eighteenth century—lose our definition, our purity. Our core national narrative can admit that “we” were not always the good guys, but please, not at the time of our birth. That remains sacred, and so we continue to push the agonizing aspects of the American saga forward or backward in time. This is a shame. Americans, from the beginning, were both democrats and bullies. Despite the hesitancy of elites, most patriots at the time of our nation’s birth believed people should govern themselves, and that is why they threw off British rule. They also believed they had the right, even the obligation, to impose their will on people they deemed inferior. These two core beliefs are key to understanding American history and the American character, and we do an injustice to ourselves and to our nation when we pretend otherwise.
June 29, 2007
Remember Oscar Micheaux! An Interview with Patrick McGilligan Posted by Allen Barra at 11:30 AM EST Patrick McGilligan’s Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only—The Life of America’s First Black Filmmaker (HarperCollins, 461 pages, $29.95) opens a door into a secret past, the world of black Hollywood in the first half of the twentieth century. McGilligan, a biographer of Robert Altman, James Cagney, and Alfred Hitchcock, among others, discussed his book on the legendary Micheaux from his home in Milwaukee. The story of Oscar Micheaux—filmmaker, novelist, black pioneer, and shameless self promoter—is so amazing that one wonders how he could have been forgotten more than half a century after his death. Why has he had to wait so long for a definitive biography? Micheaux has been in the process of being reclaimed ever since the late 1960s, but the reclamation began primarily in scholarly circles and among African-American historians and scholars in particular. It has taken time to bring his legend to the general public. There are many reasons. Since Micheaux never set foot in Jim Crow Hollywood, he didn’t benefit from the studio record-keeping and public-relations machinery that other (white) directors of his era took for granted. He drew attention and reviews from the black press only, and the black press has dwindled today. The film-critic establishment is still predominantly white and oriented toward Hollywood, so even now critics either know little about him or don’t care. Hopefully that will change. Many of his films are lost; the prints of those that survive are tattered. He had very few prints of his films made to begin with, compared with the films of major Hollywood studios. And Micheaux did not have children or close surviving relatives to speak up for him after his death. That death transpired a long time ago, more than 50 years ago; few people are alive nowadays who can claim to have known him first-hand or to have experienced his films. This is true of many who worked in “race pictures,” the bulk of which are lost. To a certain extent Micheaux lived a flamboyant life, but at the same time he covered his tracks with mystery and secrecy to elude the creditors who dogged him. So even though there were some good interviews on record with people who worked with him, and even though scholars have done a lot of very good digging into his life story and career, there were large gaps and blank areas. Most people warned me that a biography of him couldn’t be written. That intrigued me all the more. I liked the challenge.
Do you like Micheaux himself? You seem to be intrigued by him, but he certainly seems to have been something of a scoundrel. It’s said that every biography at one time or another must come to terms with whether or not he likes his subject. How do you feel about Oscar? I like and admire him without qualification, and the journey of the book convinced me of his greatness as well as his likeability. I have written about Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood, both of whom have exhibited questionable behavior in their private lives, to put it nicely. I ended up disliking one of them. Fritz Lang, another of my subjects, is believed to have shot his first wife; he flirted with Nazism; and he was a devotee of prostitutes and call girls. On the set Lang was a tyrant who bullied people. Hollywood is full of scoundrels and worse. People are always trying to cheat other people out of their rightful share of credit and money. Micheaux had to cope with racism and poverty, and he had to make his own way in life against tremendous obstacles. In order to write his books and make his films—very personal works with brave social commentary—he had to lie, cheat, and steal on occasion. The very definition of an artist! Do enough of Micheaux’s films survive to give us an accurate sense of his ability as a director? Is there anyone in mainstream Hollywood you might compare him to? Only about one third of Micheaux’s nearly four dozen films survive, and those that do survive exist in truncated form, largely because Micheaux could not afford to manufacture numerous prints of his films, and the handful that circulated were diminished by censorship and by usage. His first heyday was the silent era, and those films are the rarest. However, two of his most famous silent pictures survive in fair condition: The Symbol of the Unconquered, from 1920, and Body and Soul, from 1925, the first motion picture to star Paul Robeson. Judging these two films on content and style, they are indeed stellar works. Content-wise because they depict black America at a time when Hollywood didn’t have a clue, and because they touch on important racially-sensitive issues—from Southern peonage and lynching to religious hypocrisy and miscegenation. Style-wise, in spite of low-budget limitations, they are very sophisticated films, showing the influences of both German Expressionist and Soviet editing ideas. His casting was as sharp as his stories, and he launched many, many performers from different areas of black show business into film careers. This shouldn’t be underrated. Micheaux had a very good run after sound came in the early 1930s, and two of his most enduring films from this decade also survive: Lem Hawkins Confession, from 1935, and God’s Stepchildren, from 1938. The first is an ingenious all-black (all his films are all-black) retelling of the real-life Leo Frank case from 1913, a murder mystery that fascinated Micheaux. He had passed through Atlanta at the time of the controversial trial. And the second was his consummate parable about “passing”—black people passing as whites—one of his obsessive themes. Both have flaws; both are exceptional films. I think of Micheaux as an “auteur” before the French coined the word. Not only did he write and direct all his films, (often editing them and making small on-camera appearances too, but many of his stories were unmistakable allegories of his own life. In this respect, too, he was important and unique. I really can’t compare him to anyone in Hollywood. Maybe you could think of him as a combination of Roger Corman and Spike Lee, ahead of their time. I try not to rank or rate people that way in my books, and Micheaux was not only great, he was singular; hence the title of my book: The Great and Only. A film about Oscar Micheaux’s life would be an opportunity to rediscover a lost world. I suppose the inevitable question is who should play him in a film on his life. And who would direct? I agree with you that a film about Micheaux would have the attraction of a lost world, and it would give back a folk hero to America. So the lead character would have to be acted by a man able to display genius and charisma as well as human failings. His second wife, Alice B. Russell, is also a major part. Often she was his lead actress, sometimes his co-writer, usually his producer, always his muse. Mrs. Micheaux loomed in her husband’s career more significantly than any of the dutiful or invisible wives of Hollywood directors. Someone like Will Smith could play Micheaux to the hilt, I’m sure. But there are also many young black actors and actresses nowadays, some just beginning to make their names in film or crossing over from pop music, so it is just as likely that a relative newcomer is lurking out there, whose name we do not yet know, who would be perfect. I should add that we are already getting feelers from film companies. Micheaux’s inspiring story of struggle and conquest is a natural for a movie. Who should direct? It could be anyone from Spike Lee to Spielberg to someone like Taylor Hackford, who brought Ray Charles’s story to the screen and made a very good Chuck Berry documentary. I don’t think the color of a director’s skin is as important as their passion for the subject, but I think the script would benefit from a screenwriter with the imagination to fill in some of the mysteries of that lost world, someone who can empathize with Micheaux’s predicament living in a Jim Crow world. And that should really be someone either African-American or who can strongly identify with African-American history.
June 28, 2007
The Heart of the West—in the South: An Interview with Jim Dunham Posted by Allen Barra at 10:15 AM EST Jim Dunham’s heroes have always been cowboys and Indians. As an actor (he has toured in a one-man show as Mark Twain), fast-draw artist and frontier historian (most recently in several episodes of the Tales of The Gun series on the History Channel), Dunham has spent more than four decades collecting information and artifacts on the West and sharing his knowledge with fellow enthusiasts all over the country. He is also an accomplished painter and a Western art scholar and is director of special projects and historian for the Booth Western Art Museum, in Cartersville, Georgia. The museum’s slogan: “Explore the West without leaving the South.” Dunham recently curated Beautiful Utility: Decorated Objects from Cowboy and Indian Culture, which runs through September 16. (To see examples of artists Jim mentions and others whose work is on display in the museum, go to the Booth’s website, click on “Collections,” and then click through to individual artists to view their work.) Let’s start with the obvious question: How did one of the most remarkable museums in the country of Old West art and culture come to be in Georgia? There are several museums in the Eastern United States that are devoted to Western American art. Frederic Remington was born in upstate New York, so it stands to reason that his museum should be in his home state. The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indiana and our museum, the Booth in Georgia, have similar histories. Both grew out of collections put together by families over a number of decades, and both families decided to build museums to house their collections in their hometowns, so that they could visit often. What becomes clear when you think about it is the fact that all of us who were raised in the years following World War II had our lives filled with Wild West entertainment. It mattered little what part of the country you were raised in. I love the West and was born in a Chicago suburb. There were more Westerns on TV in the 1950s than there are reality and CSI shows today. The oil boom in America made rich people out of struggling Oklahoma and Texas ranchers, and they began to pay handsomely for cowboy- and Indian-themed art for their homes. The result was that during the time when the art world was enthralled with abstraction, many an outstanding painter or illustrator was turning to Western subjects to make a living. The Booth collection is dominated by living artists who were influenced by the movies, just like the people who bought the art. What we are finding out is that people from all over the United States personally relate to these romantic, storytelling works. So it’s a case of life imitating art imitating life? Or something like that? Which Western artists are the most representative among current Western-themed artists? And which artists whose work is in the Booth are among your favorites? The most honored and prizewinning Western artist working today is Howard Terpning, who had a painting sold at auction last year for $1.4 million. The Booth collection includes five of his best. My favorite is called River Crow, which shows two Native American Crow Indians on horseback with their image reflected in a pool of water. [To see this painting on Mr. Terpning’s website, go here.] I also like the artists that came out of an illustration background, i.e., Harold Von Schmidt, Tom Ryan, John Clymer, W. H. D. Koerner, and John Hampton. The most popular artists with the public are those who paint in a very realistic style. Don Crowley, Paul Calle, and Frank MacCarthy are the best examples. The museum, however, has great diversity, and we also have works by Andy Warhol, Fritz Scholder, and Thom Ross, who portray the West in a unique way. You can see many of these artists on our website. The Booth’s newest current exhibit, for which you are the curator, is called Beautiful Utility: Decorated Objects from Cowboy and Indian Culture. That’s an intriguing title. What does it mean? What objects does it include? The Booth’s collection is essentially made up of paintings and sculpture, plus an original 1865 Abbott-Downing company stagecoach and an antique Western mud wagon. Our 80,000-square-foot museum particularly features living artists who paint, draw, and sculpt the American frontier movement and today’s ranch life. For a change of pace, our executive director, Seth Hopkins, asked me to curate an exhibition of gear or “trappings” of both the cattle-punching era and the Native Americans. I accepted, and it turned out to be quite a challenge. My goal was to display practical items and clothing used in everyday life, with the stipulation that they must be highly decorated—cowboy and Indian equipment that transcended its useful purposes and was art as well. Working with a few collectors in the greater Atlanta area led us to some absolutely magnificent examples of Plains Indian quill and bead work, pottery, basketry, and silver work from the Southwest, and wonderful examples of artistic expression from each area of Native Americans. For examples of cowboy “beautiful utility,” we were loaned silver mounted saddles, engraved guns, tooled-leather equipment, and silver- and gold-enhanced spurs. Eventually 14 collectors contributed to the exhibit, and about 180 objects are now on display, until September 16th, 2007. The Western artist Charles M. Russell wrote about a cowboy who was the fashion leader in camp and had the best gear that could be bought. Lacking mirrors on the trail, he would admire the shadow he and his horse cast on sunny days. The other punchers called him “Pretty Shadow.” We chose the name “Beautiful Utility” to capture the essence of gear like that cowboy’s and similar Native American objects and clothing, whose aesthetic far exceeded what was required for their utility. A unique feature of the Booth is the way it goes beyond art objects to encompass other aspects of the frontier tradition. For instance, one exhibit I saw featured a history of Western film posters, from the early silents to the twenty-first century. You also have a state-of-the-art theater. What goes on there? We generally use the theater, which seats 145, for live performances, art lectures, and music groups. Once a month we have “Western Movie Sunday” and show a double feature of classic old Western films. I usually give a talk, and sometimes we have a trivia-and-fact-filled handout for the folks who attend. It’s a very popular event with folks who grew up with Westerns and want to see them again and share them with their kids and grandkids. In October you have the Fifth Annual Southeastern Cowboy Symposium and Festival. Can you give us a brief definition of cowboy poetry? The tradition of cowboy poetry can be traced back to the old days when cowboys entertained one another around the chuck wagon with songs, stories, and poems. Poetry gatherings have become popular in recent years due especially to Elko, Nevada’s Cowboy Poetry Gathering and publicity from The Tonight Show and other media coverage. And in addition to our annual Cowboy Symposium and Festival, the Booth hosts a special cowboy poetry event every March. Past performers have included Don Edwards, Rex Allen, Jr., and Michael Martin Murphy. What would we be able to do if we attended the event? The annual Cowboy Symposium and Festival is the single biggest weekend event that the museum hosts. We call it a symposium because we include writers, artists, and historians, and present a series of lectures. Last year, for example, we had author Gary Roberts discuss his book Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend, a biography of John H. “Doc” Holliday, the Georgia dentist who became famous for his adventures with Wyatt Earp. We also feature nationally known cowboy poets and cowboy singers, and this year Riders in the Sky will return for a pair of concerts. Most of the activities are on the four-acre grounds around the museum building, and they include vendors selling everything from saddles to oil paintings. We focus on hands-on activities for the whole family, with a Native American village, Indian dancing, storytelling, Civil and Indian Wars military encampments, demonstrations, and talks. Perhaps the most popular event of the Cowboy Symposium and Festival is the reenactment of the famous O.K. Corral gunfight. With a local group of actors who are interested in Western history, I have put together a 30-minute program that tells the events that led up to the shootout in the vacant lot that cold October day in 1881 Tombstone. We run the actual gunfight in slow motion with explanation and then perform it in real time. The actors fire about 30 blanks in about 30 seconds. Finally, as emcee I talk a little about the aftermath of the event and how we came to know so much about this half minute in history. You’ve been portraying, working with, and lecturing about cowboys and Indians your entire life. I’ve seen you perform several times, and I’m still amazed at the facility with which you can handle a six-gun. Tell us about some of your favorite performances. And which celebrities have you coached in the art of fancy gun handling? After several summers performing at Colorado chuck-wagon supper-entertainment venues in the 1960s for the tourist industry, I was hired by 20th Century–Fox in Los Angeles to perform a fast and fancy gun-handling act for their studio tours. This led to working with actors who needed to learn gun handling. By this time, 1967, most of the famous Western stars like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, etc., had long ago been coached by people like Arvo Ojala and Rod Redwing. However, I did get to work with Bob Hastings from McHale’s Navy, Clu Gulager from The Virginian, Bill Bixby from The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, and others. Bixby was a magician and a fast learner. I told him if he got interested in fast draw the sport, he could be a contender. Years later, I taught Armand Assante gun spinning and did the stunt closeup inserts for the HBO Western Blind Justice. I also taught Scott Bacula and Dean Stockwell how to draw for an episode of Quantum Leap titled “The Last Gunfighter.” My personal favorite program experience came in 1990, when I got to perform my act at the Golden Boot Awards in Hollywood. Gene Autry, along with Pat Buttram, had founded the awards program to honor excellence in Western film and television programming. When I got on stage, in the front row I saw Roy and Dale Rogers, Gene Autry, Pat Buttram, Iron Eyes Cody, Burt Lancaster, Rex Allen, Clayton Moore, Denver Pyle, Noah Beery, Jr., Katharine Ross, Sam Elliott, and Charlton Heston. I said from the stage, “You know, Willie Nelson wrote a song called ‘My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.’ That’s also true for me—and tonight my heroes are here in the room with me.” The icing on the cake was that after my show Gene Autry got up and said my act was the best part of the evening. A clip of me spinning my guns and Gene’s remarks were on Entertainment Tonight the next night. Sadly most of those greats have now passed away, but it was a special night I’ll never forget.
June 15, 2007
Getting Inside the Greatest Gunfights: An Interview with Bob Boze Bell Posted by Allen Barra at 07:20 PM EST Bob Boze Bell is a failed professional baseball player, former radio talk-show host, author, artist, cartoonist, Old West historian, and, currently executive editor of True West, which, founded in 1953, is the oldest continuing publication on the legend and lore of the American frontier. From today (June 15) to June 24 he will be emcee at the Single Action Shooting Society’s (SASS) End of Trail event at Founder’s Ranch, New Mexico. SASS members will reenact famous gunfights of the Old West, which include such legendary names as Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Wild Bill Hickok, and Billy the Kid. The reenactments are based on Bell’s “Classic Gunfights,” which appear regularly in True West. The End of The Trail also marks the publication of Bell’s book Classic Gunfights III. From June 22–24 Bell’s artwork will be exhibited, featuring 16 original gouache and scratchboard paintings from his Classic Gunfights series. For more details on End of Trail, see the Single Action Shooting Society’s website. For more information on Bob Boze Bell’s work, check out his blog. (The June 6 and June 11 entries relate details on how he recreates a classic gunfight.) Bell answered these questions from True West’s office in Cave Creek, Arizona, when he should have been working. You've been studying this subject for decades now. Tell us how you got interested in legendary gunfights. This is hard for even me to believe, but I have had an interest in gunfights for 50 years! A half century. It was in 1957, when I starting reading True West magazine and learning the truth behind the many TV Westerns that I loved. I went through a couple of phases that distracted me (the three B’s: baseball, the Beatles, and babes), but I kept coming back to gunfights and the West. I got real serious on Christmas Day, 1989. My mother sent me The Saga of Billy the Kid by Walter Noble Burns as a present that Christmas and I read it in one sitting. At about two in the morning I set the book down, and that was it. I knew what I had to do. Not long after this a comic book company from Chicago called me. They were interested in reviving Classic Illustrated Comics and had heard that I did a comic strip called Honkytonk Sue, and would I be interested in doing something in the Classic Illustrated style on the West. They seemed kind of hard up, like they couldn't find anyone interested in the subject. I jumped at the idea and said I wanted to do the Walter Noble Burns Kid book, and the guy on the phone hesitated. He said he didn't know if they were going to do biographies. They never called me back, but at that moment, I knew exactly how to proceed. What is your Old West Classic Gunfight series, and how have you gone about reenacting some of them with the Single Action Shooters End of Trail event? I started developing a graphic novel on Billy the Kid. I took an excerpt idea to Arizona Highways, and, after some hesitation there as well, I got a cover gig to do Billy in Arizona. My painting of Billy graced the August 1991 cover, and at that point I figured I had it made as far as getting a book deal. I sent out a query letter and a copy of the magazine to 26 publishers, and all 26 turned it down, including True West (I have the letter I sent to them framed and in my office). Even my alma mater, the University of Arizona Press, turned me down, saying, “Just what the world needs, another book on Billy the Kid.” So I went to my father, borrowed $5,000, and got my Billy the Kid book printed for $20,000. I was in the book business. One of the things I have always enjoyed doing is illustrating fight scenes. I used to do this after school at my father’s gas station on Route 66. I love seeing action in movie terms: wide shot, POVs, crane shot, eye socket shot, you name it. More than one critic has said the action sequences in the Billy book are the best part. When two crazy friends and I bought True West magazine in 1999, I immediately proposed a regular feature on Classic Gunfights, taking apart a gunfight and using the best maps, photos, and illustrations to put the reader in the scene with the best research and a no-nonsense narrative, warts and all. The first gunfight appeared in 2000, and I have since published over 75 fights that appear in three Classic Gunfight books (approximately 25 gunfights per book). What sources have been used for historical accuracy? The trick is to find the best researcher on each fight, and invariably there is one person who has dedicated decades to ferreting out the minute details about each second of a particular fight. In the case of the Northfield Bank robbery by Jesse James and the Youngers, it’s Jack Koblas, who lives in Minnesota. He knows every second of that fight. Frederick Nolan, of Chalfont Saint Giles, England, is the absolute Billy the Kid expert. For train robbery and the subsequent Silver City shootout, it’s Texas author Bob Alexander. If I’m doing anything on Tombstone I always contact Neil Carmony in Tucson to get the straight skinny. Of course, I have many friends in the Earp field, along with a few enemies, so I don’t suffer from sources in that arena, but Neil is the go-to guy for me. What gunfight are you currently working on? Currently I'm doing the Battle of Big Dry Wash for the August issue of True West. I Googled it, got the historical website for Camp Verde, contacted them, and they recommended Dr. Sam Palmer of Paradise Valley. Last Thursday I drove up to the Mogollon Rim, and Dr. Sam gave me a personal tour of the site. He has been studying this fight for 25 years, camps out on the actual site often, has found 4,000 artifacts, and knows every soldier’s name and history on both sides of the fight. This may sound odd to the outsider, but there is virtually a person like Sam for every fight I have done. I shoot about 50 photos on the site, then I start researching Apache photos and U.S. Army gear, cribbing shamelessly from Frederic Remington and others, and trying to blend the gear, the men and the location shots into an accurate portrayal of the event. Sometimes I can't get it all down like it is in my head, but I usually try to do at least six illustrations per fight. My goal is to get it right, make it concise, and make it fun and exciting to read. One of my pet peeves is reading about a fight and not being able to figure out where they are standing, who is where, how did the room look? That’s why I use Gus Walker, the Mapinator, who I have worked with for seven years. He is a great mapmaker, can take a very complicated posse chase and fight and break it down so you know exactly where everyone is. When we did the battle of Northfield, Gus broke it down to four phases, and shows where Jesse, Cole, Frank, and all the townsmen were at each stage of the fight, plus where they were shot, etc. Then Gus and I tracked Jesse and Frank’s run all the way from Minnesota back to Missouri, utilizing all of the newspaper reports of sightings. We backed all of this up by showing each item to Jack Koblas. To my knowledge, no one has ever done this before. I am very proud of our efforts in this area. The members of the Single Action Shooting Society that are going to the reenactments have practiced drawing and shooting hours on end. How do you think they’d fare against Wild Bill Hickok, Billy the Kid, and John Wesley Hardin? The short answer is not very well. It’s one thing to shoot against stationary targets or in a controlled environment, but to get an idea how different it would be, imagine going into a biker bar, jumping up on a pool table and yelling out, “Only homos ride Harleys!” Then try to defend yourself. That is the closest modern equivalent I can think of to the world of Hickok, the Kid, and Hardin. It’s a whole ’nother deal. In the movies nearly every gunfighter favors the standard Colt Peacemaker, but real-life gunfighters such as Wild Bill, Jesse James, Doc Holliday, and Billy the Kid often preferred different weapons. What were some of the other choices they had and the reasons they might have preferred them? There were dozens of choices for weaponry and an almost unlimited variety within those choices. Long barrels, short barrels, six-shot, seven-shot, single-shot. That’s one of the things I think the movies have not played with enough, and that’s the wide variety of weapon styles on the frontier. It would be like a movie showing everyone driving Fords. Frank James preferred a Remington pistol, Doc Holliday and Billy the Kid were known to carry a Lightning, or Thunderer, self-cocking, or double-action pistols. Hickok was partial to his .36 caliber Navy Colt. So what was the term that most of these men were known by? Gunfighters? Pistoleers? Shootists? What were the most popular terms for them in their own time? The term gunfighter is pretty much a modern (1950s) term, although I hesitate to say they never used it, because I am constantly amazed by terms that show up in the newspapers of the 1880s. For example, it is now widely believed that being “quick on the draw” is a modern invention of Hollywood, and although low-slung, metal-clipped holsters were basically invented in the 1950s for quicker times in competitions, I can show you newspaper accounts of Ben Thompson’s killing in San Antonio where the paper claimed he was fast on the draw. And I can also show you low-slung, buscadero-style rigs from the 1880s. Now, they were rare, and that is the key, but you can get yourself in trouble by saying, “They never did that,” or “They never wore that.” You’d be surprised at what they had. Fighting men on the American frontier were called pistoleers, man killers, shootists, gunmen, and a slew of other handles. This may sound like an odd choice of words, but do you have a favorite gunfight? In terms of drama and the personalities involved, if you could go back in time to see just one fight, which would it be? In terms of sheer firepower and the bravery of one guy, I think the Ingalls gunfight when two wagon-loads of lawmen (24) took on the outlaws (7) of Ingalls, Oklahoma, and one guy (Arkansas Tom) dominated the lawmen and kept them pinned down until his comrades could escape. That is an amazing fight It’s in Classic Gunfights I. Put yourself back in the Old West, just before what could erupt into a deadly confrontation. You can carry one sidearm. What do you choose? And how would you carry it? In the pocket of your coat like Wyatt Earp before the OK Corral, or perhaps in the waistband of your pants like many did? In a holster? If so, what kind? Cross-draw? Shoulder holster, perhaps? A sawed-off shotgun under the coat still beats everything. It scared everyone, was quite intimidating, and, this is the key part, at close range you didn’t have to be a good shot. Beyond that I’d want a Walker Colt, because it looks like a cannon. You can pick two men in all of Old West history to accompany you into this possible confrontation. Who do you want on your left, and who on your right? I want Billy the Kid on my right, laughing, smiling, and deadly. And I want Wild Bill Hickok on my left, with the butt handles of those two hoglegs daring anyone to mess with the editor of True West magazine. Come to think of it, I wish I had those two when I have to deal with my creditors.
June 9, 2007
The Still-Important Lessons of America’s War Against Mexico Posted by Allen Barra at 09:55 AM EST America’s 1846–1848 war with Mexico was one of the most important and most consequential events in our history. It is also the least known and understood of our wars. Professor Timothy J. Henderson of Auburn University Montgomery has written A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States, one of the first studies of the war and its impact on the Americas from a Mexican perspective. Professor Henderson answered these questions from his home in Montgomery, Alabama. A very good case could be made for calling America’s war with Mexico the most important in our history. By that I mean that many historians feel that one way or another America would eventually have gained its independence from Britain, which leaves the Mexican War as the one that most shaped the country as we know it today. In addition, it also helped create the conditions for the American Civil War. Would you concur with some or all of this? I would love to be able to say that I think this was the most important war in our history. That might be good for book sales. But when you think about it, in history everything that happens leads to whatever happens next, so I don’t think it’s really possible to take any one event out of context and say it’s the most important. In fact, in the first chapter of my book I make the case that the different ways in which the United States and Mexico gained their independence was crucial to how the two countries developed subsequently. The Founding Fathers of the United States were broadly in agreement on most of the important issues. They wanted independence, they wanted representative government, they wanted certain basic rights to be guaranteed, they didn’t want a state church, and so forth. Mexico’s founding fathers had serious disagreements on those fundamental points, which made it hard for them to get much constructive work done. The result was that as the United States grew stronger and wealthier, Mexico grew weaker and poorer. So from this perspective, the wars of independence look pretty decisive. But then you have to ask what caused the wars of independence to go the way they did. Would U.S. independence have been the same had it not been for, say, the Glorious Revolution? Would Mexico’s independence experience have been the same had the wars of the Spanish conquest gone differently? Of course, if you keep on like this you’re going to end up back with Cain slaying Abel, but I think that’s how history operates. It’s all of a piece. I also think people have a healthy skepticism toward authors who go around crowing about how important their topic is. But then again, let’s face it: The U.S.–Mexican War was extremely important. It doubled the size of the United States, halved the size of Mexico, laid the groundwork for two civil wars, and embittered U.S. relations with the rest of the hemisphere down to the present day. And what’s really remarkable is how little attention it’s received from historians. I think if you go into a bookstore in search of a book on the U.S.–Mexican War, it’s a pretty sure bet you’re going to be leaving empty-handed. Meanwhile, you’ll find truckloads of books on the Civil War and World War II. I’m not exactly sure what accounts for that. May I suggest that the reason so little has been written on it is because Americans have always seemed to be a little guilty about the Mexican War? Ulysses S. Grant, for one, did not seem proud to have served in it; late in his life he called the war “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Congressman Abraham Lincoln and Congressman (and ex-President) John Quincy Adams spoke out against it passionately. In Kurt Andersen’s novel Heyday, which came out earlier this year, his chief protagonist is a veteran who is ashamed to have fought in it. When I first read Andersen’s novel, I thought he was projecting a modern attitude back on the wary, but I was surprised at how many prominent Americans were against it at the time. Do you think the war gave Americans something of an uneasy conscience that has stayed with us? I think there may be something to that, though I wouldn’t want to overstate it. First of all, most professional historians—and by that I mean the type that work in universities and write books they don’t necessarily expect to be widely read—are not likely to shy away from a topic because they think it makes their country look bad. Excessive national pride can be a real liability in a profession that prizes objectivity. Second, while it’s true that there was a lot of opposition to the war at the time, that opposition was for a wide variety of reasons, most of which had little to do with sympathy for Mexico. Some thought the war would weaken the South and slavery; some thought the manner in which the war was started subverted the democratic process; still others fretted about how the addition of more territory might be somehow detrimental to the United States. Some military men took a dim view of the war simply because they deemed their opponents to be racially inferior and hence unworthy. As for our own time, my suspicion is that most people nowadays don’t have many strong feelings one way or another about the war, simply because they know almost nothing about it. I talk to people all the time—intelligent, educated folks—who are genuinely surprised to learn that the Southwest came to us by way of a war with Mexico. That’s true even of people who’ve lived their entire lives in the Southwest, and of people who grew up in towns with names like “Buena Vista” and “Monterrey.” If more people knew the circumstances under which the United States began the war with Mexico, they might have cause to cringe. But my impression is that folks who like to read about wars tend to favor military history, and from a purely military standpoint the United States acquitted itself very well in Mexico. The bottom line, I think, is that for Americans—and most peoples of the world, I would guess—winning counts for a great deal, and the United States won the war with Mexico decisively. In the bargain, it achieved the objective of territorial expansion, which I think most Americans broadly supported. And when I read some of the rhetoric in the debate on immigration, I don’t see a nation wracked by guilt over past injustices to Mexico. The most enigmatic Mexican of the war period is Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. To most Americans he is simply the man who killed Davy Crockett at the Alamo and who surrendered Texas to Sam Houston. It’s astonishing to read about Mexican history and find out that a man so seemingly unprincipled could have been such an influence on Mexican politics for so long. What was the secret of his longevity in Mexico? Were there no better and stronger candidates to rule Mexico? Good question. If you look at some of the lowlights of Santa Anna’s career, it’s really hard to understand how anyone could have taken him seriously. Among those lowlights were the notorious massacres at the Alamo and Goliad; the elaborate state funeral he held for his amputated foot; his marriage, at age 50, to a girl of 15, and that coming only a few weeks after the death of his well-regarded wife of 19 years. And then there was the way he insisted on being treated as Old World royalty in what was supposed to be a republic. All of that makes him look to us like a monster or a buffoon. I think there are several reasons for his longevity. First, Mexican politicians of the day were extremely divided between conservatives, who wanted to preserve the old society inherited from colonial days, and liberals, who wanted to change just about everything. There were very talented men on either side, but there was practically no possibility that either side would cooperate with their opponents. Santa Anna wasn’t identified with either side (or, more accurately, he was identified with both sides at different points in his career). People tended to see him as a man of action, someone who would do things while the politicians bickered. His reputation for decisiveness, by the way, was not undeserved. He did tend to take action, even if his actions were not always based on sound judgment. Also, he was very good at cultivating support within the Army and in his home region of Veracruz, which was strategically very important. But in the end I think the crucial factor is something we will never quite understand, given that we will never have the opportunity to actually meet the guy. You can find lots of statements from people who knew the details of Santa Anna’s career and had every reason to be cynical about him, but when they met him face to face they reported that he was nothing like what they’d expected. He seemed to them to be very sober, serious, and impressive, someone you instinctively trust and are inclined to follow. A born leader. His contemporaries obviously saw something in him that gets lost in any mere account of the details of his career. Not to defend the concept of Manifest Destiny, but given the burgeoning power of the United States and the relative weakness of Mexico, was the seizure of Mexico’s northern territories inevitable? Was there a point in the history of Mexican-American relations where things might have been handled differently, possibly resulting in a more amicable settlement of problems? I think Mexico was bound to lose its northern territories one way or another. In fact, Mexico never really had effective control of those territories. If Mexico had had the wherewithal to populate and defend those lands, it probably would never have invited a bunch of Anglos from the United States to settle in Texas in the first place. What military resources Mexico had were being squandered largely on domestic squabbles, and they clearly lacked the capacity to defend those faraway places from predatory nations. And strong nations were indeed predatory. If the United States hadn’t taken those lands from Mexico, some other power likely would have. As for whether the dispute could have been settled more amicably, I think it could have, but there are an awful lot of ifs involved. If the United States had truly understood what a sensitive political issue this was for Mexicans, or at least for Mexican politicians, it might have found a way to purchase Mexico’s lands that would have allowed Mexico to claim some honor and dignity. If Mexico’s leaders had found a way to compromise with one another, they might have found a way to negotiate a deal and claim it as a victory. They might even have found a way to actually populate and defend their northern territories. But the United States was impatient, aggressive, and arrogant. Mexicans were understandably alarmed at the U.S. tendency to lump Mexicans in with those “inferior” races that deserved to be despoiled and dominated. For their part, Mexican politicians were quick to play the blame game. Since successes in Mexico were so few and far between, it was essential to blame someone else for the failures, whether it be rival politicians or the evil United States. José Joaquín de Herrera, who was president of Mexico in 1845, during the crisis over the annexation of Texas, wanted to negotiate the matter and was overthrown for it. For many Mexican politicians and military men, compromise signaled weakness. Showing weakness in a confrontation with the United States could, many Mexicans felt, result in the end of their existence as a nation. So in the end, given the prevailing attitudes on both sides at the time, an amicable solution seems pretty unlikely. Still, the U.S.–Mexican War was so unnecessary and it involved so many dumb decisions—it was like most wars in that respect, I guess—that it’s hard not to think a better outcome could have been reached with just a wee bit more wisdom and patience. You write in your preface that “the immigration issue periodically flares into heated debate, as it did while I was completing this book. On the American far right, some hysterically characterize Mexican immigration as an ‘invasion.’ One fringe group even conjures the specter of a ‘Conquest of Aztlan’–a term often used by Chicano right activists for the territory of northern Mexico ceded to the U.S. by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848—charging that the Mexican government is actively abetting a conspiracy to retake the lands it lost to the United States in 1948.” How can a study of the Mexican War help us to understand and better deal with the immigration controversy of our own time? I’m struck by how similar the debate on immigration is to the debates that preceded the U.S.–Mexican War. The debate tends to treat Mexico as if it were at best irrelevant to the issue, or at worst an agent of evil. It seems that the debaters seldom take into account that the problem now is identical to the problem then, namely the vast disparity in wealth and power between the two countries. Many of the migrants who come here have to abandon their families and endure tremendous hardship. It’s not as if they want to do that; they’re merely behaving as perfectly rational economic actors, going where the jobs are. So it’s offensive when people portray them as an evil brown-skinned horde intent on subverting our nationality and sapping our prosperity. Obviously, if Mexico were to become a prosperous and stable country, then the flow of illegal immigrants would slow to a trickle. Problem solved. During the negotiations on the formation of the European Union, the problem of disparities in wealth was taken into account, and the wealthier countries invested billions to develop the economies of poorer countries like Spain and Portugal. That’s worked out very well for all concerned. By contrast, when the United States, Canada, and Mexico negotiated NAFTA, it seemed that all parties took it for granted that Mexico would be a permanent junior partner, mostly a source of cheap labor and lax environmental rules. The idea that the three countries might one day achieve parity, perhaps even be joined into a single economic unit, was not admitted even as a distant goal or a wild fantasy. It seems to me that there is a fatalistic assumption—and unfortunately it’s an assumption made by many Mexicans as well as Americans, by defenders of immigration as well as its critics—that nothing can be done to make Mexico more prosperous. Such assumptions poison the entire debate. People who want to defend immigration happily point out that Mexicans are willing to do nasty, low-paid jobs that are just too hard or disgusting for Americans to do—and they say it as if this is a good thing. I have a hard time seeing that as a positive. Do we really want to encourage the formation of a permanent underclass of ethnically distinct people doing disagreeable menial labor? Isn’t that kind of what slavery was all about? And yet the notion that Mexicans might aspire to well-paid, non-menial jobs is downright horrifying to many Americans, who apparently assume Mexicans were created for the very purpose of doing grunt labor. Other defenders of immigration argue that it’s beneficial to Mexico, since Mexican workers in the United States send about $20 billion a year to their families back home. That sum is equal to the amount Mexico gets from selling oil, its most lucrative export. That money supposedly aids Mexican development and stability. But here again, is it really healthy for an economy to be so dependent on money sent home by low-paid immigrants living in a foreign country? Wouldn’t it be better for both countries to seriously explore means to achieve mutual, and mutually reinforcing, prosperity? Just asking. I really think one of the reasons there’s so little progress on the immigration issue is that the old concept of Manifest Destiny, although it may have morphed a bit over the years, is still alive and well. In a recent interview with John McCain, Bill O’Reilly suggested that immigrants are breaking down the “white, Christian, male power structure” of the United States. And McCain, a contender for the Presidency of the United States, agreed with him. I’m actually kind of impressed that these guys would come right out and say what so often is an unspoken subtext. There’s an enduring and extremely smug assumption that the lands of North America were bestowed upon Anglo-Americans by God himself, and the presence of non-white, non-English-speaking people in our midst, in a condition anywhere approaching equality, is tampering with something that was divinely ordained. I don’t get much sense that these folks are aware that our Southwestern lands were actually taken at gunpoint in a war that was waged on a notoriously bogus pretext. And McCain’s from Arizona. Someone should ask him about that.
