Substantially Similar--A Blog on IP Issues, Writing and Film
On Translations
by John Aquino on 08/29/12
I have always been fascinated with problems in translations. Perhaps this is because I have no language but English. I have also seen how inaccurate translations can cause trouble.
A recent example is that of U..S. Secretaey of State Hilary Clinton, who, with all of the resources of the State Department at her disposal, still couldn't get an accurate translation. In 2009, she presented a large button labeled "peregruzka" to the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to symbolize how the United States wanted to reset its relationship with Russia. The only problem was that "peregruzka" doesn't mean "reset," it means "overload."
My first awareness of translation problems was when the good nuns in my Catholic elementary school showed our eighth class the Italian film "La Strada." It was subtitled, and the translation was supplied by the Catholic Educational Association. Much to my everlasting regret, my parents did not teach us Italian, even though they both spoke it fluently. It was part of the "melting pot" idea of America that was in vogue at the time in which all cultures melted into U.S. culture. The only Italian I had ever heard my Dad speak was the occasional words that ususally began with an "m" that he uttered in anger or annoyance. And so my class was watching the film, and Anthony Quinn, playing a brutish circus strongman spat out the word "mannaggia," which was one of the words I had heard my father say. The subtitled translation read, "Phooey," which I had a pretty good idea was not what my Dad had said.
Years later, I heard the story about my Uncle Pat when his daughter was dating a young man that my uncle did not like. After a while, however, my uncle's attitude appeared to have changed because he began to call the young man "ciuco," as in "Hey, ciuco" or "Well, here's my friend ciuco." The boyfriend had taken high school French and was familiar with the expression "mon petit chose," which literally means "my little thing" and is uttered with affection to another person. He thought that "ciuco" meant the same thing in Italian. Soon, the boyfriend's friends were calling him "ciuco" too. It was only later that he found out that in Italian "ciuco" means "jackass."
Inaacurate translations can be embarrassing; they can also be dangerous. In 1961, Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev met with U.S. President John F. Kennedy and in their talks Khrushchev used the expression "We will bury you." The United States and the Soviet Union were in the middle of an arms race, with each trying to stockpile more nuclear weapons than the other. It was a natural assumption that when Khrushchev said, "We will bury you" he meant in nuclear rubble. It was perceived as a threat, and it made the cold war colder. The next year, the Soviets were found to have placed missles in Cuba, just 90 miles off the coast of the United States, and the world was on the brink of nuclear war.
Years later, someone who spoke Russian and was familiar with the Russian culture pointed out that Khrushchev had not said, "We will bury you" but rather "We will dance at your funeral," quoting, I believe, a Russian folk song. Khrushchev was not threatening the United States but instead whimiscally expressing the view that the Soviet Union would outlive the United States and other democratic countries. He was probably surprised by the reaction and maybe was even expecting to have gotten a laugh. The translator either only heard something about funerals and jumped to the wrong conclusion or just didn't understand the expression or know the folk song. And yet, largely because of this mistranslation, the world was almost destroyed.
My brother married a young lady from San Salvador, and their two daughterfs are learning both English and Spanish. I envy them and hope that they'll be better at translations than the Catholic Education Association or Hillary Clinton's staff. I know in my heart they will be.
Mr. President Hit New York and Washington Big 50 Years Ago and Landed Hard
by John Aquino on 08/23/12
Fifty years ago, a Broadway master wrote a musical about a president. It tried out in Boston and Washington in September and opened in New York in October. It was a strong attempt by old Broadway hands to write a fresh and new musical, one that was reflective about the country’s young and new president. That it failed says a lot about high expectations and how hard it is to do something new.
In 1962, most of the legendary Broadway composers were dead or otherwise inactive. Cole Porter had not been involved in a Broadway show since 1955’s Silk Stockings; his last score was for the TV musical Aladdin, which was completed in 1958, shortly before his leg, injured in a 1938 fall, was finally amputated. He spent his remaining six years in virtual seclusion. Lyricist and librettist Oscar Hammerstein II of “Rodgers and Hammerstein” had died in 1960, a year after the premiere of The Sound of Music, his last musical with Richard Rodgers. George Gershwin had died in 1937, and his brother Ira had not written lyrics for Broadway since 1946’s Park Avenue. After having lost Hammerstein, Rodgers was struggling to write his own lyrics for No Strings that year and for additional songs to be included in a new version of State Fair, his 1945 film musical with Hammerstein, starring rock and roll idols Pat Boone and Bobby Darin. Composer Frederick Loewe, who suffered a heart attack during the tryouts for Camelot in 1960, had retired after that show’s premiere. His partner Alan Jay Lerner was attempting to set up collaboration with Rodgers, which never materialized. After 1957’s West Side Story, composer Leonard Bernstein had left Broadway, claiming that that had established the path for contemporary “operatic” musicals that he now expected others to follow.
