Congratulations on your enjoyable, informative article “Overrated & Underrated” (May/June 1998). As for most underrated songwriter, I’m glad that the great Harry Warren is now the “King of the Songwriting Incognitos.” His real name was Salvatore Guaragna. Some of Warren’s best-known songs were “Jeepers Creepers,” “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” “That’s Amore,” “Lullaby of Broadway,” “An Affair to Remember,” and “You’ll Never Know,” to name just a few. Warren was very upset that he was always in the shadow of Irving Berlin, but he did manage to maintain his sense of humor. During World War II, while listening to a radio report about the U.S. air operations over Germany, he remarked, “They’re bombing the wrong Berlin.”
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January 2011
They are not a particularly remarkable pair of eyes: chocolate brown, droopy-lidded, shaded by thick salt-and-pepper brows.
They are not a particularly remarkable pair of eyes: chocolate brown, droopy-lidded, shaded by thick salt-and-pepper brows.
But what they look like doesn’t matter; how they see does. They are the eyes of Al Hirschfeld, now ninety-five, the artist whose lithe and graceful caricatures have enlivened the pages of The New York Times for more than 70 years in a unique chronicle of the American theater. Hirschfeld’s eyes transform a performer so penetratingly that the individual comes to resemble the drawing rather than the other way around. And the process remains as mysterious to him now as it was when he began drawing as a child.
I don’t believe in God the Father, but I grant that the sequences of misery "He" visits upon sinners “unto the third and fourth generation” are as common as grass. They often are associated with wars. My father was a third-generation casualty of the American Civil War.
He was a good man, honest and gentle—by my memory, he hit me only twice in my entire childhood—but he was a black hole, invisible to direct examination, yet powerfully assertive, somehow, and confusing and disturbing to think about. He would park the car beside a gas pump and then, while the attendant filled the tank, wander off, leaving my mother, who couldn’t drive, and me, too young to drive, to deal with the honking cars behind us and the attendant waiting to be paid. My mother would send me off to the men’s room to find him, but he was never there. She would fume until, having asserted himself, he would reappear and rescue us and, in answer to her complaints, smile mysteriously as if he had been hiding Easter eggs. He could be conspiratorial all by himself.
There was a “Nightline” a while back during which Jeff Greenfield delivered a puzzled examination of smoking in the movies. The gist of it was that, while smoking has declined in real life in the last 30 years, characters in movies smoke as much as they did in the heyday of Bogart and Bette Davis. There has even been a study of this, showing the percentage of smokers among characters by age group. (But how do they tell if Christian Slater’s character is twenty-nine or thirty-one in a given movie?)
It seems that, for a while, tobacco companies paid to have their products and logos appear on-screen, but they claim they no longer do this. Greenfield’s interviewees postulated that smoking was an image thing, a way to look tough, sophisticated, in control. There were also suspicions that the tobacco business still exerts some hidden influence on movies.
One night in August 1943 PT-105 was drifting on station in the Solomon Islands—specifically, two miles southeast of Vella Lavella, three miles north of Gizo, and fifteen miles west of Kolombangara, all of which were enemy-occupied. As a matter of fact, other than the PT boat lying close on my port quarter and a couple of coastwatchers hiding out in the hills, there was not a friendly of any sort within fifty miles. My legs ached from hours of standing on a hard, constantly moving, sometimes bouncing deck. My head and back ached from malaria that was only partly subdued by Atabrine. Only the coffee handed up to me by Zichella, the cook, kept me from dozing off on my feet. It came to me that PT-105 was farther within the Japanese empire than any other ship in the U.S. Navy. That thought led to another: How in God’s name did I end up here?
I don’t believe I’m misquoting Jacques Barzun too violently in paraphrasing an austere dictum of his this way: “How do amateurs write? Badly, always.” Any editor will acknowledge the hard kernel of truth in this rule, but of course there are exceptions. I like to think our “My Brush With History” column offers some each issue, and a most impressive one arrived in the mail a few months back. It was a new book called PT-105, which our founding editor Oliver Jensen had sent to me with the terse injunction “You’d better read this.”
The author, Dick Keresey, had skippered a PT boat in the Pacific during World War II and, after spending the rest of his life practicing law, decided to write about his Navy career. His account is funny, scary, melancholy, exciting, and angry—this last emotion provoked not only by occasional long-ago operational follies visited upon the boats by commanders far from the fighting but also because the boats’ contribution to the war effort has been either misunderstood or forgotten.
The names jingle in horsemen’s pockets with the bright, weighty ring of precious metal. Secretariat. Man o’ War. Ruffian. Citation. Exterminator. Seabiscuit’s name is among those that clang down the years, but attempting to find his place among the greats is a hopeless labor. The conditions of racing have changed so much over time that definitive ranking of its legends is virtually impossible.
Weight .
Until recently, a major hallmark of greatness was the ability to win while lugging a whopping 130 pounds or more and to beat horses toting far lighter burdens. Seabiscuit shattered a track record under 133 pounds, won while carrying as much as 32 pounds more than his rivals, and finished first or second by a nose in eleven of the thirteen races in which he carried 130 or more. A handful have done better—the track record Dr. Fager set under 139 pounds has stood for thirty years—but today’s tracks lure elite horses to their races by offering them low imposts, so top horses seldom carry more than 127 pounds or face a weight spread greater than 12.
On a drab Detroit side street in August 1936, two hitchhikers hopped down from their last ride and walked onto the backstretch of Fair Grounds Racecourse. The stouter man was a jockey’s agent people called Yummy; he was with his client Johnny Pollard, a flame-haired former prizefighter. Yummy liked to refer to him by his boxing name, “The Cougar,” but most knew him as Red. The two had totaled Yummy’s car a long way back, picked through the wreckage to salvage their most essential belongings—twenty-seven cents and a half-pint of a brandy they called “bow-wow wine"—and thumbed their way to the track. Desperate for work, they wound through the shed rows, petitioning nearly every trainer on the grounds. No one was willing to give Pollard a leg up on a horse.