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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
.
“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
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.
It’s his birthday today. Joel McCrea had a long career, with many different phases. He did it all, although he is primarily associated with Westerns. It was what you might call a “classy” career. Steady, successful, no scandals, and he seemingly had a very practical and healthy relationship to acting, to being a star. He was great in Sullivan’s Travels – he and Veronica Lake make a great pair.
My favorite of his is The More the Merrier, with Jean Arthur and Charles Coburn (who won an Oscar for his performance). This film is one of the sexiest films ever made. The kiss Arthur and McCrea share on the steps is more erotic than any sex scene featuring totally nude bodies. Her shoulder-less dress, his handsiness – he’s literally an octopus – but he knows she wants it – and then there’s the moment where she takes control, grabs his face, and SHE kisses HIM. Here’s the scene and take note of the long long LONG take, with all that talking, and all that dialogue, and all that fiery-hot subtext …
Joel McCrea is so good in this: laconic, flat-affect, non-dramatic (as compared to Jean Arthur’s overt sadness and freaked-out-ness) … so that when he admits his love for her, and calls her “dear” in the quiet scene where they’re both lying in their single beds, in separate rooms, and talking to each other through the wall … it takes your breath away.
That last photo is Walker Evans’ innovative perspective of the parade for Charles Lindbergh after Lindbergh successfully crossed the Atlantic in 1927. It’s one of the first photos Evans took, and shows that he had a “good eye” from the start. A conventional photographer would have shown the parade, the cheering crowds, the scope and size of the event, Lindbergh himself. Evans, however, was struck by the backs of the marching band, and the carnage of ticker-tape. The empty aftermath.
And the photo above that one I love in particular, since I love Carole Lombard, have that movie poster on my wall, and Carole Lombard with a shiner is my Twitter avatar.
Walker Evans captured America at a certain time of upheaval, gigantic events which had wide-sweeping consequences, for the world, yes, but more importantly, for individuals. It was a time of both technical innovation and abject poverty. He focused on American’s homes, the objects in the homes, the rusty bed-steads in the shacks of the poor and destitute, the stoves in the corner, the kitchen utensils. Beds were important. Beds represent a respite for the economically-ravaged people he photographed. But Evans, too, just had an eye for the detail, the one essential thing that would make a photograph pop. It is a remarkable record of what America looked like at the time, its cars, its billboards. Ordinary life was what he was after. You can feel the dust in the air from the unpaved roads, smell the sugary soda from the fountains, the quiet of those small towns. But he was also an urban street photographer, taking pictures of women on subways wearing little hats, gossiping, collapsed against one another during the commute, lunch rooms crowded with office workers, the vast bustle of city life. It’s an amazing archive, an incredible historical record.
In 1936, James Agee, film critic, novelist, reporter, asked Walker Evans to come down to Alabama with him to document the life of sharecroppers for Fortune magazine. Hard hard times in America, all around. Evans’ photographs (Agee and Evans stayed with three tenant-farmer families, so you get to know the faces) are haunting. The direct gaze. The dirty children. The hovels. The gaunt cheeks. The hard-bitten eyes. Evans initially felt uncomfortable with the assignment, photographing people in such misery. He worried he was exploiting them. A common issue with photographers who go into terrible areas. But the issue is two-fold: documenting horrors brings news of events to the world, makes it palpable, energizes people to “get involved”, whatever that might mean. (One remembers Kevin Carter’s horrifying photo of the starving child in the Sudan curled up on the ground with a vulture crouching nearby. While there are conflicting reports on how that photograph came to be, Carter won a Pulitzer Prize for it. It was one of those photos, like the “napalm girl” that sears into your brain once you’ve seen it. The horror of humanity. Carter committed suicide. He had photographed many horrible things, executions, torture. His suicide note spoke of not being able to bear all of the things he had seen, they had blotted out the possibility of joy. AND, as a photographer, his job was not to change things, or provide aid. It was to document, to bear witness. That’s it. This is an ethical struggle that Walker Evans felt acutely as he photographed these families in dire straits.)
The collaboration with Agee eventually became, of course, the classic of American literature/photography, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Agee’s prose is incantatory and emotional, free-flowing and high-flung, tapping into the human condition and the terrible beauty of our drive to survive. Here is an excerpt:
Each is drawn elsewhere toward another: once more a man and a woman, in a loneliness they are not liable at that time to notice, are tightened together upon a bed: and another family has begun:
Moreover, these flexions are taking place everywhere, like a simultaneous motion of all the waves of the water of the world: and these are the classic patterns, and this is the weaving, of human living: of whose fabric each individual is a part: and of all parts of this fabric let this be borne in mind:
Each is intimately connected with the bottom and the extremest reach of time:
Each is composed of substances identical with the substances of all that surrounds him, both the common objects of his disregard, and the hot centers of stars:
All that each person is, and experiences, and shall never experience, in body and in mind, all these things are differing expressions of himself and of one root, and are identical: not one of these things nor one of these persons is ever quite to be duplicated, nor replaced, nor has it ever quite had precedent: but each is a new and incommunicably tender life, wounded in every breath, and almost as hardly killed as easily wounded: sustaining, for a while, without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe.