This really left just Irving Berlin. He had written his first big hit—“Alexander’s Rag Time Band”—in 1911 and his first Broadway score in 1914—Watch Your Step. He had composed revues for Ziegfeld and the Music Box and left Broadway for Hollywood in the thirties and forties, composing scores for Dick Powell, Astaire and Rogers and Bing Crosby, including Holiday Inn in 1942, which featured “White Christmas,” one of the most popular songs ever written. He returned to Broadway in 1946 to help out his friends Rodgers and Hammerstein, who were producing Annie Get Your Gun, when the show’s composer Jerome Kern died. The musical was based on the life of American legend Annie Oakley, who was a sharp-shooting entertainer in the late 19th century, and included an anthem to Berlin profession—“There’s No Business Like Show Business”—and made Berlin, then approaching 60, more popular than ever.
But by 1962, Berlin had not written for Broadway since 1951’s Call Me Madam. His last film score had been for White Christmas starring Crosby and Danny Kaye in 1954, which also included his last hit song, “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep.” Belin contributed the title song for the 1957 film Sayonara, starring Marlon Brando, but that had actually been written for an earlier, unproduced show. The announcement, then, that Berlin would emerge from this self-imposed exile from Broadway with a new show titled Mr. President, which would premiere late in 1962, was big, big news.
And he was not returning alone. Berlin's collaborators included the producer Leland Hayward--lately of Gypsy and The Sound of Music, and Joshua Logan—director of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Pulitzer Prize-winning South Pacific. The authors of the libretto were to be Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse, whose credits included, Life With Father (1940), which still holds the record as the longest-running straight play on Broadway, the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama State of the Union (1946), and the book for Rogers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music (1959), as well as for Porter’s Anything Goes (1934) and Berlin’s Call Me Madam (1951).
The subject of the musical was to be the President of the United States and his family. Its impetus was the public’s fascination with its youthful and seemingly robust President John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960, who was very much in the public eye. He held nationally televised press conferences almost every day—which ended with a concluding, “Thank you, Mr. President,” established the Peace Corp, and advocated physical fitness. The First Lady—Jackie Kennedy—had also caught the world’s attention with her bee-hive hairdos, pill-box hats, Cassini gowns, emphasis on “culture” in the White House, and a triumphant tour of Paris in which she stole the limelight from the president. The Irish-Catholic Kennedy family—of whom there were very many--itself was the talk of the town—if only for their ambition, nepotism, and great numbers. The president’s brother Bobby was attorney general and had ten children. One of his brothers-in-law was in charge of the Peace Corps, and another was Hollywood actor Peter Lawford. The Kennedy family was lampooned in the best-seller comedy album First Family, starring Kennedy impersonator Vaughn Meader.
The planned show also evoked memories of I’d Rather Be Right, a 1937 musical that had a singing and dancing George M. Cohan playing President Franklin D. Roosevelt—in a dream sequence, since in reality President Roosevelt was paralyzed by polio—and which had its own legendary creative team: Rodgers and his pre-Hammerstein partner Lorenz Hart wrote the score and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart the book. Although not a huge hit, the show was memorialized in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), the film biography of Cohan in which James Cagney as Cohan sang and danced “Off the Record” from I’d Rather Be Right’s score. A more famous ancestor of Mr. President was Of Thee I Sing (1930), with a score by the Gershwins and a book co-written by Kaufman. It had satirized presidential politics—candidate Wintergreen promises the nation he will marry if he wins the election, the vice president has to go on a White House tour to see what it’s like since he’s never invited to anything—and was the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for best drama.
In short, Mr. President promised a return not only of Berlin but of the Golden Age of Broadway. Cementing this was its opening number, titled “Prologue,” which was sung by David Brooks, who had played the romantic lead in Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon in 1947. Berlin even quoted his “The Girl That I Marry” from Annie Get Your Gun in the new song “Meat and Potatoes.”
But there was also something new about the enterprise, a new beginning—like the Kennedys. Lindsay and Crouse had dealt with presidential politics in their Pulitzer Prize-winning State of the Union and with U.S. ambassadors—with Berlin—in Call Me Madam but had never written about a president in office. Berlin had satirized Congress and Louisiana politics in Louisiana Purchase (1941) but had just flirted with presidential themes in Call Me Madam. There was a sense of everyone returning home, to familiar themes, and yet with a difference.
The demand for Mr. President was so great that over a million dollars worth of tickets were sold before the stars were even announced. For its three-week pre-Broadway run at Washington, D.C.’s National Theater in September 1962, the theater’s manager refused to accept mail orders and returned 4,000 pieces of unsolicited mail, much of it containing blank checks. The advance-sale box office was opened on Labor Day to avoid jamming downtown Washington streets on a business day, and the entire D.C. run was sold out by noon two days later. The real Mr. President and his wife Jackie agreed to host a charity-benefit opening night in Washington, D.C.
Berlin wanted Nanette Fabray to play the First Lady and movie actor Robert Ryan to portray the president. Fabray was an experienced stage and film actress who had appeared in the 1947 Broadway musical hit High Button Shoes with Phil Silvers and with Fred Astaire in the 1953 film The Bandwagon. (She achieved her success in spite of the fact that when she was a teen she was diagnosed with otosclerosis, which causes the bones in the ear to calcify. She performed with hearing aids.) Ryan, however, had never been in a musical and had, in fact, specialized in playing movie villains. In fact, in 1962 he was on the screen as Mister Claggart, the epitome of evil, at war with Terence Stamp’s angelic title character in Peter Ustinov’s adaptation of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd. There was scant indication in Ryan’s film work that he could play in a musical or even in a comedy. He had, however, like Fabray, although very early in his career, co-starred with Fred Astaire in a film musical—The Sky’s the Limit (1943). He had played a few non-villains--the understanding counselor in the 1947 film fantasy The Boy with Green Hair (1948) and, most recently, John the Baptist in Nicholas Ray’s The King of Kings (1961). Berlin reportedly felt that Ryan had the handsome looks of a Kennedy but also a weary businessman like quality reflective of the previous decade and of its president and Kennedy’s predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. There was also, perhaps, something of Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s vice president who had lost the 1960 election to Kennedy—straight-laced, good family man -in the musical’s president. Ryan’s president might as well have anticipated by three decades the 41st president, George Bush.
Ryan would be a non-singer in the recent tradition of Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady (1956) and Richard Burton in Camelot (1960), who both won Tonys as best actor in a musical although neither had ever appeared in one before. And so, on its face, Ryan’s non-experience in a musical was not necessarily a minus.
As he often did, Berlin, who composed very quickly, wrote some songs from an outline supplied by the authors who were still completing their book. Berlin, who wrote both music and lyrics, was used to writing songs independently. He had, after all, spent thirty years composing for Broadway revues—a collection of songs and sketches in which there was no plot—before 1943 when Rogers and Hammerstein produced Oklahoma, what was then perceived as the first integrated musical. Even though Annie and two subsequent Berlin musicals—Miss Liberty (1949) and Call Me Madam were “integrated” book shows, he usually wrote the songs before the books were done and created numbers like Madam’s counterpoint “You’re Not Sick, You’re Just in Love,” almost on the spot to fill a hole.
According to composer and music analyst Alec Wilder, Berlin’s flexibility was the amazing thing about him, to the extent that, according to Wilder, while you can write about a “typical” Cole Porter or Gershwin song, you can’t discuss a “typical” Berlin song because he so effortlessly blended with the singer or the show he was writing for. Wilder notes in particular “Moonshine Lullaby” from Annie Get Your Gun, claiming that it sounds as if Berlin had been writing hillbilly music his whole life. But this ability to blend with his singers and shows could have drawbacks—depending on his singers and shows.
As for Lindsay and Crouse, they were not exactly writing at their peak. Although they had been the librettists for the Sound of Music and the show was still running on Broadway after two years, the book had been widely criticized as saccharin. Their previous collaboration with Berlin—Call Me Madam—had satirized the Truman Administration in its dying days, and so quickly became dated.
One of the strange things about the show’s book is that, while it was partly prompted by the election of the country’s youthful new president, the president loses his re-election bid in the first act and the second act deals with his difficulties in being out of office. Lindsay and Crouse were evidently thinking more of Eisenhower, who, after having commanded the armed forces in World War II and led the United States in the 1950’s, was suddenly retired in 1961. It was also a theme from a previous Berlin musical—the 1954 film White Christmas, where a general struggles through his retirement as an innkeeper in Vermont. The movie features what some think is Berlin’s least memorable song—“What Do You with a General (When He Stops Being a General”—which he had inserted in White Christmas from the score of an unfinished musical on this topic.) Dealing with retirement after being in the national spotlight was an issue that Berlin, coming out of retirement, apparently felt an affinity for. Also, in something that, as we will see, occurs a great deal with this show, there was something prescient about the theme. The expansion of the life span also affected ex-presidents. In 1994, there were five former U.S. presidents alive, all of whom dealt with prolonged retirement in different ways.
When the show premiered, Brooks opened with “Prologue,” in which he told the audience whom the show is not about—
Not the Eisenhowers no,
This is not that kind of show,
Not the Kennedys,
No, not the Kennedys,
Just a family of four, so it couldn’t be the Kennedys,
With the Kennedys there’d have to be more than four.
Fabray, playing First Lady Nell Henderson, while the rest of those at a presidential gala dance the then popular rockish twist, sang “Let’s Go Back to the Waltz,” a somewhat listless song about dancing from the man who wrote “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.”