May 11, 2007
What the West Was Really Like: An Interview with Sherry Monahan Posted by Allen Barra at 02:45 PM EST With her books The Wicked West: Boozers, Cruisers, Gamblers, and More; Pike’s Peak: Adventurers, Communities, and Lifestyles; and now Tombstone’s Treasure: Silver Mines and Golden Saloons, Sherry Monahan has shot down more Western myths than Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Wild Bill Hickok did bad guys. She discussed her new book with us from her home in North Carolina. In your latest book you tell us that Tombstone, Arizona, in its heyday had telephones, ice cream, and baseball. Come on now, is this frontier history or science fiction? How come we’ve never seen any of this in the movies? It’s total frontier history! It would be nice to see real history reflected in the movies, but most Westerns deal with cowboys and Indians, not people swimming or eating ice cream. Besides, who would believe that Wyatt Earp popped into Miss Leary’s ice cream parlor for a scoop of chocolate or vanilla? He was a tough lawman. Eating ice cream sort of softens his image (pun intended). Can you imagine Big Nose Kate or Josephine Earp in their Victorian swimming outfits at the pool? Now there’s an attractive shot!
 | | Sherry Monahan dressed as a Wild West faro dealer. |
Another point you emphasize that I seldom see in the movies is the cost of living in mining camps, particularly Tombstone. This was, you write, “primarily because most things had to be imported. Consumers not only paid for the goods, but they also had to pay for the cost of transporting goods to town.” In southwestern Arizona, lumber cost two to three times what it cost in other parts of the state, and nearly everything else from coffee to clothes had to be brought in by wagon. I imagine this was the case in nearly every western mining camp, including Deadwood and Virginia City. How, then, could average people get by? Or was there a strong trickle-down effect from the silver and gold being mined that pumped up wages?There was a trickle-down effect. Those who lived in towns like Tombstone and Deadwood did pay higher prices because of importing, but dressmakers, tailors, housekeepers, and others simply charged more for their services, proportionate to the cost of living. No one batted an eyelash at their prices. And, not unlike today, the higher one’s salary, the more luxury they could afford. A miner or laborer did not go out to eat every night, like a mine owner or wealthy businessman did. A miner or laborer also didn’t stay at the town’s fancy hotels. They lived in either a boarding house or a rugged miner’s cabin. The picture you paint of the classical Western saloon or at least the big saloons in Tombstone is certainly much different than the one we’ve been given all these years. The music, for instance. In the movies, all we’ve ever gotten is someone playing songs on a piano—usually from the wrong period. What kind of music could you expect hear in a mining camp circa 1880? The musical selections in the saloons were played by Italian string bands, brass quartets, and even classical pianists. Some of the fancier saloons hired a solo singer, usually female, who serenaded the patrons. However, don’t drudge up that Hollywood scene with her chest hanging out, feather boas, and corsets. A female singer wore a beautiful Victorian gown, maybe sleeveless and off the shoulder, but no cleavage. The traditional Stephen Foster songs were rarely being pounded out by a drunken cowboy. Remember that saloons, in a lot of instances, were social gathering places where the local men went to relax and discuss events or politics. But, just like today, some people got carried away with too much liquor and became obnoxious. They were usually escorted out by the barkeeper or the local law enforcement. Speaking of intoxication, one of the revelations of your books concerns the drinking habits of frontiersmen. Everyone in Westerns orders whiskey, which they immediately gulp down. It seems to me that a moment’s reflection would confirm that this wouldn’t quench thirst and would lead to almost immediate drunkenness. What did cowboys, miners, and townsfolk typically order in the saloons? As you indicated, most saloon patrons did not belly up to the bar and ask for a shot of whiskey. Yes, it did happen in very remote locations where supplies were hard to come by. However, the saloons in towns like the ones you see in the movies offered all sorts of fancy drinks. Some of the most popular drinks in 1881 included mint juleps, eggnogs, champagne flips, claret sangarees, and Tom and Jerries. Imported brandies, champagne, and wine were also enjoyed. Saloon owners prided themselves on hiring the top bartenders, or “mixologists,” and advertised that fact. Beer was also very popular, and many towns had their own breweries, usually run by German or Swiss immigrants. Saloons also offered imported beer from Ireland, Germany, England, and other European countries. In your chapter on entertainments, you write about cockfights, horse racing, boxing, wrestling, variety shows, and baseball. Give us an idea of how a rancher or businessman dropping into Tombstone for a long weekend might amuse himself. Wow! The sky was the limit. Tombstone had baseball teams, a racing track, a bowling alley, shooting ranges, a swimming pool, theaters, and more. If you were a man, you could choose from any of those, or head to one of the many saloons in town for a drink or gambling. Women, on the other hand, didn’t have too many choices. They attended the sporting events in town—except for the cockfights—and on certain days of the week they could go swimming. They also attended the performances at Schieffelin Hall, but dared not enter the Bird Cage or Crystal Palace theaters. The latter two were patronized only by men, and the women who were there were either performers or “soiled doves.” They became men-only establishments because proper women chose not to enter them so as not to soil their image. You’ve given faro exhibitions and written a book on classic Tombstone cuisine. So if you were there in 1881, what job might you choose for yourself? Would you run a gambling concession, a restaurant, perhaps, or might you choose the path of Clara Brown, the much respected journalist who went to Tombstone from California back in Wyatt Earp days? I think I would like to have been that rare exception, a female faro dealer. There were very few of them, and they were very classy and well respected. They wore beautiful gowns and jewelry, stayed at the finest hotels, ate in the best restaurants, and lived a pretty nice life. Who knows? Maybe I was one in a former life. But then again, being a journalist would have been pretty neat, too.
May 5, 2007
What Happened with Kids and Sports in America? An Interview with Regan McMahon Posted by Allen Barra at 04:45 PM EST Regan McMahon’s Revolution in the Bleachers: How Parents Can Take Back Family Life in a World Gone Crazy Over Youth Sports (Gotham Books, 304 pages, $25.00) is one of the most important sports books so far in the twenty-first century. Any parents stressed out from hours of ferrying kids to baseball, soccer, or lacrosse games, or who have lost sleep wondering what sports they should pressure their kids into specializing in, needs to read it—and to recommend it to other parents. McMahon, a deputy book editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, answered these questions from her home in California. Your book, Revolution in the Bleachers, is a fascinating take on how youth sports have come to dominate American life—interrupting family meals, disrupting family vacations, things like that. You have two children of your own. Was your book developed out of personal experience?
Yes. I have two athletic kids who have played multiple team sports since early in grade school, although they didn't start in kindergarten, like many kids do these days. My daughter is now 13 and my son is 16, and they're still playing sports.
A couple of years ago, I had this moment when I was rushing to get my daughter across town from the soccer field to the volleyball gym, and she was changing uniforms and wolfing down a sandwich in the car, and my husband was at my son’s soccer game in another part of town, and I thought, this is nuts. And however tough it was for our family, with my kids playing at the recreation-league level and for their school teams, it was even harder for families with kids playing for elite club teams who were traveling far distances every weekend and staying in motels. I wanted to know: How did we get here? Why have things changed so much from when I was kid? Does it have to be this way, or is there room for change? I explored my questions in an article I wrote for The San Francisco Chronicle Magazine in March 2005 called “How Much Is Too Much?” It generated a tremendous response from readers. My book came out of that, allowing me to widen my scope and examine the issue on a national level. I was particularly interested how the runaway sports culture is affecting kids and family life. You write in your opening chapter, “When I started to think about why we parents are running around so much more than our parents did, I realized the biggest factor is the rise of sports programs for girls.” Has this enormous rise in organized sports for girls become a solution to our problems or merely compounded the problem itself? More girls playing sports has been great for girls, but it has increased the logistical challenges for parents. If you’ve got a boy and a girl, you may be running around twice as much as my parents’ generation was, when perhaps only the boy was going to practices and games during grade school and middle school. And now it seems that nearly all kids start soccer when they’re four years old. Having gender equity in government-funded school programs through Title IX is morally and socially important, but one unexpected and potentially troublesome ripple effect is an increased focus on getting college scholarships. When the Title IX rules were clarified and fully implemented in 1992 (even though this amendment to the Civil Rights Act had been signed into law by President Nixon in 1972!), the floodgates were opened, and many colleges suddenly had to field teams and give out scholarship money in women’s sports that they had never had to before. Suddenly there was lots of opportunity for women athletes. The women who did so well at the 1996 and 2000 Olympic games and won the 1999 Women’s World Cup in soccer were referred to as “Title IX babies,” because they were the ones who had benefited from the explosion in women's collegiate sports. When parents saw the results on TV, many started thinking their daughter could be the next Mia Hamm or Brandi Chastain. And it wasn’t limited to girls. The notion that my kid can get a college scholarship if he or she starts early and trains hard enough really took hold in the youth sports culture for both boys and girls. But the reality is that less that one percent of all the children who play youth sports ever get a college scholarship. What’s happened, then, is that today’s kids are sacrificing a lot and giving up a lot of traditional aspects of childhood in service of this statistically unrealistic expectation, a goal that may stem more from the parents’ needs and desires than from what the children themselves truly want. One of the most interesting points you make is that youth sports culture has diminished one of the most important aspects of family life, namely family meals. “Eating together,” you write, “is the cornerstone of family life, the ritual that nourishes us in more ways than one. It’s the time kids learn manners, learn to listen to their siblings, absorb adult vocabulary, their parents express opinions about the day’s event in terms that reflect their values as members of this family and part of the community.” What’s your advice on how we can reclaim what’s being taken from us? I encourage parents to embrace eating dinner together as a family value and make it a priority. It can be a challenge with everyone’s busy schedules, but if you believe it’s too important to let fall by the wayside, you will make it happen—if not seven days a week, then five. If not five, then at least three. If you eat dinner together less often than that, family members can start to feel unconnected, and parents and siblings may start to lose track of what’s happening in each other's lives and in the life of the family. The family dinner is a great place for kids to feel listened to and understood. There’s been quite a lot of research done by Columbia University, whose National Center on Abuse and Addiction has conducted national surveys on this since 1996 and consistently found that kids who eat dinner often with their families are less likely to be depressed or get involved with drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes.
The trouble with sports schedules is that it’s hard to find practice times when the coaches—many of whom are volunteer—can make it and when fields and gyms are available. So if your team schedules a practice from six to eight, a typical window for dinnertime, what are you going to do? Well, if the coach values family dinners, or the parents made it clear that they value the family dinner, maybe that could be factored into the decision-making when the coach or the league or the school administration is deciding on practice times. But if you can’t change what the team is doing, you can make adjustments at your end, like eating together early, before practice, or late, after practice, to preserve the dinner ritual and all the benefits that come from it. You can also consider the dinner factor when you make choices about extracurricular activates. For example, when you think about signing up for a sport or a lesson or a class, or attending an “optional” extra practice per week, look at the calendar. If you realize, “But that would mean we’d only have two nights a week when we can eat together as a family,” maybe it would be appropriate to say no, or to look for an alternative at a different time. Children need time to relate to and communicate with their family in a relaxed setting. It helps family members stay in touch with what’s going on with one another and helps children feel grounded and loved, which will serve them in good stead during adolescence, when there are lots of temptations, distractions, and outside influences. My favorite chapter in your book is “Child’s Play,” which deals with what you call the most dramatic change in American childhoods over the last couple of decades, namely the “decline and near disappearance of unstructured play.” If I’m reading you correctly, you’re saying that we’ve allowed play to be taken out of our kids’ lives and replaced with training. Would you call that an accurate assessment? What would you recommend that all of us as parents could do to bring back the notion of play into children’s sports? Yes, that’s about the size of it. I sensed there was a problem, but I had no idea of the extent of it till I started doing my research. I had no idea that bike sales were way down and that the Lego company, which had been recession-proof since it went into business in the 1930s, had suffered a downturn and closed factories last year. These companies could be in trouble because kids don’t have time for free play anymore. As I say in my book, when little kids don’t have time to play with blocks, you know we’re in trouble. These days if kids are outdoors, they’re playing organized sports. They’re not playing in the park or even in their own backyards. They’re not playing pickup games at the playground, except maybe basketball in city neighborhoods. An exclusive soccer club in Michigan actually brought in a personal trainer to devise a program to make sure their athletes were coordinated, because, as their director of coaching explained to me, kids used to become coordinated by climbing trees and jumping fences, riding bikes, falling off them, and learning how to get up again. But today’s kids aren’t doing those things, because their parents aren’t comfortable letting them play alone outside, as we grownups did when we were young. The kids are dropped off and picked up at practice in a car, and they’re never out of their parents’ or their coaches’ sight. I encourage parents to let their kids play outside again and point out that the fear of abduction is overblown. I found that even kids who live in secure, gated communities or safe small towns in the Midwest were not playing outdoors, which tells me this fear is coming from something deep in our culture apart from realistic threats. There are important things kids learn from play, including conflict resolution and how to interact with people you don’t know as well as the guys on your team. Independent play develops creativity and independence, which we should be promoting in our children. I think parents should let their kids play on their own and make up their own games, instead of always having an adult there to tell them what to do. And if parents are worried about safety, they can always check in with their kids via cell phone. I also had no idea until I wrote this book that recess is an endangered species in pubic schools around the country. Seven to thirteen percent of U.S. elementary schools have no scheduled recess. And only 36 percent of states require P.E. for elementary school students. So kids aren’t playing and running around at school as much as they used to either. As for putting play back into sports, that’s exactly what the leaders of the youth sports reform movement want to do. Youth sports has changed from being about fun and participation and skill development for everyone to being a star system that weeds out the weaker players and supports the few top players. What can parents do now? They can seek out coaches who value fun and play. My son has a wonderful soccer coach who lets the boys play Aussie rules football for the last half hour of practice some days—sometimes as a reward for working hard and sometimes, when the practice isn-t going well, because he detects that the kids are burned out and could use a change of pace. And he even spent one practice a season for just Aussie rules football as a treat, and the boys would really look forward to it. At my son’s baseball practices, sometimes his coach will let the boys play three-flies-up or pickle or have a home run derby, bringing that playground feeling into a serious training session. The kids always appreciate anything that breaks the routine of practice and constant drills and the underlying pressure to win. Another thing parents can do if they value play is to try to make sure their kids have some downtime in their schedules for unstructured play. And they can get out and play with them. Throw the ball around, or a Frisbee, or build a sand castle or take a hike in the woods. And parents should remember that kids play sports primarily to have fun. It’s the adults who sometimes start to think it’s all about winning.
