December 4, 2007
The Expert Behind the Fedora and Cigar: An Interview with Bert Randolph Sugar (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 08:45 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. Angelo Dundee, with whom you wrote My View From the Corner, is probably the best-known trainer in boxing history. Someone, maybe you, once described the trainer’s job as “a chess master who plays with live pieces.” Is there another boxing trainer would you say was Angelo’s equal as a chess master? In our book, Angelo describes a trainer’s job as one where “you’ve got to combine certain qualities belonging to a doctor, an engineer, a psychologist, and sometimes an actor, in addition to knowing your specific art well. The job also comes with a lot of headaches, which aren’t included in the job specs. In short, the very word “trainer” is a catchall covering a complex job; there are more sides to being a trainer than in a Rubik’s Cube. But there was one area Angie never involved himself in: a boxer’s personal life. In the book he explains that he learned his lesson very early when he had a four-round fighter who “came to me one day and said, ‘That wife of mine, what a pain in the ass she is.’” Distracted, Angie told him, “Well, you know how women are . . .” and left it at that. As Angie tells it, “Wouldn’t you know it, the fighter went home and told his wife, ‘Angie thinks you’re wrong . . .’ and I lost him. So whenever a fighter tries to say something to me about his private life, I just say, ‘look, do me a favor, will ya? Go over and hit the light bag.’” Angie learned at the knees of so many famous trainers, trainers like Chickie Ferrara, Ray Arcel, Charlie Goldman, Freddie Brown, and so many others who lit the way for him and on whose shoulders he stood. He shared their corners, their methods, and their stories and captures them all in the book. One of those he was especially fond of was Ray Arcel, from whom he learned many of the trainer’s “tricks of the trade.“ Especially Arcel’s work in the corner during a fight. Arcel had, according to Angie, “One little trick of cleaning off his fighter, wiping his gloves, greasing him nice and smooth and putting his hair back in place before sending him out of the corner for the next round. Now the opponent figures ‘What the hell’s going on? I thought I was beating the bejabbers out of this guy, and he looks like he’s stepping out of the pages of GQ magazine.’” Another of Arcel’s “tricks” that Angie picked up on was something he learned “watching Arcel one night when his fighter hit his opponent with a shot to the chops and the opponent went down with a thud. The referee started the count, tolling off the numbers at a snail’s pace. As the count finally reached a torturous and prolonged “five,” Arcel showed up at the top of the steps, robe in hand, and put it on his kid, inspiring the ref to quickly pick up the count and count the opponent out. And wouldn’t you know it, Angie used the same trick with his fighter one night at Madison Square Garden, and the ref turns around, sees Angie with the robe in hand, and gave the fallen opponent a quick count. As Angie says, “You learn from watching other people.” And he had the best to watch. Every time I see an estimate of how many books you’ve written, the number seems to change. Here it is, December 5, and as of today how many have you written? Like the woman under oath who, when asked her age, replied, “I’m 39 and a few months,” and in the follow-up answer to the question, “How many months are ‘and a few’?” said, “24,” the answer to how many books I’ve written is subject to the same “and a few” calculation. It all depends on what’s being counted. Is it the books I’ve written or those I’ve complied? Or those books that originally came out under one title and were later reissued under another title? Or updated versions of already published works? Or books I’ve worked on with other authors? My best guess—counting my latest book, My View from the Corner, with Angelo Dundee—is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50—and counting. But, then again, I’m writing ’em, not counting ’em. So, like Jack Benny, all I can do is say that the number is 39 “and a few.” You can fill in the blank for “and a few.” For a couple decades now, people have identified you from your TV appearances—the fedora and the cigar. Yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen that cigar lit. What’s the story there? Almost every thumbnail bio on me starts, “With his trademark fedora and cigar . . .” It’s gotten so I’ve come to believe that without the fedora and cigar I could probably enter the Federal Witness Protection Program and not be recognized. The cigar, however, is more than just a trademark. It is something I enjoy. Call it a habit, a practice or a convention if you wish—sometimes chomping on them, sometimes smoking them, and sometimes, as on television, wearing them. I also hold onto them, because at my age it gives me something to hold on to in case I’m falling down. Yes, I more than occasionally light one up. To me a good cigar is more than just a smoke. It’s a pleasurable way of living. Others have found cigar smoking a pleasurable way of living as well, including Mark Twain, who is quoted as saying, “If I cannot smoke cigars in heaven then I shall not go.” And he lived life to its fullest, as did Grouch Marx, Milton Berle, and George Burns, a happy group of mummers who, to listen to those antismoking folks, undoubtedly were killed by cigars at the average age of 89. Damn the P.C.-ers and do-gooders who would have me call homeless people “urban outdoorsmen” and hookers “human relations specialists.” The pursuit of happiness is one of our basic freedoms, and I'm free to smoke cigars whenever and wherever I want—just not in television studios.
December 4, 2007
The Expert Behind the Fedora and Cigar: An Interview with Bert Randolph Sugar (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 06:40 PM EST If Bert Randolph Sugar did not exist, it would have required Damon Runyan to invent him. A former editor of both The Ring and Boxing Illustrated magazines, the author and editor of more then 80 books, and sometime TV and film actor (including an appearance in Night and The City with Robert De Niro), Sugar can be seen on virtually any ESPN program on the history of boxing. He is instantly identifiable by his trademark fedora (black after Labor Day) and cigar. He was elected to the International Boxing Hal of Fame in January 2005. Sugar’s latest book is My View From the Corner (McGraw-Hill, 336 pages, $24.95), a collaboration with Angelo Dundee, the legendary boxing trainer of Muhammad Ali, to name just one of his many champions. Sugar answered these questions for us from his home in Chappaqua, New York. The interview is appearing in two parts. I suppose you’ve been asked this question more than any other, but who is the greatest fighter at any weight that you ever saw? Give us your top three. The word “greatest” takes on different meanings to different people. To be great you had to meet and beat great; you have to consider who a particular boxer faced—the quality of his opponents. Add to that his record, durability, boxing and punching prowess, peak years, reputation at the time, and on and on and on. You have to pretend all the fighters in your comparison are the same size—in modern terminology, ”best pound-for-pound” at any weight, any time. And here, aided and abetted by several fingers of truth serum at my neighborhood pub, are my top three picks of all time: One: Any and all descriptions for greatness can be applied to Sugar Ray Robinson, but no single description is adequate. He was boxing’s version of Rashomon; everyone saw something different. He could deliver a knockout blow going backward. He was seamless, with no fault lines. His left hand, held ever at the ready, was poetry in motion, his footwork was superior to any that had been seen in boxing up to that time; his hand speed and leverage were unmatchable. Robinson was unbeaten, untied, and unscored upon in his first 40 fights. It wasn’t until his forty-first, against Jake LaMotta, that he was beaten, losing a ten-round decision. It was a decision he would reverse five times. He was indeed the sweetest practitioner of “The Sweet Science.“ Two: Henry Armstrong, a physical loan shark who adopted General Clausewitz’s theory that the winning general is the one who can impose his will upon his enemy. No one who ever saw this fighter, known as “Hammerin’ Hank” or “Homicide Hank” or “Hurricane Hank,” will ever forget him: a nonstop punching machine, his style more rhythmic than headlong, his matchstick legs akimbo, his arms crossed in front of his face, racing the clock with each punch, and each punch punctuated with a grunt. A perpetual motion machine, Armstrong won 181 bouts, 101 of those by knockout, including winning the featherweight, welterweight, and lightweight championships, in that order, and holding all three titles simultaneously, the only man ever to do so. Three: Willie Pep was boxing’s version of the three-card monte player: Now you see him, now you don’t. His movements, which had the look of tap dancing with gloves on, left his opponents to speculate on their meaning and his fans to listen for accompanying music. Many of his opponents likened fighting the “Will o’ the Wisp” to battling a man in the hall of mirrors, unable to cope with an opponent they couldn’t find, let alone hit. Others compared the experience to catching moonbeams in a jar or chasing a shadow. Kid Campeche said after a fight in which Willie had pitched a no-hitter, “Fighting Willie Pep is like trying to stamp out a grass fire.“ Willie Pep’s long 22-year career was, in reality, two careers. In his first, Pep outclassed and outraced 109 of his 111 opponents, losing only to the grabbing, double-clutching Sammy Angott in a ten-round draw, and winning the featherweight crown at the ripe old age of 20. Then in February 1947 Pep suffered near-fatal injuries in an airplane crash. His career, if not his ability to walk, was thought to be over. But miraculously, less than six months later, he came back not only to walk, but to fight and win. Beaten by matchstick-thin Sandy Saddler for his title in 1948, he reversed the outcome in 1949 in as great a fight as the division has ever seen. The name Willie Pep will forever be remembered by fight fans as a name put to melody and symphony, a balletic will to grace and an ability to evade punches. The mixed martial arts type of fighting as exemplified by the pay-per-view success of the Ultimate Fighting Championship events has caused some people to say that boxing is now old-fashioned. How would you respond to that? Called by the Washington Post “gruesome junk” and by Senator John McCain “human cock fighting,” mixed martial “arts” is little more than glorified bar fighting without broken beer bottles, one step short of bomb throwing. Nevertheless, in our current culture of violence it seems to appeal to that 18- to 34-year-old segment of the market that has been weaned on violent video games and professional wrestling—substituting the cartoon violence of pro wrestling for the real violence of mixed martial “arts.“ All of which appeals to a viewing audience that possesses the attention span equal to the life of a mayfly. Hopefully it will go the way of demolition derbies, back to where it belongs: the bars. However, that doesn’t fully answer the question of whether boxing is “old-fashioned.” In a sense it is. For back in its salad days, that being for the first half and more of the twentieth century, boxing was one of the three major sports, along with baseball and horse racing. (Remember: this was before the 1958 Colts–Giants championship game elevated pro football to the higher echelon of sports!) Back in those days boxing was BIG and big news as well, The New York Times devoting five of its six front-page columns and three banner headlines to events like the Tunney–Dempsey fights. But following pro football, other sports soon began to take their place at the main sports table, courtesy of television, including pro and college basketball, college football, NASCAR, etc., etc., etc.; the et ceteras going on for about four or five pages or more. Hell, to watch ESPN and other channels, you’d think Texas Hold-’Em was a sport. Back in the late 1950s, just after the mob scandals came to light, Dan Parker of the New York Mirror wrote, “I’ve been at its bedside for 40 years waiting for boxing to die “ Well, here it is more than a half century later and boxing is still there. And will be there for many more years, all reports of its death—and even of its becoming “old-fashioned”—as exaggerated as those reports were of Mark Twain’s death. It’s too great of a sport not to be. Retract the obituaries, please! This interview concludes here.