Fabray was then given a comic number, “The First Lady of the Land,” the type Berlin could write from the show’s outline, listing stereotypical complaints of a First Lady, such as standing in a receiving line with an aching spine, having to smile all the time, being able to keep mundane gifts like an unhousebroken poodle and a dehydrated skunk but having to send back the diamond.
Finally, there was a show stopper. The president’s daughter Leslie complains of how the Secret Service—spoils her romantic life:
The Secret Service
Makes me nervous.
When I am dating
They are waiting to observe us.
When I get ready to hold steady
For a kiss he’ll plant,
The Secret Service makes me nervous and I can’t.
Berlin caught the problem children of presidents or any family that gets secret service protection face rather nicely, showing an unexpected playfulness. Ethel Kennedy, wife of the president’s brother Bobby, told Berlin’s daughter Mary Ellin Barrett in 1968 when Bobby was running for president that “‘The Secret Service Makes Me Nervous’ is our family theme song.”
But it soon became clear that if this cute, comic song is your show stopper, you have problems.
Today, what seems most interesting about the show is its prescience about U.S.-Soviet relations. In Mr. President, the Russians try to cancel the First Family’s trip to Moscow—recalling the awkward moment when Eisenhower had to turn back from a visit to Russian during an incident involving a U.S. U2 spy plane, but the First Family insists on continuing and land in a village where they speaks words of peace to a few Russian workmen. The workmen remain alone on stage and plaintively wave as the President’s plane takes off. In retrospect, this emphasis on détente with the Russian may seem bold and daring and, again, prescient. The year before, the Russians had divided the city of Berlin with a wall. Countries under Russian communist rule were seen as oppressed and downtrodden. Dissidents were executed or exiled to Siberia, the frozen wastelands of Russia. By having this Reaganish/Bush-like president seek out the Russian people and preach words of peace, Lindsay and Crouse were anticipating the end of the Cold War under Reagan and Bush (‘41), and the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But at the time, this portrayal produced no heat.
Returning home, the Hendersons find that his election opponent is using the Russian refusal to meet with him as a sign of his ineffectiveness as president. He loses the election and spends the second act as an ex-president, again, an anti-climactic choice for Lindsey and Crouse to make.
The play received poor notices in its August 1962 Boston run. The Record American critic Elliot Norton wrote, “Dreadful is the only word. Anything milder would be misleading, not to say dishonest. . .Never in his whole career has Irving Berlin written so many corny songs.”
Ryan’s singing voice was thin in his big solo “It Gets Lonely in the White House.” He was respected but not liked, although Fabray was loved.
At the urging of his collaborators, Berlin labored and inserted a song for the president’s daughter to capitalize on the dance craze of the twist and perhaps mitigate the effects of the show’s opening “old fashioned” waltz:
Congressmen's lips that are pucked
Waiting for plums to be plucked,
Legal concerns, making out their returns
With expenses they'd like to deduct,
Drinking a toast to the host with the most
While they're doing the Washington Twist.
In Washington, on Sept. 25, 1962, the gala benefit performance was held. The Secret Service sealed off the block around the National Theatre. One major problem was that the president missed the first act to, tellingly, watch a closed circuit broadcast of the Liston-Patterson heavyweight championship fight back at the White House. Both the audience and cast were continually looking back to the presidential box to see if he had arrived. (When the show was produced in Kansas City in 1964, former president Harry S. Truman attended, was stricken by an appendicitis attack, and taken away by ambulance, suggesting that presidential attendance at the show has not been a blessing for anyone.)
The reviews in Washington were as negative as they had been in Boston.
Mr. President opened at the St. James Theater on Broadway on October 20, 1962 with a $2.6 million advance. The reviews for the show were bad, although Fabray was praised. Walter Kerr wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, “Mr. Berlin’s hand seems to rise and fall thoughtlessly, as though he weren’t looking at the keys. More seriously, the words—which always were simple, but simply evocative—are prosaic, mere wooden soldiers keeping up with the beat. . . ‘It gets lonely in the White house when you’re being attacked, And the loyal opposition gets into the act’ isn’t good Berlin, it is just weak editorial writing. Strangely, the number of harsh, consonant line endings which are turned into rhymes increases wildly, and against all the old fashioned rules of song writing.”
In fairness to Berlin, Kerr either cheated a bit to make a point or misheard the lines, and his rendition makes them sound more prosaic than they are. The real lines of President Henderson’s song are, “It gets lonely in the White House when you’ve been attacked, with the loyal opposition getting in the act.”
On October 22, two days after the Broadway opening, the world was plunged into the Cuban Missile crisis and nuclear war with the Soviet Union was thought to be imminent. Whatever the show’s problems, the events of the day made a singing and dancing president seem out of place.
Mr. President was almost completely overlooked at the 1963 Tony Awards. Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum won the best musical award, and Lionel Bart was voted best composer/lyricist for his work on Oliver! Nanette Fabray was nominated for best actress in a musical but lost to Vivien Leigh for her turn in Tovarich. Berlin was given a special award for his life achievement.
