Mystery Ship

For years this handsome scene of maritime action in the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine (www.penobscotmarinemuseum.org), bore the information: “Two brigs engaging during the War of 1812.” Recent research, however, has revealed that it is of a far rarer subject: The ship in the foreground is a slaver.

The rendering shows one of the Royal Navy’s brigs in hot pursuit of a Baltimore clipper-style brig. The painting, bought in Britain, came to the museum in 1962 with no information other than the artist’s name, E. Poulson. The slaver has the raked masts and the sizable rig developed in Baltimore clipper ships during the War of 1812 and popular for decades afterward among owners who needed speed. This particular brig has a figurehead, possibly a witch, that may someday lead to identifying the ship.

Poulson’s paintings are rare; they appear in just a few museum collections. He is thought to have been a master mariner, possibly a Royal Navy officer, painting from about 1840 to 1865 while living in retirement in Sunderland on the North Sea. He might well have witnessed or participated in a chase such as this while on active duty.

The scene is fascinating, depicting a dramatic moment in a despicable business. A sudden squall, possibly assisted by a cannonball, has just split the slaver’s fore-topsail. Men are racing aloft to take it in and perhaps to finish setting the lower sail. On deck, remarkable details tell a further story. The slaves are being taken from the hold and forced to sit beneath the windward rail to improve stability and increase speed. Gathering the slaves on deck would also have made it easy to throw them overboard, a not uncommon practice when a slave ship was in danger of capture.

Careful examination has shown some of the slaver’s crew to be Africans. They played a role in the slave trade, often corralling captives for white buyers. Although data on the racial composition of captured slavers is hard to find, the crew Poulson depicts may not be unusual. Did this slaver escape? Or was she captured, perhaps to be turned against her fellow slavers?

Screenings

Marlon Brando changed American acting and became enduringly famous astonishingly fast. Just four years encompass nearly all his career-defining roles: Stanley Kowalski in the film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951); the Mexican peasant revolutionary in Viva Zapata! (1952); the alienated but noble-souled biker gang leader in The Wild One (1953); and, of course, his Oscar-winning Terry Malloy, who “coulda been a contender” in On the Waterfront (1954).

Except for his Don Corleone in The Godfather nearly two decades later, almost all of Brando’s remaining acting career was a bewildering series of false starts, dead ends, and near misses. No other great American actor has appeared in so few films or so many outright bad ones.

And yet, in the nearly 40 years after his great, popular works, Brando turned in a dazzling and strange collection of performances in movies that have been either forgotten or ignored. A Marlon Brando obscure-film festival might include the following (all but one of them hard to find but available on VHS):

A neglected masterpiece from the Italian doctrinaire communist Gilo Pontecorvo, whose 1965 The Battle of Algiers is a landmark in world cinema. Burn! is almost pure Marxist propaganda, but it’s hip and exhilarating filmmaking that gave Brando one of his greatest roles, that of a British secret agent who is sent to a Caribbean island to foment a revolt that he will then be in the best position to crush.

Burn! was buried practically upon release. The Spanish government resented the Spaniards in the film being cast as villains—the fictitious island had been colonized by Spain—and lobbied with United Artists to change the story; parts of the film were reshot and cut to turn the island into a Portuguese colony. (Why the British didn’t object to Brando’s character isn’t known.) The movie was dumped on an international market without publicity and quickly sank.

This odd and uneven combination of horror and art film from the English director Michael Winner has been seen by so few people that to this day the impression lingers that it was a version of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. Actually, it was supposed to precede the events in James’s novella and explain how Quint and Miss Jessel perverted the souls of the children in the story. The Nightcomers is, at times, legitimately terrifying, but it’s an ugly, murky, and unpleasant film. The one thing that’s undeniably right about it is Brando’s performance as Quint, which hints at depths of depravity that go deeper than even Henry James was willing to suggest.

This is one of the strangest collaborations in modern American cinema not to have been a success, a movie made from a book by a great American novelist, Carson McCullers, directed by one of our great filmmakers, John Huston, and starring one of our greatest actors, Brando, in one of his greatest performances. Reflections in a Golden Eye, which also starred Julie Harris, Elizabeth Taylor, and Brian Keith, delivered everything promised but could find no popular audience, not even an art-house one, in a year dominated by Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Belle de Jour. Perhaps McCullers’s 1941 short novel about life in an Army camp just before the Second World War seemed too dated; perhaps Huston, in spots, treated the Southern material with a bit too much of a gothic touch. Brando, as an officer married to Taylor who is barely managing to suppress his homosexuality, is a primping, narcissistic horror, at the same time appalling and pathetic. There are many times in Brando’s career when you feel that no other actor could have played his role; in this film, you think not only that no other could have played it but that no other would have.

This was one of the most publicized disappointments of the seventies, the movie that was supposed to set off sparks when the greatest film actor of the generation, Jack Nicholson, was paired off against the greatest film actor of the previous generation. With Bonnie and Clyde’s Arthur Penn as director and a script by Thomas McGuane, there seemed to be no way it could miss. But Penn’s direction was uncertain, probably reflecting the principals’ uneasiness with McGuane’s script, which failed to develop the relationship between Nicholson’s stock thief and Brando’s bounty-hunting regulator. Both give excellent performances, but they seem to be acting in separate movies.

Still, it’s a fascinating film, with Brando’s sadistic killer, Robert E. Lee Clayton, constantly shifting his accents, his identities, even his hats, each time he stalks a foe. Unfortunately, audiences couldn’t apply the richness of the character’s psychosis to the framework of the traditional Western. (And as much could be said for another Western, One-Eyed Jacks, Brando’s only directorial effort, in which he plays a Billy the Kid type of character.)

Nearly two decades after The Godfather, Brando topped every Brando impressionist in show business with his own caricature of Don Corleone in this underrated comedy, costarring Matthew Broderick and Bruno Kirby (who played the young Clemenza in The Godfather, Part II). More than that, he turned the caricature into a flesh-and-blood human being. Classic scene: A nervous Broderick, meeting Brando for the first time in the back of a restaurant in Little Italy, glances at a picture on the wall. “Is that Mussolini?” he inquires. After a pause Brando replies, “It ain’t Tony Bennett.”

The Buyable Past

This is American art pottery at its most beautiful. Pieces frequently boast floral motifs, lush landscapes, or seascapes rivaling those that contemporaneous artists painted on canvas. Even modest items with glazes untouched by Rookwood’s talented decorators can boast subtle color gradations—as when the pink body of a vase fades gradually into an apple green rim.

Cincinnati-based Rookwood was in part a patriotic venture. George Ward Nichols, a judge at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, lamented that “in decorated wares there is scarcely any competition with foreign countries.” His wife, Maria Longworth Nichols, who founded Rookwood with the backing of her affluent father in 1880, would soon remedy that. Mrs. Nichols was an amateur potter, but her enterprise soon became very professional indeed, thanks to gifted staff artists like Albert Valentien, who joined the firm in 1881, stayed for 24 years, then retired to California to paint wildflowers. In 1889 Rookwood won a gold medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle, and it took the highest award at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. More such honors followed, and even though the firm began to waver during the Depression, it managed to keep going until the 1960s. Today the building that housed Rookwood is a restaurant. If you visit, you can sit at a bar near a kiln and raise a glass to the artists whose masterworks blossomed in its glow.

Identifying Rookwood is never a problem, since the company marked the bottom of every piece with a logo and the year it was made. In 1886 the familiar reverse R joined to a P appeared, and a flame point above or around it was added each year until 1900. From 1901 on, Roman numerals beneath indicated the year of manufacture. There were style numbers, glaze codes, and other specifics, and when one of Rookwood’s resident artists decorated an item, he or she monogrammed it. Even seconds are identifiable; each has a crude X scratched into its bottom.

A lot of Rookwood pottery is available, and prices span a vast spectrum. You can find a small vase without artist’s decoration for less than $100 and lovely decorator-monogrammed pieces for under $1,000. The very best can soar much higher; last June a 1900 Kataro Shirayamadani carved and painted vase with an electroplated base fetched $305,000 at auction.