November 20, 2007
Who Was the Real Buffalo Bill Cody? An Interview with Robert E. Bonner (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 01:30 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. How did Buffalo Bill get along in his declining years? And why has the memory of his colossal business failures been erased from our national memory? Assuming his declining years would be his sixties (he died just before his seventy-first birthday), we are talking about 1906 to 1917. In Wyoming those were not especially hard years. He did suffer the final loss of all his development prospects and had to endure the ignominy of being sued by everyone who farmed under the Cody Canal, but he probably did not lose any more money. His show continued to bring in reasonably good money until 1912, but he got involved in a gold mine in Arizona where an unscrupulous partner bilked him of just about every dollar he earned. In 1913 he fell prey to Henry Tammen, publisher of the Denver Post, who broke up his show and took Cody into a kind of debt peonage that had him riding into arenas every summer for the rest of his life, no matter how sick or exhausted he became. He came back to Cody every winter and enjoyed his time in town and at the ranch. The town would hold big parties for him whenever he returned, but he had very little to do with its growing or running. Sometime after 1910 his wife, Louisa, returned to him and lived with him when he was in Cody. She also, as I pointed out in the book, became the owner of his ranch and the Irma Hotel, to protect them from being seized for debt. There were occasional bursts of the old energy, and he was never living in actual poverty, but he was obviously fading out. As for the second question, I am not sure the national consciousness ever grasped how seriously he had failed as an entrepreneur. He continued to advertise the town of Cody in the Wild West and promote Yellowstone tourism. He kept his face before the public, and by that time he had built such a triumphal myth around himself that there was probably little room for people in general to attach any idea of these failures to his familiar form on horseback. He had made a place for himself in a comfortable version of American history. Nobody wanted to have their visions of him complicated by facts that might have pointed elsewhere. Our modern-day experience of Ronald Reagan might be somewhat similar. In your conclusion you write that Cody was “a complex and conflicted man, one who failed to realize his imperial ambitions in Wyoming but who nevertheless left an enduring mark on the country. His legacy is as complex as his personality.” Who, then, would you say is the real William Cody—the performer and Wild West impresario or the ambitious but failed businessman? If you don’t mind, I will expand the choices a bit, because in my mind he is not finally either of these. Louis Warren (author of Buffalo Bill’s America) thought that the real Buffalo Bill was the performer, and given the point and scope of his book, that makes sense. He was also, on the strength of my own research, an ambitious but failed capitalist. I came to think in the course of my work, however, that he was most himself when he was out hunting, or taking other people out hunting, in the mountains above his ranch or along the eastern border of Yellowstone Park. The life of the performer, while he wore it well as a young man, came increasingly to drag him down. His venture into the world of business and development seemed to have chastened him. His hunting trips were refuges from those things, where he could turn his mind back to his youth and happier times. They also showed him (and others) that there was money to be made in tourism, particularly tourism based on hunting and the outdoor life of those up-country ranches. I think tourism as Cody saw it was continuous with his Wild West shows, in that it was presenting to people from the East a packaged vision of life in the West. The venue had shifted from Eastern arenas to Western ranches, but the goal was the same. I think I would say that the real Bill Cody was the genial host who presided over the meeting of East and West.
November 20, 2007
Who Was the Real Buffalo Bill Cody? An Interview with Robert E. Bonner (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 11:55 AM EST The trail blazed by William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody has been traveled by so many biographers, historians, and debunkers that there wouldn’t seem to be anything new signposts on it. Robert E. Bonner’s William F. Cody’s Wyoming Empire: The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows (University of Oklahoma Press, 318 pages, $32.95) examines an important part of the Buffalo Bill story that has been virtually forgotten, Cody’s attempt at becoming a Western land developer and town promoter in Wyoming. Bonner, a professor of history emeritus at Carleton College, answered these questions for us from his home in Northfield, Minnesota. The interview is appearing in two parts It would be hard to find a figure of the frontier west more mythologized than William F. Cody. There have been several books on him this decade alone, including Joy S. Casson’s Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Larry McMurtry’s The Colonel and Little Missie. What’s the essential difference between William F. Cody’s Wyoming Empire and those books? The first and most fundamental difference is that both Kasson and McMurtry look at Buffalo Bill through the lens of the Wild West show. Both of them are concerned with his self-creation through that medium and—Kasson to a greater extent than McMurtry—the effect his celebrity had on ideas of the West and American history in general. I have tried, insofar as it is possible, to keep the Wild West out of my account. Obviously the show was the source of most of the money that went into Cody’s Wyoming ventures, and his need to appear every summer in arenas away from Wyoming affected the way he did or did not attend to business there, but I am not concerned with what he did in the Wild West, and they are. The fact that he was a great celebrity I take as given, and I attempt to understand how that celebrity played out in his enterprises in Wyoming. McMurtry appears not to be interested at all in what Bill Cody did when he was not the star of the Wild West. He mentions some of the things Cody did in Wyoming more or less in passing, but it is the show and the relationship with Annie Oakley that occupy most of his time. He locates Buffalo Bill’s Wyoming life entirely in Sheridan, where he spent one or two off seasons before the Cody venture got going, and more or less ignores his work around the town of Cody. Kasson is not especially interested in his work in Wyoming either. Both of them have interesting things to say about Cody as a celebrity guide and hunter, but mostly as a young man prior to the Wild West. I have chosen to concentrate on his work in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin, because it is there that we can see the man off his horse and on the ground, working (or not working) with other men to build something more substantial than an entertainment. How did Cody use his fame from the Wild West shows to promote his business interests? Was he shy about his own celebrity? In the first instance, he used his celebrity to horn in on the big irrigation project that George Beck and Horace Alger, two Sheridan businessmen, were planning. As Beck said later, Cody came to them and asked to join in, and, as they knew he was the “best advertised man in the world,” they not only let him in, they made him president of the company. Celebrity was perhaps more to the fore in his dealings with officials of the government of the state of Wyoming. He presented to them the prospect of having their state advertised across the nation by the most popular man in America, and they went out of their way to accommodate him. Cody patronized Elwood Mead, the state engineer, to smooth the way not only for the Cody Canal but for several other projects he conceived. Mead was not quite an errand boy for Buffalo Bill, but he took care of just about anything Cody wanted, and he ultimately certified the Cody Canal as completed when it would not reliably hold water, because he had hitched his wagon to Cody’s star. Cody employed his small army of press agents to fill newspapers in Wyoming with glowing descriptions of his plans for the Big Horn Basin. He dropped the names of Theodore Roosevelt and General Nelson Miles whenever he had a chance, to remind governors and others just who they were dealing with. He was never shy about reminding people in Wyoming how well-connected he was in the East. He was so full of himself that he identified the state’s interests with his own, and important state officers came to accept this identification. You write that “William Cody, addicted to the spotlight, seemed to choose undertakings with at least one eye on reputation. He also attempted to use the weight of the reputation he had earned in the Wild West arena to swing money and authority his way in economic transactions in Wyoming. He had convinced himself of the truth of his ‘frontier imposture’ and built fame and fortune on it.” Did Cody really see himself as on a par with the great capitalist businessmen and political leaders of his era, or was he simply a confidence artist on a colossal scale? I don’t believe he thought for a minute he was in the same league with Rockefeller, Carnegie, Frick, or those guys. He did rub shoulders with wealthy capitalists of somewhat lesser rank in clubs in New York like the Rocky Mountain Club, and he cultivated relationships with people like George Perkins of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. He made personal calls on Presidents Cleveland and Roosevelt, and hosted Generals Nelson Miles and Leonard Wood in Wyoming. I think he thought he belonged in the company of wealthy men and political leaders on terms other than those of a visiting showman, and he expected his undertakings in Wyoming to gain him that status. Unfortunately, the tools he found at hand for this job were the tools of show business, and as a result he became vulnerable to the charge that he was only a large-scale con artist. I developed the term “capitalist imposture” as a more polite way of pointing to that. The entire story of his second land development in the Big Horn Basin, the Cody-Salsbury project, reveals this most painfully, but the cold-eyed observations of the Burlington’s men in the field regarding the conduct and prospects of the Shoshone Irrigation Company on the Cody Canal show how real businessmen regarded him. This interview concludes here.