The show closed in April 1963 after its advance sales had run out. President Kennedy was assassinated in November. The show has never been revived.
Berlin contributed one more song to a Broadway musical—again, a counterpoint, “An Old Fashioned Wedding” to the 1966 revival of his 1946 hit Annie Get Your Gun—and dabbled with other shows that were never produced. Just like his friend Cole Porter, he became a recluse but for a much longer period. He died in 1989 at the age of 101. Ryan died in 1973 and never performed in another musical, although he did do a film comedy with Sid Caesar in 1967. In the 1980’s, Fabray’s hearing was restored through operations. In 1976, Leonard Bernstein returned to Broadway with Alan Jay Lerner—who had been continually hunting for a new collaborator after Loewe’s retirement—with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which told the history of the White House and its occupants. It also failed.
One thing is clear. Berlin and Lindsey and Crouse were old dogs and this was a new trick, trying to write something new and youthful and sharp and biting. They were indeed were sometimes looking back to Eisenhower and not ahead to Kennedy. It might have been better if Berlin, who was born in Russia, had written Fiddler on the Roof two years later about an aging Russian dairyman and his family.
In looking back, Mr. President did not fail so much but maybe just could not live up to expectations. The book was surely no stronger than Lindsay and Crouse’s had been for The Sound of Music, but as noted, it took positions about U.S.-Russian relations that may have seemed naïve in 1962 but did not when the Berlin Wall came down 27 years later. Berlin’s score shows signs of carelessness, especially in its rhymes, and is occasionally perfunctory, but he was dealing with age and the changing times in his own way and found resources that many did not know he had. Songs like “The Secret Service” sounds fresh after nearly 40 years, and Berlins adds new colors to his musical palettes, especially with his “Washington Twist.” If it had been written in the late fifties or even mid-seventies, the show might have fared better.
Copyright 2012 by John T. Aquino
On Reputation--Phyllis Diller's and Roger Clemens
by John Aquino on 08/22/12
When I first started these blogs, I wrote on the topic of reputation, especially as illustrated by the topic of a book and articles I had written on fictionalization in fact-based films.
I find my thoughts turning to reputation again with the death of Phylis Diller and the trial of Roger Clemens (along with his recent announcement of his return to baseball).
It was very touching to read all of these women comedians, actors, actresses, and fans writer about how well they remembered Diller and how much she had meant to them. Now, Diller's heyday was in the 1960s when she was on the Jack Parr and Johnny Carson shows, in movies like Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!, and in her tv shows The Pruitts of Southampton. I remember as a teenager being tickled by her risque and self-deprecating humor, like when she doing a tv spoof of the 1965 movie The Collector with Bob Hope, only at one point she tries to lock him in the room, takes the key puts it in her bodice, and we hear it go clank on the floor.
She was fun and she was memorable. But that was 40 plus years ago. And yet they did obituaries of her on news programs and in national newspapers. The fact that I remember the Collector spoof says a lot about her and something about me--then.
I felt the same thing when Richard Boone died. He had been in Have Gun, Will Travel in the late 1950s and early 1960s as the gun-for-hire Paladin, dressed in black, all six feet one of him. His next show was The Richard Boone Show which had the great playwright Clifford Odets as head writer. But soon his tv success faded, and he went back to doing what he had been doing before his television work--playing cowboy villains in movies like Big Jake (1971) opposite John Wayne.
When he died of throat cancer in 1981 at the age of just 63, he hadn't been doing too much. But the next morning the New York Times ran an obituary on him as if he were a statesman. Hollywood stars and producers who wouldn't have given him a part the day before sang his praises. What was happening was that people of my generation who grew up watching him play Paladin in Have Gun Will Travel turned out to have always remembered him.
Maybe Shakespeare had it reversed when he wrote in Julian Caesar "the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."
On the other hand, there's the story of Roger Clemens, the great pitcher for the Yankees and Rangers. I've been in New York and Austin, Texas recently and discussed him with relatives, who reacted much as the sports writers did in their columns the day after his trial ended: "I don't care what the jury said. He did it. He took steroids! He's guilty, and I will never vote to have him go into the Hall of Fame." Sports writers vote to have players admitted into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
And I said to myself--and my relatives--what does the guy have to do! He testified before Congress that he had never taken steroids while other players testifying admitted it or basically refused to answer. Some Congressman believed the trainer who claimed to have given Clemens steroids over Clemens--a shady guy, he kept syringes that reportedly had Clemens' blood in a can in his basement (for blackmail or was he just sentimental?)--and referred the matter to the U.S. Attorney who presented charges of perjury againt Clemens.
