“As we say in church, I look back on a job well done.” — LaVern Baker

Posted on November 11, 2024 by sheila

It’s the birthday of Rock and Roll Hall of Famer LaVern Baker.

Her legacy is vast, so vast that it’s under threat of being forgotten. With the birth of a new style of music, a lot of huge forces are at play, forces simultaneously cultural/political/generational. Changing things up is never the job of one person, even though the history books iron things out that way, singling out individuals solely. There are of course individual humans who make a massive difference, who almost (almost) single-handedly steer everything to go in another direction. (But even there, other forces are at play. Nothing operates in a vacuum. The insane unprecedented unforeseen success of Eminem, for example, his radical merging of hip-hop and pop – he wasn’t the first to do it though! it was just the SCALE of his success that made it so notable – his mainstream success was weird, especially because of his very VERY un-mainstream attitude/persona – he was like the Sex Pistols – NOT for prime time viewing – how he then became a global phenomenon, introducing other cultures to hip hop – (I have a friend from India who told me, “Eminem is literally what introduced me to hip hop. It’s the same for most of my friends too. Eminem was the way in.” – all of this had to happen, numbers-wise, in order for hip-hop to basically replace rock ‘n roll as the primary music genre – to BECOME pop culture – HE did that. He was the person who did that. BUT – the ground was already set for something like that to happen. This is not to say it was inevitable. It still might not have happened. It had to be him who did it, for various reasons. And there are still many many people who wish it HADN’T happened. So be it. It did. I love Eminem but he was not inevitable. I think he came along at a brief crossroads moment where there was a VOID in the culture. I wrote about the void in my massive Eminem post. Very few people are big enough, talented enough, to fill a void like that – or sense a void, even. The same void was there when Elvis came along. There wasn’t a void in MUSIC: there was a ton going on in music, fascinating things, the OPPOSITE of a void. The void was in the larger culture, which – in America, at least – was experiencing a flattening-out of post-war prosperity sparked with terror of the atom bomb, more and more people with more and more leisure time, the erosion of class distinctions, informed by things like electronics/washing machines/indoor plumbing/radio/television – giving people more free time, developments like the GI Bill, which ushered people who otherwise wouldn’t have gone to college into higher education, the burgeoning civil rights movement, and also the generational phenomenon of a massive new demographic of teenagers running around wanting to have fun. There were more teenagers than adults in America. Crazy. All of THAT created a VOID that NEEDED to be filled.)

There were many many people who were crucial in developing the new sound populating the air waves, the raucous sexually adventurous must-be-danced-to sound: the desire “out there” for something DIFFERENT being reflected by the smart performers who felt the need. So there were people like Fats Domino, Sam Phillips, Wynonie Harris, Ahmet Ertegun, Little Richard, Carl Perkins … I mean, these people were all over the place, geographically and culturally, but they all felt the same restless desire to CHANGE. To open the damn windows and let in something NEW. LaVern Baker felt it too.

LaVern Baker was born in 1929. Her grandmother was a runaway slave. She grew up in Chicago, and there were a couple of successful female blues singers in her family, from whom she took great inspiration. She started performing when she was a teenager, as sooo many people who changed the world did. It takes teenagers to really feel what teenagers want. Baker was one of those rare people who felt the void, and had awareness of what was happening “out there” AS it was happening. She entered a trend by birth, the blues “trend”, but then expanded it, pushing it forward into the Now, into the Future. Art isn’t meant to be set in stone. Art that won’t change does exist but it remains niche, with a small audience. Rock ‘n roll was not going to be that. Little Richard called himself the “architect of rock ‘n roll” (and who’s gonna argue? Who wants to go toe to toe with Little Richard? I don’t.) Still: there were many architects. Baker was one of them.

Rhythm and blues was its own thing. I would even venture to say that, although it appealed to kids, it was FOR adults. But there were so many more KIDS “out there” in the early 1950s: something had to be done to satisfy THEM. They wanted to dance, and make out, and throw each other around. Old-school blues wouldn’t allow them to do that. But there were other strands, jump blues, blues shouters, etc. These pretty much rested solely in night clubs, some of it deemed too suggestive for radio play. It didn’t have a chance to spread nationally or to move out of the sub-culture within the culture. Out in the white world, there was boogie-woogie and big band music, where white teenagers were throwing each other around, working up a sweat. This was not music for a “Tennessee Waltz” type courtship. These powerful “trends” – jump blues, boogie-woogie, big band dance music – were already merging, HAD already merged, but it was about to go mainstream.

Baker was a blues singer when she was very young, and when she was 17 she was able to sing in bars and clubs. At first she was a novelty act, called “Little Miss Sharecropper”, where she dressed in raggedy blue jeans and a straw hat and sang the blues. There was pressure on her to adopt this persona by club owners, basically due to the limited success of another performer, Mildred Jorman, who adopted the name “Little Miss Cornshucks”. Baker was an urban Chicago girl. Her life had nothing to do with sharecropping. These were racist stereotypes, and they made Black performers acceptable to the white nightclub audience. It was also a dead end, artistically.

Nevertheless, Baker was more successful as “Little Miss Sharecropper” than Mildred ever was as “Little Miss Cornshucks”. Her family moved to Detroit in the 1940s, which put her in a burgeoning music scene where she didn’t need to pretend to be a simple sharecropping girl to make people sit up and listen. She started recording stuff, which did okay (not nationally, but locally) and she toured around the Midwest. 1953 in general seems to be a very very important year (I appeared on the Very Good Year podcast to talk about the movies in 1953!) 1953 was when the VOID in the culture got too big to ignore. People started pouring into the void, filling it up. (And in July, 1953, a 19 year old truck driver in Memphis slinked into Sun Records to “record a song for his mother”.) Baker signed with Atlantic, with her biggest fan Ahmet Ertegun, who also felt the void “out there”.

She had a minor hit with “Soul on Fire” and then struck gold with her next single, “Tweedle Dee”.

She’s singing with the Atlantic house band, a world-class operation: listen to the arrangement, and how it’s so carefully done to not overwhelm her performance. She’s the star of the track. Her voice is so powerful and flexible: strong as hell but with variety and shadings. You can hear her playfulness, her humor. She’s got that rasp too, but she can control it. She brings in the rasp as an emotional thing, it’s a vocal choice. And it’s thrilling. By no metric on earth is “Tweedle Dee” a great song. It’s barely a good song. But Baker obliterates those critical considerations since she is having so much fun and crushing it so hard!

“Tweedle Dee” launched her nationally. It was #4 on the r&b charts (“race” charts) but it was something like #13 on the POP charts. It was that all-important thing, a crossover hit, which was still almost unheard of in October 1954. White charts and “race” charts were two separate things, by design, but Baker crossed over. The kids – black and white – flipped over it. Elvis was just two months into his career in October 1954. He would be the one to obliterate the crossover “line”, but he was white. He dragged the white world along with him (although “dragged” isn’t the right word, because they all went willingly). But Baker got there first (in fact, Elvis sang “Tweedle Dee” on one of his earliest appearances on the Louisiana Hayride radio show in the fall of 1954. It’s a pretty weak showing, for him, but it speaks to how quickly the song infiltrated the national consciousness. Everyone knew it.)

I am so happy Baker performed the number on the Ed Sullivan Show so we can see her in action at the moment she “hit”.

“Tweedle Dee” was one of those game-changer songs. You can hear in it the boogie-woogie big-band influence, but you can also hear in it – and her voice – the deep well of blues influence. Baker wasn’t a teenager by this point, but she brought to her performance a lively sense of humor, a kind of insouciant “I want what I want” vibe, and she is not ashamed or coy. Listen to the lyrics. This was a woman singing about her needs. She’s blatant, she’s greedy (in the best sense): “Gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme all the love you got!” Go, LaVern! This was something the teenagers loved, found revelatory, a break with their parents’ conservative values.