November 2, 2007
The Genius of Raymond Chandler: An Interview with Judith Freeman (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 01:00 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. So many fine actors have played Philip Marlowe over the years—Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Montgomery, James Garner, Robert Mitchum, Powers Boothe, and James Caan in TV productions, even Elliott Gould. Chandler, who died in 1959, lived long enough to see Powell, Bogey, and Montgomery play the part. Which was his favorite, and who else would he liked to have seen play Marlowe? And—I presume you’ve seen most of the Marlowes—who is your own favorite? Chandler initially had Cary Grant in mind as the actor he felt was suited to the role of Marlowe, but that was probably Chandler projecting his own image of himself as the well-dressed, good-looking debonair guy—and as a young man Chandler was that. He looks incredibly elegant and handsome in a picture taken in L.A. in the twenties showing him standing under a tree in profile. Cary Grant never played Marlowe, and given the Marlowes we’ve seen, it’s kind of hard to imagine him in the role of hard-boiled dick. As far as I know, Chandler never weighed in on Robert Montgomery’s performance for the record. He is on record as saying that he thought Dick Powell (in Murder My Sweet, an adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely) made the best Marlowe, but I’m a little uncertain about when exactly he made that comment—before or after he saw Bogart in The Big Sleep. (The Big Sleep came out in 1946, two years after Murder, My Sweet.) He definitely appreciated Bogart’s performance, though to my knowledge he never actually said he thought Bogart was the best Marlowe. What he said was that Bogart was “the genuine article”—so much better than any other tough-guy actors that he made bums of the Ladds and the Powells, and perhaps that can be interpreted as crowning him as the ultimate Marlowe. Or it could be an indication of Chandler’s appreciation of a film performance. Bogart, he said, could be tough without a gun, which Powell never could. But I think Chandler was really talking about Bogart’s acting ability, that he was the genuine article as an actor. He recognized that Bogart was a great, better than Powell, and he brought a charged quality to the role, even though he was quite wrong physically for the part. It was the quality of Bogart’s performance, that sense of humor that contained a grating, rather misogynistic undertone of contempt, especially for the women in the story, that Chandler found compelling. All that Bogart had to do to dominate a scene, he said, was to enter it. In contrast, Dick Powell was a much softer guy, more ordinary, a less cynical, less harsh and jaded Marlowe. He seems more human in many ways, more vulnerable, and you see this in his scenes with women. He doesn’t snarl at Claire Trevor, who plays Mrs. Grayle (alias Velma), or try to outwit her with force, but sort of bats the ball around with her, sometimes uncertainly plays cat and mouse, and he almost gets a naughty schoolboy-caught-in-the-act look on his face when he’s caught staring at her legs. He was closer, I think, to the true Marlowe, to the spirit of the man that Chandler created on the page and who arose out of his own fantasies. But I can understand how he’d be seduced by the brilliant Marlowe that Bogart created. It’s a tough call for me as to which Marlowe I prefer, but I’d have to say that the Dick Powell Marlowe is my favorite because I feel he’s the truest, closest incarnation of the literary Marlowe, though I loved Bogart in The Big Sleep and laughed out loud in scene after scene and was mesmerized by his acting. I also loved Robert Mitchum in a later adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely, not because he convinced me he was Marlowe but because he was Robert Mitchum, filling the screen with his great brooding presence. The Marlowe I least liked was Robert Montgomery, in Lady in the Lake, who, even though he may have been the father of that perky Bewitched Elizabeth Montgomery, made a really nasty Marlowe, so snarling and misogynistic I could hardly watch him. I thought Elliott Gould was great, the first actor to capture that sense of Marlowe’s sexual ambivalence, but he never became Marlowe for me, he was always Elliott Gould, and the completely changed ending of the movie had him behaving in ways Marlowe never would. It’ll be interesting to see what Clive Owen does with the role, in an adaptation of Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business, to be directed by Frank Miller. In any case, it’s clear that Marlowe will never die, and that he provides a very malleable suit of armor for an actor to slip into. Chandler once wrote a letter to the effect that “Over there [England] I’m an author, over here just a writer of mysteries.” Why do you suppose it was that British critics discovered Chandler so much earlier than their America counterparts? The rest of that quote in the letter is “Don’t know why,” meaning Chandler himself couldn’t figure out why he was viewed so differently in England from America. And I don’t know why either. He knew a lot more about England than I do, and he couldn’t figure it out. But it’s possible that Americans felt defensive about how their society was being portrayed, didn’t like the fact that those early Chandler novels depicted a pretty corrupt culture, from cops to politicians, whereas the British were fascinated by the sordidness of that sun-filled world that had been so hyped. It could also be the puritanical streak coming out: Some American critics talked about the “nastiness” of the characters, how no one except Marlowe was decent, and the language was so bad. Even the critic for The New York Times complained that the publisher had to resort to the dash in The Big Sleep, so degenerate was the language, and complained that Chandler had created a world of moral defectives—pornographers and blackmailers and homosexuals and gangsters. This sounds so prudish now, but then Americans are kind of prudish compared with Europeans. Can you imagine a European politician draping a nude statue before he’d stand in front of it for a press conference? Could be the British were just so much more curious about these remarkable books, so uninvested in a self-serving image, more interested in the otherness of the settings, and more willing to be amused by a really brilliant writer.
You introduce an idea about Chandler that few have ever dared to investigate, namely the possibility that he was homosexual. No doubt this is going to enrage a great many of his long-time fans, but I think your case is well made. Can you summarize? Actually I’m not the first to raise the question of homosexuality in connection with both Chandler and his work, and specifically Philip Marlowe. The subject came up in both Frank McShane’s and Tom Hiney’s biographies, and also in essays written before and after Chandler’s death, including a very moving one by his close friend Natasha Spender, wife of the poet Stephen Spender, who knew him very well at the end of his life and whom I interviewed for my book. But you are right in saying that I look at the subject more closely than others have, because I felt it had a place in the discussion of his marriage. The truth is we’ll never know if Chandler harbored homosexual inclinations. I found nothing in my research to indicate he ever had a relationship with a man. What is clearer is that both Chandler and his creation Marlowe harbored very complex feelings when it came to women (and men) and their sexuality. There’s an anxiety, a feeling they are sliding along a slippery slope of attraction and repulsion, mistrust and anxiety, a kind of boyish prurience as well as an impossibly strict code of morality, in a world where women are the villains and men long for friendship. I’m not going to repeat all the arguments I make in the book, or the discoveries that came from my readings and interviews; they’re there for the reader to discover. Any discussion of an iconic hard-boiled writer, and an iconic male literary figure, that even dares to bring up the question of homosexuality is bound to raise certain hackles, but I like to believe that I handle the subject with a certain sensitivity and respect, and I stress that there’s no clear answer to the question.
November 2, 2007
The Genius of Raymond Chandler: An Interview with Judith Freeman (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 10:00 AM EST Raymond Chandler is the most influential mystery writer since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His leading advocates, including W. H. Auden, Clive James, and even, grudgingly, Edmund Wilson, have argued that he transcends the genre of detective fiction and that his books should be simply considered literature. No one denies that Chandler’s influence on popular culture has been enormous: The Big Sleep, the Bogart-Bacall vehicle directed by Howard Hawks, is still regarded (along with John Huston’s film from Dashiell Hammett’s book The Maltese Falcon) as one of the two greatest American detective movies ever made, and Chandler’s books and film scripts (most notably for Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train) helped define the concept of film noir, which continues to influence writers as diverse as the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami and the graphic novelist Frank Miller, who is set to direct a film version of Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business. Judith Freeman’s The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, which comes out November 6 from Pantheon, is the first book to examine in depth the strange relationship between Chandler and his much older wife, Cissy, as well as their peripatetic life together in and around Los Angeles. Ms. Freeman answered questions for us from her home in California. The interview is appearing in two parts. Raymond Chandler has been imitated, parodied, and practically plagiarized for so long that his style of detective story has practically become a cliché. Yet somehow the work not only survives but stays fresh. Just about all his books have been in print continuously since they were published. What do you think it is about Chandler that endures? The short answer is his brilliance, which is a multi-faceted thing. There’s his humor for starters. As Christopher Isherwood observed, There’s fun in Chandler. He’s an immensely amusing writer, and readers connect with that wit. And yet he says some profound things about American society and the corruption in its institutions, how we’re a big, rough, rich, appetent society, and crime is the price we pay for our gluttony. His books contain that quality he most valued in writing, namely vitality, and it is a hard thing to fake if you don’t have it, which is why so many imitators fail. But in the end I think it’s Marlowe that gives the books their real staying power. Philip Marlowe is an enigma. He says so himself at one point. He’s vulnerable, like us, and we feel his sad good-naturedness. He’s an iconic America male, just as Marilyn Monroe was an iconic American female. And this is interesting because Chandler once said that only he and Marilyn Monroe had managed to reach all the brows—high-brow, middle-brow, and low-brow. This is another reason why Chandler endures. He reaches across the intellectual spectrum with stories that still seem fresh in their telling. When I was at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival two years ago the writer whose name was evoked most often when taking about L.A. was Raymond Chandler. This is odd because Chandler certainly had mixed feelings about Southern California in general and Los Angeles in particular. I think one of his most famous putdowns was that L.A. had “all the personality of a paper cup.” Yet he had many opportunities to move and never did. How would you sum up his strange on-again, off-again affair with the City of Angels? He had a definite love-hate relationship with L.A. I think he loved it when he first arrived, in 1913, and it must have been a pretty idyllic place then, very different from London, the city where he’d spent much of his childhood. He really took to driving and loved automobiles. But L.A. was a place that got despoiled quite rapidly, and the banality and lack of taste in a population composed increasingly of transplanted Midwesterners—the so called hog-and-hominy crowd—began to disgust him. On the one hand, you had religious nuts of every stripe, and on the other, you had bunko artists bilking the ignorant rubes, as well as gangsters, bad cops, and corrupt politicians. Smog arrived, and stupid fads, and objects with built-in obsolescence. After a while L.A became Paradise Despoiled for him, a grotesque and impossible place to live. California, he said, was the department store state—everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else. He lost it as a place to set his fiction, because he had to either love a city or hate it to write about it, or maybe both, he said, “like a woman.” Eventually L.A. bored him. It became “just a tired old whore” to him. Still, he put it on the literary map. His relationship with L.A. was very symbiotic. The city gave him his material, and in return he gave it a lasting identity. No one wrote better about L.A. or captured more of its unique essence. What were Cissy’s feelings about her husband’s writing? Was she supportive or did she feel, as many of Chandler’s contemporaries did, that he should try to write something more “serious”? Chandler claimed his wife never liked what he wrote. He said her advice to him was to quit writing out of the corner of his mouth. What did she mean by that? I think she meant, drop that tough-guy stuff. Loose the slang and prison talk and violence, write a story that depicts a softer, more romantic world, not one filled with gangsters and crooks and rotten blondes. We should be glad he didn’t take her advice.
October 10, 2007
The Bear Bryant I Knew: An Interview with John Underwood (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 04:30 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. Probably the most famous coach–quarterback relationship in history was the one between Bear Bryant and Joe Namath.On the surface, they seemed to be total opposites—Bryant growing up dirt poor in an Arkansas town so small it wasn’t on the map, while Namath, the son of immigrant parents, grew up in a Pennsylvania steel mill town. Bryant was the full-time authoritarian, while Namath was supremely rebellious. Yet, they clicked, or at least they learned to. Why do you think they worked together so well?
The easy answer would be that Bryant, in his own words, considered Namath “the best athlete I ever saw,” and why wouldn’t a smart coach make every effort to get along with such a player? Bryant said he would have been a “damn fool” not to make such an accommodation. But it was a lot more complicated than that, and to understand the strength of the relationship (and the depth of it), you need to read Bryant’s account of one of the greatest “gut checks” he ever had—the time he suspended Namath from the Alabama team for the last two games of the 1963 season, both on national television. Even his coaches tried to talk him out of it. (Namath’s offense, having to do with team off-campus-conduct rules, was relatively minor by today’s standards.) But Bryant understood Namath’s background and his need for benevolent discipline. After a face-to-face confrontation, Joe supported the punishment, and the next year he was allowed back and quarterbacked Alabama to another national championship. Bryant then got him legal help in negotiating what at the time was the biggest pro contract in NFL history, a $400,000 deal with the New York Jets (Bryant’s salary, he liked to point out, was $12,000 that year). I think it revealing to note that they grew closer after Namath left school. He returned to the Alabama campus whenever he could, which usually meant getting on the blackboard with Bryant to discuss football tactics. They played golf together (Bryant, ever competitive, said he found ways to beat Namath with strokes), and when offered the Dolphins job, Bear purposely sought Namath’s advice. Namath even helped him recruit players. Bryant told of Joe talking one hotshot candidate out of a school that, among other things, offered him a new car. Namath told him playing for Bryant was more valuable.
Bear Bryant had a power to intimidate strong men—George Blanda, for instance, as you pointed out, and just about every sportswriter he encountered. Did you ever feel that he was trying to intimidate you? What was your initial reaction? And did your opinion of him change in the course of doing the book? The short answer, again, is no, he never intimidated me, but I qualify that by saying I don’t think he ever tried. For reasons I never examined (probably because our relationship was always so gratifying), he granted me a kind of familial respect,like one might a beloved if erratic younger sibling. I certainly saw the difference, though, and once even dared criticize it. I was in Tuscaloosa for a game and after a Wednesday practice walked with him into the press room to confront about a dozen journalists, dutifully huddled around an empty chair. Bryant, smoking a cigarette, sat down, and without looking at or acknowledging anyone, smoked it down to the butt, the ashes coagulating, intact. Total silence. Finally, Bear spoke: “Good practice today.” The writers scribbled, audibly, on their notepads. “Defensive backs need better coaching.” More scribbling. “Big game Saturday.” Scribble, scribble. And so it went. All told, I doubt more than five questions were asked from the floor. Finally Bryant said, “Anything else, men?” Nope. He thanked them and got up, and as we walked out together I said, “You call that a press conference?” He grinned. “That’s the way we do things in Alabama.” For sure, that kind of awe could be called intimidation. But I saw the other side, too—how candid he was with those he knew well enough to trust, writers like Benny Marshall and Fred Russell and Mickey Herskowitz and Alf Van Hoose. For me it came to a head with the partnership we forged in telling his story. He never refused an answer, never dodged an issue, never let a subject go unexamined. To use his words, that’s the way he did things in Alabama. At least when I knew him.
October 10, 2007
The Bear Bryant I Knew: An Interview with John Underwood (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 03:15 PM EST Paul W. “Bear” Bryant, who died in January 1983, was by most reckonings the greatest college football coach of all time. To many Americans, though, he was more than that: He defined the ethos of a time long gone when college football existed for the good of coaches, players, and schools and not as an appendage to the professional game. Bryant’s 1974 autobiography, Bear: My Hard Life & Good Times as Alabama’s Head Coach, co-written with Sports Illustrated’s John Underwood (who also co-wrote the autobiography of another great American icon, Ted Williams, My Turn at Bat), is regarded as a modern sports classic of candid observations and gruff good humor. Bear has recently been republished by Triumph Books with a new introduction from Underwood and a CD of an interview with Bryant. Underwood spoke to us from his home in Florida about his relationship with Bryant and their collaboration on Bear. The interview is appearing in two parts. Bear Bryant seems to loom larger in college football today than he did a couple of years after his death in 1983. His image has grown stronger while that of his contemporaries such as Bud Wilkinson and Woody Hayes has faded. What do you think accounts for this? It’s difficult to summarize such an attribute, but I would have to say that what set Bryant apart from all the others (in any field) that I knew, know, or know of, was a presence that fairly demanded not just attention and respect but outright awe. He was tall, imposing, ruggedly handsome, and amazingly erudite in that countrified growl of a voice, and he filled any room that he walked into and any field of play that he graced. The effect was universal. Years after he quarterbacked for Bryant at Kentucky, George Blanda wrote that on seeing him for the first time he thought, “This must be what God looks like.” Blanda said when Bryant walked into a room, you wanted to stand up and applaud. In the new introduction I wrote for the book, I recalled a time when Bryant invited me to live with the Alabama team for a story I was doing for Sports Illustrated. It was before an important road game, and at the pregame breakfast on Saturday I sat next to an Alabama professor and department head who had also been invited along. (Bryant curried faculty support by doing smart things like that.) When he made his talk to the team, he barely spoke above the growl of a whisper that he activated whenever he wanted your utmost attention. The players leaned forward in their seats, eager to hear, and in so doing one accidentally tipped over a glass of water. The spill hitting the floor sounded like Niagara Falls. When Bryant finished, the professor turned to me and said, “If I could reach my students like that, I’d teach for nothing.” Bear Bryant and Vince Lombardi were practically exact contemporaries, with both ruling their respective worlds of college and professional football. But Lombardi left no disciples behind, while Bryant produced more successful coaches and assistant coaches than anyone in football history. Why do you think he was so successful at turning out acolytes? Respect, deeply felt and almost religiously applied on his coaches’ part, and an equal willingness on his to let them spread their wings (within reason, and within the context of staff unity). I write in the introduction of a time Dude Hennessey told of when practice had gone sour and a disgusted Bryant ordered his staff to meet in his office “first thing” the next morning. Not being sure what “first thing” meant, and not daring to ask, Hennessey slept on his office floor that night. Consistent, too, with his coaches was that they always seemed to enjoy going the extra mile, I suspect because Bryant disdained anything less. And despite what has been accurately characterized (even by him) as his own large ego, he appreciated them. I was driving with him across campus late one night after we’d been to dinner in Tuscaloosa, and as we passed the athletic offices he noticed a light on in an upstairs window. Matter-of-factly, without turning in my direction, he muttered, “It’s that damn Howard Schnellenberger up there making me look like a genius.” I heard him say almost the same thing another time about another lighted window of another assistant coach, Ken Donahue. I think they knew he felt that way, and learned from it. I think it made a huge difference.
October 2, 2007
Abraham Lincoln, Southern Conservative: An Interview with Orville Vernon Burton (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 07:00 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. “The Populists,” you write, “were the last of Lincoln’s people, the last whose concerns for racial justice and millennial perfection were based on faith in the goodness of the common man.” Were the Populists a mere fringe group, or did they have lasting impact on the government’s racial and social policies? The Populists were not a fringe group but a viable third party. I painted the Populists with a broad brush, but I found in them real potential for continued strength—except for the seemingly inevitable politics of division. Divisions existed among the various coalitions composing the movement. Midwestern and Western Populists were very different from those of the former Confederacy. Race relations among Populists continued to be very divisive. The goals of industrial labor could clash with the goals of small farmers. It is ironic that when urbanization and industrialization were growing at such a rapid pace and revolutionizing the country, the momentous political protest movement began with farmers who were being left behind. Just as America was becoming decidedly more urban and industrial, abandoning its Jeffersonian heritage of the independent farmer, it was those very farmers who launched the most significant third-party protest. And yet, very much like Lincoln, all Populist groups believed that people, rural and urban, black and white, should be rewarded for hard work. Also, like Lincoln, they believed in the rule of law and a fair system, especially a fair economic system. I use Lincoln as a fulcrum to understand the period of history after the Age of Jackson. During the Age of Lincoln, family, community, and church were responsible for morality; henceforth, government became the conservator of moral order. In one of Lincoln’s wonderful stories, from an 1859 letter, he tells how two drunks in long overcoats got in a fight and afterwards discovered that in the tussle they had ended up exchanging overcoats. Lincoln argued that the party of Jefferson and Jackson had done just that with his own Republican Party. Republicans were “for both the man and the dollar, but in cases of conflict, the man before the dollar.” The Populists were the last group to place the man before the dollar. The Populists were also the last political party before the modern civil rights movement that centered much of its energy on the question of African-American polity, one of the issues that defined the Age of Lincoln. I end this period with the demise of the Populist Movement, because that marked a fundamental change in attitude between government and citizenry. Also changed forever was the world of mass politics. Whereas Abraham Lincoln addressed his audiences at length as one concerned citizen to another, politics became more professional. The barbecues, parades, and rallies for the entire community, where speakers educated, entertained, and established a real personal bond with their electorate, passed away with the Populists. Government became more businesslike and bureaucratic. More and more Americans seemed increasingly content to leave government to the legislators and education to the new universities. As social problems grew ever more complex, public officials and private citizens grew to rely upon a range of new professional organizations for information, guidance, regulation, and policy. A new faith in science and experts replaced millennial idealism and belief in the common citizens’ ability to solve problems. Having been driven to the excess of civil war by religious fervor to rid society of its sins, now experts would regulate those excesses. The end of the Populists signaled the end of power for a yeoman class who sought to extend the personal, virtuous, face-to-face social relations they had grown up with as rural, evangelical Protestants. With the party’s demise went the hope of restructuring the American economic system along more egalitarian lines. Future reform efforts would take a less millennial approach. New reformers would not trust and encourage the spark of God in the spirit of the common man. Whether the Progressives of the early twentieth century or the New Dealers of the 1930s, reformers would seek to control and rein in both the masses and the magnates. Whereas Populists wanted fair elections so that all could vote, including African-Americans, modern reformers looked to a bureaucratic state to regulate and to control, not trusting the instincts of the common folks but only of the “best people.” Nationwide, reformers were obsessed with lower orders (immigrants, African-Americans, poor workers) voting. Reforms in the electoral process purposefully entrenched ruling elites. Disfranchisement, or more technically franchise restriction, was the product of an attempt by the upper and middle class to restrict the franchise of those people who were most prone to vote Fusionist or Populist. Aims centered on protecting freedoms and voting rights for African-Americans, and for all citizens, lost out to expanding the interests of corporations and trusts. Today the term “populist” is sometimes used to slander a candidate, suggesting that he is provincial or appealing to the populace instead of listening to the studied experts. Sad to say, the divisions that fractured the Populist Party still reverberate today. As the historian C. Vann Woodward showed in his biography of the Populist leader Tom Watson, this idealistic agrarian reformer became a race-baiting, anti-Semitic demagogue. Yet there is no evidence in the scholarship or in the Populist literature itself that Populists were any more anti-Semitic, anti-black, or anti-foreign than any other group in the society at the time, and there is some evidence that they were less so. Populist ideals also still reverberate. Just as in the Age of Lincoln, moral choice, democratic citizenship, and equality still mingle. “Determine that the thing can and shall be done,” wrote Lincoln, “and then we shall find the way.”
October 2, 2007
Abraham Lincoln, Southern Conservative: An Interview with Orville Vernon Burton (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 04:55 PM EST Just when it seemed as if there was nothing new to say about the most written about American President, we have Orville Vernon Burton’s
The Age of Lincoln (Hill and Wang, 432 pages, $27), winner of the Chicago Tribune‘s 2007 Heartland award for nonfiction. A successor to Arthur M. Schlesinger’s classic The Age of Jackson, The Age of Lincoln shows how, in the words of James McPherson, “the ferment of religious reform merged with the dynamism of free-labor capitalism to forge a Northern political culture that triumphed over the South and slavery.” Professor Burton portrays Lincoln as a product of his time and of Southern yeoman culture, and how that shaped his political thought before and during the Civil War. Burton talked to us from his home near the University of Illinois–Champaign, where he is a University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar. The interview is appearing in two parts. Though Lincoln was born in Kentucky, he is almost never thought of by historians as a Southerner. One of the most interesting aspects of your book is its reappraisal of Lincoln’s Southern heritage. How did this shape his views on freedom and slavery? Walt Whitman described Lincoln as belonging to all the states, “not the North only, but the South—perhaps belongs most tenderly and devoutly to the South, of all; for there, really, this man’s birth-stock. There and thence his antecedent stamp. Why should I not say that thence his manliest traits—his universality—his canny, easy ways and words upon the surface—his inflexible determination and courage at heart? Have you never realized it, my friends, that Lincoln, though grafted on the West, is essentially, in personnel and character, a South-ern contribution?” Others have also claimed Lincoln for the South. In both The Clansman in 1905 and The Southerner: A Romance of the Real Lincoln in 1913—the latter dedicated to Woodrow Wilson, “our first Southern-born president since Lincoln”—Thomas Dixon pictured Lincoln as a Southerner, but in a very different sense than I do, as a Southerner dedicated to preserving white supremacy. Dixon uses part of the Whitman quotation above as an epigram for the second book. So, why do I think this is important? Because Lincoln’s Southernness had a huge impact on his personality, ambition, sense of honor, and his views on freedom and slavery. To get away from the slavery system, the Lincoln family had moved first to Indiana and then to Illinois. Seeing slavery first-hand in Virginia and Kentucky gained Lincoln’s father, and Abraham after him, a lifelong antipathy to the institution. Decades later Lincoln recalled the sight of enslaved men chained together on a Mississippi riverboat, and he doubtless compared their grim journey to vibrant New Orleans with his own. That memory of slavery and freedom counterposed, gliding along life’s river together, was “a continual torment,” he declared. As often as he saw such scenes, they always had “the power of making me miserable.” Although he was no stranger to racial prejudice, he embraced the Golden Rule of labor’s uplift: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” Liberty for Lincoln was more than a question of enslaved or free. In 1858 the elite white Southerner James Henry Hammond explained to the U.S. Senate how every society required a laboring foundation, or “mudsill class,” if others were to attain the fruits of higher civilization. This class, according to Hammond, had little prospect of ever rising from its degraded state. The mudsill theory ran counter to Abraham Lincoln’s view of labor. Thus Lincoln as a yeoman Southerner in the northern Midwest pointed out in September 1859 that most people were neither hirelings nor capitalists. “Men, with their families—wives, sons and daughters—work for themselves, on their farms, in their houses and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand, nor of hirelings or slaves on the other.” Growing up poor, with homesteading as a way of life, he respected hardworking, less wealthy, but self-reliant Southern men and women. Lincoln here espoused a Southern ethic both conservative and radical, rooted in the deeds of men and women and in the toil they performed; he found no one “more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty.” Just as he desired to rise to a station of independence and honor by his own labors, he would not—indeed with any honesty could not—withhold that opportunity from others. As a Southern yeoman, Lincoln insisted on a new understanding of liberty: equality of opportunity in the race of life. His belief in equal opportunity would continue to evolve until he was ready to assert the still astonishing claim that race was politically inconsequential, that African-Americans were citizens and entitled to equal protection under the law and full political rights. In the more than 140 years since the Emancipation Proclamation, Americans have argued as to whether it was primarily a war measure or a justice measure. Would it be fair to say that you would regard it as both? While I definitely regard it as both, I believe it was first and foremost a war measure. Because the Constitution sanctioned slavery, the President had no legal authority to free slaves as a measure of justice. Yet as a military measure, the commander-in-chief had the authority to confiscate rebel property. It was the Confederates who insisted that slaves were property, consistent with the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. By the autumn of 1862, Lincoln was desperate for more soldiers. However moral, complex, and far-reaching this decision, he understood very well that the Emancipation Proclamation was a weapon of war. And it was an effective one. African-Americans volunteered in the Union armed services and met critical manpower needs. At the same time, Southerners had to put an even greater emphasis on controlling their enslaved population, leaving less time and money available for the war effort. Moreover, emancipation ended any question of European intervention. With Northern articulation that the war was now about the moral issue of slavery, the English and French decided that it was not in their interest to recognize the Confederacy’s independence. Although it was a war measure, I agree with Lincoln that it was a justice measure as well. He hated slavery all his life. When Lincoln addressed Congress, he spoke about how, “in giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.” He understood that emancipation dovetailed with a larger, millennial understanding of what was at stake in the war. You make a strong case for Lincoln as both a conservative and a radical. How did his vision of the United States that could emerge from the ruins of the war differ from that of his contemporaries? First, a disclaimer. If I were a prophet, I would certainly make more money than I do as a historian. Nevertheless, I do believe things would have been much different had Lincoln lived through Reconstruction. He was a careful, calculating, masterful politician. As you remember, when he answered Horace Greeley’s call for abolition, “The Prayer of Twenty Million,” Lincoln had already made the decision to issue an emancipation proclamation. When he wrote to Greeley, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that,” he was taking a brilliant political stance that calmed conservative fears while paving the way forward for what he had already determined to do. This is indicative of how he worked politically, bringing the rest of the country to positions that he had already moved to and was already acting upon. Thus, although we can really never know how his vision for America would have emerged following the war, we do have some evidence for speculation. Often as an expert witness for minorities in voting rights or discrimination cases, I have had to make what is called a “totality of circumstances” argument when there is no “smoking gun.” In the case of Lincoln, I believe that I can make a very good “totality of circumstances” case for how Lincoln’s vision would have differed from his contemporaries’ and how we would have had a different United States emerging from the Civil War. Lincoln appointed Salmon P. Chase, a rival and thorn in his side, to be Chief Justice because Chase would champion rights for African-Americans. The incorruptible William Lloyd Garrison also understood how Lincoln’s logic worked, and when he congratulated Lincoln on the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, he was confident that Lincoln’s efforts would continue: “I am sure you will consent to not compromise that which will leave a slave in his fetters.” Many have faulted Lincoln’s general amnesty plan as too lenient, but what they miss is his faith and belief in the common man, the yeoman and poor white in the South, to do the right thing, and in his own ability to convince them. His general amnesty was for those who would take an oath of loyalty to the United States and pledge to obey federal laws pertaining to slavery. He would not provide amnesty to officials and military leaders of the Confederacy. I have argued throughout The Age of Lincoln that it is a commitment to the rule of law that guided Lincoln’s thinking. That, of course, is both conservative and radical, depending on how the rule of law is used. Lincoln was conservative to believe in the rule of law, but radical to argue that the rule of law applied to all. Of course, he would not have understood the terms “radical” and “conservative”; those are the judgments of a historian. But for Lincoln the rule of law meant the enforcement of fair play, a level playing field. When white Southern extremists used the law unfairly to justify terror, as they did during Reconstruction, I believe he would not have stood for it. We see over and over again his sense of fair play and his abhorrence of extralegal violence. For example, when he was the commander of the militia company in the Black Hawk war, men in the company captured an elderly Native American and were determined to kill him. Lincoln threatened to fight anyone who injured the innocent Indian. And this master politician, this Father Abraham, savior of the Union, would have the gravitas and the cachet to lead the people in a vision of an America as a land of opportunity and fair play for all. As he so often did, he could explain to his fellow Americans, including non-elite Southern whites, how the Constitution had to ensure that personal liberty be protected by law. Lincoln claimed before the war that “those who would deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and under a just God, cannot long retain it.” Near the end of the war, he commented upon the essential need “in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom.” The goal of reconstructing government on racial equality, while far more wide-ranging, was never predestined for failure, and I believe that with Lincoln overseeing his vision it would have succeeded. His enemies agreed. When John Wilkes Booth heard Lincoln speak on April 11, 1865, Booth used what I believe was the correct logic to interpret Lincoln’s vision: “That means nigger citizenship.” We have less evidence for Lincoln’s vision of worker rights in a new industrial America. He encouraged corporate growth in order to win the war, but I prefer to think that his sense of fair play would have dictated his vision in labor relations also. The same pattern of commitment to fairness under the law, I believe, would have been applicable to the excesses of unbridled capitalism and the plight of the industrial worker.
