Baseball’s Hall of Fame (and Infamy)

Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues, and the Inside Story of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Zev Chafets.
Illustrated. 237 pages. Bloomsbury. $25.

Took it, started reading it.

Over the years the Baseball Hall of Fame, the shrine in Cooperstown, N.Y., that held its annual induction ceremony on Sunday, has been so fraught with controversies about who deserves admission and who doesn’t that Red Smith, the great sports columnist, once wrote that the only solution was to blow up the place and start over.

In his new book, “Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues and the Inside Story of the Baseball Hall of Fame,” Zev Chafets suggests that part of the problem is that the whole institution is built on a foundation of deceit: a falsified creation myth that asserts, all evidence to the contrary, that our national pastime was first played on the bucolic pastures of Cooperstown and that a leathery, rag-stuffed orb bought from a local farmer for $5 might be the game’s Holy Grail, the very first baseball.

I've gotten to that part. Just as absurd as the idea that Abner Doubleday laid out a baseball diamond (something he never spoke of, and that his obituary did not mention) is the idea that that orb was the first baseball. Yet baseball is built, and lives, on myth.

Equally hypocritical is Rule 5 of the hall’s election requirements, the character clause, which specifies that admission should be based not just on a player’s record and ability but also on his integrity, sportsmanship and virtue. This is the bar that has been used to exclude Pete Rose (gambling) and Mark McGwire (performance-enhancing drugs), along with troublesome, mouthy characters like Dave Parker and Dick Allen, and that may eventually be used to banish Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez and anyone else tainted by accusations of steroid use.

But the brand of moralizing practiced by the Hall of Fame has always been highly selective and inconsistent. At the time of the annual induction ceremony in 2007, Mr. Chafets writes, the hall included “a convicted drug dealer, a reformed cokehead who narrowly beat a lifetime suspension from baseball, a celebrated sex addict, an Elders of Zion conspiracy nut, a pitcher who wrote a book about how he cheated his way into the hall, a well-known and highly arrested drunk driver and a couple of nasty beanball artists.”

That’s just among the living members. The roster of deceased immortals (some inducted before the character clause went into effect) includes Ty Cobb, one of the very first members, famously a sociopath, possibly a murderer and a notorious racist who was also a card-carrying, torch-waving member of the Klu Klux Klan, as were Tris Speaker and Rogers Hornsby. The hall is full of gamblers, brawlers and defendants in paternity suits, and there are numerous drunks, starting with Grover Cleveland Alexander, who Bill Veeck, the colorful baseball executive, once said pitched better drunk than sober.

Doc Ellis once said he pitched a game while tripping on LSD.

Despite its title, though, “Cooperstown Confidential” is not especially gossipy or tabloidy. Most of the dirt Mr. Chafets exposes has been dug up before, and he relies less on new reporting than on other books, especially “The Politics of Glory,” Bill James’s more thorough 1994 history of the hall, and Nicholas Fox Weber’s recent “Clarks of Cooperstown,” a history of the wealthy local family that founded and still controls the Hall of Fame.

The Clarks were something: the grandfather was not just a bigamist, but a trigamist, and, perhaps, even a quadrigamist, who ran off to Europe to avoid the US law; in France he married anew. And the family feuded.

As he readily admits, Mr. Chafets, a former columnist at The Daily News and a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, is not a baseball expert, and it sometimes shows. He says that Jim Bunning pitched one no-hitter when he in fact hurled two, one of them a perfect game.

What shows is awful copyediting. Bunning might be the stupidest man in the Senate, but he did pitch a no-hitter in each league.

Mrs Henderson Presents

Great acting, great story, music, great fun.

Genius In Exile

One morning in September 1940, a newly arrived European musician paid a visit to the conductor Otto Klemperer in Los Angeles and found him ­discussing Gustav Mahler with his fellow-exile Bruno Walter. The visitor went on to lunch at the new home of Thomas Mann in Pacific Palisades, where he worked on some chamber music with Mann’s son Michael, a ­viola player. In the evening, he dropped in on Igor Stravinsky in Hollywood, assisting in a run-through of his violin concerto.

For a brief and unrepeatable moment, an eyeblink in cultural history, the City of Angels contained the future of classical music.

Classical music is, of course, a misnomer: something is classical because it is valued for its transcendence, and is from an earlier age. This classical music is really Western European orchestral music. Much as I like it, some of it, anyway, I can not help but notice that it is a bunch of white men that are its stalwarts, its stars. Surely there was much more other music around that qualified as beautiful, transcendent; just depends where we look.

For the duration of World War II, Los Angeles was at the cutting edge of musical creation. How the frontiers of a rarified art ­relocated to a place ruled by sun, surf and superficial movies is the subject of “A Windfall of Musicians,” ­Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s engaging study, based in the main on survivor interviews and documentary archives.

The influx was provoked by Adolf Hitler, whose ­seizure of power on Jan. 30, 1933, soon enough meant the banishment of modern art and Jewish musicians from German public life. Hollywood offered exiled ­writers a chance of employment, luring in the brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, the best-selling “Grand Hotel” novelist Vicki Baum and Erich Maria Remarque, the author of the World War I classic “All’s Quiet on the Western Front.”

Musicians sought sanctuary first on the East Coast, with its venerable symphony orchestras and prestigious ­universities, drifting west in disillusion with the deep ­conservatism they encountered. Los Angeles, for all its open-air lifestyle, was no paradise. ­Schoenberg ­partnered Charles Chaplin and George ­Gershwin on the tennis court but found himself teaching music to ­“superficial and external” students, many of them ­concerned more with their credits than the ­challenge of art. Appalled by the ubiquity of commercialism, ­Schoenberg told the artist Oskar Kokoschka that he was living in a “world in which I nearly die of disgust.” Lotte Lehmann, a serene Lieder singer, wrote a novel called “Of Heaven, Hell and Hollywood,” leaving no doubt about the infernal realm she now inhabited.

I have searched high and low for the book, but it is not to be found, alas.

Ms. Crawford, who has spent much of her working life teaching and making music in Southern California, brings a physical familiarity to her narrative and a keen eye for poignant detail, the shock of the new. She quotes Vicki Baum’s first impression: “I stayed drunk for weeks with this sun and air and the beauty of the hills.” Ms. Crawford makes too much of minor figures like Ernst Toch and perhaps too little of Kurt Weill, whose Hollywood visits require deeper research. ­Nevertheless, “A Windfall of Musicians” is valuable for its account of how the West became a cultural force in America, a rising counterweight to the ­tradition-stifled East.

Up to a point, that is. In 1997, the trustees of the ­University of Southern California decided to rename the Arnold Schoenberg Institute building after a recent ­donor and vacate its contents. Vienna rescued the composer’s archives, his scores, his letters and his paintings, housing them in a purpose-built Arnold Schoenberg Centre. With this crowning slur to history, Los Angeles was cleansed of its modernist accident, or aberration.

Apollo moon landings

Five Best: Harrison H. Schmitt selects stellar insider accounts of the Apollo moon landings

1. Deke! Biography
By Donald K. Slayton
Forge/St. Martin’s, 1994

Neil Armstrong became the first man to step on the moon 40 years ago because Donald “Deke” Slayton—a former Mercury ­astronaut and NASA’s director of flight-crew operations—assigned him to command Apollo 11. In the Apollo project’s evolving effort to put men on the lunar surface, Apollo 11 was the fifth test flight and the first to carry a ­Lunar Module capable of an actual moon landing. Up to the moment of touchdown, though, a landing ­remained far from certain. “Deke!,” written with Michael Cassutt, gives Slayton’s personal narrative of ­decisions that determined who would fly in space, who would not, and how they would be trained for history’s greatest adventure. Slayton also ­relates how a farm boy from Leon, Wis., evolved into a no-nonsense ­manager of the complex interactions between the technical demands of the space program, the astronauts’ ­necessary type-A personalities, and their personal screw-ups as aggressive ­pilots and generally self-centered ­human beings.

2. Failure Is Not an Option 629.453 K
By Gene Kranz
Simon & Schuster, 2000

Apollo astronauts rode to the moon on the tip of a spear held by thousands of engineers, mostly men in their 20s, who would make up one of history’s most disciplined operational teams. In “Failure Is Not an Option,” Gene Kranz describes his path from flying a F-86 fighter to creating and leading NASA’s flight controllers. Kranz provided the catalyst so that their ­motivation, imagination, competence and courage could be applied to the immense challenge of landing men on the moon and bringing them safely back to Earth. He also prepared these newly graduated engineers to deal with the inevitable emergencies of space flight. Kranz led Mission Control as it guided the crew of Apollo 11 to the lunar surface and nine months later returned a stricken Apollo 13 mission from the brink of disaster to a remarkable triumph of American spirit and ingenuity.

3. Rocket Boys Biography
By Homer Hickam Jr.
Delacorte, 1998

The motivation of many of the young men who ­became miracle workers for Apollo ­began with the launch of Sputnik I in October 1957 by the Soviet Union. I know that my interest in space began at that point. So did Homer Hickam’s. His “Rocket Boys” (later released as “October Sky,” after the title of a 1999 movie based on the book) vividly describes his roots in West Virginia coal-mining country and his post-Sputnik attempts during high school to build and launch small rockets. Hickam went on to become an engineer and was part of the Saturn V rocket team that launched 27 astronauts to the moon. His story was typical of Apollo ­veterans across the country.

4. Apollo Expeditions to the Moon 629.454 C
Edited by Edgar M. Cortright
NASA, 1975

Believe it or not, James Webb, Robert Seamans, Samuel Phillips, George Low, Christopher Craft and other NASA managers were practically household names 40 years ago. They were the core of the effort to meet President John F. Kennedy’s May 1961 directive to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. These men rapidly put together the engineering team and supporting infrastructure leading to Americans walking on the moon on July 20, 1969, and to five additional missions of lunar exploration, ending with my own, Apollo 17, in December 1972. Soon after succeeding in this goal, project managers joined several Apollo astronauts in writing chapters for Edgar M. Cortright’s “Apollo ­Expeditions to the Moon,” explaining “how it was done.” Each chapter ­provides insights fresh from those who did it, ranging from high policy to the human experience of being there.

5. Carrying the Fire Biography and 629.4
By Michael Collins
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974

“I have been places and done things you simply would not believe,” writes Apollo 11 astronaut Mike Collins near the end of “Carrying the Fire.” That observation reflects my own memories of exploring the moon’s Valley of Taurus-Littrow. Forty years ago, ­Collins spent the day alone in lunar ­orbit as the command-module pilot while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin explored the moon’s surface. Collins ultimately gave us arguably the best personal story by an astronaut, capturing all the hard work, family interactions and excitement of being in the group of men who would be the public face of Apollo. They and all with whom they worked believed, correctly, that this was the most important contribution they could make with their lives.

—Mr. Schmitt, a former U.S. senator for New Mexico and, as Apollo 17’s geologist and lunar-module pilot, the last man to step on the moon, is the author of “Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise and Energy and the Human Settlement of Space” (Copernicus/Praxis, 2006).

Frida

Enjoyed it. Ashley Judd plays Tina Modotti; I only became aware of who Modotti was by weeding the Biography section at HWPL and seeing two books on her.

Transamerica

Rather weird film about a transexual woman, played by Felicity Huffman. Weird in a curious, good way.

Button-Down Era’s Rebel With a Camera

About Ray




It is a curious coincidence — but then again, as they say, probably no accident — that Nicholas Ray’s “In a Lonely Place” was released in the same year (1950) as Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard.” Both films cast a dark, cynical, knowing eye on life in Hollywood, and both concern screenwriters down on their luck and hoping for a break. While neither refers to the political unease infesting the film colony at that blacklist-haunted moment, both seethe with unspoken paranoia and anxiety, with a sense of imminent betrayal and lurking menace.