April 19, 2007
The Undying Greatness of Jimmie Rodgers: An Interview with Nolan Porterfield Posted by Allen Barra at 03:35 PM EST The Undying Greatness of Jimmie Rodgers: An Interview with Nolan Porterfield The publication of Nolan Porterfield’s Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler, in 1979, set a high-water mark for scholarship in the field of American roots music. Since his death from tuberculosis, two days after his final recording session – Rodgers has never really gone out of style, his work constantly reinterpreted by every new generation of folk, rock, and country artists. The actor Tim Blake Nelson’s rendition of Rodgers’s popular “In The Jailhouse Now” in the Coen Brothers O Brother, Where Art Thou? signaled a new wave of interest in Rodgers’s life and work. Porterfield’s book has just been reprinted by the University of Mississippi Press, in a paperback edition with a new preface by the author. Porterfield answered the following questions from his home in Kentucky. One of the revelations of your book is the extent of Jimmie Rodgers’s popularity, a fact largely forgotten today, even to people who revere his name. How would you compare him to the most visible popular singing star of the early 1930s, Bing Crosby? I would question the assumption that Jimmie Rodgers’s popularity is “largely forgotten today.” There’s plenty of evidence that his influence remains strong, especially among the many grassroots musicians who are pursuing professional careers these days, and that would not be happening if they weren’t aware of Rodgers’s stature. They may not know all the details of his career, but they know the songs and keep on singing them. It’s difficult to make a comparison between Rodgers and Bing Crosby, first because they were different kinds of singers and appealed to different audiences, and second, when Rodgers died in 1933, Crosby was just beginning to establish his solo career. Who’s singing Bing Crosby songs these days? Record sales are not necessarily a useful measure in making comparisons, but it’s worth noting that Crosby didn’t have a million-seller until 1937, while Rodgers’s 1927 “Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas)” is generally considered to have sold at least a million copies during the time it was in Victor’s catalog. (Interesting coincidence: Crosby’s first “gold record” was “Sweet Leilani,” and he was accompanied by the orchestra of Lani McIntire, who had also recorded with Rodgers back in 1930.) Jimmie Rodgers is often credited by historians with creating what came to be called country music. Yet those listening to Rodgers’s original recordings for the first time may be surprised that it doesn’t sound more “pure”—that is, I think I’m trying to say, more like folk music, like the Carter Family or similar artists of the period. Rogers’s music seems to take in so many influences—the traditional songs of Celtic origin, Mississippi Delta blues, yodeling, the Hawaiian music you mentioned, perhaps vaudeville, and God know what else. I guess what I’m groping for is that Jimmie Rodgers wasn’t a purist when it came to music—or am I lessening to Rodgers’s music the wrong way? I’m not sure just what “purist” means when it comes to Jimmie Rodgers, but you’re right that he drew from many diverse sources and in the process transformed them into something uniquely his own. As I wrote in the book, “While Rodgers and the Carters appealed to similar audiences and shared common rural origins, there were significant differences between them. . . . Putting A. P., Sara, and Maybelle together with Jimmie Rodgers was not exactly an attempt to mix oil with water (axle grease and STP might be a more fitting metaphor) but, as the results indicate, the risks were considerable. It is to everyone’s credit that their joint efforts were brought off with reasonable success, in some places even with positive verve.” If listeners today think he isn’t sufficiently “folk,” that’s their problem. I seriously doubt if either he or the Carters thought in terms of “folk music.” It was a fuzzy concept 80 years ago, and it’s even more complex and subjective today. Ultimately Jimmie Rodgers didn’t care what label you hung on him or his music, so long as he drew audiences and sold records. For whatever it’s worth, when someone says “folk music” in my presence, I find important business elsewhere. There’s a richness and diversity of influence in Rodgers’s music that I don’t hear in country artists today. It’s hard to think of any country artist today who’s open to so many styles of music. As regards the yodel, for instance, you write, “Regardless of where he got it, he made it totally and uniquely his own.” He is credited with popularizing the steel guitar, which he got from Hawaiian music, and he even recorded with Louis Armstrong, the most influential jazz musician of the twentieth century. Rodgers’s relationship with Armstrong especially intrigues me. You call their getting together “one of country music’s unfathomable mysteries.” But you also suggest that their work together was not so improbable as some other writers have led us to believe. Why? I think it’s rather obvious. They were of the same generation and both grew up in the Deep South, shaped by cultural and musical influences that were very much alike. I don’t presume to know what Rodgers’s racial attitudes were—I suspect they were much the same as those of most white Southerners in his time—but I do know that he lived and worked among blacks from an early age, identified with them, and had a natural affinity with their music. Almost from the beginning his recordings were flavored with jazz and blues; he recorded with a black jazz band as early as 1929 (an unissued take of “Frankie and Johnny”), and in 1931 he was backed by the Louisville Jug Band, and also by the St. Louis bluesman Clifford Gibson on a take of “Let Me Be Your Side Track” that didn’t surface until 1991. Ralph Peer was the catalyst that brought Rodgers and Louis Armstrong together, and I doubt if either of them thought twice about what we now view, probably erroneously, as an unusual pairing. A few years ago I had a very strange experience outside of Meridian, Mississippi. I was doing a story on Peter Tosh, the late reggae singer, for a rock magazine, and I was following his band’s bus from Houston to Birmingham. About two miles outside Meridian, the bus broke down. While Tosh and his band members were lounging on the side of the road, I mentioned to them that they were just a few minutes away from the birthplace of a country music legend. Had any of them ever heard of Jimmie Rodgers? They all got excited—“Chee-mie Ro-chers!” Tosh said. “I like his music very much!” That happened just before I read your book. It made me realize the appeal that Jimmie’s music has to transcend race, culture, and time. I don’t think any other country singer, with the possible exception of Hank Williams, has such a broad audience. What would you say is the secret of Jimmie’s appeal? Rodgers’s music is simple, basic, and delivered with an authenticity that gives it universal appeal. His songs range across the spectrum of elemental human concerns—love, work, joy, sadness, death—and he sang honestly of so many walks of life and so many hopes, fears, and dreams of ordinary men and women that almost everyone can identify with what they hear. There is another intrinsic element that really can’t be explained. Jimmie Rodgers possessed a unique combination of voice, instrument, material, and style that distinguishes every enduring musical talent. I’m convinced, along with many others, that music is generational, which means that we should have stopped listening to Jimmie Rodgers long ago. But for all these reasons, we haven’t.
April 4, 2007
Getting the Past Right in Fiction: A Talk with Bruce Olds Posted by Allen Barra at 12:10 PM EST Bruce Olds is one of the most acclaimed and intriguing of recent American novelists, a writer who has combined the techniques of postmodernist fiction with the traditional historical novel. Raising Holy Hell (1995) and Bucking The Tiger (2001) both examine the lives of notorious nineteenth-century Americans. His latest, The Moments Lost: A Midwest Pilgrim’s Progress, takes a more personal approach to American history. The protagonist, Franklyn Shiv, who writes about one of the most turbulent eras in American labor, was inspired by the life of Olds’s great-grandfather. I talked with him about all three of these books.
Your first two novels, Raising Holy Hell, about John Brown, and Bucking The Tiger, about Doc Holliday, fit uneasily into the category of historical fiction. I say uneasily because many of the techniques you used seem light years from the novels that get lumped into that category. In The Moments Lost, you also take historical themes in a new direction—but I'll get to that in a moment. What would you say your primary influences have been in both fiction and history?
I suspect my own influences go more to writing—to the use of language and the form that language assumes—than to either fiction or history per se. I always have read and still do read a lot of poetry. I’m quite hopeless when it comes to writing the stuff myself, haven’t the knack, but I’m tremendously drawn to the Poem, capital P, and its privileging of and sensitivity to language and form. In this respect I’m particularly fascinated by poetry that works with historical content, specifically American history. I reckon I’m what the academics would call a formalist on the fiction side, an Americanist on the historical.
That said, the first book I recall being truly excited by—this would have been in grammar school, seventh grade perhaps—was Ivanhoe. Which, looking back, makes almost too much sense. Later, at university, I briefly fell under the sway of the old New Journalists—Mailer, Wolfe, Breslin, Talese, McPhee, Murray Kempton, that crowd—until I discovered the meta-fictionists, William Gass in particular. I'm still a huge fan of his work. Sentence for sentence, I find its bravery galvanizing.
But perhaps the work that fuses all of these elements and influences most effectively for me is that of Paul Metcalf, Herman Melville's great-grandson, with whom I carried on a correspondence for some while before his death in 1999, and to whom I dedicated the second novel. Paul described his work as “the personal poetry of pure document,” and he had much to say about the relationship between poetry, prose, history, and fiction and the synergy to be exploited between them, which he likened—his words—to “the plunge of sex, accomplished with sexual energy, the focus of all one’s vitalities.”
Paul was an unapologetically subversive guy, which is why, perhaps, he seldom published in other than obscure and offbeat presses. My favorite quote of his is, “It is those of us who cannot untangle ourselves from the past who are really dangerous in the present because we hurl ourselves across the present with a language they cannot understand.” Isn’t that great? I agree, entirely.
You’ve referred to Raising Holy Hell and Bucking the Tiger as “fictional biographies.” The Moments Lost seems to draw heavily from the history of your own family, though Clarence Darrow, Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, and the Wobblies all put in appearances. You’ve said that Franklyn Shiv, your protagonist, is inspired by your own great-grandfather; how does his life actually connect with the historical figures in the book?
I don't know if the story itself draws heavily from the history of my own family, but the impetus behind its writing certainly does, since my ancestors lived in the place (Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula) where and the time (the early twentieth century) when the story is set.
As my great-grandfather was killed in a mine cave-in in 1910 at the age of 37, three years before the strike, the character of Franklyn Shivs was not directly inspired by him. Rather, Shivs is based on an actual person, a newspaper reporter named Frank Shavs, about whom we have no more than a scant paragraph’s worth of historical information.
Which is to say that, in light of the book being 470 pages, Shivs is largely a fictional creation. If his life connects with anyone’s, his interior life I mean, I would imagine that it connects most closely with my own, albeit in ways about which I remain in the dark even now.
The only character in the book who was inspired in the way you are referring to, is the character I call “the Kid.” He’s my grandfather, at a similar age.
At the end of The Moments Lost, there’s a section called “Family Plot.” There are several pages from what appears to be your grandfather’s diary as well as an extract from a mine inspector’s report about your great grandfather’s death in a mine accident. I say “appears” because I was wondering if it was real or whether or not Bruce Olds the novelist was pulling a literary prank, the sort of thing Nabokov did with the open letter from the lawyer in Lolita that was actually written by Nabokov. I’m betting, by the way, that the diary and the report are real documents.
As a novelist, I have nothing but admiration for that sort of Nabokovian legerdemain when it is well done, but in this case you win. Those are real documents, save for some few emendations I chose to make for aesthetic reasons, none of which alter their meaning or truth. On the other hand, had I felt the aesthetic need to fabricate them of whole cloth, I would not have hesitated. There is historical fact and there is fictional truth, and while I wouldn’t presume to speak for others, the distinction between the two, in my opinion, is one that could use more blurring, not less.
It’s axiomatic that no one writes a historical novel unless he feels he has an objective view of the history he’s writing about. That’s not to say that any novelist can ever truly be objective, but that it was necessary for, say, Tolstoy or Sir Walter Scott, for that matter, to feel that he had achieved an overview that was essentially correct. But how does one stay objective when writing about one’s own ancestors? Your vision of your great-grandfather would have to be more of a fictional creation than, say, Big Bill Haywood or Clarence Darrow, wouldn’t it? Did it make you feel uneasy to reimagine the lives of your ancestors?
But I wasn't reimagining their lives as much as I was reimagining the cultural dynamics of their lives, their historical circumstances, the social and political and economic cross-currents at play in that place at that time. As I say, none of the characters in the book, save one, are based on my ancestors, and that one, in the context of the story, is a child.
That said, I don’t disagree that it never hurts to steep oneself in the historical facts of the matter, to do one’s homework, so to say. Not that all historical novelists feel this way. I recall William Styron remarking that he did just enough research in preparation for The Confessions of Nat Turner to trigger his imagination. That beyond that he was afraid he would know too much, that the facts would inhibit him, that the history would handcuff and tether him, leave him too earthbound.
Personally I am more comfortable knowing too much than not enough. When I toy with, or twist, or ignore, or flat violate the historical facts, I want and need to know that I am doing so for aesthetic reasons, with premeditation and malice aforethought.
Besides, a large part of the fun for me lies in doing the research. I really enjoy the spadework. At some point, of course, one is compelled to call a halt and get on with it, but if I can be faulted in this regard, it would be for over-researching, not its opposite.
A pretentious critic in the Los Angeles Times wrote of Bucking the Tiger, that Olds “lights a torch for American historical fiction.” Is that a tough mandate to live up to?
No, I don’t find it a tough mandate to live up to because I don’t interpret it as a mandate. The only mandate I subscribe to is to write the next sentence as well, as felicitously, as I am capable of writing it. Believe me, there is no tougher mandate in the world.
January 29, 2007
The Strangeness of Sports Records: Seven Questions for Allen St. John Posted by Allen Barra at 04:35 PM EST Allen St. John writes the “By the Numbers” column for The Wall Street Journal and is the author of Clapton’s Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument. His latest book, Made to Be Broken: The 50 Greatest Records and Streaks in Sports (Triumph Books) deals not only with the greatest achievements in sports but with America’s obsession with big numbers. I recently talked with him about this.
Not to turn you into an amateur sociologist, but what do you think is behind American sports fans’ obsession with breaking records?
Records and record-keeping are really what make a sport a sport. Why is golf a sport, but ballet isn’t? It’s not about athleticism, it’s about competing and keeping score. It’s about who’s better and who’s best. And in this context, a great record is a dare. It a taunting voice from the past that says, “Hey, top this—if you can.”
Does it seem to you sometimes as if many fans don't even know about the existence of a particular record until someone is about to break it?
The most relevant records are the ones that are at least in some danger of being broken. No one cares about the record for triples in a season. It’s not that Chief Wilson is better than Jose Reyes; it’s that the stadiums and the game have changed so much that even the fastest players of today have no shot at hitting 36 triples or anything close to it. On the other hand a record that gets broken a couple of times a year—like world records in swimming and speed skating—seems cheap and disposable. The best records get broken every now and then, but they don’t go down without a fight.
In recent years, numerous record have been broken that no one would have thought possible just a few years ago. Is there really any such thing as a record that can never be broken, and if, so, what would your top nominations be?