He could have plea bargained. Instead, he plead not guilty, insisting on his innocence, and risking five years in prison. Innocent people go to jail too, especially when the members don't like the defendant. It was a big risk for him. But he went ahead with it. The jury found him not guilty, which means with all of the government's resources it could not prove he had taken steroids and so could not prove he had lied about taking steroids. Clemens put himself on the line, he stood tough, and he endured.
And yet with all that, sports writers and my relatives aren't satisfied.
I mentioned my surprise to my Uncle Pat in Austin, and he said, "You have to understand that Clemens is not well liked." He described being at the ticket window for a game and having Clemens storm in, demand his tickets, and reduce the ticket agent to tears.
But I thought the point of the Hall of Fame was that it was the skill that mattered. Babe Ruth was fat and undisciplined, but, man, could he hit. Ty Cobb, who played the outfield for the Detroit Tigers for most of his playing career, was hated by his teammates, hated by the opposing teams, hated by the umpires, hated by the fans--when they would boo him he would run into the stands and beat him up. And yet when the Basebal Hall of Fame was started in 1936, the first player inducted into it was--Ty Cobb. His skill was so great it was undeniable.
Today's sports writers and fans should take a lesson from those of 1936. To paraphrase Shakespeare, Clemens' reputation is a "jewel" of great worth--seven Cy Young Awards, a lifetime 3.12 ERA, 4,672 strikeouts--and they should not be so cavalier about it, especially when the ruling of a court of law indicates that his skills were not enhanced by steroids but were indeed his own.
Copyright 2012 by John T. Aquino
On the Death of Gore Vidal--Who Really Wanted to be Mickey Rooney
by John Aquino on 08/01/12
I have two vivid memories about Gore Vidal, celebrated author, playwright, novelist, essayist, failed politician, and gadfly celebrity, who died on July 31 and whom I never met and only saw once—it was at a party and when he first came in people clustered around him but, since he was bored, snappish, and maybe angry about something, by the time he left the entire party had moved to the other end of the room.
The first memory is reading his 1964 novel Julian. I read it in paperback in 1968 when my father was dying. I sat in the hospital waiting room, waiting for my mother to come out after spending her own time with Dad, and I remember realizing as I was reading it that history was not dead and that it could be read from different angles and fresh perspectives without being false. The second memory is of his calling conservative William Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” in a television one-on-one during the 1968 Democratic convention. I had to look up what “crypto” meant, finding its definition to be “hidden” or “secret,” which is a pretty damning thing to say about anyone. Buckley knew exactly what it meant and he, usually the most erudite and eloquent human being, was reduced to calling Vidal a “queer” and threatening to sock him.
Vidal was almost a jack of all trades and a master of none. Writing evidently came easily to him. I first became aware of him as a television writer, reading his tv play Visit to a Small Planet in a paperback of “great” television dramas of the 1950s along with Paddy Chayefsky's Marty , Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight, and Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men. Four years before Serling used the science fiction genre to comment on contemporary issues in the tv series The Twilight Zone, Vidal employed the story of an alien visiting earth as a satire on the Cold War and the fear of Communism. The teleplay starred Cyril Ritchard, fresh from playing Captain Hook on Broadway and tv, as a seemingly all-powerful alien who is later revealed to have escaped from his planet where he is regarded as a big baby. Vidal later ineptly adapted his 1955 teleplay for Broadway in 1957 with Ritchard acting and directing, and it was made into a 1960 Jerry Lewis movie.
Vidal wrote a lot for television, much of it formula—I own a VHS of an adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde he wrote starring Michael Rennie—but at least one show, The Death of Billy the Kid, was appreciated enough to become the movie The Left-Handed Gun starring Paul Newman as a Marlon Brando-esque version of the outlaw with a screenplay by Leslie Stevens and not Vidal. Later in his career, Vidal wrote a sharp television mystery dealing with student military life—he was born at West Point where his father taught—called Dress Gray (1986).
He moved to Hollywood, where he adapted the work of other playwrights—Chayefsky’s A Catered Affair and, collaborating with Tennessee Williams, Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer. Vidal later told the story about how he was hired to work on the screenplay for Ben Hur (1959) and was able to address the question about why Messala hated Ben Hur so much by suggesting in oblique phrases that they had been lovers and that hell hath no fury as a lover scorned. Charlton Heston, who played Ben Hur, mocked Vidal’s claim in his autobiography, but Vidal does appeared to have worked on the screenplay—uncredited along with British playwright Christopher Fry—and there is such a scene in the finished movie and the scene works.
Vidal then wrote The Best Man for Broadway in 1960. It is still a powerful drama of individuals dealing with the issue of power, the power to be president and to run a country. It was made into a 1964 movie starring Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson and was revived for Broadway just this past year. Political conventions such as the one Vidal depicts don’t really exist anymore. It's interesting, then, that the play keeps getting revived, but it is revived because the people in the drama and the country they are fighting to lead still live.
Vidal also collaborated with Francis Ford Coppola of all people on the screenplay for the unjustly neglected war movie “Is Paris Burning? (1967)” I have always thought that the scene in which Orson Welles as a diplomat struggles to help a woman played by Leslie Caron keep her husband off a train headed for a concentration camp was one of the most powerful I have ever experienced.
Vidal then returned to novels. His second novel, The City and the Pillar (1948) had created a sensation for its portrayal of homosexuality and evidently drove Vidal to writing for television. He published Julian in 1964, based on the life of the grandson of the Emperor Constantine, who was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. When he became emperor, Julian attempted to restore worship of the Roman gods. The characters are vivid rather than cardboard. It recalls—and in his published notes on the novel Vidal credited as his influence--Robert Graves’ I Claudius and Claudius the God. I remember being fascinated about the scene where Julian, who tells the novel in the first person, describes his last meeting with his grandfather who walked away after starting a sentence with the word “remember” but never finished it. Julian later wondered if his grandfather was going to ask him to “remember me.” As I said, I was reading this while my father was dying.
In 1967, Vidal published Washington, D.C., which appears to have been inspired by his own family—his grandfather was a U.S. senator and he and Jacqueline Kennedy shared a stepfather. As a native Washingtonian, I felt that this was one of the few novels about the city that actually reflected the city.
I didn’t read his next novel Myra Breckinridge but did read among his later ones Burr, 1876, Lincoln, and Creation. The first three were good reads, tellings and reassessments of historical events, although they were maybe a little perfunctory. The last was one of the most boring, gosh-awful things I ever read about a Persian diplomat in the 5th century BCE who travels the world gathering creation myths—to no purpose. I remember Vidal going on talk shows to promote the book and insisting that he did not believe in God, which makes a survey of creation myths rather pointless. Vidal evidently carried this non-belief to his last days.
I used to buy Vidal’s collections of essays, read one or two, and end up bringing the books to Second Story Books for credit. I remember a review he wrote of books on Orson Welles in The New York Review of Books in which Vidal described his encounters with Welles—mostly on the phone—and never mentioned the books under review.
In his later years, he revisited the Billy the Kid story for a 1989 television movie starring Val Kilmer and adapted Lincoln for television in 1988. In the latter, Sam Waterson's was a most memorable Lincoln--he had almost none of Raymond Massey's height and majesty but evoked Lincoln's humor and humanity quite well.
But mostly Vidal seemed to wander around being outrageous, suggesting that the Bush administration had advanced knowledge of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And yet, for all of that, as he got older, maybe he got a little gentler. I remember seeing him on Turner Classic Movies, reminiscing about watching Mickey Rooney as Puck--the mischieveous fairy--in the 1935 movie of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “I wanted to be Mickey Rooney!” he insisted, seriously.
I don’t want to end this like Citizen Kane with the little boy, rather than wanting to play with his sled, wanting to be Mickey Rooney and growing up to be Gore Vidal. A jack of all trades and a master of none? Maybe. I don’t think he will be remembered as a great novelist, playwright, or screenwriter, and his essays probably date rather badly.
But a career that produced Visit to a Small Planet,The Best Man, Julian, Washington, D.C., and Lincoln is a good career.
Copyright 2012 by John T. Aquino
What and Why Is Law and Literature?
by John Aquino on 07/16/12
As I have mentioned before on these pages, my wife is a Shakespeare scholar, and I have a B.A. and M.A. in English. When I was taking evening law classes, I heard about a legal movement or trend called “law and literature.” My law school offered a course in law and literature, and in my third year I signed up, thinking that with my background it would be especially meaningful to me. After I took the course, I didn’t know what law and literature was. And I am still not sure I know.
Some of those who have written about law and literature claim that law has greater value and meaning if it taps into a large cultural or philosophical or social-science context rather than existing in isolation. Richard Weisberg and Robert Weisberg, among others, write that literary works, especially narratives centered on a legal conflict, will offer attorneys and judges insight into the nature of law.
It sounds reasonable. I am not sure how it is different than saying that a holistic education is the best education or that it is better to be well read than not.
In the class I took, we read Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Dickens’ Bleak House, and Scott Turow’s Burden of Evidence. It came out during one of the many Socratic discussions the professor held that I was a member of the Mystery Writers of America, and I was quizzed about my opinion of Turow’s book.
I actually prefer Turow to John Grisham. I remember reading Grisham’s early books and feeling that they had interesting premises but that everyone seemed to be waiting around for the Federal Express package to be delivered for the plot to move forward. Turow’s plots seemed more grounded. But I remember saying with Burden of Proof that (spoiler alert) the explanation of the mystery is that his wife killed assistant D.A. Rusty Savich’s mistress and made it look like her husband did it by injecting the mistress’ corpse with the wife’s discharge that she had kept in the freezer. (“Honey, what’s this?” “I dunno. But let’s keep it until I figure it out.”) I felt on reading this twist that Turow had the idea for this but then had to explain it. He threw in a sentence about how she had read a book on artificial insemination. “Is that all it took?” I asked. “I mean, the mistress is lying there dead and the wife has to inject her in her vaginal area. She only had one shot. Didn’t she have to practice? Like start by injecting pineapples?”