September 14, 2007
The Golden Age of Toots Shor: An Interview with Kristi Jacobson Posted by Allen Barra at 12:05 PM EST The 1977 obituary in The New York Times for Bernard “Toots” Shor noted that New York’s mot famous saloonkeeper was “a magnet, around which flowed any of the special streams of New York’s greatness.” Those streams included athletes, movie stars, writers, and politicians—virtually anyone who was well-known and successful in New York. In the 1957 noir cult movie favorite Sweet Smell of Success, Tony Curtis’s predatory publicist, Sidney Falco, makes his important connections with Burt Lancaster’s powerful gossip columnist, J. J. Hunsecker, at Shor’s place. Kristi Jacobson, Shor’s granddaughter, has crafted a fascinating documentary portrait of Toots, tracing his life from South Philadelphia to success in New York, using film clips, TV segments, still photographs, and interviews with such luminaries as Mike Wallace, Walter Cronkite, Whitey Ford, Frank Gifford, Gay Talese, and a score of others. Her film, Toots, is not just a biography of a man but a portrait of a city, a culture, and an era. The movie opens in New York City today, and Ms. Jacobson spoke with us about it and its subject from her office in the Soho neighborhood of New York. Toots Shor has to be the most famous saloon in American history. More celebrities mingled there and rubbed elbows with each other than at any other bar in America. Why was this? What was it about Toots and his bar-restaurant that attracted the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Joe DiMaggio, and Frank Sinatra? I have asked myself the same question for years. I’ve often wondered what Toots, an uneducated “bum,” had in common with men as accomplished and disparate as Eisenhower, Hemingway, Sinatra, DiMaggio, and Hoffa. Toots had a rough-hewn charm, a straight-talking no-nonsense honesty, and a sincere love of fun. But I think ultimately the saloon’s place in history was the result of a perfect confluence of person, place, and time. The period in New York between the 1940s and 1950s was a unique time, and Toots and his saloon embodied the era—the post-Prohibition, post–World War II period when people wanted to let off steam and really have a good time. And his attitude toward life, friendship, and drinking gave people—famous and common—a place to feel at home. New York at that time was just emerging as the capital of the world, and the kinds of people who made up the fabric of New York City were a lot like Toots—tough, children of immigrants, who came to New York with little more then some loose change in their pockets and dreams of a better life. Toots’s belief that “a saloonkeeper is the most important person in a community” also played a role, in that he took the job very seriously and built not just a saloon but a community unlike any other. He was the first one there in the morning and the last to leave at night. At Toots’s, “drinking hard” was required, and loyalty, friendship, or “palship,” as he called it, was paramount. As he said to Mike Wallace in a 1959 interview, friends meant so much to him that it was “nearly a photo finish” between friends and family in his life. Since Toots took his friendships so seriously, he protected those who were celebrities, and as Peter Duchin says, “If you tried to get an autograph from someone at Toots, some waiter would break your leg!” Celebrity culture had not gotten so out of control then. His saloon also cut across class lines, since for him “class” was judged by how loyal, decent, and honest a person was, and because of his own humble background he respected above all those who, like him, came from nothing. He revered athletes and sportswriters above all, and the feeling was mutual. Toots’s was the ultimate clubhouse during a very special time in our history. Watching your film, one gets the impression that a large part of the saloon’s appeal was that it embodied the New York sports culture of the 1950s. Baseball players like Mickey Mantle, boxers like Joe Louis, football players such as Frank Gifford, they all hung out at Toots’s and seemed to feel at ease there. Do you think your grandfather was a sports fan per se, or was he more interested in the men who played sports? Both. He was definitely a diehard sports fan. He loved nothing more than a good game, or a good fight, or a good race. He felt that sports were the backbone of American life, and that any good citizen should have a devoted interest in them. He even marked events in his own life by sports. When did he open his restaurant? “I signed the lease on September 15, 1939—the day Tony Galento beat Lou Nova in Philadelphia.” His first wedding anniversary? “One of the biggest upsets in football happened that day,” he said of November 2, 1935. “Notre Dame beat Ohio State. What a game! Notre Dame scored two touchdowns in the last minute and a half of play.” But it was more than just sports fanaticism. He had tremendous respect for athletes, and I think he also strongly identified with them. As Peter Duchin says in the film, “though [Toots] loved Joe DiMaggio, who was the most famous ballplayer, as much as he possibly could, he still would love somebody else who was a great polo player. He revered the sportsmen.” I think part of that was that most athletes of that era were working-class, tough-as-nails kids who, with a good dose of talent and sheer will, scrapped their way out of their neighborhoods and into professional sports, and eventually into sports stardom. Likewise, these athletes saw a similar story in Toots, who was proud of his background and his upbringing as a street fighter in the streets of South Philadelphia. Toots made a point to talk to, and often console, both big-name athletes and younger ones who were struggling. Joe Garagiola tells a great story in the film about the time Toots came to sit with him on the stairs of his restaurant: “There was the big, famous, successful restaurateur sitting with a .220-hitting catcher, listening to my problems. There was no gain for him. He was taking care of, if I can say it now, a scared kid who didn’t know where to go.” I think it is difficult to separate the two—his love of sports and his interest in the men who played. Another story comes to mind that never made it into the film but is one of my favorites: After a game in 1945, Toots rushed back from the Polo Grounds after watching Mel Ott hit his 500th home run. He arrived at his saloon to find Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, at one of the tables. Toots introduced himself and chatted until Ott arrived, flush from his achievement. “Excuse me, Sir Fleming,” Toots said, “but I gotta leave you. Somebody important just came in.” On one remarkable occasion, Chief Justice Earl Warren was at one table and Frank Costello, perhaps the most notorious organized crime figure in America, was at another. If the account I heard is correct, they tipped their glasses and smiled at each other. What do you think it was about your grandfather’s saloon that made it a kind of neutral territory for two such people? I think the way Toots treated people in his joint had an effect on how people treated each other in the place too. It is, when I think about it, quite remarkable that among Toots’s closest friends were men who operated on such opposite sides of the law. But Toots didn’t think anything of a scene like this. To him, they were just his friends. It was another day, another coupla pals. It all made perfect sense to him, and others seemed to follow along. The tone was set by Toots that all were welcome (unless he didn’t like you, of course) and that was that. It was also a different time—some call it a magical time—when these guys, who all rose to power together from the Depression and Prohibition, respected each other in a way that’s difficult to imagine today. Everyone I interviewed for the film described Frank Costello as a dignified man who commanded an incredible amount of respect from others. I try to imagine a situation today that would be comparable, and I come up with nothing. I find it absolutely fascinating how accessible these people were then, and that a moment like this could even be possible. To celebrities like Mike Wallace, Whitey Ford, and Frank Gifford, the sale of your grandfather’s restaurant in 1961 marked the end of an era. And most of the customers never felt quite at home in the second incarnation of Toots’s saloon. What was it about the 1960s that he couldn’t quite adjust to? It seems to me that it was everything about the 1960s that Toots couldn’t, or wouldn’t, adjust to. The sixties were of course a time of great change, not just in the world and the United States, but especially in New York City. Toots had no tolerance for drugs or rock music or the excessive wealth and attitude that athletes were beginning to acquire. The downtown club scene, Studio 54, and the people who went there—these were not the crowd that Toots catered to or wanted in his saloon. People were moving to the suburbs, and TV had a huge affect on nightlife. Instead of adapting to the changes, Toots thought his attitude toward life would in the end prevail, that he could stick it out, and people would keep coming to his joint. As we know, that was not the way it worked out. Unlike the rest of us, though, this didn’t upset Toots. ”I started off broke, so I’m no worse off now,” he said with a laugh in 1975. The 1960s may have led to the demise of his restaurant, but Toots remained strong-willed until the very end.