Before last season, nobody would have thought that a contemporary player could break Wilt Chamberlain’s record of scoring 100 points in an NBA game. But in the process of scoring 81 against Toronto, Kobe Bryant actually scored a higher percentage of his team’s points than Wilt did. So all of a sudden the NBA single game scoring record seems a lot more vulnerable than it did only 18 months ago.
One of the records that people always refer to as being unbreakable is Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. While it’s stood for a very long time, I think it’s much more vulnerable than most fans think. After all, against top college competition, Robin Ventura managed to put together a 58-game hitting streak. And right now we’re in a period where the game is being played in hitters’ parks and a lot of runs are being scored, which translates into more plate appearances per game. That said, if the record does get broken, I don’t think it’s going to be by an all-time great like Albert Pujols or A-Rod. I think it’s much more likely to be a guy who’ll be able to get 30 games under his belt while flying under the radar, like Jimmie Rollins or Luis Castillo.
My vote for the all-time most unbreakable record? Johnny Van Dermeer’s record for consecutive no-hitters. To break it a guy would have to throw three no-hitters in a row. That’s an easy way to win a bar bet, right there.
Is there perhaps a different definition of what constitutes a record now than in decades past? I’m thinking of two things. First, several years ago when Larry Holmes looked like he might win 49 consecutive fights, many in the sports press began saying that he had a chance to break Marciano’s “record” of 49-0. But I never heard Marciano or anyone else talk about going 49-0 as a record until Holmes began to approach it. I’m also thinking of when Jose Canseco hit 40 home runs and stole 40 bases in the same season, the first player ever to do so, and Mickey Mantle commented, “If I’d-a known they were going to make such a fuss about it, I’d-a done it.” I think there’s a point to what Mantle was saying. Aren’t some of what we call records basically media creations?
No doubt, and it’s not a new phenomenon. When DiMaggio was on his hot streak in 1941, they actually had to go back and figure out that Wee Willie Keeler held the hitting streak record. It wasn't common knowledge. The consecutive games streak wasn’t a big deal when Gehrig broke Everett Scott’s mark, but for better or worse it was a national event when Ripken passed Gehrig. But a year later, when Ripken broke the world record held by Sachio Kinugasa of the Hiroshima Carp, there were only about half a dozen of us who noticed. Part of it, of course, is that we simply have more stats and better research at our disposal now. But the bottom line is that all records aren’t equally important, and it’s up to the fans—and the media—to decide which ones really resonate.
One of the best things about Made to Be Broken is that you cover every major sport from team sports to NASCAR, golf, and tennis. Some are obvious while some are not so but deserve to be—for instance, I didn’t know until I read your book that the Soviet gymnast Larissa Latynina won more Olympic medals than any other athlete in Olympic history. Which of these unsung records do you find most interesting?
There are a few records that I particularly like. In baseball, what is every hitter’s goal when he comes to the plate? It is, one way or another, to come around and score. Well, that’s what Rickey Henderson did 2,295 times, more than any other player in major league history. Ty Cobb set the old record back in 1925, and every great player in baseball history—Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Williams, Stan Musial, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle—had a chance to break the record but couldn’t. And yet when Rickey broke the record it was the third biggest baseball story of the week, behind Barry Bonds’s seventieth homer and Tony Gwynn’s impending retirement.
You can’t help but be impressed with the résumé of Michael Schumacher, the Formula One driver. He owns every significant record—wins, championships, points—in a tremendously competitive sport. But even though he’s the highest salaried athlete in the history of the world, no one in American knows who he is.
The last one that I really like is Mike Austin and the longest drive in pro golf history. He was a 64-year-old teaching pro, but in the U.S. Senior Open in Las Vegas in 1974 he whacked a ball 515 yards, farther than Tiger Woods or John Daly ever did. And this wasn’t a fluke. Austin was a real pioneer in swing theory, but his short game was so bad that his best pro finish was thirty-seventh. In a way, that hole was a microcosm of his career. Austin drove past the green and three putted, so the longest drive in the history of professional golf only set him up for a bogey.
I noticed that you put Cal Ripken, Jr.’s consecutive-games streak last on your list of 50. Many fans would argue that it should be number one on the list. Why so low?
This one’s a huge pet peeve of mine. I only included Ripken’s record to make the argument against it. I see this as a glorified perfect attendance record, like that weird kid in your homeroom who came to school with whooping cough just so he wouldn’t be marked absent. A meaningful record should represent an aspect of excellence in the game. Well, I think there’s no question that Mr. Ripken and the Orioles would have been better off if he had taken a few days off. If you graph the career of most hitters, it looks like a bell curve. They get better and better every year, reach a peak in their mid- to late twenties, and then begin a decline. Ripken’s career looks more like a ski slope. He had his best year in 1983 at age 22, winning the MVP and his team winning the World Series, and from there—with the exception of his second MVP year in 1990—he began a long slow decline. And the Orioles were just a few games over .500 during his streak and made the playoffs only twice. The longer the streak went on, the worse Ripken played. It has always struck me as truly amazing that a player can be allowed to put his pursuit of a record ahead of the team. And because of his lunch-pail image, Ripken never got called on it. Sports columnists are so quick to criticize the high school kid who scores 100 points in a game against an overmatched opponent or a guy like Rickey Davis, the NBA player who took a shot at the opposing basket with the game out of reach so that he could get a rebound and complete his first triple double. These guys were putting themselves ahead of the game, but they were doing it in garbage time. Ripken cost his team games year after year, and cost himself—and us—a chance to see if he could top Honus Wagner as the greatest shortstop ever. Ripken gets my vote as the most selfish player in baseball history.
If you could look into a crystal ball at an edition of Made To Be Broken from the year, say, 2027, what new records would be likely to have been added to the contents?
A lot of sports fans tend to look at the record book as the canon. But as I’ve said before, I think that many records are more vulnerable than we imagine. Only with hindsight do we see how it’s possible. I think the state of the game determines which records are vulnerable, and right now baseball is in a hitter-friendly phase, football has placed an increased emphasis on passing, and hockey is moving toward an era of shooting and scoring instead of clutching and grabbing. So I think all the records at the top of the list are vulnerable. The baseball home run record could trade hands several times, even after Bonds passes Aaron. Jerry Rice knew that Randy Moss was on record pace for many receiving records, which is why Rice tried to hang on as long as he did. Could Sidney Crosby challenge Wayne Gretzky’s records? It’ll be fun to watch.
One other huge wild card: advances in sports science. Sport medicine is already allowing players to have longer careers, so they don’t go limping out of the game in their early thirties the way Mickey Mantle did. On the other hand, while sports have been very quick to declare victory in the war on performance-enhancing drugs, the reality is that each succeeding generation of performance-enhancing drugs is more effective and harder to detect. And gene doping could change the landscape in ways that we simply can’t comprehend now.
October 27, 2006
The World Series with Yogi Posted by Allen Barra at 08:30 AM EST
 | | Yogi Berra and fans on Tuesday night. | | (Credit: Margaret Barra) |
There’s watching the World Series, and then there’s watching the World Series with Yogi Berra.Tuesday night a sellout crowd of 80 people watched the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Detroit Tigers 5-0 in Game Three of the World Series with Yogi, his wife, Carmen, and other members of the Berra clan, at the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center on the campus of Montclair State University in New Jersey. The museum’s amphitheater, designed to resemble the bleachers at Yankee Stadium, regularly hosts lectures and appearances from noted baseball writers and former players, as well as serving as a screening room for baseball films. Nothing fills the theater, though, like Yogi’s annual World Series event. “We may have to build an upper deck to accommodate people next year,” joked Dave Kaplan, director of the museum and learning center. The donation is $250 a seat, and there’s no question that everyone leaves feeling they got more than their money’s worth. One Cardinals fan, Frances Fisher of St. Louis, said, “ I saved money all year to be able to come, and I never dreamed that the Cardinals would be playing. I just wanted to see Yogi. He’s still as big a hero in St. Louis as he is in the New York area.” (Berra, born and raised in St. Louis, refused to pick a favorite for this year’s match. “I feel I should be neutral,” he told everyone before the game.) Part of the attraction is the museum itself. “The House That Yogi Built”—or, as some call it, “The House Built by Yogi’s Friends”—covers nearly 7,500 square feet and is on the first-base side of Yogi Berra Stadium, a charming minor-league ballpark that is home to both the Montclair State Red Hawks and the New Jersey Jackals of the independent Northwest League. With interiors designed by Frank Cirillo, former director of exhibits and design for the Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, the museum includes, among other displays, a photo history of New York baseball, the Yankee cow from the 2002 Cow Parade autographed by Yankees past and present, and a special exhibit of Andy Jurinko paintings, “Heart of The Game.” And, of course, there are tributes to Berra’s unique status in American culture, showcases that include his record 10 World Series rings, Yogi figurines, comic books, cereal boxes, magazine covers, and even illustrations of Berra’s cartoon namesake, Yogi Bear. As Berra says, “Every time I walk through here I see pictures of me I’ve never seen before.” Attendees are given a commemorative card autographed by Yogi, and prizes are awarded for between-innings trivia contests. For many, the highlight of the evening is a fifth-inning break where every guest who brought their camera can have their picture taken with Yogi. While snacking on peanuts, popcorn, hot dogs, and cokes, guests enjoy questions and answers with Yogi and Carmen. From this year’s event: Q: Yogi, who’s your favorite catcher in the game today? Yogi: Pudge. [Ivan Rodriguez of the Detroit Tigers] Q: Yogi, who was the best player you ever saw? Yogi: Joe DiMaggio. You see guys diving for ball in the outfield? DiMaggio never had to dive for a ball. He was always in perfect position to make the play. When asked about whether or not the announcer Joe Buck was as good as the announcers from his playing days, it was classic Yogi: “I don’t know. I was playing back then. I wasn’t listening to the games.” Would he trade the Yankees’ troubled third baseman, Alex Rodriguez? Berra was adamant. “No, I wouldn’t trade him. I’d give him a chance to work his problems out.” Yogi had some advice for A-Rod’s postseason batting woes: “You see the ball, you hit the ball.” Berra, who holds numerous World Series hitting records, reminded the audience, “Nobody’s perfect. I hit .125 in my first World Series in 1947.“ Actually, someone reminded him, it was .158. Another guest asked Berra to name the best pitchers he had ever seen. One of his choices was the Dodgers’ great left-hander Sandy Koufax, which prompted a question from Carmen Berra: “Did you ever get a hit off Koufax?” “Yeah,” Yogi replied, “I got lucky.” Every year, at least one person asks Berra if he has changed his mind on one of the most famous plays in baseball history, Jackie Robinson’s steal of home in the 1955 World Series, one of he few times in his career when Yogi was known to shout at an umpire in protest. “No, I haven’t changed my mind,” said Berra with a grin. “He’s still out.” Every guest leaves with a commemorative card autographed by the Yankee Hall of Famer. But the best parting gift is a verbal treasure from the man comedian Billy Crystal once called, “a piece of American folk art.” Two years ago, a woman asked him, “Could you please make up a Yogi-ism for me?” “Ma’m,” replied Yogi with a shrug, “if I could do that, I’d be famous.” Indeed.
October 26, 2006
What Happened to American Sports? Four Questions for Andrew Zimablist Posted by Allen Barra at 11:00 AM EST Andrew Zimbalist is the Robert A. Woods professor of economics at Smith College and a member of the Five College Graduate Faculty. He has consulted widely in the sports industry and has published 18 books, including In the Best Interests of Baseball? The Revolutionary Reign of Bud Selig (2006). His latest book, The Bottom Line: Observations and Arguments on the Sports Business (2006), from Temple University Press, further establishes his reputation as the leading literary sports economist. I talked to him recently about the problems of sports as big business.
It seemed like for the first seven or eight decades of the last century the fans and the media were pretty much ignorant—some might say blissfully ignorant—of the complexities of the sports business. In recent years, it seems as if there’s been an explosion of interest in the business of bigtime sports, one exemplified in part by the popularity of your own work. Why the boom in literature about the business of sports?
You hit the nail on the head. It’s my books—nothing else. Well, okay, maybe—let’s see.
Free agency coming first to baseball in 1976 and then the other sports has to be the principal cause. On the one hand, free agency, with its skyrocketing salaries, forced fans to take notice. One’s income determines one’s worth in our world. The human condition impels us to seek transcendence, which we have always done through hero worship. When our adulation of a ballplayer is affirmed by his $10 million salary, it gives us license to further indulge our fandom. On the other hand, team owners, suddenly paying skyrocketing salaries, had for the first time to behave like real business executives. They had to go beyond opening up the stadium doors an hour and a half before game time and assuming fans would show up. They began to do real marketing and promotional work, and to develop corporate sponsorships, among other things. They began to seek hundreds of millions of dollars in public subsidies for new, revenue-rich facilities. The money in the game became extant.
In the pre-free-agency days, owners were wont to tell players that they could not offer them any more money because they were already the highest paid player on the team. When players discovered that they were feeding many players on a team the same baloney, the players began in the late 1960s to make their salaries public and the media obligingly spread the word far and wide. In contrast, we don’t generally hear about the compensation packages of corporate executives or movie stars.
Moreover, it is apparent that salaries and team payrolls play a very significant role in affecting competitive outcomes. But to understand the strategies behind team payrolls, trades, and free agent signings, fans have to learn about revenue-sharing systems, luxury taxes, salary caps, and more. That is, to follow the game, the informed fan must learn about the economics of the sport.
Several essays in The Bottom Line deal with the true value of sports franchises such as the Boston Red Sox and New York Mets. In your estimation, what are the most profitable franchises in all American professional sports? On average, if you could own a pro team would it be better to own a team in Major League Baseball, the National Football League, or the National Basketball Association.
It of course depends on how you define profitability. Does it include related-party transaction profits? Does it include compensation to the team owner or members of his or her family? Does it include interest income on an owner’s loans to the franchise? Does it include the value of tax sheltering or the unrealized capital gains? I cannot speak about individual teams due to confidentiality arrangements in consultancies I am involved in, but, overall, without any question whatsoever, the most profitable professional team sport has been the NFL.
One of the most interesting sections in The Bottom Line deals with the National Collegiate Athletic Association and college sports, which is a subject very few in the sports media are knowledgeable about. Though you state in no uncertain terms that college athletes are exploited, you are skeptical about the idea of pay for play. What’s your main objection to it? Also, do you believe that colleges use the same kind of creative bookkeeping in the financial figures they release to the public as professional leagues?
If we define exploitation as a condition when someone is paid less than the value that he or she produces, then it is true that some college athletes are exploited. Most likely, this would be a handful of stars on the football and men’s basketball teams at Division IA universities. As long as college sports benefits from a myriad of special tax exemptions, public funding, and the association with the university, then intercollegiate athletics, in my view, should strive to fulfill Article I of the NCAA constitution, which stipulates that sports are ancillary to the main function of the university, which is education. If college sports are to be reformed, it should be toward the realization of the primacy of academics. If, however, college athletic departments are ready to renounce their branding as part to the university and its attendant tax benefits, then I have no problems with the fuller commercialization of college sports along with cash salaries for the athletes.
That said, with the current system there is a profound contradiction. It is that the suppression of salaries for the athletes leads to an unrealistic and unhealthy bloating of coaches’ salaries. Not only are these $1- to $3-million compensation packages to coaches out of any proportion to the value they produce, they send the wrong signal to college students when the head coaches are paid 10 to 20 times more than the highest-paid professors and one to four times more than the university president.
Creative accounting might be too generous a term for the accounting practices used in university athletic departments. It is certainly possible to shift costs away from athletics to the general budget, to physical plant, to music, to dance, to food services, to academic tutoring, and thereb, thoroughly distort the financial reality of the athletics department. And colleges generally do this. The problem is that they do it unsystematically, if not erratically, and practically every college uses its own system. Put this together with the confusion around student fees, capital accounting, and donations and it leads to a misleading portrait of the economic effect on a university’s budget from its intercollegiate athletics program. The hard reality is that out of some 1,200 schools in the NCAA and 118-odd in Division IA there are probably no more than a half dozen or so athletic departments that run a true surplus in any given year.
It seems to me that one of the main reasons why steroids gained such a foothold in sports is that the players didn’t want to do away with them, because they help increase performance, thus helping them to more lucrative contracts, and the owners weren’t anxious to do away with them, because the players’ enhanced performances helped sell tickets. But in the long run, don’t both players and owners stand to gain much by the abolition of performance drugs?
Yes, clearly, if there were a foolproof system to assure that no players were using performance-enhancing substances, it would be to everyone’s benefit. Right now, however, there is no such system. The most obvious problem is HGH, an enhancer for which no reliable test exists and certainly no urine test which is all that is permitted in the U.S. team sports leagues. There are other loopholes as well, and a few years down the road we are looking at the morass of gene doping.