But outside of this course being a nice respite from contracts and international law, I really didn’t get it. I didn’t see how it was different from a psychology professor bringing in a recording of Rodgers and Hart’s song “Where or When” to illustrate the concept of déjà vu.
Maybe the need for it is that law professors have been finding that students are coming to them not having had a holistic education and not being well read. I’m not sure that a course or two on law and literature is going to correct a dozen years of educational neglect. The movement toward law and literature also may be the product of fifty or so years professors emphasizing case law to the exclusion of all else—see Professor Kingsfield in the film and television series The Paper Chase. (When my father was in law school at Georgetown University in the early 1920s, he read cases but also read the speeches of Cicero and other classical literature and was trained in rhetoric.)
Last week, I was working on the website of the New York Court of Appeals and saw that they had a video recording of the court’s 2012 Lecture, which was by Daniel J. Kornstein, author of Kill All the Lawyers: Shakespeare’s Legal Appeal. I had read his book when it came out and thought it pretty superficial. In the lecture, he talked on Shakespeare and the law and how Shakespeare forms the basis for any law and literature course or discussion.
His book was published, and I am sure it was successful since he was invited to speak. I am sure he’s a fine lawyer. My problem with his talk is that it reflected what I think is the weakness of the law and literature concept, at least as I have experienced it.
Kornstein pointed out that 20 of Shakespeare’s 38 plays have trial scenes. He said, “Shakespeare helps us understand law, and law helps us understand Shakespeare. Great art often inspires a passion for justice.”
He suggested that Shakespeare’s plays can illustrate certain principles and concepts of law. Kornstein said that in The Winter’s Tale when Leontes orders “a just and open trial” for Hermione, what else is he doing by acknowledging the need for due process.
Kornstein focused on Measure for Measure, as we had in our class, and listed these legal issues that exist in the play
• sexual harassment—the judge Angelo says that he will only release the novice nun’s Isabella’s brother Lucio if she sleeps with Angelo;
• dead letter statutes—the law by which Isabella’s brother is to be sentenced has not been utilized for 14 years;
• capital punishment—the dead letter statute carries the death penalty;
• sentencing guidelines; and
• abuse of power.
I still say, that’s fine, but justices and attorneys were citing and quoting Shakespeare long before the law and literature movement began. Finding a literary allusion to a legal concept can enhance the learning of the concept but cannot teach it by itself.
One thing that Kornstein did say that is interesting is that Isabella in Measure for Measure has a beautiful speech about mercy that is not as famous as Portia’s in Merchant of Venice ("The quality of mercy is not strained..") but he thinks it is better.
ANGELO
Your brother is a forfeit of the law,
And you but waste your words.
ISABELLA
Alas, alas!
Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once;
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy. How would you be,
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are? O, think on that;
And mercy then will breathe within your lips,
Like man new made.
ANGELO
Be you content, fair maid;
It is the law, not I condemn your brother:
Were he my kinsman, brother, or my son,
It should be thus with him: he must die tomorrow.
ISABELLA
To-morrow! O, that's sudden! Spare him, spare him!
He's not prepared for death. Even for our kitchens
We kill the fowl of season: shall we serve heaven
With less respect than we do minister
To our gross selves? Good, good my lord, bethink you;
Who is it that hath died for this offence?
There's many have committed it.
LUCIO
[Aside to ISABELLA] Ay, well said.
ANGELO
The law hath not been dead, though it hath slept:
Those many had not dared to do that evil,
If the first that did the edict infringe
Had answer'd for his deed: now 'tis awake
Takes note of what is done; and, like a prophet,
Looks in a glass, that shows what future evils,
Either new, or by remissness new-conceived,
And so in progress to be hatch'd and born,
Are now to have no successive degrees,
But, ere they live, to end.
ISABELLA
Yet show some pity.
ANGELO
I show it most of all when I show justice;
For then I pity those I do not know,
Which a dismiss'd offence would after gall;
And do him right that, answering one foul wrong,
Lives not to act another. Be satisfied;
Your brother dies to-morrow; be content.
ISABELLA
So you must be the first that gives this sentence,
And he, that suffer's. O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.
LUCIO
[Aside to ISABELLA] That's well said.
ISABELLA
Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder;
Nothing but thunder! Merciful Heaven,
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak
Than the soft myrtle: but man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.
Portia’s is really a single speech, rather than this exchange with another character. I think they are both good and just different, Isabella’s being more dynamic because she is interacting with someone else.
Anyway, that’s what I think about law and literature.
Copyright 2012 by John T. Aquino