I had not seen In a Lonely Place until recently, and found it great. Bogart shines in the role of the screenwriter looking for a new break, an end to his bad luck.

Wilder’s characters — the thwarted young writer played by William Holden and the moldering, reclusive former star incarnated by Gloria Swanson — are specimens of spiritual malaise and moral decay, held up to ruthless analytical scrutiny. Ray, laying hold of similarly ripe psychological material, handles it with an empathy that is at least as disconcerting as Wilder’s rigor.

I'm going to try Sunset Boulevard; haven't seen it in years.
“In a Lonely Place,” which begins a weeklong run at Film Forum on Friday, leading into “Nick Ray,” a 14-film retrospective of his work, obeys the rules of the film noir genre dutifully enough, though Ray, as was his custom when circumstances allowed, took some liberties with the original script, which was adapted by Andrew Solt from a story by Dorothy B. Hughes. There is a murder, a police investigation, a star-crossed love affair and violence that erupts suddenly and scarily. But this is not a crime story, and certainly not much of a whodunit, even though it stars Humphrey Bogart, the most recognizable movie detective of the previous decade.
Ray’s career in Hollywood was relatively brief and frequently frustrating. He flourished in the 1950s and was responsible for one of the decade’s cinematic touchstones, “Rebel Without a Cause.” That movie, like “In a Lonely Place,” takes a fairly conventional template and fills it with wild, extravagant emotions and hyperbolically expressive cinematic effects.

One of three films James Dean would make.
There is some suspense in the story but not much doubt about how things will end. Throughout, though, the details of the plot register less than the shadings of emotion, as the center of attention pivots from Dixon’s anger to Laurel’s fear. And these emotions have the effect of isolating these two loners, who had found a measure of companionship together, from each other and from everyone else around them.
“In a Lonely Place,” like “Rebel Without a Cause,” “Hot Blooded,” “Bigger Than Life” and “Bitter Victory,” is a Nicholas Ray movie whose title would suit just about any of them. There may be no other director in the Hollywood mainstream (where Ray was never altogether comfortable) whose vision is at once so bleak and so luxuriously satisfying. As the ’50s went on, he shifted from black and white to Technicolor and CinemaScope, and the deep colors and widescreen format brought his blend of Method naturalism, psychosexual subtext and operatic scale to lustrous and splendid new life.

Keeping Mum

Excellent fun. Maggie Smith is spot-on, and the rest of the cast makes the film work.

Five Best: These novels about arduous journeys are transporting, says Rose Tremain

1. As I Lay Dying. William Faulkner. Jonathan Cape, 1930.

The Bundren family, poor white farmers in Mississippi, attempts to keep a pledge to its dead matriarch, Addie, to bury her with her kin a hundred miles away. The coffin is put aboard a mule-drawn wagon, and the Bundrens climb in and set off—just as a storm sweeps in, drenching the travelers and raising the river levels. Every jolt and tip of the cart is felt by the reader in this anguished under­taking, but William Faulkner is charting far more than a hazardous journey. At its core, “As I Lay Dying” is a powerful story of ­domestic entropy, a tale ­perfectly served by its elliptical, multi-voiced narration, in which nobody is ­listening to anybody else. As Addie’s body ­begins to putrefy and buzzards start to circle under the leaden sky, as the wagon is almost lost in the swollen Mississippi, so the secrets and lies of the Bundrens are washed up on some lonely and silent shore, where, still, no individual cry can be heard.