September 12, 2007
The Game That Changed Football Forever: An Interview with Frank Maggio Posted by Allen Barra at 02:15 PM EST In today’s football, the pass rules. But there was a time when the game was largely, in Damon Runyon’s phrase, “three yards and a cloud of dust.” In the early 1900s the game became so dangerous that President Theodore Roosevelt considered banning it. Football was saved by the forward pass, putting an emphasis on speed and skill and spread the action out. It took years, though, for the pass to win acceptance among the nation’s college football coaches. In Notre Dame and the Game That Changed Football: How Jesse Harper Made the Forward Pass a Weapon and Knute Rockne a Legend, Frank Maggio tells the story of the 1913 Army–Notre Dame game, after which nothing in football would ever be the same. I discussed it with him recently. The title of your book claims that the 1913 Notre Dame–Army game actually changed the course of the game of football. That’s a mouthful, but I have to say that you justify the claim. Can you give us a brief summation of why the game is such a landmark? The game was the first time the forward pass was used in such an extensive, dramatic, and successful fashion. It was extensive in its sheer quantity and quality. Gus Dorais completed 14 of 17 passes for 243 yards, unheard of statistics for that day and age and pretty good in today’s game. Notre Dame would like to have such passing success in their games this season. It was dramatic because it was the first time that long passes—20, 30, and 40 yards—had been thrown to receivers who caught them while on a dead run. In the past, passes were thrown to stationary receivers, and until 1912 a pass could not be thrown farther than 20 yards from the spot where the quarterback was standing. It was successful because it led Notre Dame to victory and immediate national recognition—as well as awakening the football world of the possibilities of the forward pass. What was the status of the forward pass prior to that game? The forward pass in its nascent form had been incorporated into the rules of football in 1906, and coaches, especially in the Midwest and South, were quick to see its potential. Its use, however, was limited, so it didn’t become a major weapon until 1912, when the restrictions were lifted. The Notre Dame–Army game of 1913 was not the first use of the forward pass, but it was the first extensive use of the pass after the rule changes. Also, it was the first effective use in a major game between well-known schools and in a major media center, New York. Because of those two factors the game received maximum publicity, and as one writer said, it “demonstrated the devastating potential of the forward pass.” So, though this type of passing might have been used earlier than November 1, 1913, it went unnoticed. The importance of the major media center cannot be overstated. The game received national publicity, and was immediately hailed by the press as a “landmark” game. What were the national reputations the Notre Dame and Army football teams at the time of the game? In 1913 the major powers in college football were in the East. Army was well recognized as one of those major powers. Others in that day, by way of example, were Harvard, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. Army’s 1913 loss to Notre Dame was their only loss in 1913. In 1914 Army was undefeated and declared national champions. Notre Dame, on the other hand, was virtually unknown in the East, or really anywhere else, with the exception of the Midwest. They were at that time a small, financially poor Catholic men’s school. 1913 was the first year Notre Dame had a professional football coach, Jesse Harper, and the first time they ventured out on the national stage. In 1913 Notre Dame went East and played Army and Penn State and went Southwest and played the University of Texas It was the first time a college team had attempted such a national schedule. And Notre Dame was undefeated in 1913. At what point did Jesse Harper and Notre Dame decide to make the forward pass their primary offensive weapon? Had they used it much before the Army game? Why did it catch Army so off-guard? Jesse Harper was very familiar with the forward pass prior to coming to Notre Dame. He had worked with it from the time it came into the rules in 1906 and used it extensively in his last two years at Wabash College, almost beating Notre Dame with the forward pass in 1911. However, in that game a successful touchdown pass by Wabash was nullified because it was thrown more than 20 yards. When Harper arrived at Notre Dame in 1913, the numerous restrictions on the forward pass had been lifted, and the football had been changed from its original oval-like shape to a more aerodynamic “prolate spheroid.” Both of these factors greatly facilitated the use of the forward pass. Harper’s 1913 Notre Dame team immediately began using it. The summer before the 1913 season, Harper had Gus Dorias, his quarterback, and Knute Rockne, his receiver, working with the pass during their summer jobs on Lake Erie. In the practice sessions, Notre Dame worked extensively with the pass and had great success in their first three games of the 1913 season. Army was the fourth game on their schedule. Army was familiar with the forward pass. In fact, their coach, Charles Daly, had been on the 1906 committee that brought the pass into the rules of football. However, the Eastern schools had virtually ignored it, and there was little or no scouting in those days, so Army had no idea that Notre Dame knew how to throw and catch the pass. Thus Army, prepared for a titanic struggle on the offensive and defensive line with the fighting Irish runners, was completely thrown off their game. Everyone knows that Knute Rockne went on to become the most innovative coach in football history and that he died in a plane crash in 1931. What became of the other famous participants in that 1913 game? As for Army, the men playing in the 1913 game were known in West Point lore as the class “the stars fell on,” because so many of them went on to be multistar generals in World War II. The two most famous were sitting on the bench during the 1913 game, namely Dwight Eisenhower and his roommate, Omar Bradley. Both were five-star generals at the end of World War II, and Ike, of course, went on to become President of the United States.
Of the Notre Dame players, Harper, whose later years are reviewed in my book, became a cattle rancher in Kansas. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach in 1970. Rockne, of course, went on to become one of the greatest legends in the history of college football. His story is well known. Gus Dorais, the outstanding quarterback of the 1913 team, played some professional football but mostly distinguished himself as a coach. He coached college football for almost 20 years and was the head coach of the Detroit Lions from 1943 to 1947. He also was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach. Ray Eichenlaub, the powerful and very important fullback on the 1913 team, was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1972. The rest of the team I have been unable to trace, so, to my dismay, there the story ends.
September 7, 2007
The Films That Are How We Know Football: An Interview with Steve Sabol (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 04:15 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. Is it fair to say that from the very start you were self-conscious about the mythology of pro football? Absolutely. We thought of ourselves as filmmakers, romantics, and storytellers. We never used video, always film. Video is too immediate, too right now. Film has texture and context. What was the film where it all came together for you? In 1965 we did the league’s first promotional film, They Call It Pro Football. If my dad’s 1962 film of the Packers-Giants was Birth of a Nation, then They Call It Pro Football was Citizen Kane. That was the film where we first used the big background score and had John Facenda as narrator. We premiered it at Toots Shor’s restaurant in New York, and the commissioner, Pete Rozelle, said, “This isn’t a highlight film, it’s a movie. From that time on we had Pete’s full support. He never tried to curtail our creative freedom, even though what we did was sometimes a bit too avant-garde for some of the more conservative owners. The music used by NFL Films has always been distinctive. From the start you never went for the rah-rah college marching band sound. You always use a full orchestral score. Why? For as far back as I can remember, I was always captivated by orchestras. When I was a kid in Philadelphia, my friends would run home and turn on American Bandstand. I’d brag my ginger snap cookies, go to the TV, and turn on Victory at Sea. I was enthralled by Richard Rodgers’s music, and I liked big thundering sort of songs—at summer camp I used to love singing stuff like “What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?”—things like that. Marching bands sounded tinny. A lot of the NFL owners wanted John Philip Sousa–type music in the back of their films. I always loved the sound of cellos and timpani, and especially French horns. And until 1983 we had the “voice of God,” John Facenda, doing the narration. [The Philadelphia Phillies’ Harry Callas currently does the NFL Films voiceovers.] Where did you find Facenda? Twenty-four years after his death, people still ask about him. They ask, “Where in the world did you find him?” He was a local Philadelphia news anchor. Most people’s jaws drop when I tell them that he wasn’t a football fan. When I gave him the copy to read, I’d say, “Do you want to see these highlights?” or something. He’d say, “No, No, that’s okay. I don’t need to.” He actually recorded his voiceovers without seeing the images. I think the words Facenda read were as much a part of NFL Films’ style as the images and the music. Whose prose poetry was Facenda reading? I’m afraid that would be mine. As a kid, one of my favorite poets was Kipling, and one of my favorite sportswriters was Grantland Rice—you know, “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the four horsemen rode again . . .” That kind of stuff. One of my favorite NFL Film productions was a profile of Vince Lombardi. Let me read you some of the text: “Lombardi —a certain magic still lingers in the very name. It speaks of duels in the snow, in the cold November mud . . .” And here’s something from your profile of the old Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach: “His passion was football. His obsession was winning. A championship was his destiny.” Are those your words? Yes, in all their splendid pomposity. Of all the games that NFL Films has covered and all the specials you’ve produced and all the Emmys you’ve won over the decades, what would you say you’re proudest of? Of when people come up to me and say, “You know, I didn’t watch the game when John Elway went the length of the field to win the game for Denver” or “I missed that drive in the 1989 Super Bowl when Joe Montana took the ’49ers down the field in the last two minutes, but I saw them happen in your films, and I felt like I was there.”
September 7, 2007
The Films That Are How We Know Football: An Interview with Steve Sabol (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 12:15 PM EST NFL Films may not be, as the late New York Giants general manager Wellington Mara once put it, “the heart and soul of the NFL,” but it is where the heart and soul of the National Football League reside. Founded in the early 1960s by Ed Sabol, an overcoat salesman from Philadelphia who began his film career with a Bell & Howell camera he was given as a wedding gift, the company has been run by his son Steve since Ed’s retirement in 1974. Two years after Ed Sabol fil |
