Hedy’s folIy

In a front-page review, on Sunday 18 December 2011, John Adams (the composer) writes about The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, by Richard Rhodes. The illustration accompanying the review speaks to her attributes: a startlingly beautiful Vienna-born actress who, although still in her early 20s, had accomplished her own scandal by appearing nude and simulating passionate adulterous sex in a mostly silent movie called “Ecstasy.”

Louis B. Mayer had seen her "Ecstasy" but was ambivalent about her (“You’re lovely, but . . . I don’t like what people would think about a girl who flits bare-assed around the screen.”). Nonetheless, he signed her to a contract, with the proviso that she change her name.

She commanded the screen not so much for her acting, which at best was passably droll and arch, but rather for the perfect beauty of her face, with its colliding sensuality and innocence, and for the subtle irony and sly intelligence that animated her work with screen partners like Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart and Charles Boyer.

Under contract to MGM, she worked hard, was generally liked, and although not a diva was scrupulous about fighting for her rights in an era when actors and actresses were “properties” rather than people. She avoided the celebrity party circuit, preferring small gatherings with close friends. At home she set up a drafting table and devoted her downtime to inventions, including a bouillon-like cube that when mixed with water would produce an instant soft drink. It was at a dinner at the home of the actress Janet Gaynor in 1940 that she met George ­Antheil.

Antheil was a composer from Trenton, and had caused a sensation similar to Stravinsky with his Rites of Spring. He went to work in Hollywood, scoring films. He had also written a book, “Every Man His Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Criminology.” He also wrote pieces for Esquire, and Hedy Lamar had read one of those.

According to Antheil’s autobiography, “Bad Boy of Music,” Hedy requested the meeting because she had read one of his Esquire articles about glands. This was Hollywood, and the most beautiful woman in the world was concerned about her breast size.
These were days before implants.

That a glamorous movie star whose day job involved hours of makeup calls and dress fittings would spend her off hours designing sophisticated weapons systems is one of the great curiosities of Hollywood history. Lamarr, however, not only possessed a head for abstract spatial relationships, but she also had been in her former life a fly on the wall during meetings and technical discussions between her ­munitions-manufacturer husband and his clients, some of them Nazi officials.

Seven Days in May

1964 film about a rogue Air Force general who opposes the President's treaty with the Soviet Union, and puts in place a plan to overthrow the President and take power to save the nation. Burt Lancaster is cold and calculating, Kirk Douglas spry as his aide, Ava Gardner subdued as his mistress, Frederic March understated yet passionate as the President. Clichés eventually seep in, of course, but it remains a powerful film. I'd love top see it reprised

Invictus

Put in Clint Eastwood, Morgan, Freeman and Matt Damon, add Nelson Mandela, and who will criticize it? 2009 film got 75% at RottenTomatoes.com (Delivered with typically stately precision from director Clint Eastwood, Invictus may not be rousing enough for some viewers, but Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman inhabit their real-life characters with admirable conviction.) I was not terribly impressed: acting was excellent, but it seemed clichéd.

From here to eternity

The famous scene in the black and white film classic that holds up very well. Burt Lancaster in good form, a lover in an illicit affair, the conniving sargeant that keep the company moving smoothly in the absence of the captain conducting his own illicit love affairs, and the leader who commands action when the base comes under attack on Sunday 7 December 1941. Frank Sinatra does a very good job as the doomed Maggio, and Deborah Kerr does an equally good job as the captain's cheated-on and cheating wife who falls for Lancaster's . But Montgomery Clift and Donna Reed are the commanding presences in this film. Monty nails his character, Robert E. Lee Prewitt, morose, determined, stubborn, defiant, proud, and never flags. Donna Reed, in utter contrast to her future role as wholesome suburban mom, plays a prostitute (one needs to read between the lines, as it were, for the word is never uttered in this 1953 film) who falls for Prew. Film making at its best.

Books About Scandals

Five Best - March 20, 2010:  Now it can be told: Henry E. Scott's favorite books about scandals


1. The Informant. Kurt Eichenwald. Broadway, 2000.       364.168 E

More than 5,000 book titles on Amazon include the word "scandal"—that says a lot about the theme's drawing power, but some of the best books on the subject are more subtly titled. Kurt Eichenwald's "The Informant" is a classic of corporate-scandal reportage, dissecting the 1990s price-fixing conspiracy by Archer Daniels Midland and overseas agricultural companies. The book reads like a John Grisham thriller as Eichenwald weaves the improbable story of Mark Whitacre, an ADM executive who became the FBI's secret source—and who turned out to be crooked, too. Who knew that a complex tale about an international plot to rig the prices of an animal-feed additive called lysine could be almost impossible to put down?