It’s different when a woman sings “Gimme gimme gimme”. It just is. It’s inherently feminist, whether the people at the time would label it “feminist” or not. It brings women in to the story. It’s not just BOYS who want fun sexy times. Girls want it too. The whole world exploded with possibilities.

She had another hit with “Jim Dandy”, another sexually expressive song from a female point of view.

The lyrics are funny. There’s no euphemism really. Jim Dandy’s got it going ON and Baker is IN.TO. IT.

She toured Europe, she toured Australia with Bill Haley and Big Joe Turner. She was instrumental in spreading rock ‘n roll to the world. This can’t be measured. She appeared in rock ‘n roll movies, a new exploitation style of cinema, and this made her recognizable to the world.

Now comes the twist in the story and her name is Georgia Gibbs, of “If I Knew Your Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake” …. fame? Gibbs loved “Tweedle Dee”, as everyone did, but she put out a cover identical to Baker’s (she even hired the same back-up band and used the same arrangement, literally note for note.). The success of Gibbs’ version obliterated the original, in terms of sales and visibility, even with Baker’s Ed Sullivan Show performance. Baker was pissed. She didn’t mind people covering her songs as long as they put their own spin on it. The era of the singer-songwriter hadn’t happened. This was an era when everyone sang everyone else’s songs. There are like 10 versions of “Good Rockin’ Tonight” before Elvis came along. The IMPACT might be different, and there’s unfairness in that, yes, but it’s just a general unfairness. COPYING is different from COVERING. And Georgia Gibbs was a COPIER.

Unlike everyone else who was irritated at being copied (and watching the copiers get more success), Baker got loud about it. Ahmet Ertegun tells just one story: “We were at the airport, on our way to a record convention. LaVern stopped at one of those machines you get flight insurance from. She was a comedienne, you know, and she had that look in her eyes. She said, ‘In case something happens, do I make my beneficiary Georgia Gibbs?'” Meaning: if I die, Gibbs can’t copy me anymore, she’ll need the money. lol Baker didn’t stop there. She wrote an open letter to Georgia Gibbs:

Dear Georgia, inasmuch as I’ll be flying over quite a stretch of blue water on my forthcoming Australian tour, l am naturally concerned about making the round trip safely and soundly. My thoughts naturally turn to you at this time, and I am enclosing an insurance policy on my life in the amount of $125,000. This should be at least partial compensation for you if I should be killed or injured, and thereby deprive you of the opportunity to copy my songs and arrangements in the future.

She went to bat – taking great risks, and paying the price – for other artists. She was a star: everything she did generated publicity. She was queen of the Open Letter. She wrote another famous open letter to Charles Diggs Jr., the first Black man elected to Congress from Baker’s home state, Michigan, and a champion of civil rights. Baker asked him to strengthen or at least fortify U.S. copyright law to make such copying practices open to litigation.

In her open letter to Diggs, she wrote:

After an investigation of the facts, you might see some wisdom in introducing a law to make it illegal to duplicate another’s work. It’s not that I mind someone singing a song that I wrote or have written for me by someone, but I bitterly resent their arrogance in thefting my music note-for-note.

This made headlines. It brought the issue – with all its racist implications – into the mainstream culture. No laws were passed against “copying” but it became such an implicit no-no that Georgia Gibbs backed off trying to enter the r&b trend and stayed in her “baked a cake” lane (and, consequently, descended into obscurity). Baker’s loudness about this issue made “copying” so unpopular radio stations started refusing to play white note-for-note cover versions, and someone as famous and influential as Alan Freed stopped playing them on his broadcast.

Another important development adding to all of this: the white record producers/radio stations were behind the times. They assumed white kids would not buy records made by Black people. The older generation was wrong. Their ideas were outdated. White kids were buying Little Richard and Fats Domino and LaVern Baker records. They were into it. They heard this music on the radio. They didn’t need to actively seek it out anymore. It was right there in the air. There was no need for duplication. Baker helped bring this awareness out into the open.

This is a HUGE and important legacy.

I love her 1961 hit “Saved”, which Elvis ended up doing 8 years later on his 1968 comeback special. It’s a gospel rager.

What I love about “Saved” is how openly it admits sin. Smoking, drinking, doing the ‘hoochy-cooch” … there’s humanity in it, having faith is not about being perfect. Also, though, it makes sinning sound way too fun to give up. Kind of like how, despite all of John Milton’s efforts, Satan is the most appealing character in Paradise Lost.

You couldn’t get more mainstream at the time, the late 50s, than collaborating with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, a couple of Jewish boys who were also rock ‘n roll architects. Baker sang their “Whippersnapper”:

She had hits with all kinds of music, including ballads. In 1965, she did a FUNKY duet with the great Jackie Wilson called “Think Twice”.

They recorded an X-rated version too! Not for public consumption but we have it and it is raucous fun.

DAMN.

Listen to her DOMINATE.

Baker didn’t really have hits after that but she continued working, often mentoring younger singers coming up, promoting them, helping them. She toured Vietnam with the USO and then landed in the Philippines where she worked at a military base night club, not just performing, but booking the acts, basically running the place. She gave opportunities to young artists. She picked out talent and nurtured them.

“LaVern Baker looked out for us.” — Renée Minus White of the Chantels

She stayed in the Philippines. She liked the work. It put her in contact with artists of all generations and she seemed to relish the opportunity to help younger people. She was strong. She fought for the rights of artists, and was able to see the results. She returned to the United States 22 years later. She appeared on Broadway as Bessie Smith. She died in 1997.

Aretha Franklin was the first female solo artist inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. LaVern Baker was the second.

References:
500 songs podcast
The History of Rock ‘n Roll Song by Song
Hall of Fame article

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“Excessive consciousness is a disease.” Happy Birthday, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Posted on November 11, 2024 by sheila

“Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you. You may say I’m not worth bothering with; in that case, I can say exactly the same to you. We are talking seriously. And if you do not deign to give me your attention, I will not bow before you. I have my underground.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground, 1864

I wrote a thing on Notes From Underground here. Notes from Underground is so ahead of its time as to be damn near SPOOKY. That’s a 20th century book published in 1864.

He’s one of my favorite authors and I return to his stuff again and again. In fact, I just re-read Crime and Punishment last year. It’s my 4th or 5th time. I don’t really count the first time, which was in high school, although SOMEthing got under my skin back then. The book gets deeper and deeper each time I return to it. Also FUNNIER. It often makes me laugh out loud. Razmuhin! I love that character so much.

His humor is one of the things that startles me about Dostoevsky consistently. He’s funniest when his characters are at their most deadly serious. There is nothing funny about the situation in The Double at ALL and yet … it IS hiLARious. The lead character in White Nights is in DEADLY EARNEST but he’s so so funny! You want to tell him to please just put a cool cloth on his head and RELAX. Laughing “at” Dostoevsky’s characters is dangerous though – for me, anyway – because it’s like laughing at myself, laughing at vulnerability, laughing at people who are sensitive, who take things too hard. I finished Crime and Punishment this last time on the flight back from Utah, and I was in tears. I’ve read the damn thing like 5 times. And I’m still in tears. I take it personally. I think it’s impossible not to. He was just that kind of writer.

QUOTES

E.M. Forster’s lecture on the “prophetic novelist”, under which category he put Dostoevsky:

“Prophecy — in our sense — is a tone of voice. It may imply any of the faiths that have haunted humanity — Christianity, Buddhism, dualism, Satanism, or the mere raising of human love and hatred to such a power that their normal receptacles no longer contain them: but what particular view of the universe is recommended — with that we are not directly concerned. It is the implication that signifies and will filter into the turns of the novelist’s phrase, and in this lecture, which promises to be so vague and grandiose, we may come nearer than elsewhere to the minutiae of style.”

E.M. Forster:

In Dostoevsky the characters and situations always stand for more than themselves; infinity attends them; though yet they remain individuals they expand to embrace it and summon it to embrace them … Every sentence he writes implies this extension, and the implication is the dominant aspect of his work. He is a great novelist in the ordinary sense — that is to say his characters have relation to ordinary life and also live in their own surroundings, there are incidents which keep us excited, and so on; he has also the greatness of a prophet, to which our ordinary standards are inapplicable.

Dostoevsky’s characters ask us to share something deeper than their experience. They convey to us a sensation that is partly physical — the sensation of sinking into a translucent globe and seeing our experience floating far above us on its surface, tiny, remote, yet ours. We have not ceased to be people, we have given nothing up, but “the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea”.

Clifford Odets, journal entry, March 29, 1940

The man of genius walks, talks, sleeps, eats, loves, and works with a load of dynamite in him. If he carries this load carefully — balance — its power for good work and use is enormous — it can landscape a whole mountainside. Abuse — out of balance — is suicide and a bitter grave.

It is in this sense that the artist, if he makes a proper amalgam, is beyond good and evil, for everything in him is for creation and life.

For example, let us say that Dostoevsky had impulses of rape in his heart. See how a great artist held this part of himself within his recognition and acceptance of what he was. Its creative uses were enormous. It gave him work, tone, feeling, anguish, a wealth of feeling. Finally, it was just such “weaknesses” which gave Dostoevsky’s novels their religious ecstatic fervor.

In other words … inner contradictions are not solved by throwing out half of the personality, but by keeping both sides tearing and pulling, often torturing the self, until an AMALGAM ON A HIGH LEVEL OF LIFE AND EXPERIENCE IS ACHIEVED! For the artist there is not “bad”. He must throw out nothing, exclude nothing, but always hold in balance. When he has made this balance he has made and found his form.

H.L. Mencken:

The more the facts are studied, the more they bear it out. In those fields of art, at all events, which concern themselves with ideas as well as with sensations it is almost impossible to find any trace of an artist who was not actively hostile to his environment, and thus an indifferent patriot. From Dante to Tolstoy and from Shakespeare to Mark Twain the story is ever the same. Names suggest themselves instantly: Goethe, Heine, Shelley, Byron, Thackeray, Balzac, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Dostoevsky, Carlyle, Moliere, Pope – all bitter critics of their time and nation, most of them piously hated by the contemporary 100 per centers, some of them actually fugitives from rage and reprisal.

Dostoevsky
by Charles Bukowski

against the wall, the firing squad ready.
then he got a reprieve.
suppose they had shot Dostoevsky?
before he wrote all that?
I suppose it wouldn’t have
mattered
not directly.
there are billions of people who have
never read him and never
will.
but as a young man I know that he
got me through the factories,
past the whores,
lifted me high through the night
and put me down
in a better
place.
even while in the bar
drinking with the other
derelicts,
I was glad they gave Dostoevsky a
reprieve,
it gave me one,
allowed me to look directly at those
rancid faces
in my world,
death pointing its finger,
I held fast,
an immaculate drunk
sharing the stinking dark with
my
brothers.

James Baldwin:

I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing that way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. I’m still learning how to write. I don’t know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from Dostoevsky, from Balzac. I’m sure that my life in France would have been very different had I not met Balzac. Even though I hadn’t experienced it yet, I understood something about the concierge, all the French institutions and personalities. The way that country and its society works. How to find my way around in it, not get lost in it, and not feel rejected by it.

William Styron:

Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word – life. Certainly this might be an age of so-called faithlessness and despair we live in, but the new writers haven’t cornered any market on faithlessness and despair, any more than Dostoevsky or Marlowe or Sophocles did. Every age has its terrible aches and pains, its peculiar new horrors, and every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what that same friend of mine calls “the fleas of life” – you know, colds, hangovers, bills, sprained ankles, and little nuisances of one sort or another. They are the constants of life, at the core of life, along with nice little delights that come along every now and then. Dostoevsky had them and Marlowe had them and we all have them, and they’re a hell of a lot more invariable than nuclear fission or the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. So is Love invariable, and Unrequited Love, and Death and Insult and Hilarity. Mark Twain was as baffled and appalled by Darwin’s theories as anyone else, and those theories seemed as monstrous to the Victorians as atomic energy, but he still wrote about riverboats and old Hannibal, Missouri.

Alexander Woollcott to Mrs. Otis Skinner, Aug. 2 1935:

[I have been] weeping steadily because once again I had come to the great healing chapter of The Brothers Karamazov. It always chokes me up and fills me with a love of mankind which sometimes lasts till noon of the following day.

Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint:

I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off!

John Gardner:

The theory of the superman is kind of interesting, abstractly. The question is, Is it right? Will it work? Can human beings live with it? So Dostoevsky sets up the experiment imaginatively. Obviously he doesn’t want to go out and actually kill somebody to see if it works, so he imagines a perfectly convincing St. Petersburg and a perfectly convincing person who would do this. (What student in all of St. Petersburg would commit a murder? What relatives would he have? What friends? What would his pattern be? What would he eat?) Dostoevsky follows the experiment out and finds out what does happen.

I think all great art does this, and you don’t have to do it realistically. Obviously Raskolnikov could have bee a giant saurian as long as his character is consistent and convincing, tuned to what we know about actual feeling.

Gabriel Fallon, Sean O’Casey: The Man I Knew:

Then Yeats ventured an opinion. He said that the play, particularly in the final scene, reminded him of a Dostoevsky novel. Lady Gregory turned to him and said, “You know, Willie, you never read a novel by Dostoevsky.” And she promised to amend this deficiency by sending him a copy of The Idiot.

Ralph Ellison:

Never mind, I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is, among other things, a protest against the limitations of nineteenth-century rationalism. Don Quixote, Man’s Fate, Oedipus Rex, The Trial – all these embody protest, even against the limitation of human life itself. If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

Michael Schmidt:

Fyodor Dostoevsky is nearer to Poe in his fiction than any American successors.

James Baldwin:

I was always struck by the minor characters in Dostoevsky and Dickens. The minor characters have a certain freedom that the major ones don’t. They can make comments, they can move, yet they haven’t got the same weight or intensity.

From “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle”:
By Hugh MacDiarmid
(Gin Glesca folk are tired o’ Hengler,
And still need breid and circuses, there’s Spengler,
Or gin ye s’ud need mair than ane to teach ye,
Then learn frae Dostoevski and frae Nietzsche.

Rebecca West, letter to Sylvia Lund, 1917, written during air raids:

Talking of these nasty foreigners I cannot agree with you about Tolstoy. I wish I could. Twice have I read War and Peace and found nothing but stuffed Tolstoys, and such lots and lots of them. And plainly Anna Karenina was written simply to convince Tolstoy that there was nothing in this expensive and troublesome business of adultery and oh Gawd, oh Gawd, Kitty! And about Resurrection I cannot speak, but only yawn. And those short stories seem to me as fatuous as the fables of La Fontaine. But Dostoevsky –! The serenity of The Brothers Karamazov, the mental power of The Possessed, the art of The Raw Youth! Isn’t it awful to think that nothing can ever decide this dispute?

John Gardner:

Look, it’s impossible for us to read Dostoevsky as a writer of thrillers anymore because of this whole weight of explanation and analysis we’ve loaded on the books. And yet The Brothers Karamazov is obviously, among other things, a thriller novel. It also contains, to my mind, some pretentious philosophizing.

William Styron:

My God, think of how morbid and depressing Dostoevsky would have been if he could have gotten hold of some of the juicy work of Dr. Wilhelm Stekel, say Sadism and Masochism. What people like John Webster and, say, Hieronymus Bosch, felt intuitively about some of the keen horrors that lurk in the human mind, we now have neatly cataloged and clinically described by Krafft-Ebing and the Menningers and Karen Horny, and they’re available to any fifteen year old with a pass-card to the New York Public Library.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“Each time I see it, I know I accomplished what I set out to do as an actress, that I created a person.” — Bibi Andersson on Persona

Posted on November 11, 2024 by sheila

It’s her birthday today.

It was my great honor to write and narrate a video-essay for The Criterion Collection about Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann’s collaboration – both separately and together – with Ingmar Bergman: Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson, Sisters in the Art

From David Thomson’s The New Biographical Dictionary of Film : Expanded and Updated , the entry on Bibi Andersson:

“She needed such a holiday to prepare for one of the most harrowing female roles the screen has presented: Nurse Alma in Persona (66, Bergman). That this masterpiece owed so much to Bibi Andersson was acknowledgement of her greater emotional experience. She was thirty now, and in that astonishing scene where Liv Ullmann and she look into the camera as if it were a mirror, and Ullmann arranges Andersson’s hair, it is as if Bergman were saying, ‘Look what time has done. Look what a creature this is.’ Alma talks throughout Persona but is never answered, so that her own insecurity and instability grow. Technically the part calls for domination of timing, speech, and movement that exposes the chasms in the soul. And it was in showing that breakdown, in reliving Alma’s experience of the orgy on the beach years before, in deliberately leaving glass on the gravel, and in realizing with awe and panic that she is only another character for the supposedly sick actress, that Andersson herself seemed one of the most tormented women in cinema.”

Indeed. I saw the movie in college when I was studying acting and felt a kind of swoon of despair/anxiety/desire: it’s like you’re shown “the bar” which others have set in the field you’ve chosen for yourself. And you may never be that good, but at least you recognize what there is to strive for. That’s what Bibi in Persona did for me. Her drunken monologue which remains, for me, one of the greatest single pieces of acting I’ve ever seen.

But there is so much more to her career than just Persona. She did 10 movies in total with Ingmar Bergman, and had a rich career elsewhere (although it is through those films with Bergman that she will be remembered: Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Persona being the most famous, but there’s also The Passion of Anna, The Magician, The Devil’s Eye, Brink of Life … God, this collaboration. (Here’s a piece I wrote about Bergman’s work.)

She was one of the greatest actresses who ever lived. I was so in awe of her as a teenager after Persona that I stayed far far away from that film for some time. I needed courage in my own pursuit of acting, I needed to find my own way and her example was too daunting, too intimidating. (I had a similar thing with Gena Rowlands. The fact that, so many years, later, I would pay tribute to both Rowlands and Andersson for the Criterion Collection, having completely found another path for myself, hacking a writing career out of NOTHING all by myself … is a beautiful and strange dovetail, and I don’t quite know what to make of it.)

Bibi Andersson was flat out on another level, and I recognized it instantly. It is a level very few actors reach … but at least you know it’s there, at least you know the bar has been set.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“Often we’d secretly like to do the very things we discipline ourselves against. Isn’t that true? Well, here in the movies I can be as mean, as wicked as I want to – and all without hurting anybody.” — Claude Rains

Posted on November 10, 2024 by sheila

For Claude Rains’ birthday: a conversation some years back, where Mitchell and I discuss the superb actor. I asked Mitchell to describe him in one word, and we took it from there. We both love Rains so much, it was fun to discuss him.

CLAUDE RAINS

SOM: One word.

MF: Professional.

In a lot of ways, Cary Grant was the greatest male movie star ever. But I think that Claude Rains was actor first, movie star second. You need it done? You get Claude Rains. He’s the pro. There’s a scene in Mr. Skeffington where he has dinner with his daughter and it is so heartbreaking and so contemporary and so real. His performance is so full of compassion. He’s got those warm watery eyes. But then you can see him play somebody almost evil like in Notorious.

MF: He can be funny and quirky like in Casablanca. And then somebody so good and honest like in Now, Voyager. Or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Then he played Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra, with Vivien Leigh as Cleopatra, and he’s marvelous and funny and warm.

MF: Nobody looks like Claude Rains. It would be very difficult to know who he really was. Cary Grant wanted us, on some level, to know who he was. He was sort of telling us what to think about him in a lot of ways, and then he used that as the jumping-off point of his acting career. But with Claude Rains, I don’t know who the hell Claude Rains is. I couldn’t even begin to tell you. To a lot of people he’s The Invisible Man. To a lot of people he’s the guy from Casablanca. To me his ultimate performance is in Mr. Skeffington because he is so full of kindness in that movie.

MF: On Turner Classic Movies they do these little mini bios between movies and I think Richard Chamberlain did one about Claude Rains and working with Rains towards the end of Rains’ life. Rains was older and having trouble remembering his lines. This is why I say he was a professional. He had a big speech in the movie, he kept blowing his lines, he was getting frustrated, he kept saying, “There’s too many words.” You know, blaming it on the script in some way. And before he became too much of a douchebag about it, he said in a self-deprecating way, sort of called it on himself: “Clearly I can’t remember my lines.” He was totally professional to call that out on himself, and then of course went on to give a fabulous performance.

MF: I think Claude Rains … I don’t want to limit it to film acting, I think he’s one of the greatest actors who has ever lived. Even though he was always Claude Rains, clearly recognizable, his funny little face, his weird stance … he’s the greatest there ever was. There’s Deception with Bette Davis where he plays this evil son of a bitch music teacher and she ends up shooting him. And you totally buy him in that, and then you totally love him as the father in all those movies where he has a brood of girls. You just believed him, no matter what he said.

SOM: He doesn’t change his appearance radically which is the trend now with actors, they feel like they’re not doing enough: “If I look like myself, I’m not acting”. Claude Rains always had his silver hair, but it’s like his soul changed. He could change his soul.

MF: I think he came from the school where I’m not sure they knew how to do it any other way. You walked out onstage and you became the character. I’m not familiar with his history. Was he a stage actor?

SOM: He had a ton of stage experience. He came from good old Show Trash. His parents were actors.

MF: See, that’s it. And isn’t that interesting, my first word was professional. The man was a pro. He also finished off with some classic films, unlike Joan Crawford. That’s a cautionary tale.


Claude Rains in “Lawrence of Arabia”

SOM: Well, he’s a male.

MF: The boys fared better. Joan and Bette … they gave Meryl Streep the gift of being able to have the long career that she has. The battles that Joan and Bette fought, all of them, Susan Hayward, Meryl Streep is the beneficiary of that.

SOM: When people dismiss Meryl Streep as “Well, she’s a leading lady, she’s a movie star, whatever”, my point always is: “Whether or not you like her acting is irrelevant. What other leading lady in her mid 60s do you know of?” This is a pioneer career. Can we give her props for that? I am so sick of ignorant commentary like that where people have no idea of the context of what is happening right before our eyes.

MF: There are two women of that age who can open movies, and it’s Barbra Streisand and Meryl Streep.

SOM: Joan Crawford was not doing the parts she should have been doing when she was an old lady.

MF: Yes, she did not get the opportunity. So the fact that those ladies lasted, in spite of everything that was against them, is extraordinary. But boy, Claude Rains finished out pretty great. His two last films were Lawrence of Arabia and The Greatest Story Ever Told. That’s pretty high up there. He wasn’t doing Trog, let’s put it that way. He was a consummate pro.

Posted in Actors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments

R.I.P. Judith Jamison

Posted on November 10, 2024 by sheila

R.I.P. to legend Judith Jamison.

I feel so fortunate I saw her on Broadway in Sophisticated Ladies! I was a kid and had no idea what was going on, really, but I appreciated every second of it (it was only the second show I saw on Broadway). There is quite a bit of footage of Sophisticated Ladies, but, sadly, due to an injury Jamison was out of the show during filming. But it lives in my head!

Years later, I studied at Alvin Ailey, which is just wild, considering I am NOT a dancer. My grad school’s movement classes were held at the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater on West 55th Street, and we were taught by Ailey company members. I completely understood the honor of all of this. It took me about a month to get over my sense of awe. I was there three mornings a week so it did become normal. But still, there was an element of, oops, sorry, let me just sneak in and out of the locker room and not get in anyone’s way. We were trained in Lester Horton’s famous “flat back series” (a standard part of Ailey’s training, and really great for posture, sturdiness, and making strong shapes with your body). We all still reference this experience to each other (“Oh God, doing the flat back series at 8 a.m. before coffee, member?”). You had to have the bravery to launch yourself across those massive studio floors – without thinking, without hesitation – doing flat back with all your might – even if you felt shy. And the teachers would yell from the other side of the studio as you flat-backed your way towards them, “YES. THAT’S IT. YES. YES.” Grateful to all of them.


My great friend Shelagh and I, lying on the Alvin Ailey studio floor, at some ungodly hour of the morning before class. In winter, it was dark out when I got off the subway on my way to class.

It was incredible getting to be in the presence of all these people, and that legacy, not to mention – or TO mention – getting to attend the performances of their famous repertoire, including Jamison’s legendary dance piece “Cry”. (I didn’t see her do it, but it is an integral part of their repertory.). Amazing to get to be around all this, even in a tangential way.

^^ The only footage I’ve been able to find of Jamison dancing “Cry”.

Great interview with Jamison here:

I took classes there during Jamison’s time as Artistic Director, so I would sometimes get a glimpse of her in the hallways, surrounded by people, talking/listening seriously, and she was imposing and beautiful, sometimes with a long silk scarf draped around her neck and shoulders falling down her back – her posture so erect and graceful, something only years of dance training could create.

It was surreal and moving, since I had the vivid memory of being a gaga kid, sitting in the balcony at the Lunt-Fontaine theatre, drinking in the stunning show and the dancing, and the striking silhouettes she created just with her body, silhouettes filled with power and intention: you knew who she was, even when she was backlit. And there she was, years later, right in front of me.

What an honor it was, to be – briefly – in the orbit of such an artist.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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#OTD 1938 Open season announced

Posted on November 9, 2024 by sheila

From William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany:

On the night of November 9-10, shortly after the party bosses, led by Hitler and Goering, had concluded the annual celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, the worst pogrom that had yet taken place in the Third Reich occurred. According to Dr. Goebbels and the German press, which he controlled, it was a “spontaneous” demonstration of the German people in reaction to the news of the murder in Paris. But after the war, documents came to light which show how “spontaneous” it was. They are among the most illuminating — and gruesome — secret papers of the prewar Nazi era.

On the evening of November 9, according to a secret report made by the chief party judge, Major Walther Buch, Dr. Goebbels issued instructions that “spontaneous demonstrations” were to be “organized and executed” during the night. But the real organizer was Reinhard Heydrich, the sinister thirty-four-year-old Number Two man, after Himmler, in the SS, who ran the Security Service (SD) and the Gestapo. His teletyped orders during the evening are among the captured German documents.

At 1:20 am on November 10 he flashed an urgent teletype message to all headquarters and stations of the state police and the SD instructing them to get together with party and SS leaders “to discuss the organization of the demonstrations.”

a. Only such measures should be taken which do not involve danger to German property. (For instance synagogues are to be burned down only when there is no danger of fire to the surroundings.)

b. Business and private apartments of Jews may be destroyed but not looted …

d. …. 2. The demonstrations which are going to take place should not be hindered by the police …

5. As many Jews, especially rich ones, are to be arrested as can be accommodated in the existing prisons … Upon their arrest, the appropriate concentration camps should be contacted immediately, in order to confine them in these camps as soon as possible.

It was a night of horror throughout Germany. Synagoges, Jewish homes and shops went up in flames and several Jews, men, women and children, were shot or otherwise slain while trying to escape burning to death …

A number of German insurance firms faced bankruptcy if they were to make good the policies on gutted buildings (most of which, though they harbored Jewish shops, were owned by Gentiles) and damaged goods. The destruction in broken window glass alone came to five million marks ($1,250,000) as Herr Hilgard, who had been called in to speak for the insurance companies, reminded Goering; and most of the glass replacements would have to be imported from abroad in foreign exchange, of which Germany was very short.

“This cannot continue!” exclaimed Goering, who, among other things, was the czar of the German economy. “We won’t be able to last, with all this. Impossible!” And turning to Heydrich, he shouted, “I wish you had killed two hundred Jews instead of destroying so many valuables!”

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Review: Small Things Like These (2024)

Posted on November 8, 2024 by sheila

Cillian Murphy gives one of my favorite performances this year in the quiet painful Small Things Like These, an intimate character study with Ireland’s shameful Magdalene Laundries looming over everything. I reviewed for Ebert.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“I have a fan base that’s super, super loyal.” — Lance Kerwin

Posted on November 6, 2024 by sheila

You can say that again. I’m still here.

It’s his birthday today. I discovered him when I was 10, 11, and everyone in my very small weird generation knew who he was. He was a teen idol. Something about him GOT to me. The obsession burned – in a grade-school way – I was barely prepared for the TUMULT of feeling he inspired. For me, it was the Afterschool Specials. I “followed” him as best I could. He died last year. I had never written anything about him before, except in passing, this golden boy of my pre-adolescent dreams, so I decided to pay tribute on my Substack.

I was Googling around looking for recent interviews with him, and found a really good one. He tells some great stories about all the people he worked with – these famous legends who were all still around in the 70s: Mitchum, Glenn Ford, etc. I loved hearing how he – a child at the time – thought about what he was doing as an actor, and why he liked being an actor.

Posted in Actors, On This Day, Television | Tagged | 2 Comments

Happy Birthday, Ralph Macchio, or: How one episode of Eight is Enough saved my life

Posted on November 5, 2024 by sheila

Yesterday was Ralph Macchio’s birthday.

I always knew Ralph Macchio was something special. I knew it before Karate Kid. I knew it from Eight is Enough. I clocked him as awesome from the beginning. I felt territorial. When everyone else figured out his awesomeness in Karate Kid, I felt jealous. He was ALL MINE for a brief time! I SAW HIM FIRST.

Before we begin, here is the trailer for a gripping new documentary about Ralph Macchio, searching for a comeback, called Wax On F*ck Off.

You never forget the celebrity (actor/musician) who first launched you into the world of imagination and fantasy. Ralph Macchio was that for a lot of people.

Here’s a piece I wrote many years ago about Ralph Macchio and the impact his performance in one episode of Eight Is Enough had on me. (Not for nothing but: the year in which this all happened – 7th/8th grade – is when I had my first what I would call nervous breakdown. Sorry to say, but it was ignored. They – the “they” in charge of my mental health – think this was when bipolar first introduced itself, along with my first period – this is how it happens for girls a lot of the time. It’s a LOT. And so the story I describe below has even deeper meaning for me. Yes, it’s sad, that one episode of Eight is Enough is all I had to hold onto in that wretched year of almost near-total anguish … but it’s not really sad. I made it through and Ralph Macchio helped.)

How Eight is Enough Saved My Life

I am a big fan of celebrity crushes, it was part of how I first fell in love with the movies. I have fine-tuned the “celebrity crush” into a work of art. I should give seminars about how to do them properly.

My first crush? It’s a toss-up between Ralph Macchio and Lance Kerwin, but the Macchio crush was more transformational. I say that with zero exaggeration.

Now I am talking about pre–Karate Kid Ralph Macchio. Very important distinction. I am talking about his stint on Eight is Enough. When he hit paydirt with Karate Kid, and was suddenly on the cover of every teen magazine on the rack, I felt oddly jealous about it. Like I was losing him. I had been with him back then, Before it was cool. I somehow liked it better when he was just my little secret.

Some people don’t even remember his one-season stint on Eight is Enough. Ah, but that is probably because they gave up on the show long before he arrived. Macchio was obviously brought on as “young blood” to draw in an audience like me, horny love-sick pre-teens. The ratings were down. Bringing in a troubled cute teenage boy was an obvious ploy to jumpstart the show again. It worked.

To me, at 12 years old, when the show was in its heyday, the older siblings (David, Mary, Susan, Joannie, Nancy, Elizabeth and Tommy) were too sophisticated, too slick, and also a little bit ikky, frankly. David, the oldest, was a particularly disturbing individual, I thought, with his pearly whites and feathered hair, and his part-time jobs. He had too much of a fake-tan sleazoid veneer. His teeth didn’t fool me. The guy was a creep.

The girls all wore shiny lip gloss, shoulder pads, or frightening workout outfits involving spandex and lilac leotard ensembles. The push-up bra was not in existence in the Bradford house. The sisters all had droopy sloopy-shouldered silhouettes that made me feel very uncomfortable.

Cars pulled in and out of the driveway. There were teenage problems of the 17- and 18-year-old variety. I was 11. I could not relate.

And Bowl-Cut Nicholas did nothing for me. He was a CHILD. I was not a CHILD, thankyouverymuch. I found him plain old nauseating.

I needed something else. Someone who hit my demographic in its sweet spot. Someone … a boy … who was just the age I needed him to be …

Along came Jeremy Andretti, played by Ralph Macchio. Jeremy was the random orphaned nephew of Abby (played by Betty Buckley, of course). The Bradford family opened their hearts and their home to the troubled teenager, who was sullen, uncommunicative, and to-die-for. The first time I laid eyes on him, I was gone. He was everything I found attractive, although I didn’t know it then, being only 12 years old. It was this weird awakening, watching Jeremy in action. My heart fluttered. He was sensitive, but he covered it up with a tough outer shell. His shyness plus his toughness were a killer combo.

I wouldn’t realize until later that that shy/tough thing, that hard-shell-yet-sensitive thing he had going on was part of a long continuum of movie stars who made careers out of mixing those two qualities. Tough-yet-sensitive hard-boiled-outer-shell guys. James Cagney. Cary Grant in Notorious. Humphrey Bogart. Jeremy Andretti needed to be tough, not because he was mean, or callous, but because he felt too much. He was too vulnerable.

Almost immediately, with Jeremy’s arrival, I became addicted to Eight is Enough. I was crushed when Jeremy’s storyline was not the featured one. I suffered through the ikky-lipglossed-leotarded storylines of the older siblings, and the sickeningly sweet Bowl-Cut storylines, waiting, waiting, week after week … for Jeremy to step into the spotlight.

My crush was a secret. It was so powerful that it actually embarrassed me. It was a runaway train, and this is now a familiar sensation to me, years later. I still get embarrassed sometimes, when I get swept away like this, but I figure there are worse things in life than this habit of mine. It has brought me great joy. It is one of the ways I revel in movies. It has an art to it. It comes from somewhere very deep, and it has to do with fantasies (not just sexual), and dreams, and the “substance of things hoped for”. It also is how I stumbled my way into a writing career, because what else am I doing here, but writing about things that matter deeply to me, that move me, that transform me? Granted, crushes are a little different, but only in context, not in form. I still get those crushes. I’m an old-hat at them by now.

The crush arrives usually at a low moment when I need fortitude, when I need to perceive a light at the end of the tunnel. The crush helps me to hold on, to hold out hope that someday, someday, the closeness I yearn for will manifest in real life, and not just in re-runs of Eight is Fucking Enough. This is what actors can give us, potentially. This is what certain actors (and certain performances) have given me.

Movies are great company.

I discovered Ralph Macchio as Jeremy Andretti when I was at the lowest of the lowest of points. I was in junior high. I didn’t really take to adolescence, shall we say. I was a fish out of water in the machinations of junior high. I was bruised and battered very quickly from rejection from boys, and not just rejection, but outright laughter in my face, when I would ask them to dance, what have you, at the first dances I ever went to. (I was “that girl”, the pariah of the school, for one awful year). I was pudgy. My clothes were all wrong. My Xena jeans didn’t look the same on me as they did on Cris D., the goddess of junior high. Kids crank-called my house and shouted insults about my clothes into my ear. I sat alone in the cafeteria. I was in a very deep depression and didn’t even know it. I found it hard to get out of bed in the morning. I had thoughts of going to sleep forever. I would cry on the way to school.

In the middle of that howling wilderness, one particular episode of Eight is Enough aired, and that episode I can say, without too much exaggeration, saved my life.

I remember that episode almost shot for shot, and I have not seen it since it was on that first time in the early 80s, so that gives you some idea of its lasting impact. I’m not sure how many people out there yearn for a box set of Eight is Enough – such thing does not exist and I’m not sure why – but I would buy the whole damn thing just so I could see this episode again. But maybe it’s best that I only remember it and remember what it gave me.

Here’s how the episode opened:

In a movie theatre. We can see that the movie being shown is an old Fred Astaire Ginger Rogers movie. There they are, dancing across the marble floor, floating, across, her dress graceful, light, he elegant, lithe. Then we cut to the audience in the movie theatre, and there is Ralph Macchio, with his beautiful face, watching, totally engrossed. He’s eating popcorn, and he is totally into the movie.

And two seats away from him sits a teenage girl, also by herself, also engrossed, also chomping on popcorn.

A sort of G-rated True Romance.

After the film, the two of them somehow strike up a conversation in the lobby and they both rave, unselfconsciously, about their love for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and how much they love old movies and how cool it is that the local movie theatre would run them as matinees.

Our first clue of the HOOK of this episode (and why it hooked me so hard): the two bond over old movies. I loved old movies, too. I did a paper for my Drama Club about Fred Astaire when I was 11 years old. I researched that thing as intensely as if I were writing an actual book. I was like that girl, sitting in the matinee, watching Top Hat, and losing myself utterly in the fantasy of its dream-world.

The girl reveals that she just moved to the town, and is a little nervous about starting at the high school on Monday. Jeremy is very excited that she is going to be going to his school, he feels a bond with this girl. They part, him telling her that he will keep his eye out for her on Monday. Teenage romance shivers in the air!

But what was so deadly for me watching it, what hooked me in so deeply, was that their connection was not based on lust or desire. I couldn’t relate to those things yet. No: it was a shared interest in something, a common passion. This was devastatingly effective.

They see each other at school. They have sweet encounters in the hall. They meet up “by coincidence” at the next Saturday matinee of a Fred Astaire movie. Only this time, they sit together, side by side, sharing popcorn, grinning at each other.

I died a million deaths watching all of this. I ached! I yearned! I burned up inside like a pubescent Tennessee Williams character. I had so much to GIVE, so much of myself to share but nowhere to put it yet. Holding all of that back actually hurt. (It still does.) So I put all of that feeling and yearning and hoping into Ralph Macchio.

Then, inevitably, conflict arises. Turns out that Jeremy’s interest in Fred Astaire is something he hides from his friends. He could never admit to liking old movies with DANCE NUMBERS to his buddies. As long as his little Saturday-matinee romance was kept secret from his friends, he was cool with it.

Of course, one day she comes up to him in the cafeteria, where he sits with his group of friends. Oh, the hostility of the high school cafeteria! The caste system! The Darwinian brutality! She says to him, in front of his friends, with a big friendly smile – “Hi! What are you doing Saturday? They’re playing ‘Swingtime‘!”

She just broke the unspoken rules. She didn’t even know it was a rule. She was like me. I found myself in the world of junior high, with all these rules suddenly, social rules, all these boundaries of what was acceptable behavior – none of which was in operation in grade school – and I most certainly did not get the memo. She didn’t know that he was ashamed of that part of himself, that he needed to keep it secret from his buddies.

He makes believe he doesn’t even know what she is talking about. It is a complete and utter betrayal of their bond. His friends snicker. Ruthlessly. She stands there, alone, shamed. She walks away, mortified, with the taunting voices of his group of friends imitating her: “Swingtime is playing! Swingtime is playing!”

I knew her pain! I was snickered at! My intensity was scorned!

And yet, watching. I wanted to crawl through the television and yell at her: NO! He does like you! He’s just embarrassed! He can’t admit to liking those movies in front of his friends! He does like you – and that’s why he rejected you!

And so, I ached for him as well. He was deciding to NOT be himself so he could fit in with the group. He was choosing cool indifference (and therefore loneliness) over unafraid involvement. Not just with her. But with who he really was. This was a tragedy.

I saw people making those choices all around me every day in junior high: suppressing the unacceptable parts of themselves to fit in with the pack. It was “the thing” to do but I found it painful. I tried, I really did, but I couldn’t manage it.

Jeremy feels horrible about how he treated her. He tries to talk to her in the hallways. She rejects him. He tries again. She ignores him. She is a stony wall, an ice princess. She was a real hard-ass, that one. I didn’t think that I could withstand his heartfelt apologies. I knew I would cave. In other words, I was a sucker, I was weak, I was desperate. And so I learned something from watching her: No one should shame you the way he shamed her. Especially if he had opened up to her in private. His behavior was unacceptable. A girl has to set her own standards for how she wants to be treated and she shouldn’t accept anything less. A man needs to be able to stand up to his friends and say, “This is who I am. Deal.” It is not okay any other way. My response to this came from my loneliness. From feeling left out. I was so eager for attention from any boy that I would take the scraps from his cafeteria table … rather than wait for someone willing to eat a whole meal with me. I watched the girl on Eight is Enough say “no” to his scraps, and I was in AWE.

This was a mind-blower. Truly. I am still learning that lesson. She would not allow him to compartmentalize her, and only acknowledge her existence on Saturday afternoons.

Finally came the climax of the episode. After watching it, I lived it over and over and over in my head, I obsessed on it, I fixated on it, I held onto it, knowing instinctively that this is something I need to remember.

She was walking along on the sidewalk in front of the school. The campus was crowded with students. His declaration (when it came) needed to be that public. This is a well-known formula, of course, used in countless movies to great success: the public revelation of emotion, the declaration of love made in front of a crowd. The final expression of commitment is not just made between two people privately, but involves the whole world. It has to. It’s like a wedding ceremony: the bond between two human beings is enough of a big deal that it must be made publicly to have any real weight.

Jeremy runs up to her and tries to talk to her. She staunchly keeps walking on, clutching her books to her chest. He walks along beside her, apologizing, ignoring the rejection. He has lost the indifference. Now it matters more to him to tell her the truth and he doesn’t care who sees.

She finally shouts at him, “Leave me alone!!” She marches off without him, leaving him standing there with a crestfallen look on his face. People stare. The two of them are making a scene. He doesn’t care anymore. And now he is the one who has been publicly rejected and shamed.

And in that moment, the transformation occurs. He leaps into the unknown, he tosses himself off the cliff.

I have no empirical evidence of this, no quote to back up my theory, but I would warrant a guess that this next moment could be responsible for Ralph Macchio’s enormous success a couple of years later in major motion pictures. If I had been a casting director, and I had seen this one scene in Eight is Enough, I would have thought: “That kid could carry a film.” There was a seismic shift during the scene and by the end of it, he became a viable leading man. You think I’m kidding? I’m dead serious. Why else would I remember the scene so clearly decades later?

She walks away, with an air of finality. He stands, helpless, and then, on impulse, he jumps up on a nearby bench, and blurts out, in tune, at the top of his lungs: “I won’t dance! Don’t ask me!”

She stops dead in her tracks and slowly looks back at him, shocked. All the watching students start snickering, giggling. He doesn’t care. He stays up on the bench, and sings out at top volume: “I won’t dance, don’t ask me! I won’t dance Madame with you! My heart won’t let my feet do things that they should do!” He starts to dance around up on the bench, even as the small mocking crowd gathers. She stares up at him, dumbfounded.

He leaps off the bench and dances toward her, still singing the song. She’s embarrassed, blushing, she doesn’t know what to do. Then she gets her nerve back, and turns her back on him, starting to stalk off. (I gasped, watching. The fortitude! The strength of self! To resist!!)

Eventually, of course, his singing and dancing breaks her down.

But it was more than that, it was more than just him breaking her down so she would like him again. It was more about his fearlessness in publicly admitting his feelings for her, but it goes even deeper than that: the moment was about him finally admitting and claiming who he was. That’s what the scene was about. Falling in love is not just about declaring yourself to the other person. You also must say, “Here. This is who I am. This is me.”

He dances around her, serenading her in front of the whole school. I was too young, watching it, to realize what a cliche it was. Finally, he takes her in his arms. Suddenly it seems like he is wearing a top hat and tails, his movements are graceful and yet forceful. It is startling. The crowd gasps. He waltzes her around, awkwardly, and she’s laughing now, she’s melted, and he finishes the song with a flourish, dipping her body over backwards, like an old pro.

The crowd (naturally) bursts into applause.

I thought about the episode for days. I actually wrote it out into short-story form, so I could elaborate on the feelings of both parties. I wanted to live it.

The message was, obviously, that being yourself, and admitting who you are, not changing yourself for other people, is superior to belonging to the crowd. This sliced through me like a laser.

This was especially true, it must be admitted, because it was the boy making these declarations, it was the boy who had the real struggle. It was the boy who had to give up his public persona, and be fearless. In my limited and very painful experience in junior high, boys traveled in packs, were aloof and cruel to me, and acted embarrassed when I asked them to dance. I was always in such a state of uncertainty and pain when it came to the boys I liked. (I know now that boys had their own brand of hard time during those years but that only came with perspective, and getting older. While I was in it, I had none of that. Boys were on another planet. A planet I so wanted to visit. But they didn’t want me there. It was very painful.)

The thought that a boy my age could be interested in me the way Jeremy was interested in her, and that a boy could throw caution to the wind in front of his peers, was so attractive to me, so powerful, that I basically melted into a hot quivering puddle of longing and hope that lasted for months. It blew my mind.

What it said to me was (outside of the celebrity-crush aspect of the whole thing): “Don’t just look at the surface of things. Don’t passively accept the aloofness of the boys you like. They might be afraid, or shy, or don’t want to seem goofy to their firends. Differentiate between who they were with their friends and who they were when you got them alone.”