Who Invented the Fortune Cookie?

It’s a mystery shrouded in an enigma wrapped in a cookie. Today’s prepackaged meal-ending prophecy has Asian antecedents that go back to the thirteenth century, when anti-Mongol rebels in China passed secret messages in cakes. Beginning in the 1870s, Chinese railroad workers in America baked holiday greetings inside biscuits. But the fortune cookie in its present form, with a cheerful prediction or affirmation folded inside a brittle beige carapace carefully prepared to simulate the flavor of Styrofoam, is known to have originated in California early in the twentieth century. The only question is where.

San Francisco is one claimant, though San Francisco has claimed credit for inventing just about every pseudo-ethnic dish, including chop suey, Irish coffee, and cioppino, an Italian seafood stew. The supposed inventor was a gardener named Makoto Hagiwara, who built the famous Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. Around 1907, the story goes, Hagiwara was fired by an anti-Japanese mayor and then rehired after a public outcry. In gratitude, he gave his supporters cookies with thank-you messages inside, inspired by traditional Japanese senbei rice wafers. According to Hagiwara’s great-great-grandson Erik S. Hagiwara-Nagata, a San Francisco landscape architect, “It was developed to suit American tastes by making it sweet.”

Equally confident in its cookie claim is San Francisco’s perennial rival, Los Angeles. In the L.A. version, sometime around 1918 a Chinese immigrant named David Jung, owner of the Hong Kong Noodle Company, began handing out rolled-up pastries containing scriptural passages to unemployed men. Another Los Angeles candidate is Seichi Kito, a Japanese-American baker who put haiku verses inside cookies and sold them to Chinese restaurants. The bakery he founded, Fugetsudo, still stands in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo section, where it is run by Kito’s descendants. The shop recently celebrated its 100th anniversary, and a mold purportedly used to make the original cookies is prominently displayed in its window.

In 1983 the Court of Historical Review—a self-appointed, quasi-judicial organization based in San Francisco—held a trial to decide the question. In a theatrical atmosphere that would have seemed less startling a century earlier, participants wore yellow makeup and Celestial costumes and spoke in pidgin English as they presented the oral history underlying each side’s case. The presiding magistrate, Daniel M. Hanlon (a federal judge in real life), ruled for San Francisco, as expected, but Los Angeles boosters ignored his decision, considering it as legitimate as a Dodgers-Giants game officiated by San Francisco sandlot umpires.

Whatever the fortune cookie’s provenance, it became a staple in America’s Chinese restaurants in the years following World War II. A great leap forward came in 1981 with the introduction of the Fortune HI machine, which automated the entire production process, from mixing the ingredients and baking the dough to inserting the fortune and folding the wafer. A skilled handworker could make about 750 cookies per hour; the new machine could turn out 1,500. Today the nearly 30-foot-long Japanese-made Kitamura FCM-8006W can produce 8,000 per hour. Mass production like this allows the East Coast’s biggest fortune-cookie maker, Wonton Food Inc., of Brooklyn, New York, to ship 60 million cookies a month.

In the wake of its mainstreaming and subsequent industrialization, the fortune cookie has been pressed into service as an advertising medium. In 2001 Wonton Food began selling ad space on the back of its fortunes and baking cookies with custom-written messages inside. This practice, too, turns out to have historical antecedents. In 1960 a New York City Council candidate handed out fortune cookies that contained campaign pitches, and the director Billy Wilder had 20,000 promotional cookies made for his 1966 film The Fortune Cookie.

Also in the 1960s, Lotus Fortune Cookies, of San Francisco, was hired to make cookies with fortunes soliciting ideas for a new Pepsodent toothpaste jingle. Today the company specializes in custom-made fortune cookies for trade shows, weddings, and other events. Customers are invited to compose their own messages. As Greg Louie, owner of Lotus Fortune Cookies, says, “You write ‘em, you read ‘em, you eat ‘em.”