2. A Gospel of Shame. Frank Bruni and Elinor Burkett.
  Viking, 1993.    261.832 B

"A Gospel of Shame" is a disturbing account of religious scandal. New York Times reporter Frank Bruni and magazine writer Elinor Burkett put the reader in parochial-school classrooms and vividly conjure the terror felt by children subjected to gropings and worse by the priests who were supposed to be their moral shepherds. Bruni and Burkett also document the now well-known conspiracy by the Catholic Church hierarchy to cover up the child-abuse scandals. "Shame" opens with the story of 40-year-old Frank Fitzpatrick's 1990 telephone call to Father James Porter, his childhood priest at St. Mary's Church in North Attleboro, Mass. Fitzpatrick confronts him: Why did Porter molest Fitzpatrick and other children? The priest replies: "Who knows?"—and laughs.

3. Eight Men Out. Eliot Asinof. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963.    796.357 A

These days, when sports reporters seem to spend as much time in courtrooms as in locker rooms, sports scandals aren't hard to find. Eliot Asinof's "Eight Men Out" is all the more entertaining for its depiction of a baseball conspiracy that occurred back when players' transgressions went largely unreported: the "Black Sox scandal" of the 1919 World Series. Asinof's exhaustively researched tale shows how the Chicago White Sox were paid by New York gangster Arnold Rothstein to throw the Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Players in on the fix included the team's star, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson. He took the bribe money, but Rothstein should have asked for a refund: Jackson hit .375 in the Series and drove in six runs. But Jackson was among the eight White Sox players banned from baseball after the conspiracy was uncovered.

4. Forgiven. Charles E. Shepard. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989.           B Bakker S

Scandal is especially delicious when it snares people who preach morality. In "Forgiven," Charles E. Shepard recounts, as the subtitle has it, "the rise and fall of Jim Bakker and the PTL ministry," building on stories that the reporter broke in the Charlotte Observer about the seamy reality of Bakker's multimillion-dollar evangelical empire. (PTL, Bakker said, stood for Praise the Lord and People That Love.) The preacher's downfall began in the mid-1980s with the revelation of his sexual encounter with a young woman in a Florida hotel room and Bakker's efforts to buy her silence. Bakker, who hosted "The PTL Club" television show with his heavily mascaraed wife, Tammy Faye, "used tears, humor, righteous anger, bruised self-pity, and gentle ministry to touch viewers in their living rooms," Shepard writes. In particular Bakker put the touch on them for fake time-shares at the PTL religious theme park in South Carolina. The scam funded Bakker's lavish living, but it also landed him in jail. This engaging true tale is stranger than Sinclair Lewis's "Elmer Gantry" fiction.

5. Investigation Hollywood. Fred Otash. Regnery, 1976.

It is hard to imagine being shocked by anything that occurs in Hollywood these days, but that wasn't always the case. In 1976 Fred Otash—billed as "scandaland's top private detective"— published a startling chronicle of the days in the 1950s when publicists worked overtime to cover up their clients' misbehavior. Perhaps Otash's most fascinating story involves a closeted gay actor and his angry wife, who is collecting evidence to sweeten the settlement she'll get when she sues for divorce. She hires Otash to secretly record her confrontation with the actor—referred to here as "Mr. Star," later revealed to be Rock Hudson— over his affairs with his agent and other men. It's a sorry business, but then the grist for most scandals usually is.

—Mr. Scott's "Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential, America's Scandalous Scandal Magazine" was recently published by Pantheon.

The Polanski Hypocrisy

Amid the many reactions to director Roman Polanski's arrest last weekend in Switzerland more than 30 years after he fled the U.S. after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, none have been as strong as those of the international film community. A petition demanding his release has attracted over 100 film-world signatories, including luminaries from Martin Scorsese and Costa-Gavras to David Lynch and Wong Kar Wai.

Reading the petition, you could be forgiven for thinking that the dispute was over some obscure diplomatic codicil. Its principal focus is on the mechanics of the arrest, namely Switzerland's detention of Mr. Polanski on a U.S. request as he was traveling to the Zurich Film Festival. It cites Switzerland's status as a "neutral country" and the "extraterritorial nature" of film festivals. The substance of his guilty plea and the circumstances of the crime receive only glancing mention, in a single line: "His arrest follows an American arrest warrant dating from 1978 against the filmmaker, in a case of morals."

One would never know that those easily brushed off "morals"—rape and pedophilia—have actually been a central concern of some of the petition's signatories.

I'm baffled by people defending him.

In their depictions of these acts, the directors and actors in question seem keenly aware of the extreme violence of rape and the terrible psychological consequences that follow its victims for years afterward. But for them, apparently, life doesn't imitate art.

Still, some film-world names were notable for their absence from the petition. Director Luc Besson refrained from signing it, noting, in an interview with RTL Soir, "I don't have any opinion on this, but I have a daughter, 13 years old. And if she was violated, nothing would be the same, even 30 years later."

Not have an opinion? He does, and it is the right one. Mr. Paletta, who wrote the opinion piece in the Journal, is an editor at the Manhattan Institute, which is a conservative think tank.

Patrick Swayze

• Filmography | Times Topics: Patrick Swayze
• Slide Show |

September 15, 2009
Patrick Swayze, Star of ‘Dirty Dancing,’ Dies at 57
By ANITA GATES

Patrick Swayze, the balletically athletic actor who rose to stardom in the films “Dirty Dancing” and “Ghost” and whose 20-month battle with advanced pancreatic cancer drew wide attention, died Monday. He was 57.

His publicist, Annett Wolf, told The Associated Press in Los Angeles that Mr. Swayze had died with family members at his side.

Mr. Swayze’s cancer was diagnosed in January 2008. Six months later he had already outlived his prognosis and was filmed at an airport, smiling at photographers and calling himself, only half-facetiously, “a miracle dude.”

He even went through with plans to star in “The Beast,” a drama series for A&E. He filmed a complete season while undergoing treatment. Mr. Swayze insisted on continuing with the series. “How do you nurture a positive attitude when all the statistics say you’re a dead man?” he told The New York Times last October. “You go to work.”

Miraculous attitude.

The show, on which he played an undercover F.B.I. agent, had its premiere in January and earned him admiring reviews.

A week before the series began, Mr. Swayze was the subject of a one-hour “Barbara Walters Special” on ABC, in which he talked about his illness. “I keep my heart and my soul and my spirit open to miracles,” he told Ms. Walters. But he said he was not going to pursue every experimental treatment that came along. If he were to “spend so much time chasing staying alive,” he said, he wouldn’t be able to enjoy the time he had left.

“I want to live,” he said.

Shortly after the interview, he was hospitalized for pneumonia. At least one tabloid newspaper ran photographs of him in April with reports that the cancer had metastasized and that his weight had dropped to 105 pounds.

Mr. Swayze rose to stardom in 1987. He had received attention in several early movies and in the mini-series “North and South,” but the coming-of-age film “Dirty Dancing” established him as a romantic leading man. He starred opposite Jennifer Grey as a young working-class dance instructor at a Catskills resort who proved to have more heart, integrity and sex appeal than many of the wealthy guests with whom he was forbidden to fraternize.

O, yes, I remember the mini-series. And the film; it was a great one.

He exhibited similar emotional intensity in the supernatural romance “Ghost” (1990), an enormous box-office hit. His character, a loft-living yuppie banker, is murdered early in the film and spends the rest of it as a spirit, desperately trying to communicate with his fiancée (Demi Moore) with the help of a psychic (Whoopi Goldberg). The film, which also showcased his physical grace, solidified his stardom.

One of my all-time favorites

Mr. Swayze was proud of “Ghost,” as he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1990. “I needed to do something that will affect the audience in a positive way, make them feel better about their lives and appreciate what they have,” he said.

Patrick Wayne Swayze was born on Aug. 18, 1952, in Houston, the son of Jesse Wayne Swayze, an engineer and rodeo cowboy, and Patsy Swayze, a dance instructor and choreographer. He began dancing as a child and was often teased about it. But he was also a student athlete, and his dancing career was hampered by a football injury.

After attending San Jacinto, a community college in Texas, Mr. Swayze moved to New York to study dance, becoming a member of Eliot Feld Ballet. He made his Broadway debut in 1975 as a dancer in “Goodtime Charley” and was cast in the original Broadway production of “Grease,” taking over the lead role. (He returned to Broadway almost three decades later, filling in as the razzle-dazzle lawyer Billy Flynn in “Chicago” in 2003.)