July 20, 2006
All About Satchel Page: Five Questions for Dan Gutman Posted by Allen Barra at 10:40 AM EST Dan Gutman is probably the most popular writer of sports fiction for young adults in the country. Among his bestsellers are such as Honus & Me, The Million Dollar Shot, and Satch & Me. Here are five questions concerning Satchel Paige, the philosopher and folk hero who might well have been the greatest pitcher in the game’s history. Check Gutman out at www.dangutman.com.
Did we miss Satchel’s 100th birthday? When did he turn 100?
No one knows for sure, but a likely birth date is July 7, and we’re sure he was born in 1906. Satch himself probably didn’t know for certain.
Satchel Paige seems to have evolved into an American folk hero. Why does he fascinate us now, more than 60 years after his baseball career was winding down?
Satch is one of those figures, like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, who make us wonder “What if . . .” With Dean and Monroe, we wonder what heights they might have attained if they hadn’t died young. With Satch, we wonder what heights he might have attained if he had had the chance to prove himself when he was young. Legend has it he won 2,000 games and pitched 50 no-hitters in the Negro leagues. By the time black players were finally allowed in the majors, he was 42 and long past his prime. Was he the fastest? Was he the best? We’ll never know.
Paige was regarded as a great pitcher, maybe the greatest of his time, not just by his black contemporaries but by many of the white players he faced in barnstorming games. What exactly were “barnstorming games”? Didn’t his teams fare well against those featuring great white pitchers such as Dizzy Dean and Bob Feller?
Back in the good old days before TV, black and white teams used to travel around the country during the off-season and play exhibition games in small towns. They would attract big crowds, because most people had never seen top players perform. The black teams more than held their own against white major-leaguers, which is evidence that there were a lot of Negro-leaguers who were just as good as major-leaguers, if not better. It should be noted that the black players were certainly more motivated to win, while the white players might have been playing for the extra paycheck. In any case, some baseball fans believe that all pre-1947 major-league records and stats are meaningless, because pitchers like Walter Johnson never had to pitch to great black hitters like Josh Gibson. And hitters like Babe Ruth never had to face a Satchel Paige fastball.
What do you think the existing evidence indicates? Would Satchel have been a star in the big leagues back in the 1930s had he been given a chance? What white pitcher would you compare him to?
Personality-wise, I’d say Satch most resembled Dizzy Dean. Both had a slightly goofy and uneducated yet intelligent way of looking at life. Physically, I’d compare him to Randy Johnson. Both were impossibly tall and skinny—two goony birds. As far as skill level and dominance, Satch was just as good as Walter Johnson, Bob Feller, and Cy Young, plus he had a repertoire of pitches and deliveries like Luis Tiant. But I think that if Satch had been in the majors in his prime, he would have been better than all of them.
Like Yogi Berra, Satch is reputed to have said a lot of famous things, some of which he did say and some of which he didn’t. Of the things he said that he did say, what are your favorites?
”Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
”We don’t stop playing because we get old. We get old because we stop playing.”
”I never threw an illegal pitch. The trouble is, once in a while I would toss one that ain’t never been seen by this generation.”
”Just take the ball and throw it where you want to. Throw strikes. Home plate don’t move.”
”Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.”
”Money and women. They’re two of the strongest things in the world. The things you do for a woman you wouldn’t do for anything else. Same with money.”
”Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like nobody’s watching.”
”You win a few, you lose a few. Some get rained out. But you got to dress for all of them.”
”My pitching philosophy is simple; you gotta keep the ball off the fat part of the bat.”
”I never had a job. I always played baseball.”
”If you tell a lie, always rehearse it. If it don’t sound good to you, it won’t sound good to no one else.”
And you might want to know about “Satchel Paige’s Rules for Staying Young,” first published in Collier’s magazine in 1953:
Avoid fried meats, which angry up the blood.
If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.
Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.
Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society—the social ramble ain’t restful.
Avoid running at all times.
And don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.
July 6, 2006
Doc Holliday Gets a New Biography Posted by Allen Barra at 10:15 AM EST Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday are joined together in American frontier mythology the way Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig are in baseball. Wyatt, a peace officer in the toughest cattle and mining towns of the Old West, is the one whom modern movie audiences most easily identify with, whether played by Burt Lancaster, Kurt Russell, or Kevin Costner. But Doc, the aristocratic son of a Georgia plantation owner, always seems to enter the Earp movies through a side door before stealing the film, as did Kirk Douglas in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Dennis Quaid in Wyatt Earp, and, most especially, Val Kilmer in Tombstone.
In the movies, Doc appears as a Western version of a Joseph Conrad character, a tarnished cavalier with a mysterious past whose strongest virtue is loyalty to Wyatt Earp. Happily, as revealed in Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend (Wiley, $30), a provocative and immensely readable new biography by Gary L. Roberts (an emeritus professor at Abraham Baldwin College), much of the legend is true, or at least is rooted in fact.
Born in Griffin, Georgia, in 1851, John Henry Holliday, like so many young Southern men of the period, found his life radically transformed by the Civil War in which his father served. Sent to a Philadelphia college to study the burgeoning trade of dentistry, young Holliday later contracted tuberculosis and left his native state never to return. Precisely why he left has never been explained; wisely, Roberts presents the evidence for all the theories—from fleeing authorities after a shooting to a doomed romance with his cousin to the supposedly curative powers of the Western climate—without leaning heavily toward any of them.
Frail and soft-spoken, Holliday drifted first to Texas and then to Kansas, drifting from dentistry to the profession best suited to an expatriate Southern gentleman, gambling. He finally reached the fabulous silver-mining town of Tombstone, Arizona, earning immortality in 1881 at the street fight in Tombstone (as it was called at the time) and its controversial and bloody aftermath, in which Wyatt, Doc, and their followers pursued a vendetta against the cattle-rustling faction who murdered Wyatt’s younger brother Morgan.
Along the way he became involved in just enough shootings (as with all gunfighters, Hollywood has exaggerated the number, of course) to establish a reputation. It wasn’t always positive. The mood swings provoked by tuberculosis and his increasing dependence on alcohol inspired a wide divergence of opinion: Wyatt Earp, whose life he saved in Dodge City, was quoted as calling him (in the highly polished words of a script writer) “a frontiersman and a vagabond . . . a philosopher, but he preferred to be a wag. He was . . . the quickest man with a six-shooter I ever knew.” Earp’s good friend Bat Masterson, himself a renowned peace officer and later a New York journalist, saw him as “hot headed and impetuous and very much given to both drinking and quarreling . . . [he] was very much disliked.” On the other hand, Wyatt’s older brother Virgil called him both “gentlemanly” and “a good dentist.”
The truth seems to be that he was all of these seemingly contradictory things and many more, depending upon who did the telling. Doc himself left us practically no primary documents; a stash of letters to his beloved cousin Melanie, who had become a nun in Georgia, was destroyed, perhaps shutting us out forever from the true nature of their relationship. (Melanie would inspire her good friend Margaret Mitchell to name a character after her in Gone With The Wind; some have speculated that Doc was the model for Ashley Wilkes.)
Disease finally did what bullets couldn’t. After years of flaunting his indifference to death, Doc succumbed to tuberculosis in 1887 in Glenwood Springs, Colorado; he died, according to a local paper, “with his boots off,” a fact that must have caused him great amusement. “He remains,” writes Roberts, “essentially, a man without a voice, a circumstance that makes him, at once, a compelling subject and a frustrating figure.” He is and probably always will be the eternal wild card in the deck of the Old West’s most enduring legend.
June 20, 2006
Speaking of Glory Road . . . Posted by Allen Barra at 12:00 PM EST . . . as I did in this space yesterday, here are a few observations about the true story that the movie tells, and about basketball at that time.
—The same year the Texas Western Miners became the first all-black team to win the NCAA title was also the year that the Boston Celtic great Bill Russell became the first black NBA coach.
—The 1965-66 Texas Western game was characterized by the slam dunk, a relatively new play in college basketball. Ten months after TWU’s championship, the NCAA Rules Committee voted to outlaw the slam dunk. The ban would last ten years.
—Despite the style of ball the ’66 Miners helped usher in, their play that season was, according to center David “Big Daddy D” Lattin, “more white-oriented than any team we saw in the NCAA tournament. We played the most intelligent, the most boring, the most disciplined game of all.”
—Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp never stopped berating the 1966 Texas Western team that beat his Wildcats for the national championship. He once referred to them as “a bunch of crooks,” and in an interview years later said, erroneously, that TWU was “placed on probation” for recruiting violations on the ’65-’66 team.
—Despite Rupp’s accusations, the seven black players on the ’65-’66 TWU squad did just fine. Four graduated that year, the other three went back and got their degrees. One of the players died in 2002. The surviving players are all married and have grandchildren.
—The effect of the Miners’ victory in the ’66 NCAAs was electric and immediate, inaugurating what one historian called “the most substantial increase in integration in the history of college sports.” The next season every conference in the Southeast and Southwest had black players.
—Don Haskins had coached girls’ college basketball before accepting the men’s job at Texas Western. He coached the rest of his career there, retiring in 1999 after winning seven Western Athletic Conference titles. In 1997 he was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame. Among the letters of recommendation he received was one from Pat Riley, who played on the Kentucky team TWU beat in 1966.
—Despite the later recognition of what the ’66 Miners accomplished, there was relatively little sense at the time that history was being made. “I started my five best players,” Haskins would tell an interviewer years later. “That they were all black and that it was the first time five black players had started in an NCAA championship game meant nothing to me.” According to Pat Riley, “As I got into the NBA and players began to speak to me about that game, I started to realize the significance of it.”
June 19, 2006
Glory Road and Basketball History Posted by Allen Barra at 10:45 AM EST In 1965 Don Haskins, the men’s basketball coach at an obscure university, Texas Western (now the University of Texas at El Paso), decided to level the playing field, so to speak, by tapping into a new source of talent: black players. In 1966 his squad became the first all black team to win the NCAA championship. That their opponent was Kentucky, coached by the very symbol of white domination of the sport, Adolph “The Baron” Rupp, almost seems to be something out of fiction. In fact the whole story, like that of nearly every inspirational sports movie, from Remember the Titans (which, like Glory Road, the film based on Haskins’s team, was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer) to Friday Night Lights, seems to be something out of fiction.
Glory Road, which has just been released on DVD, gets most of the known facts right but never quite succeeds in illuminating them. Played by Josh Lucas—beefier here than as Reese Witherspoon’s amiable beer-swilling husband in Sweet Home Alabama—Haskins is a decent, dedicated man who never becomes self-conscious about his role in sports or social history and who is merely intent on fielding the best team he possibly can. Very good. Affirmative action does not work in sports, and there is no reason why a coach should consider starting a player for any other reason than his ability.
Surely there was some steel and fire to Haskins that made him the first coach in the south to face the inevitable storm of scorn and protest that he knew would follow his decision, but the script, by Chris Cleveland, Bettina Gilois, and Gregory Allen Howard, never begins to deal with this. Nor does it seem to have a clue as to how Haskins inspired and united his boys in the face of such adversity. Recalling their coach for Frank Fitzpatrick’s 1999 book, And The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Kentucky, Texas Western, and the Game That Changed American Sports, Haskins’ players invariably recalled hating him at the time for his unrelenting toughness.
It might be interesting to see how a white Southerner hammered discipline into young black kids, most of them from New York and other urban areas, back in the era of segregated sports. Instead we’re spoon fed big doses of tough love washed down with platitudes such as “It’s not about talent, it’s about heart!” and “The dignity’s inside you!” (Where else would it be?)
Glory Road isn’t shoddy, and it isn’t offensive—except perhaps for the shamelessness of the title, which links it to the greatest movie about the American Civil war, Glory. But it’s so respectful of its major characters that the ironies and complexities of their story never really come alive. Only Derek Luke, who stood out in Friday Night Lights, makes a sharp impression among the players as an unapologetic urbanite plunked down reluctantly in a rustic Texas setting.
The film leads the viewers step by step through Texas Western’s season, telling us not only when to cheer but who to boo, especially John Voight, as a caricature of Adolph Rupp, who, to be fair, is deserving of much scorn for the ungracious remarks he continued to make over the years about the team that defeated him. Voight, in the typical actor’s affectation, plays Rupp with an unnecessary prosthetic nose, an obvious attempt to bring verisimilitude to an underwritten role. Glory Road’s political simplicity may help to make it a hit with the teen crowd that needs its politics and history spelled out on flash cards; it probably also won’t hurt that the basketball scenes are edited with an MTV-style rhythm, as the one-thing-at-a-time style of basketball that was played in the mid-sixties would probably have kids laughing in the aisles today. (Like the big title fight between Jim “Cinderella Man” Braddock and Max Baer, Texas Western’s title game with Kentucky was supposed to have been a snooze, so the director and editor supply the dramatics that history neglected.)
Directed by a first-timer, James Gartner—who has, on the evidence of this film, no discernible style—Glory Road has one truly memorable sequence, a documentary segment at the end with the real Haskins and Pat Riley, who played for Kentucky in the 1966 championship game, reminiscing and laughing about the game’s significance, that has all the genuine warmth, humor, and rough edges that have been combed out of the movie’s account of the story.
May 23, 2006
Poker and Life: An Interview Posted by Allen Barra at 10:15 AM EST Steven Lubet is one of America’s best-known literary lawyers. A professor of law at Northwestern University, he is the author of the popular textbook Modern Trial Advocacy and the widely praised Murder In Tombstone: The Forgotten Trial of Wyatt Earp. He writes a regular column for American Lawyer magazine and has also written for the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and American Heritage. In his latest book, Lawyers’ Poker: 52 Lessons That Lawyers Can Learn From Card Players (Oxford, $28), he takes on America’s newest gaming craze, poker, and explores the natural kinship between the card table and the courtroom. I spoke with him about poker, the law, and the Old West.
Your book is subtitled “52 Lessons That Lawyers Can Learn From Card Players.” Fess up. What kind of poker player are you? And don’t try to bluff me.
I am a student of poker strategy and an admirer of the poker greats, but I do not currently play. My basic point is that poker geniuses really know what they’re talking about, and that lawyers have lots to learn from them when it comes to strategy and tactics. Most importantly, then, you don’t have to be a poker player in order to learn from poker players. Just as you don’t need to be an ancient Chinese general in order to apply Sun Tzu’s philosophy of war to contemporary business.
And what’s the principal thing that poker players can learn from lawyers?
When it comes to strategy, I’m not sure lawyers have much to teach poker players. And the reason is that poker players have done such an excellent job of analyzing their game. The literature on poker is not only extensive, but, more important, it’s been validated in practice. Unlike law, poker is a game of repetition. Certain situations are repeated over and over—and since you can play 30 hands an hour or as many as 300 hands in one extended sitting, it is truly possible to experiment with various ploys and techniques. In that sense poker is more like science, or at least social science, than law is. Lawyers are really intellectual borrowers or copycats, who devour all sorts of ideas from other disciplines. We learn lots from economists, psychologists, even physicists—but it is usually a one-way process.
Still, if I had to provide one lesson to card players (on behalf of lawyers), it would be this: It’s not what you win, it’s what you keep. Diversify your investments and make sure that your financial manager is bonded and insured. Then, if you go broke you will always have someone to sue.
Who’s the best lawyer you’ve ever known? Who’s the best poker player?
The best lawyer I’ve ever known is Gerry Spence. Not only is he a genius, but he is also an inspiration to young (and not so young) lawyers who want to use their skills for the benefit of ordinary people. Gerry’s best piece of advice is to show the jury that you trust them, so that they will return your trust. He calls it “the golden mirror.” The best lawyer I’ve ever seen in trial is Chicago’s Eugene Pincham. He’s not as famous as Gerry Spence, but he is gifted as well. Gene Pincham has also devoted much of his career to assisting the needy, although, like Gerry Spence, he’s also managed to make a good living. Both Gerry and Gene are semi-retired from practice. I’m sure there are younger lawyers ready to take up the challenge.
I haven’t met any of the great poker players, but the best of the analysts would have to include, in my opinion, Doyle Brunson (though he is stylistically challenged) and David Sklansky. When it comes to poker literature (that is, not how-to books), the best writer is James McManus, with A. Alvarez and Anthony Holden in the running as well.
In your Lesson 13, “Patience,” you quote McManus: “Lying in wait is what good poker players do best.” It sounds as if patience is one of the most important qualities a poker player or a lawyer could have. If you had to name two others for both professions, what would they be?
The essential qualities for good lawyers and card players would have to include attentiveness and self-control. Attentiveness allows you to see patterns in your adversaries’ conduct, while self-control allows you to adapt your own behavior to fit the situation. In both cases you want to be able to accurately evaluate the opposition while preventing them from figuring out your own intentions. In poker, of course, you want to know whether your opponent is bluffing or betting for value (while holding good cards), while at the same time keeping them guessing about the strength of your own hand. In legal negotiation, for example, you need to figure out whether a “drop dead” offer is really the last word, or if there is in fact something more in reserve—and in contrast you want opposing counsel to believe that your final offer is truly final. In order to accomplish any of these goals, you must be super attentive, noticing anything that might be revealing about the other side. And at the same time, you must be in complete control of your own conduct, sometimes concealing your intentions and sometimes revealing them—but always for a purpose.
Great lawyers and card players add a third quality—storytelling. In poker, that’s usually called “representing a hand.” So you don’t bluff just by making massive bets (which would eventually become transparent) but rather by playing as though you are holding specific cards. Thus if you are betting as though you are drawing to a flush, you will fold if the cards on the table seem to bust your drawing hand. That will pay off handsomely later, because it will make you look like a tight player who only bets for value. That’s a story worth sticking to.
Lawyer storytelling is different, to be sure, because the stories must be true (contrary to popular opinion and all the lawyer jokes in the world). The art lies in making them coherent and engaging. Thus rather than present a series of simple facts, the great lawyers weave them into a compelling narrative that leads to a single answer. The similarity to poker lies in recognizing that a complete story is more persuasive than the sum of its individual facts.
Why poker now? Why has TV suddenly discovered poker? Is this just a craze that will pass in a couple of years, or, given poker’s longstanding hold on the American psyche, is it something that will continue to grow?
Poker is played by over 60 million Americans, and has been for years, so there is nothing new about the poker “craze.” Until recently, however, nobody had figured out a way to televise it. In that sense, poker was sort of like soccer—extremely popular among participants but invisible in the mass media. It’s hard to say how long poker tournaments will stay on television, but the game is only getting more popular, with millions now playing online.
March 23, 2006
Hoop Dreams Come True: A Thought-Provoking Documentary Posted by Allen Barra at 07:30 AM EST Increasingly, it seems, documentaries, or at least sports documentaries, are not so much imitations of life as B-movies. Through The Fire (Walt Disney Video, $29.99) chronicles the meteoric rise of Sebastian Telfair, the most sensational Coney Island schoolyard legend ever. The film’s promotional tag line reads, “His family gave him the dream, the streets gave him the drive. The game gave him the chance.” And happily for ESPN, which just released the film on DVD, none of that is untrue. It just seems untrue while you’re watching. Directed by Jonathan Hock—who did Imax’s Michael Jordan to the Max and has done numerous shows for ESPN, most notably Streetball—Through The Fire is a documentary structured as a feature film. The central casting is perfect; Telfair couldn’t be more charming if he were played by a young Cuba Gooding, Jr. It’s hard to imagine that even Hollywood could come up with more of an underdog scenario than Telfair’s real life story. We’re scarcely settled in our seats before Sebastian, with Abraham Lincoln High School fresh from its third league title and a state championship, calls a press conference to announce his choice of a university, Louisville, coached by Rick Pitino. In a movie, side stories would then converge on our hero. His older brother, also something of a basketball legend, would fail to make the NBA draft, devastating the family. Then, as if to underline their desperate straits, a drug-related shooting in their building would emphasize how desperately Mrs. Telfair and her children needed to get out of the project. Darned if life doesn’t cooperate and provide precisely these circumstances. Sebastian opts for the NBA and a whopping $15 million Adidas deal. But this didn’t end his underdog status; it merely heightened it. When he announced he would be available for the draft, much of the New York press got hostile, questioning whether his size (slightly under six feet and about 170 pounds) and inexperience would allow him to succeed in the NBA. In truth, these questions have yet to be answered, and it will probably take a follow-up documentary to resolve them. Telfair is currently a mediocre role player for the Portland Trailblazers, averaging under ten points a game. “Right now,” he recently told an Associated Press writer, “I don’t know who I am. I’m definitely not Sebastian Telfair.” Such doubts are absent from Hock’s film, which is one long sustained cheer for the system that helped lift Sebastian and his family out of economic despair. As you might expect from a director who has worked so closely with ESPN (the network that broadcast the high school game that first brought Telfair before a national audience), the emphasis is on the game itself, and here Hock is on steady ground. All of the basketball, from the energetic schoolyard pickups to the high school games, is so lovingly recorded, and the grace and spirit of the young men so evident, that it exposes the over-edited basketball sequences in movies like Glory Road for the studio concoctions that they are. Sebastian himself is clean-cut, smiling, and buoyant, and he handles the media with a slickness that belies his years. No doubt he has picked up a lick of media savvy from watching his cousin, Stephon Marbury. Telfair seems like the very incarnation of what the game is supposed to be about, and Hock’s camera sticks to him so close that at times you’re almost expecting a referee to jump in and call a technical. One never questions for a moment that Sebastian deserves everything that he finally gets. Unfortunately we also don’t question the larger issues that surround the Telfair story. Leaving aside the issue as to whether Sebastian or his brother (who is now playing professional ball in Greece—not such a bad life after all) would have been better off going to college, it might have been appropriate for someone in the film to address the question of how many lives have been ruined for kids who chased the carrot at the end of the stick like Sebastian but never got to bite. A friend of mine who covered high school and college basketball for 30 years once estimated that it takes at least a thousand young boys, all of them competing furiously from grade school level on up, to create the forge that will produce a single great talent. How many of them, dropping out of school to pursue basketball, get burned before they get through the fire? Through The Fire is an exhilarating watch, but you have to wear blinders to walk away from it unconcerned with all the issues it pretends don’t exist.
February 2, 2006
Discovering the Real Jesse James: An Interview Posted by Allen Barra at 11:45 AM EST The writer T. J. Stiles’s 2002 book, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (now a Vintage paperback, $16), took a truly fresh look at an American legend. It was the first book to place the outlaw’s life and legend in a modern context. Stiles was one of the consultants for the new PBS documentary American Experience: Jesse James, which airs nationwide this coming Monday, February 6. I spoke to him about what he’s learned about his extraordinary subject. Your book on Jesse James was a surprise success, and I say surprise because few would have thought there was any new approach to take, so much had been written over the years. What was particularly different about your perspective on him? There are two parts to my answer. First, I took Jesse James seriously as a historical figure. And in taking him seriously I found that he was actually more significant than most people, even well-informed outlaw buffs, ever realized. One of my favorite quotations is by the British historian E. P. Thompson, who wrote in The Making of the English Working Class that his mission was to rescue his subjects from “the enormous condescension of posterity.” For historians, condescension is very attractive, because it seems inherently the most sophisticated position. In Jesse James’s case, this has led some scholars to conclude that the popular-culture myth was more significant than the flesh-and-blood man. I tried to examine the evidence with a clear eye, and I found that the reverse was true. He had a strong sense of mission on top of his obvious greed and violence, and he had a noteworthy impact on his times. The second part of the answer is that I removed Jesse James from the frontier, where we usually think of him, and placed him in an unexpected context: the Civil War and Reconstruction. On the wide spectrum of late-nineteenth-century violence in America, I found him to be closer to the Ku Klux Klan than to Billy the Kid (closer, though not the same). His story opens a window on deep conflicts in American history that still affect us to this day, the struggle over secession and slavery and the fights over emancipation and civil rights that followed. After a career as a Confederate guerrilla, James became an outlaw who was definitely interested in money, first and foremost, but what separated him from virtually every other criminal of his time was his attempt to portray himself in a political light, as both a martyr of and scourge to Radical Republicans. That role, with its overtones of terrorism, obviously speaks to the world we find ourselves in today. So the short answer is, I painted an unexpected portrait of an American icon—and instead of debunking him, I found him to be more important than most of us realized, as well as more relevant to our own time. Would it be fair to say that James became a folk hero largely because of his appeal to the unreconstructed South? Not entirely. There were actually two legends of Jesse James. One existed during his lifetime and was cultivated by the newspaper editor John Newman Edwards and James himself. The other arose very, very late in his life and drew its greatest strength far from his birthplace, through dime novels and ballads. The two legends shared some common traits. Jesse James was depicted as a good man driven outside the law by unjust forces larger than himself, a man whose cunning and skill with a gun outwitted the authorities time and again, who never robbed the average working man or woman but only corporations or the government. The first legend, the one that surrounded him during his lifetime, rested on his status as a Confederate hero in the face of radical Reconstruction. It brought him national attention, and without it the second legend never would have arisen. But Jesse James outlived his political role. When he returned to crime, in 1879, Reconstruction was over, and the Confederates had won. The second act in his bandit career, being devoid of politics, laid the foundation for the dime-novel Robin-Hood myth that is still the predominant image of Jesse James in American culture. Interestingly, his appeal during his lifetime was fairly specific to the border states, especially Missouri and Kentucky. The post-Civil War period in the border states was different from in the Deep South; the white population there was deeply divided. It was in that context that the legend of Jesse James flourished, as he battled local Unionists as well as federal authorities. When he moved to Nashville, in 1875, he felt the need to write letters to the local newspapers to explain his Confederate-hero status back in Missouri. When you read histories of the period, it sometimes seems that Jesse’s brother Frank and their partner Cole Younger were as prominent as Jesse. And Frank James and Cole Younger outlived Jesse by many years, even lending their names to a Wild West show. Yet today they are mere appendages to the Jesse James story. Why did this happen? Jesse James had two things going for him that his brother Frank and Cole Younger lacked: a flare for the dramatic and a high-profile death. In other respects they seem to have been equals. From what little evidence we have of the James-Younger gang’s internal deliberations, we can conclude that they were a small band of comrades in arms, with no operational commander who ruled the others. In addition, Frank and Cole both made statements in later years that show that they shared Jesse’s strong Confederate identity and loathing of Radical Republicans (at least during their outlaw years). But time and time again, Jesse James pushed himself forward, demanding public attention. He made himself the public face of the bushwhacker-bandits. He was the one who wrote letters to the press, who seems to have made dramatic pronouncements during robberies, who forged a particular alliance with the editor John Newman Edwards. When Edwards wrote a newspaper supplement on five of the outlaws, he devoted more than half of the 20 pages to Jesse. Frank was quieter and retreated from the outlaw life (or tried to) after the Northfield debacle in 1876. Jesse kept going and even announced himself by name at his last train robbery. And there’s no denying the incredible drama of his assassination, carried out by his last two gang members in league with the governor of Missouri. There legend cannot improve on the facts. Frank, on the other hand, lived quietly for three decades after his surrender and acquittal, and Cole Younger spent the same period in prison. In the public eye they faded out. Does the American Experience episode on James focus more on his life or on his legend? Or is one inseparable from the other? The film focuses on the flesh-and-blood Jesse James. It shows how much more brutal the real outlaw was than the legendary one, but it also makes clear that he was a product of his time and place, perhaps the most violent time and place in our history. But even the living Jesse was wrapped up in legend, and the film does a good job of sketching out the myths that surrounded him and how they related to his real life. It illustrates, for example, how he became a prisoner of the legend he and John Newman Edwards were creating for him, and turned into a man so hungry for attention that he couldn’t stop his string of high-profile robberies until he was killed. And it suggests how the later myth arose in an America tired of the hatreds of the Civil War, when the battle between populists and corporations had come to dominate the scene. The upcoming Jesse James film, with Brad Pitt, is made from a superb novel, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, by Ron Hansen. With luck it will be the best movie on James. There have been a couple of dozen movies about him. Do you have anything good to say about any of them? I do think the new movie has a good chance of being the best Jesse James film, and for precisely that reason. The question of realism is usually the one I get when it comes to James movies, and I don’t think it should even be asked. The movies have perpetuated an entire mythical universe that is its own thing, created with no desire to check it against the real world. It would be kind of strange to see a film version of James that had him killing unarmed people left and right in the Civil War, or that positioned the first bank robberies in the political turmoil of Missouri in 1866, or that showed Jesse as a media-savvy public figure writing letters and press releases. But do I have anything good to say about them? I did enjoy The Long Riders a great deal; I liked the way the two sets of brothers played off each other, even if they didn’t spend that much time together in actuality. And I’m fond of The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, in part because I like Robert Duvall so much, even as a crazy, over-the-top Jesse. But in terms of realism, none of them measures up.
December 7, 2005
A Talk with Bob (“Boze”) Bell, True Westerner Posted by Allen Barra at 12:20 PM EST Immortalized in the title of a Sam Shepard play, True West, the oldest continuing magazine on the legend and lore of the Wild West, has been a part of Americana since its inception in 1952. In 2000, Bob (“Boze”) Bell–failed professional baseball player, radio talk show host, author, artist, and Western historian–bought the magazine with a group of associates, became managing editor, and began the process of revamping its content and image. From the magazine’s offices in Cave Creek, Arizona, Bell found time to field ten questions from AmericanHeritage.com. How did you get the name “Boze”? In 1964, during a high school baseball game with our archrivals, Needles, California, I hit a Texas Leaguer to short right field, rounded first, and realizing I could easily make it to second, I turned and ran the rest of the way backwards, with a slight but mocking chicken strut. The Kingman Bulldogs bench (my team) went nuts, and coach Baca, also my Spanish teacher, called me “Piaso” (Spanish for clown). My teammates picked up on this and began chanting “Bozo! Bozo!” As the season went on and the legend of my antics grew, my teammates began to call me Boze, for short. I guess you could say it has stuck. What other career stops did you have on the way to becoming the managing editor of True West? I was a drummer in a soul band (Faye Shaw and the Generation), I worked hard as an underground cartoonist (the Doper Roper), I was a drummer in a heavy metal band (Central Heating), I was a draftsman, I was a land surveyor, I was a drummer in a country band (Roy Brown and Country Gold), I was a freelance cartoonist (Playboy, National Lampoon), I was an editorial cartoonist (New Times Weekly, Phoenix), I published a humor magazine (The Razz Revue, 1972-1976), I self-published four comic books (Honkytonk Sue, 1978-80), I was a morning drive-radio personality (KSLX 100.7, The Jones & Boze Show, 1986-1994), and to prove I was still crazy after all those failed career moves, me and two friends bought True West magazine in November of 1999.
Hmmm. It would not be incorrect to say you were one of those . . . “underground cartoonists”? Something of, you know, a hippie?