2. Voss. Patrick White. Viking, 1957.

In this novel set in Australia in the 1840s, Johann Voss, a German exile, sets off with a motley team of men to explore the unmapped outback. As he travels deeper into this hostile world, Voss struggles to understand the nature of the sudden and blinding love that overtook him just before his departure, when he fell for Laura Trevelyan, an orphaned young woman shunned in her uncle’s household for her obstinate cleverness. Voss has undertaken his arduous journey in the belief that suffering will make him a saint—a faith that both attracts and repels the men he leads, as it does his beloved. Persecuted by every tribulation the intemperate wilderness can inflict, oppressed by dreams of normality and sexual happiness, surrounded by dying animals and an ­increasingly mutinous crew, Voss stumbles on. Sensing her lover’s torments from afar, Laura—who has taken her dead maid’s child, Mercy, as her own—falls gravely ill with a brain fever. She ­recovers only when all hope for Voss’s return is abandoned. Patrick White, who died in 1990, won the 1973 ­Nobel literature prize and wrote a dozen novels, including “The Living and the Dead” and “The Vivisector,” but “Voss” is his greatest work.

3. Quarantine. Jim Crace. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1957.

Judea. Two thousand years ago. A fat and lazy merchant, Musa, lies dying in a tent, abandoned to “the devil’s fever.” Miri, his ­pregnant wife, prays for her violent husband’s death. But while she’s away digging his grave, a young pilgrim from Galilee arrives at their tent and whispers a blessing to the dying Musa before beginning a 40-day fast in a remote cave. When Miri returns, Musa has recovered. For the Galilean is none other than Jesus of Nazareth. Jim Crace’s brilliant and audacious re-creation of Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness succeeds primarily through incremental invention, lit by unexpected flares of anarchic humor. He gives ­Jesus four pilgrim ­companions, misfits all, rolling the dice at the possibility of rebirth through self-denial. Into Musa’s materialistic mind Crace puts the idea of claiming ownership of the land where the caves are found and ­charging rent for using them. And for Jesus’ suffering the ­author contrives a resolution that is shocking but also, for many readers, deeply satisfying.

4. Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living. Carrie Tiffany. Scribner, 2006.

In 1934, a “farming train” travels across the sparsely populated lands of northern Australia, distributing aid to poor settlers in the form of scientific data on animal feed, crop production and domestic skills. In the train’s ­“sewing car” is a young woman, Jean, whose romantic vision of the world makes her tragically susceptible to men’s desires. Dragged off the train by an impetuous suitor, Roger Pettergree, a soil expert, and married before she has time to imagine her own future, Jean embarks with Pettergree on a long, doomed journey to establish a scientifically managed model farm on land unfit to support it. In this debut novel, Carrie Tiffany shows perfect pitch, creating a world in which drought and vermin combine to snatch all rewards from human endeavour and yet where Jean’s generosity of spirit imbues the meanest artifact with ­transcendent beauty.

5. The Crossing. Cormac McCarthy. Knopf, 1994.

Cormac McCarthy is ­America’s greatest contemporary poet of the wild. His fictional journeys have strange beginnings and desolate endings, confirming man’s smallness in a world where “God sits and conspires in the destruction of what he has been at such pains to ­create,” as McCarthy writes in “The Crossing.” Here, 16-year-old Billy ­Parham, son of a rancher, rescues a she-wolf from a trap one winter’s morning and decides to light out from home, dragging the wolf behind his horse across the border into Mexico. Billy’s intention is to release the wolf into the inaccessible mountains from which she strayed, but by crossing a geographical and temporal border, he enters a world of anarchy and violence. Piece by inevitable piece, he is stripped of everything that gives his life ­sustenance and meaning. Billy’s ­courage in the face of pain, loss, ­hunger and bereavement, no less than his unsentimental understanding of the lives of animals, makes him a ­remarkable and timeless hero. This heroism is, in its turn, heroically served by McCarthy’s dark unraveling ­sentences that gather like storm clouds and break in freakish thunder.

—Ms. Tremain’s novels include ­“Music and Silence” and “The ­Colour.” Her most recent work, “The Road Home,” has just been released in paperback.

Mind the Gap

Watched it for the second time. Liked it. 5 stories of different characters are told in parallel; eventually, the fate of the characters interweaves as they are all in New York City.