He made his screen debut in “Skatetown, U.S.A.” (1979), a roller-disco movie starring Scott Baio. Looking back on that film, he told the Toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail in 1984, “I saw that with not too much trouble I could become a teenybopper star, but I knew if I accepted that, it would take years to win credibility as a serious actor.”

His first notable film was “The Outsiders” (1983), a drama about teenage gangs that starred other newcomers like Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon and Emilio Estevez. The same year he was cast in a short-lived television series, “Renegades,” a sort of updated “Mod Squad” about young gang leaders turned deputies.

His public profile grew steadily, especially with his appearances in “Red Dawn” (1984), a film about small-town high school students fighting the Soviets in World War III, and in “North and South” (1985), a 12-hour mini-series in which he played a conflicted Southern soldier.

“People don’t identify with victims,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press, discussing his “North and South” character, originally written as a more passive man. “They identify with people who have the world come down on their heads and who fight to survive.”

After that came “Dirty Dancing” and then, just three years later, “Ghost,” with a few largely forgotten movies in between.

During the 1990s he was a bank-robbing surfer in “Point Break” (1991) and a drag queen with the daunting name Vida Boheme in “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar” (1995). “To Wong Foo” earned him his third Golden Globe nomination. (The others were for “Dirty Dancing” and “Ghost.”)

His portrayal of a noble doctor in Roland Joffé’s “City of Joy” (1992) was not well received. But then, critics rarely praised his acting ability. At best he was commended for his athletic presence and stalwart demeanor.

From 1995 to 2007 he made more than a dozen feature films, including “Donnie Darko” (2001), in which he played an obnoxious motivational speaker. In 2006 he surprised many by starring in London as the streetwise gambler Nathan Detroit in the musical “Guys and Dolls.” His last film was “Powder Blue,” a drama with Lisa Kudrow that was released on DVD this year. As a young unknown, Mr. Swayze met Lisa Niemi, a fellow Houstonian, in one of his mother’s dance classes. They married in 1975. She survives him, along with his mother; two brothers, Don and Sean; and a sister, Bambi. Another sister, Vicky, died in 1994.

Mr. Swayze said more than once that he was determined not to be typecast. In a 1989 interview with The Chicago Sun-Times, he said, “The only plan I have is that every time people think they have me pegged, I’m going to come out of left field and do something unexpected.”

He also expressed concern about the dangers of Hollywood superficiality. “One of the reasons I bought my ranch was because I didn’t want to hear the hype,” he told The A.P. in 1985, referring to his horse ranch in the San Gabriel Mountains. He added, “Your horses don’t lie to you.”

U.S. NEWS - SEPTEMBER 15, 2009, 5:32 P.M. ET

Actor Patrick Swayze Dies of Pancreatic Cancer
Associated Press

LOS ANGELES -- Patrick Swayze, the hunky actor who danced his way into moviegoers" hearts with "Dirty Dancing" and then broke them with "Ghost," died Monday after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 57.

"Patrick Swayze passed away peacefully today with family at his side after facing the challenges of his illness for the last 20 months," said a statement released Monday evening by his publicist, Annett Wolf. Mr. Swayze died in Los Angeles, Wolf said, but declined to give further details.
One Last Dance

View Slideshow

A look at Patrick Swayze's life and career

Fans of the actor were saddened to learn in March 2008 that Mr. Swayze was suffering from a particularly deadly form of cancer. He kept working despite the diagnosis, putting together a memoir with his wife and shooting "The Beast," an A&E drama series for which he had already made the pilot.

Mr. Swayze said he opted not to use painkilling drugs while making "The Beast" because they would have taken the edge off his performance. The show drew a respectable 1.3 million viewers when the 13 episodes ran in 2009, but A&E said it had reluctantly decided not to renew it for a second season.

When he first went public with the illness, some reports gave him only weeks to live, but his doctor said his situation was "considerably more optimistic" than that. Mr. Swayze acknowledged that time might be running out given the grim nature of the disease.

"I'd say five years is pretty wishful thinking," Mr. Swayze told ABC's Barbara Walters in early 2009. "Two years seems likely if you're going to believe statistics. I want to last until they find a cure, which means I'd better get a fire under it."

C. Thomas Howell, who co-starred with Mr. Swayze in "The Outsiders," "Grandview U.S.A." and "Red Dawn", said: "I have always had a special place in my heart for Patrick. While I was fortunate enough to work with him in three films, it was our passion for horses that forged a friendship between us that I treasure to this day. Not only did we lose a fine actor today, I lost my older 'Outsiders" brother."

Other celebrities used Twitter to express condolences, and "Dirty Dancing" was the top trending topic for a while Monday night, trailed by several other Swayze films.

Ashton Kutcher -- whose wife, Demi Moore, co-starred with Mr. Swayze in "Ghost" -- wrote: "RIP P Swayze." Mr. Kutcher also linked to a YouTube clip of the actor poking fun at himself in a classic "Saturday Night Live" sketch, in which he played a wannabe Chippendales dancer alongside the corpulent -- and frighteningly shirtless -- Chris Farley.

And Larry King wrote: "Patrick Swayze was a wonderful actor & a terrific guy. He put his heart in everything. He was an extraordinary fighter in his battle w Cancer." Mr. King added that he'd do a tribute to Mr. Swayze on his CNN program Tuesday night.

A three-time Golden Globe nominee, Mr. Swayze became a star with his performance as the misunderstood bad-boy Johnny Castle in "Dirty Dancing." As the son of a choreographer who began his career in musical theater, he seemed a natural to play the role.

A coming-of-age romance starring Jennifer Grey as an idealistic young woman on vacation with her family and Swayze as the Catskills resort's sexy (and much older) dance instructor, the film made great use of both his grace on his feet and his muscular physique.

It became an international phenomenon in the summer of 1987, spawning albums, an Oscar-winning hit song in "(I've Had) the Time of My Life," stage productions and a sequel, 2004's "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights," in which he made a cameo.

Mr. Swayze performed and co-wrote a song on the soundtrack, the ballad "She's Like the Wind," inspired by his wife, Lisa Niemi. The film also gave him the chance to utter the now-classic line, "Nobody puts Baby in a corner."

Mr. Swayze followed that up with the 1989 action flick "Road House," in which he played a bouncer at a rowdy bar. But it was his performance in 1990's "Ghost" that showed his vulnerable, sensitive side. He starred as a murdered man trying to communicate with his fiancee (Ms. Moore) -- with great frustration and longing -- through a psychic played by Whoopi Goldberg.

The film earned a best-picture nomination and a supporting-actress Oscar for Ms. Goldberg, who said she wouldn't have won if it weren't for Mr. Swayze.

Mr. Swayze himself earned three Golden Globe nominations, for "Dirty Dancing," "Ghost" and 1995's "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar," which further allowed him to toy with his masculine image. The role called for him to play a drag queen on a cross-country road trip alongside Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo.

Among his earlier films, Swayze was part of the star-studded lineup of up-and-comers in Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 adaptation of S.E. Hinton's novel "The Outsiders," alongside Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Emilio Estevez and Diane Lane.

Other "80s films included "Red Dawn," "Grandview U.S.A." (for which he also provided choreography) and "Youngblood," once more with Lowe, as Canadian hockey teammates.

In the "90s, he made such eclectic films as "Point Break" (1991), in which he played the leader of a band of bank-robbing surfers, and the family Western "Tall Tale" (1995), in which he starred as Pecos Bill. He appeared on the cover of People magazine as its "Sexiest Man Alive" in 1991, but his career tapered off toward the end of the 1990s, when he also had stay in rehab for alcohol abuse. In 2001, he appeared in the cult favorite "Donnie Darko," and in 2003 he returned to the New York stage with "Chicago"; 2006 found him in the musical "Guys and Dolls" in London.

Mr. Swayze was born in 1952 in Houston, the son of Jesse Swayze and choreographer Patsy Swayze, whose films include "Urban Cowboy."

He played football but also was drawn to dance and theater, performing with the Feld, Joffrey and Harkness Ballets and appearing on Broadway as Danny Zuko in "Grease." But he turned to acting in 1978 after a series of injuries.

Within a couple years of moving to Los Angeles, he made his debut in the roller-disco movie "Skatetown, U.S.A." The eclectic cast included Scott Baio, Flip Wilson, Maureen McCormack and Billy Barty.

Off-screen, he was an avid conservationist who was moved by his time in Africa to shine a light on "man's greed and absolute unwillingness to operate according to Mother Nature's laws," he told the AP in 2004.

Mr. Swayze was married since 1975 to Ms. Niemi, a fellow dancer who took lessons with his mother; they met when he was 19 and she was 15. A licensed pilot, Ms. Niemi would fly her husband from Los Angeles to Northern California for treatment at Stanford University Medical Center.

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.

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.

Gilda

Friday night movie.

"Johnny Farrell goes to work for Ballin Mundson, the proprietor of an illegal gambling casino in a South American city and quickly rises to become Mundson's 'main man.' All is well until Mundson returns from a trip with his new bride, Gilda-- a woman from Johnny's past. Mundson, unaware of their previous love affair, assigns Farrell the job of keeping Gilda a faithful wife. Fraught with hatred, Gilda does her best to antagonize, intimidate, and instill jealousy in Farrell-- until circumstances allow him to get even."

For 1946, a good film. Script weak; then again, it was 1946. The acting is excellent.






An interested aside: Gilda Radner was named after this Gilda, according to Make 'em laugh: the funny business of America. (2008). Kantor, Michael& Laurence Maslon. Hachette: New York. pp. 238-239. [Wednesday, June 17, 2009 Delanceyplace.com 6/17/09 - Gilda Radner]

Books on the Brilliantly Disturbed

1. A Beautiful Mind

By Sylvia Nasar
Simon & Schuster, 1998

To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, there are no second acts in the lives of schizophrenics. Once entrenched, paranoia rarely lifts. Thus the resurrection of mathematician and economist John Nash is a tale for the ages. While Nash's conversation as a young man had "always mixed mathematics and myth," by the late 1950s the MIT professor was going far beyond eccentricity. He talked of becoming the emperor of Antarctica; he also insisted that aliens were communicating to him through the New York Times. Nash spent the next three and a half decades as a revolving-door psychiatric in-patient and aimless wanderer. But after receiving the 1994 Nobel Prize for his long-ago dissertation on game theory, the former boy wonder miraculously regained his appetite for scientific study. Sylvia Nasar's "A Beautiful Mind" is less schmaltzy and tidy than the Oscar-winning movie based on it. The Hollywood version suggests that Nash benefited from new medications, but as Nasar reports, Nash actually stopped taking antipsychotics in 1970 and relied solely on his potent mind. "Gradually," Nash recalled, "I began to reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking."

2. The Man Who Loved China
By Simon Winchester
Harper, 2008

Best known for his gripping narrative about the odd couple behind the Oxford English Dictionary ("The Professor and the Madman"), Simon Winchester here portrays the hypomanic, chain-smoking Brit who produced an immense encyclopedic work all by his lonesome. In 1936, Joseph Needham, a noted biochemist and ladies man, fell in love with a young scholar from Nanjing who taught him classical Chinese. "Almost delirious with happiness" from creating his own personal English-Chinese dictionary, this "20th century Erasmus" then sought to rescue China from its lowly status as "the booby nation." Needham's magnum opus -- he produced 17 volumes before his death in 1994 -- was called "Science and Civilisation in China," and it argued that the Middle Kingdom was once way ahead of the West. Printing, for example, came six centuries before Gutenberg. Winchester spotlights Needham's perilous research trips, which brought him into contact with Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai, as well as his colorful non-academic obsessions, including gymnosophy (i.e., nudism), Morris dancing and burnt toast.

3. Empire
By Donald Bartlett and James Steele
Norton, 1979

Nearly a full generation before Leonardo DiCaprio did his star turn in "The Aviator," Donald Bartlett and James Steele punctured the myth that once was Howard Hughes. Today it's easy to forget that Hughes's name was, for a long time, synonymous solely with gargantuan achievement. "Nobody can outdo me," the 25-year-old movie producer proclaimed shortly after taking Hollywood by storm with "Hell's Angels" (1930), an early talkie, which he also directed. Eight years later, the dashing mogul became a national hero when he shattered the record for flying around the world by a full three days. Bartlett and Steele, having sifted through 250,000 pages of documents, detail every chilling twist and turn of Hughes's descent into emotional paralysis. By the late 1960s, just about all the lonely billionaire ("Don't dare call me millionaire!") looked forward to was sitting naked in the middle of hotel rooms -- "the germ-free zone."

4. The Difference Engine
By Doron Swade
Viking, 2001

In 1822, disgusted by human error, the 30-year-old Cambridge-educated mathematician Charles Babbage dreamed up a cure: a calculating machine. After his annus horribilis of 1827, in which he lost a son as well as his wife and father, Babbage was inconsolable. To avoid a complete breakdown, he threw himself into working on a mechanical computer that he called the "difference engine." A few years later, he completed a part of Difference Engine No. 1, a 15-ton contraption that he used as a demonstration piece. Unfortunately, Babbage's obsession produced mountains of elaborate drawings for uncompleted machines but little else except bitterness. According to one of his few friends, the aging loner "spoke as if he hated mankind in general, Englishmen in particular and the English government most of all." Though as Doron Swade, a curator at the Science Museum in London, memorably shows in "The Difference Engine," this indefatigable misanthrope was the grandfather of the computer age.

5. Wizard
By Marc Seifer
Birch Lane, 1996

A century before cellphones and the Internet, another "wireless revolution" turned America upside-down. Its chief theoretician was Nikola Tesla, a Serb from Croatia, who secured the first patent for a means to produce high-frequency radio waves. Tesla was considered, along with Thomas Edison, one of the "twin wizards of electricity," Marc Seifer writes in this absorbing biography. Right after arriving in Manhattan in 1884, Tesla began working 20-hour days at Edison's lab; when his boss nixed his alternating-current induction motor, Tesla set out on his own. Seifer's meticulously researched account, some 20 years in the making, features riveting anecdotes of this man about town who hobnobbed with both Mark Twain and Stanford White. Like Howard Hughes, Tesla was a germo-phobe who called the hotel room home. But the room number had to be divisible by three, and he required assurances that no hotel employee would get within three feet of him. Sworn to celibacy, the anorexic Tesla saved up his passion for pigeons: "To care for those . . . birds . . . is the delight of my life. It is my only means of playing."

Mr. (Joshua) Kendall's biography of Peter Roget, "The Man Who Made Lists," has just been released in paperback.