But also it said to me: “Do not accept being treated cruelly. Even if he’s cute and you like him so much. Do not chip away at yourself. It is forbidden.”

And here is where it gets global, here is why I still remember the episode shot for shot, even though I have never seen the episode since:

Hang on. Just hang on.

There may not be a boy in your life right now who would leap on a park bench for you (i.e.: get you, love you, celebrate you), but hang on. There will be.

The loneliness you feel right now shall pass. This, too, shall pass.

The girl Jeremy fell for in the episode was not a hot babe. She had long straight hair and wore long skirts. And so: You didn’t have to change who you are for a boy to be interested in you (the lesson I learned from the ending of Grease). You just had to be yourself, and be true to yourself and continue shining your own particular light with its own particular wattage and someone would see that light eventually and be drawn to it. If you tried to change yourself, and fit into what you thought was the ideal, if you tried to adjust yourself to what you thought guys wanted, then you would not be being truthful, and the right kind of guy for you would not be able to find his way to you.

That one episode of Eight is Enough got me through many dark hours in junior high. It burned me up inside, a fire that eventually went out, but a fire I have never forgotten. That one episode helped me not be ashamed of my own individual passions (Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies being one of them), to not put pressure on myself to fit into the round hole of the junior high social agenda. Maybe if I stuck to my own path, and kept cultivating my own personality, and expressing my own individual interests, fearlessly, without apology, then a Jeremy type might be in my future. (There wasn’t, not really. However: the following year, I met a bunch of people who are still my friends today. Way more important than any man has ever been.)

The episode said to me something nobody else was saying to me, not teachers, not parents, not anyone:

Keep going, Sheila. You’re okay as you are. You’re doing okay. Everything is going to be okay.

Thanks, Ralph Macchio, for what you gave me in your wonderful performance in that one episode.

And thanks, too, to the creators of Eight is Enough for realizing that eight kids were actually not enough.

Thank you for realizing you needed one more.

Posted in Actors, On This Day, Television | Tagged , | 35 Comments

“A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.” — journalist Ida Tarbell

Posted on November 5, 2024 by sheila

It’s a good day to think about unchecked power. Power needs people out there to check it. It’s a good day to acknowledge that the world – its money and resources – is dominated by a multi-national cadre of fat cats who don’t care about regular people, or the environment, or, hell, ethics and morals. One of the ways we CHECK these assholes is with the printed word. And so it’s also a good day to pay tribute to freedom of speech and freedom of the press, as embodied so ferociously by the woman often referred to as “the mother of muckraking journalism”, Ida Tarbell.

“Rockefeller and his associates did not build the Standard Oil Co. in the board rooms of Wall Street banks. They fought their way to control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price cutting, by ruthless efficiency of organization.” – Ida Tarbell

“There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral.” — Ida Tarbell

Ida Tarbell was the bane of John D. Rockefeller’s existence with her explosive series of scathing articles about Standard Oil’s unsavory and rapacious practices, published in 1902. Those articles brought down a monolith.

Theodore Roosevelt called out Tarbell by name as a “muckraker”, and of course she didn’t care for the name. It didn’t matter though because … Standard Oil left a lot of MUCK in its wake, and so damn right she was going to rake it up. In the journalistic free-for-all of her day, she was tireless and single-minded, rigorous in her research techniques (like digging into long-forgotten dusty archives). She is often referred to as a pioneer of investigative reporting, if not THE pioneer. In her era, journalism was wild and irresponsible, more interested in pumping up emotional frenzies (xenophobic, patriotic, whatever) in their readership than getting to the truth. Big Money tarnished everything. The newspapers were in the pocket of Big Money too. (As always, the past gives us lessons for our present moment, for our future). Tarbell resisted the pull of emotionalism, even though she despised Standard Oil. She was all about primary sources, and she painstakingly went through stacks and stacks account ledgers, line by line, entire rooms full of archives – something very few had the patience for. The truth would be in the numbers. She knew that. She wrote: “There is no more effective medicine to apply to feverish public sentiment than figures.” “Going after” Standard Oil was David vs. Goliath. (Ron Chernow’s biography of John D. Rockefeller is fantastic, if you haven’t read it.)

Tarbell is withering in her attack on Standard Oil, and on John himself:

“And he calls his great organization a benefaction, and points to his church-going and charities as proof of his righteousness. This is supreme wrong-doing cloaked by religion. There is but one name for it — hypocrisy.”

When the magazine publishing her articles was under attack, threatened by litigation on all sides, Tarbell didn’t care. Her attitude was practically, “LET them have a go at me. I’d like to see them try.” Tarbell’s articles were eventually compiled in a book, and the book was so widely read and discussed it led to the Supreme Court’s decision to intervene, and crush the monopoly of Standard Oil.

She was one of the most important journalists of the 20th century.

And, lest we forget: she did all of this at a time when she, a woman, couldn’t vote.

I learned about her in a class I took in college (the best class I ever took, by the way). It was an entire class on the Industrial Revolution, taught by Maury Klein (look him up, he’s a bigwig in the field, especially in regards to the railroads). We had to read Tarbell’s articles, compiled under the title The History of the Standard Oil Company.

It’s an invigorating read. Her prose LEAPS and CRACKLES. She’s got the facts, but she’s also pissed. You can feel it.

“We must organize men and women for labor as if for war. Watch the perfection of the training and the movement of the masses that at this moment are meeting in unspeakable, infernal slaughter in Europe. See how the humblest is fitted to his task. With what ease great bodies wheel, turn, advance, retreat. Consider how, after standing men in line that they may be knocked to pieces, they promptly and scientifically collect such as have escaped, both friend and foe, and (oh, amazing and heart-breaking human logic!) under the safe sign of the cross, tenderly nurse them back to health. If this can be done for War, should we do less for Peace?”

Ida Tarbell was a courageous and pioneering women who didn’t let society dictate to her who she should be, did not ask for a seat at the Big Boys Table – because asking means you still think you need permission (i.e. and thinking you need permission is internalized patriarchy). You still hear stuff like: “Why don’t men let us do such and such?” LET us?? Who made them BOSSES of the world. Fuck THAT. Who are THEY to LET us do anything? All I ask is that men take their foot off my goddamn neck. Ida Tarbell barged into “the room where it happens” – uninvited – unwelcome – and didn’t sit down at the Big Boys Table, oh no, she walked in and kicked the table over.

“Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to benumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.”

Ida Tarbell changed the course of the 20th century by going after a monster company, a many-tentacled behemoth which had insinuated itself into every layer of society. One woman went up against free-wheeling brutal capitalism. Her work continues to be relevant today. (Hello, Facebook. Hello, Disney. Hello, companies acting as mini-Nation-States.) But also she became the standard-bearer for a new kind of journalism, giving journalists jobs beyond purple prose, hearsay and rumor. She paved a pathway for others to follow. (As this post shows, her work is still taught in college classes.) Her articles led to the Anti-Trust laws, fought in the courts, with the sensational trials dominating the economics/politics/all-of-America in the early decades of the 20th century. I still believe in the Ideals of who we should be – and so often aren’t – and I love the people who fight for those Ideals. We need to fight. We can’t just accept the status quo, just because the opponent is rich and powerful. You can’t re-set history. What can be done about the here-and-now?

That was what Ida Tarbell cared about.
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“There was born in me a hatred of privilege, privilege of any sort. It was all pretty hazy, to be sure, but it still was well, at 15, to have one definite plan based on things seen and heard, ready for a future platform of social and economic justice if I should ever awake to my need of one.” – Ida Tarbell

 
 
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Posted in Books, On This Day, writers | Tagged , | 1 Comment