To be honest, I never made it to full-blown hippie. I was at best a weekend hippie. If you don’t mind my saying so, all those jobs makes you sound like somebody who would have ended up working for Rolling Stone or The Village Voice. How in the world did you end up as the editor and co-owner of the most popular magazine on the American West? How far back do you go with True West as a reader and a fan? Although I have freelanced for Playboy and National Lampoon, my heart has always been in the West. I discovered True West magazine in the summer of 1957 at Desert Drugs in downtown Kingman, Arizona. For a 10-year-old kid it was a life-changing moment. My favorite show on television that year was The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, and I often wondered if that show and the many others on TV in those days were true. True West gave me the unvarnished truth. I soon came to love the real characters of the Old West even more than the cleaned-up versions on TV. After seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, my life changed in that direction, and I spent some 20 years chasing rock ’n’ roll dreams, but I never completely lost my love of the West. In 1974, I think it was, the David Wolper TV show Appointment with Destiny tackled the O.K. Corral fight in Tombstone, and I found myself reawakening my Old West interest. I would still see True West on the newsstand from time to time and pick it up and think, “My fave old mag is dying. I think I know what it would take to bring it back.” In 1999 that opportunity presented itself, and with two other crazy True West fans we bought the magazine and moved the headquarters to Cave Creek. It’s been a bumpy ride, but I’ve loved every minute of it. Some people would ask how Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and General Custer are still relevant to modern American society. How would you answer them? The more I learn about these Old West characters the more I understand about our times, our beliefs, our foibles and boondoggles. There’s plenty to learn from Custer’s career that applies directly to Iraq, and there’s just as much insight into the Crips and Bloods to be gleaned from studying Billy the Kid and Jesse James. And I do believe I sense a certain Wyatt Earp stubbornness and focus of vision in our current Commander in Chief. Someone once said the farther back you look the farther ahead you can see. I think that’s not only true but profoundly relevant to all aspects of our world. Other than that, I just think it’s damned fun. True West is an American institution. Did you irk some of the Old Western buffs by dragging the magazine into the new world? And have you succeeded in lowering the magazine’s age demographic? When we bought the magazine, in 1999, it was all but out of business. The previous owners were still printing on pulp paper, and I knew I had to take some drastic measures to get some life back into it. As we updated the paper from pulp to gloss and tweaked the graphics and the writing, it was amazing to me how many of the old-time fans resented the changes. Almost to a man they’d say, “Why change something that was working?” This was understandable to me, since we all had been reading the magazine for decades and loved it. Unfortunately, a reader’s survey in early 2000 showed us that the average age of our reader was 68. We also were receiving a disturbing amount of phone calls from relatives canceling subscriptions because “grandpa bought the farm”—or I guess I should say ranch. Well, I knew if I didn’t act I was about to lose the ranch myself, and I knew I had to act boldly. Finally, after six years, we are steadily gaining younger readers. Our current average reader’s age is 48, and we are working hard on getting history out to a younger audience. Still, we are committed to the same ideals that our founder Joe Small expounded: Tell the truth about our history, warts and all. That has not changed. I am very encouraged and excited about True West magazine leading the charge. We are making history exciting and interesting to a new generation of fans. To me, it doesn’t get any better than that. The new book from True West, True Tales and Amazing Legends of the Old West (published by Crown), reads like a who’s who of the Old West. I see stories on Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Cody, Jesse James, Davy Crockett, et al. Which audience are you trying to reach with the book, the one that grew up on stories of these people or a new generation that you’re trying to bring up to speed. Or are you perhaps after both? Yes, we believe that there is a whole new audience that will be fascinated by Old West icons like Billy the Kid, Wild Bill, and Davy Crockett once they hear their stories. The trick is to expose our new readers to these old stalwarts but still make them fresh for our older readers. This isn’t easy. I’m talking more about the magazine here. One of the common complaints from our longtime readers is that they are tired of the same old names and want new stuff. However, I believe one of the reasons the previous owners were not making it with the magazine is that they went too deep and started talking about very minor characters like Dick Brewer rather than Billy the Kid, or Pony Diehl rather than Wyatt Earp. It’s a tough balance, but we’re getting better at it. Basically, we can’t forget who brought us to the dance. Do you regard the book as a new take on Old West legends? How do the profiles differ from the way they might have been written in the True West of half a century ago? When we bought True West magazine, six years ago, I made a vow to revisit the many gunfights I had read about growing up but to redo them with better graphics, better maps, better photographs, and better scholarship. I hired the best mapmaker in Arizona, Gus Walker, to give us a clear picture of where they stood, where they rode in from, and where they went to. On each gunfight we have gone to the experts. In the case of Wild Bill, that’s Joseph Rosa, a Brit who knows more about Hickok than any living person. In the case of Billy the Kid, we corresponded at length with Fred Nolan (also an England boy), and for Pat Garrett and John Wesley Hardin, we went to Leon Metz. The key is to find the best scholarship. Many of the “facts” printed in the old True Wests from the 1950s have been disproved or are based on the faulty memories of old timers. Also we have had the honor and privilege of utilizing the amazing photo collection of Robert McCubbin. To scan from the original photos is a tremendous advantage for our readers. And to see the actual bloodstains on Ben Thompson’s picture (found in King Fisher’s pocket when the two were gunned down in the Vaudeville Theater in San Antonio) is just the coolest. We pride ourselves on putting you right in the action, with no B.S. or Hollywood goofiness. Just the facts, warts and all. In my artwork I have tried to find the right clothing, weapons, and terrain for each gunfight. No saguaros standing in New Mexico, no 1895 Winchesters in a gunfight that took place in 1876, no 1950s cowboy hats on 1880s cowboys’ heads. I take these things seriously, and I want the look to be right. What are your favorite Westerns? What do you think is the most overrated Western? It depends on the mood I’m in. Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller isn’t a Western in the typical sense, but it’s a great vision of the West and one of the few Westerns that use weather in an important way. I love the way in the big showdown the snow muffles the sound of everything. It’s a strange movie, quite beautiful. I love the ensemble acting and attention to period detail in Tombstone, which has just about the best dialogue of any Western I’ve ever seen. Overrated? I’ve got to say I just don’t get Unforgiven. I find it dreary, depressing, and cynical. Let’s cut to the chase. Billy the Kid and Wild Bill Hickok face off. Who wins? In my opinion, nobody could face down Hickok in his prime. He was the Michael Jordan of gunfighters. On the other hand, Billy the Kid was a wily, slippery little devil and would figure out a way to win, either by distraction (“Hey Wild Bill, nice hairdo!”) or stealth. Virtually all of the Old West gunfighters had an uncanny knack for getting the drop on an opponent. Ironically, both Hickok and the Kid were done in by men who got the drop on them.
November 3, 2005
The Genius and Tradition Behind a Great Guitar Posted by Allen Barra at 09:00 AM EST Wayne Henderson lives and works in Rugby, Virginia, a community in the Blue Ridge Mountains with a population of seven. (He jokes that he and his fellow residents have to take turns being “the mayor, the preacher, and the town drunk.”) He’s an American original, perhaps the finest living guitar maker in the world, an artist equally at home at Carnegie Hall or entertaining rescue-squad workers at a potluck dinner. In a wonderful new book, Clapton’s Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument (Free Press, $25), Allen St. John articulates Henderson’s vision, leading us through the steps by which a few strips of wood and a half dozen steel strings become the means for transforming inspiration into sound. Ostensibly the story of how Henderson (winner of the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship) built a guitar for the British rock legend Eric Clapton—after keeping him waiting for 10 years—Clapton’s Guitar is only a guitar book in the sense that The Orchid Thief is a only book about gardening. St. John makes the case for the transformative power of certain objects and the not-so-quaint notion of craftsmanship. The book is as much the story of a man as of an instrument, and of the characters who stop by just to watch. Henderson’s shop is perched, both literally and figuratively, on the outskirts of the twentieth century, in a place that, give or take a few power tools, hasn’t changed much since his mother was born almost a hundred years ago. Henderson boils the instrument’s thin rosewood sides over a hot plate to get them to bend, and he finds rare and valuable tonewood in the most unlikely places; one instrument was built from a piece of Brazilian rosewood that was once a table in Truman Capote’s yacht. St. John writes likes Henderson’s guitars play, clear and resonant. And with harmony, too, bringing in another master guitar builder, Massachusetts-based T. J. Thompson, to occasionally offer alternative methods of attaining guitar-craft perfection. Clapton’s Guitar centers on a poignant irony: Henderson is a practical businessman quietly trying to stem the course of modern commerce. For 200 years American capitalism has been about figuring out ways to take handmade goods and mass-produce them quickly, cheaply, and efficiently. Every day when he pulls on his baseball cap and picks up a bottle of Titebond, Henderson resists the pull of time. The golden-age instruments that he replicates were built on an assembly line at the Martin guitar company factory in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, during the depths of the Great Depression. The only way to recreate that magic is with one man working alone in a tiny shop, taking a pile of wood and a sharp whittling knife, and “cutting away everything that doesn’t look like a guitar.” When Henderson fills in a tiny gap hidden in the bowels of a guitar with a sliver of mahogany no thicker than a sheet of looseleaf paper, a detail that the owner of the guitar will never see, it’s a small triumph over the culture of good enough. St. John’s attention to his own craft is worthy of his subject. He picks up on some delightful details, such as Henderson’s penchant for writing semi-obscene messages inside his heirloom guitars. If the instrument is treated with lifelong care, no one will ever see his rude notes. We can be thankful that Eric Clapton, and not Pete Townshend, was the one who commissioned Wayne Henderson.
October 28, 2005
The Greatness of Hank Williams—As Explored in a New Biography Posted by Allen Barra at 10:10 AM EST Hank Williams was the last echo of the barbaric yawp from Walt Whitman’s America. In just five short years, from 1948 to his death in the backseat of a car on the way to a concert on January 1, 1953, he recorded 66 songs, most of them his own compositions, many of which can still be heard on radio stations almost anywhere in the world. A Nashville songwriter named Harlan Howard summed them up in a nutshell: “Three chords and the truth.” Every American and just about everyone who knows something about America recognizes at least a refrain from “Cold, Cold Heart,” “I Can’t Help It if I’m Still in Love With You,” “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Why Don’t You Love Me (Like You Used to Do)?,” “Jambalaya,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and perhaps a score of other songs, whether in versions by Williams himself or Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole, the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Tony Bennett, James Brown, Linda Ronstadt, the Bee Gees, and even Lawrence Welk. What other songwriter been covered by Nat King Cole, the Grateful Dead, and Lawrence Welk? Primarily due to legal squabbles within the Williams family that kept letters and papers out of the hands of potential biographers, and partly because his personal history was so unrelentingly bleak, Williams’s life and work has received surprisingly little serious attention. His own home state of Alabama, which could never quite decide if it regarded him as a suitable native son, did not erect a statue of him until 1991, and not until 1993 were his lyrics taken seriously enough to be published between covers. Not until 1995 did he receive a definitive biography, Hank Williams, by the music historian Colin Escott, who also co-produced the comprehensive set of Williams’s recordings, The Complete Hank Williams. And not until Paul Hemphill’s new Lovesick Blues – The Life of Hank Williams (Viking, $23.95) has Williams been the subject of a book as exhilarating as his music. Hemphill, the Birmingham-born journalist whose 1970 The Nashville Sound was many a college student’s first guide to country music, has now given us in Lovesick Blues perhaps the first book that could be read with equal pleasure by both Hank Williams and his current generation of fans. Like his subject, Hemphill keeps the story lean and simple. Hiram “Hank” Williams, a logger’s son, grew up in tiny West Mount Olive, Alabama, in a log cabin in back of a country store. Once the family was settled, the father, Lonnie, split, and Hank didn’t see him for another ten years. Little Hank roamed the town, listening to music at both white and black churches. “Rather than relying on secondary sources,” Hemphill writes, “—commercial radio, tape recordings, songwriting lessons—he had gone straight to the roots” of his music. His first direct influence was a black professional musician named Rufus Payne, known by the locals as “Tee-Tot.” Payne gave Hank an informal course in nearly half a century of Southern music—country blues, gospel, and medicine show tunes. He taught him something else, too: poor folks wanted to see a performer who looked better than they did. When he became a professional, Hank would emulate his teacher, always performing in a hat, coat and tie. Thin, pale, and suffering from the boyhood ravages of spina bifida, the teenage Williams became an alcoholic. He dropped out of school and got his education in a circuit of clubs that, as Hemphill puts it, “had a particular edge to them; which is to say you could get killed in there.” It was the only work he would ever know, and when he showed up he was good at it. When he didn’t he risked the wrath of small-time mobsters like Jack Ruby (yes, that Jack Ruby). His voice, lyrics, and onstage charisma soon won him a huge following, but his erratic behavior and reputation were anathema to the establishment represented by the Grand Ole Opry. His idol, Roy Acuff, told him, “You got a million-dollar voice, son, but a ten-cent brain.” Perhaps, but as one of his band members put it, “For a man like that, to make that kind of impression on mankind, he had to be a genius. Education might’ve ruined him.” He had an amazing natural poetic gift, honed by a partnership with a Nashville producer named Fred Rose, and together they came up with lyrics that would make a fin-de-siècle French poet weep: “The silence of a falling star lights up a purple sky,
And as I’m wondering where you are, I’m so lonesome I could cry.” He possessed an innate sense of what his audience wanted because, as G. K. Chesterton said of Dickens, he wanted the same things they wanted. Though Williams was the first country songwriter whose work was recorded by mainstream popular singers, he resisted the trend toward greater sophistication; when one of his musicians asked if a recording sounded “too country,” he answered, “It’s never too country.” Hank Williams was the greatest star of the heroic era of country music in the years following the World War II, when the songs were “written and performed by Southern boys and girls not a day’s bus ride from the cotton fields or Appalachian hollows whence they had come. . . . To people in cities like Chicago and New York, especially the more sophisticated songwriters on Tin Pan Alley, country music was for losers. But for people like my father, it was the latest news from home.” Who could have guessed that more than half a century later, in cities like Chicago and New York and London and Tokyo and Moscow, that news would still seem so current?
September 14, 2005
Appreciating Edmund Wilson Posted by Allen Barra at 12:55 PM EST To call Edmund Wilson (who lived from 1895 to 1972) the greatest American critic or our most dynamic man of letters doesn’t begin to hint at the scope of his achievement. Wilson’s passions ranged from modernist literature (his favorites were the writers he came of age with—Yeats, Proust, Joyce, Hemingway, though not, oddly, Kafka), to politics (particularly the ways in which Marxism had permanently shaken the world), the American Civil War, the ancient Middle East, northeastern American Indians, and just about anything else that piqued his intellect. He wrote good fiction (a novel, I Thought Of Daisy, and a collection of stories, Memoirs of Hecate County), boring plays, scintillating memoirs, and journals that now function as time capsules for the decades in which they were written; he translated classic Russian poetry; and he filled several thick, rich volumes with reviews and essays on everything from his Princeton classmate F. Scott Fitzgerald to why he hated detective stories (the best known are probably The American Earthquake, The Shores of Light, and Classics and Commercials). No other American writer has produced so many essential volumes; no American who aspires to be an intellectual can afford not to be familiar with Axel’s Castle, To The Finland Station, The Wound and The Bow, Patriotic Gore, A Window on Russia, and perhaps a dozen other Wilson titles. Hemingway said that Wilson’s opinion was the only one “in the States I have any respect for.” W. H. Auden candidly admitted that he wrote for Wilson alone. Since Wilson’s death 33 years ago there have been numerous portraits and a couple of readable biographies, but Lewis M. Dabney’s new Edmund Wilson—A Life in Literature (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30) is by far the most comprehensive deep-dish study of both his life and work, and at a whopping 600-plus pages, a grand feast for the intellectually horny. Born and raised in Red Bank, New Jersey, a handsome sleepy town with a Southern flavor, young Edmund was given an education grounded in both the Scriptures (his mother was proud to be a descendant of Cotton Mather) and the classics. His father, a one-time attorney general of New Jersey, was an upper-class WASP with surprisingly cosmopolitan tastes. (One of his friends was a Jew, Sigmund Eisner, grandfather of the Michael Eisner who would one day head Disney Productions). Given his background, it was inevitable that Wilson would attend Princeton, where he received, as Dabney puts it, “a purely humanistic education in the tradition going back to Erasmus, though absorbed within a country club environment.” There he met and befriended F. Scott Fitzgerald, a relationship that would loom large in American literature, not only because of his influence on Fitzgerald but because of his role in reviving Fitzgerald’s reputation years after his death. Wilson’s complacent world was shaken by the piles of corpses he saw during the First World War. Sobered, and with his horizons expanded, he returned home and became a top-flight journalist and critic for Vanity Fair, and then, as The New Republic’s literary editor, helped turn that magazine into “the primary organ in the United States for people who love books. ” He finally found a home at The New Yorker, where, in the words of one of his contemporaries, one picked up the magazine “to see what in God’s name he would be doing next.” As early as the mid-1930s, he had surpassed his early idol H. L. Mencken in both scope and influence as the most acclaimed critic in the country. There were four tumultuous marriages, including one to the brilliant and acerbic novelist and critic Mary McCarthy. (“American letters,” write Wilson’s biographer, “has not seen another alliance so flawed and distinguished.” There were dozens of celebrated affairs and friendships—whether in pursuit of one or the other, in Dabney’s sly phrasing, “he was always in search of a promising student.” His feuds, most notably his famous falling out with the Russian imigri novelist Vladimir Nabokov, dominated the pages of the leading literary periodicals. Given Wilson’s decades-long on and off romance with Marxism, it’s amazing in retrospect that he and the fanatical anti-Communist Nabokov were ever friends at all. Always, always, there was alcohol, astonishing quantities of it. Edmund Wilson, concludes Dabney, “was the only well known literary alcoholic of his generation who was not compromised by his drinking,” but, as Dabney makes clear, “alcohol undermined his marriages.” A Life in Literature humanizes our greatest man of letters without ever trivializing him. The most American of the twentieth century’s great scholars, Wilson spoke “with a pronounced British accent” while bristling at British class snobbishness. The great interpreter of Joyce and Eliot liked to relax with Bing Crosby records; by age 60 he enjoyed sitting down with Frank Sinatra’s album In the Wee Small Hours. He was a model of urbanity and intellectual control to some, but Anais Nin found him “irrational, lustful, violent.” A Seneca Indian woman he befriended while writing Apologies to The Iroquois was so impressed by his sincerity that she offered to make him a member of the tribe and named her son for him. Indeed at times in Dabney’s enormously satisfying account there seem to be several Edmund Wilsons, all of them products of a time, as the author puts it, “culturally narrower than ours,” but “in some respects more literate.” Till the end of his life Edmund Wilson reflected the confidence, vitality and sometimes arrogance of an America that had, with startling swiftness in the history of the western world, become not only important but dominant, a society whose “Mass culture was not yet its primary export.” A Life in Literature makes one nostalgic for such a time and such a man.
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