Autobiographies by Actresses

1. Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister
By Evelyn Keyes
Stuart, 1977
As the title of Evelyn Keyes's exuberantly clear-eyed autobiography makes clear, the woman who played Suellen in "Gone With the Wind" was more often bridesmaid than star. But what she was denied on the screen she made up for on the page in one of the juiciest and most shrewdly observed books ever to come out of Hollywood. The actress who grew up poor and provincial in Atlanta went knocking on studio doors with nothing more than a vague dream of stardom and a naïveté so thick it was almost a protective armor. She needed every bit of that, and her extraordinary humor, to survive the Daddy figures who served as mentors and something more: Cecil B. DeMille, Harry Cohn, Charles Vidor and John Huston, her third and most flamboyant husband. He takes her out deer hunting in Idaho and fishing with Hemingway in Key West (where the writer's wife, Maria, "cleaned her toenails with a long knife and cut the bread with it afterward"). On the Idaho trip, under Huston's tutelage, Keyes successfully kills a buck -- an experience that her husband later describes as "the best part of our life together." In "Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister," Keyes, who died last summer, raises unflappability to a fine art. Don't be fooled by the throwaway style: The timing is too good, the mots too justes.
2. The Lonely Life
By Bette Davis
Putnam, 1962
Any actress who can expose herself to the flesh-peddling standards of Hollywood -- surviving such confidence-shattering epithets as "little brown wren" and "as sexy as Slim Summerville" -- and still insist on a high-toned career while staring down studio bosses has chutzpah to burn. And Bette Davis, a stalwart New Englander who made three movies a year while using her excess energy to fight with Warner Bros., had it in spades. Even more important than sheer ambition, or perhaps it is one of ambition's hallmarks, was Davis's ability to put aside her East Coast theatrical snobbery and see movies as a different medium and moviemaking as a craft with different technical demands that she was determined to learn. As suggested by the title of her memoir, "The Lonely Life," Davis had little interest in false pride; she describes the highs and lows of her career and marriages, coming to the realization that you can't "have it all." Her attempts to be a "real" wife were doomed to failure, she confesses. The role of the "little woman" was perhaps the only one totally beyond her.
3. My Story
By Mary Astor
Doubleday, 1959
Though she made more than a hundred films, most of them silents, the dark-eyed beauty Mary Astor was never a mega-star, but she was more interesting than many who were. Astor was the daughter of an educated, schoolteacher mother and an ambitious German immigrant father so grasping and domineering that studio executives refused to negotiate with him. Sheltered and exploited her entire life, she hadn't had a chance to develop a moral compass or a sense of self before falling under the spell of mentor-lovers both kind (Jack Barrymore) and ambivalent (the rest), and of husbands (four in all) with a lower libido than hers. An increasingly disabling alcoholism led her first to the Catholic Church and then (with the encouragement of a priest-psychotherapist) to the writing of this remarkable book, in which she comes to terms with the rushed-into marriages, the drinking and above all the furor in the 1930s over a diary -- which surfaced during a child-custody battle with one of her ex-husbands -- in which she recorded her affair with writer George S. Kaufman. In "My Story," Astor displays those unusual and very grown-up qualities -- refined but sensual, stand-offish but come-hither -- that sometimes were a liability in Hollywood casting but make for a complex and riveting memoir.
4. Lulu in Hollywood
By Louise Brooks
Knopf, 1982
After laboring for much of the 1920s in Hollywood, the black-helmeted Kansas-born free spirit Louise Brooks had to go to Europe to become a star. She was a revelation in two mesmerizing German silent films directed by G.W. Pabst, "Pandora's Box" (1928) and "Diary of a Lost Girl" (1929) -- but then Brooks, independent-minded to a fault, refused to compromise once Hollywood came calling, and she basically threw her career away. By the late 1940s, she was working as a saleslady at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York. She was rescued by admirers, chief among them James Card, curator of the George Eastman House film archive in Rochester, N.Y. He persuaded Brooks to move to Rochester, where she lived in the 1950s as a recluse, watched films, her own and others, and was reborn as a writer. (She was also rediscovered as an actress by Kenneth Tynan, who championed her work in an influential piece for The New Yorker.) "Lulu in Hollywood" -- Lulu was the ill-fated innocent who drove men to distraction in "Pandora's Box" -- is a collection of Brooks's often brilliant essays. Some of the pieces recount her own joyous romp through the 1920s as a Ziegfeld showgirl (a job she enjoyed more than making movies) and party-girl courtesan. Other essays shimmer with insight as she discusses the work of Humphrey Bogart, W.C. Fields, Greta Garbo, Lillian Gish and others. She paints a vivid picture of Bogie, for instance, still showing vestiges of the stiff stage actor in "The Roaring Twenties" in 1939, when he appears helpless opposite James Cagney, whose "swift dialogue" and "swift movements . . . had the glitter and precision of a meat slicer . . . impossible to anticipate or counterattack."
5. Me
By Katharine Hepburn
Random House, 1991
Katharine Hepburn, equal to Bette Davis in ambition, seems in this memoir also to share her sense of solitary pursuit: "People who want to be famous are really loners. Or they should be." Like Davis, Hepburn put career first; unlike Davis, she never really fantasized the perfect marriage and the little white house. Until she fell for Spencer Tracy, she kept her lovers -- Howard Hughes, Leland Hayward -- at arm's length and was a shrewd businesswoman from the start. Her writing style consists of a slapdash series of jottings to self and fans, as if she were dictating while striding over a golf course. Yet "Me" captures beautifully that signal Hepburn combination of presumption and insecurity, self-love and abject humility. Should I have done this, done that? Wasn't I a bitch! And, yes, she was, often, but also an enchantress, and she is unstinting in showing us both. A superhuman resiliency allows her (like Davis) to suffer the most humiliating setbacks -- she was once famously declared "box-office poison" -- and continue going forward. Her flinty New England upbringing was both inspiration and protection: At her parents' urging, she was diving off cliffs, wrestling and competing from an early age, turning fear into something she feared so much that it made her fearless.

Ms. Haskell's "Frankly My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited" will be published next week by Yale University Press.
* FIVE BEST
* FEBRUARY 21, 2009
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W8

Paul Newman

Another tribute, this one from the WSJ film critic.

Paul Newman dead at age 83

3 different stories on this great actor and liberal activist from the Times, Journal and NY Daily News.

Madame X

Good movie. Made in 1937, before soundtracks. Gladys George delivers a stunning performance as a 'cheatin' wife' who is turned out by her husband, becomes a lush, sorta circles the globe, and winds up back in France as a murderess defended by her son (who has no idea he's defending his own Mum, or, rather, Mahmah). Why she did not go on to have a successful career is a riddle I need to answer for my own satisfaction, at the least.