Walker Evans’ contribution to the 20th century cannot be measured.
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.
Lois Smith, who turns 94 years old today, made her film debut in 1955, where she played a young prostitute in East of Eden. She has a small scene with James Dean, and then exits the film forever. But she makes a huge impression. The memory of her lingers.
In 2021, 66 years later – let me say that again – 66 years after she made her film debut – Lois Smith won a Tony for her performance in The Inheritance. She was – at age 90 – the oldest Tony winner. Her speech was amazing. Unfortunately it’s not on YouTube. The speeches of all the YOUNGER winners are on YouTube. Typical. Let us honor our history. The video is here. She was so happy, and so was the audience.
Some years ago, I was involved in a theatre workshop where we developed a play about the artist Joseph Cornell. We workshopped in one of those giant airy studios at Juilliard. We played around with format. We envisioned the play taking place IN one of Cornell’s boxes. I played the young woman who came into his life late – one of those aimless Automat girls he loved so much – and he gave her money and was obsessed with her. She ended up stealing a couple of boxes and – like a dummy-dumb – tried to sell them to New York galleries. Cornell was famous. Everyone knew him. So they called Cornell to report that a raggedy strange young woman was trying to sell his boxes. Horrible. He was devastated but refused to press charges. She had a horrible end, murdered in a hotel on the UWS – a murder which was never solved. Some of the details are hazy, my research was a long time ago. A sad episode in JC’s life.
The point is: Joseph Cornell loved Lois Smith, and knew her casually, and made a box for her. It was 1955, and she was on Broadway in an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Young and the Beautiful. This was before East of Eden dropped. Lois Smith actually has the box (unlike, say, Lauren Bacall – the box Cornell made for her is probably priceless at this point). It hangs in her hallway. In a New Yorker article, the writer, Michael Schulman, gives a description of the box:
Cornell, who knew Smith through the writer Donald Windham, cut out her image, in a white tulle gown, from the Playbill cover. “The back of it is wonderful,” Smith said recently, flipping the box to reveal papier-mâché text. “It has a quote from Hölderlin: ‘Home, poor heart, you cannot rediscover, if the dream alone does not suffice.’ ”
So back to the workshop: the director – my friend Ted – knew Lois because of her work at Steppenwolf (she’s a company member). When we both lived in Chicago, Ted and I went to see her in a new play (The Mesmerist) at Steppenwolf, and the three of us went out to dinner afterwards. I was starstruck, and so wanted to ask her about James Dean, and at first I was just trying to put together the images: the beautiful white-haired woman before me, and the girl at the bar in East of Eden – but she was so friendly, so nice, I soon forgot about being starstruck. We all just discussed the play, its problems, its triumphs, the process of development, regular old shop talk among theatre people. I’ve always loved her, but ever since that night I had dinner with her, she is a role model for any working actress. The whole thing is about the work. Success – or at least the regular meaning of the word – is truly irrelevant. It’s just work.
Later, Ted and I were both in New York, working on the Cornell project, and Lois came on as adviser for our project. She knew Joseph Cornell. She opened a lot of doors for us, including getting us into the private screening room at MoMA to watch his chopped-up and now-famous films. We were shown the JC collection, including the ones not on display.
As I said, when I met her I kept seeing her defeated pose at the bar in East of Eden, the movie that “turned me on” to acting and also moviemaking as an artform. I saw that movie at age 13. I remember wondering who she was. She made an impression, even in the bombardment of James Dean on my psyche. I memorized the name. “LOIS SMITH.” And there I was, an adult, so many years later, having dinner with her, and then, a couple years after that, talking with her about Joseph Cornell in a huge rehearsal studio at Juilliard, and it all seemed perfectly normal, a straight line between back then and now. It was as though 13-year-old me had already cleared a space for this moment.
It is a rare kind of experience. The rarest.
Thank you Lois for all of your work, for being a role model, for opening up the possibility for others what a good working career looks like – success doesn’t matter, keep doing the work, keep striving, it’s the work that matters – and also for showing an interest in our experimental open-ended project – and not just an interest – but actually HELPING us achieve our goals (one call to MoMA by Lois Smith and we were in). Thank you for taking the time out of your busy career to meet with a ragtag group of young actors to tell us stories about this artist who loved you so much.
And we loved you right back.
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.
:
. 
. Agee’s prose is incantatory and emotional, free-flowing and high-flung, tapping into the human condition and the terrible beauty of our drive to survive. Here is an excerpt:
