In
1919 Helen Keller was 39 years old and an international celebrity, but
she was having trouble paying the bills. So she took her act on the
road.
WHO WAS HELEN KELLER?
Born in
Alabama in 1880, Helen Keller was a cheerful, bright baby who was just
beginning to learn to talk. Then, at 19 months old, she contracted a
high fever that left her blind, deaf, and unable to speak. All of a
sudden, Helen's normal development stopped and she became a "wild child"
-she ate with her hands, threw food, and broke things. The Keller's
relatives urged her affluent parents to send the little girl to an
asylum, which was a too-common destination for blind-deaf people in
those days. But Mrs. Keller knew that inside her angry daughter was an
intelligent girl trying desperately to communicate.
So when
Helen was six years old, her parents brought her to the famous inventor
Alexander Graham Bell, who was trying to find a way to cure deafness.
Bell was unable to help Helen but recommended the Perkins School for the
Blind in Boston. The school's headmaster decide that Helen needed
constant home care and sent a 20-year-old teacher named Annie Sullivan, a
recent graduate of the school, who was herself partially blind.
Sullivan had no experience with deaf-blind students, but after a rough
start, she had a major breakthrough when she got Helen to understand the
connection between actual water and the letters "w-a-t-e-r," which
Sullivan spelled using sign language in Helen's hand.
AN UNLIKELY CELEBRITY
After
that, a whole new world opened up for Keller. Under Sullivan's
tutelage, she excelled at reading and writing, and in 1904 she became
the first deaf-blind person in history to graduate from college. Keller
had been famous since childhood thanks to a series of article written
about her by the headmaster at Perkins, but her celebrity skyrocketed
after her first book, The Story of My Life, was published when
she was 22 years old. Keller then became an advocate for the deaf-blind,
as well as a political activist -touting socialism, worker's rights,
and pacifism. But she was most famous for simply being Helen Keller.
OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS
Starting
in Keller's teenage years, vaudeville promoters came calling. At
Sullivan's urging, Keller always politely declined, explaining that she
made her living writing books and giving formal lectures -not by
appearing in front of rowdy crowds who paid a nickel each to gawk at
(and heckle) jugglers, comedians, and singers, not to mention "freak"
acts such as the dog-faced boy or Siamese twins. Even though vaudeville
shows were advertised as "family entertainment," audiences could get out
of hand.
But in 1919 Keller convinced Sullivan to let her take
the job. The pros just outweighed the cons. For one, Keller's two
previous books hadn't sold well, and the money she was making on the
Chautauqua adult-education lecture circuit wasn't enough to sustain her.
And because they had to travel to a new town for each lecture, the
daily schedule was becoming too hectic for Sullivan, whose eyesight and
health were growing worse. Doing vaudeville shows would allow them to
stay in the same town for a week at a time, rather than traveling nearly
every day. Another factor that led Keller to
vaudeville: She disapproved of the way Hollywood had told her story in a
1919 silent movie based on her life called Deliverance,
in which she and Sullivan appeared as themselves at the end. The film
glossed over a lot of details about her life, and completely avoided her
political views. Vaudeville would give Keller a chance to set the
record straight.
And finally, Keller was a people person, and
she knew that vaudeville would be a great way to educate the masses
about the struggles of the disabled. So against her family's wishes, she
signed on to the Orpheum vaudeville circuit.
NATURAL-BORN KELLERS
Keller
knew that her decision to become a vaudeville performer was risky. How
would the crowds treat her -like a freak, or as a respected speaker?
There were, in essence, two Helen Kellers. "The sweet myth, the
canonical one, portrays her as an angel upon earth, saved from the
savagery of darkness and silence," wrote Keller biographer Walter
Kendrick. But the real Keller was not so angelic -she was a fiery,
middle-aged woman who espoused radical left-wing ideals and spoke out
against the United States' involvement in World War I, which most
Americans supported. With vaudeville, Keller's ambitious goal was to put
on an entertaining, educational act without compromising her ideals.
The
public, in turn, wanted to see for themselves whether Keller could
actually do all the things for which she was credited. Because
deaf-blind people were often institutionalized, most people assumed they
were "retarded." Indeed, rumors had persisted for years that Keller was
not the writer she was made out to be, that she really didn't master
five languages, and that her books were ghostwritten frauds.
Furthermore, her critics charged, Keller was incapable of having
sophisticated political opinions -Sullivan and her husband, John Macy,
were using Keller to espouse their Marxist views. Keller was ready to prove that she did her own thinking.
The
first shows were scheduled for early 1920 at the Palace Theater in New
York City, one of vaudeville's premier venues. The playbill advertised:
Blind,
deaf, and formerly DUMB, Helen Keller presents a remarkable portrayal
of the triumph of her life over the greatest obstacles that ever
confronted a human being!
HELEN BACK AGAIN
Billed
as "The Star of Happiness," the 20-minute act began with the curtain
rising to reveal Sullivan sitting in a drawing room. As Mendelssohn's
"Spring Song" played, Sullivan spent the first few minutes chronicling
Keller's rise from a sightless, soundless childhood to a prosperous
adulthood (basically the same story later made famous by William
Gibson's 1959 play The Miracle Worker).
Then Sullivan led Keller onto the stage. Keller sat at a piano and
exclaimed loudly, "It is very beautiful!" For the audience, this was a
surprise. Despite what the poster said, Keller was rumored to be mute.
But Keller proved that she could indeed talk, albeit very poorly -only
her inner circle could understand what she said, so Sullivan was always
there to translate. Said one audience member after hearing Keller recite
the Lord's Prayer: "Her voice was the loneliest sound in the world."
But
the performances were by no means somber affairs. Keller smiled
throughout as Sullivan told stories about her, including one about her lifetime friendship
with Samuel Clemens, who once said after a meeting with Keller,
"Blindness is an exciting business. If you don't believe it, get up some
dark night on the wrong side of your bed when the house is on fire and
try to find the door." The crowd laughed at the jokes, and watched
intently as Keller demonstrated how she could "hear" a human voice: She
placed her hand on Sullivan's face -the first finger resting on the
mouth, the second finger beside the bridge of the nose, and the thumb
resting on the throat. Keller could then feel the vibrations created by
the voice and understand Sullivan's words.
Q&A
The
most popular part of the act came at the end when Keller took questions
from the audience as Sullivan translated. This gave Keller a chance to
show off her quick wit …and to push her socialist views (which were
actually better received on the vaudeville stage than they were on the
conservative Chautauqua circuit). A few recorded exchanges:
Q: How old are you? A: Between 16 and 60.
Q: What do think is the most important question before the country today? A: How to get a drink. [Prohibition had recently banned the sale of alcohol.]
Q: Do you believe all political prisoners should be released? A:
Certainly. They opposed the war on the grounds that it was commercial
war. Now everyone with a grain of sense says it was. Their crime is,
they said it first.
Q: Does talking tire you? A: Did you ever hear of a woman who tired of talking?
IT'S A HIT!
Audiences loved "The Star of Happiness." And so did the critics. The New York Times wrote,
"Keller has conquered again, and the Monday afternoon audience at the
Palace, one of the most critical and cynical in the world, was hers."
Everywhere Keller and Sullivan went throughout the United States and
Canada, crowds greeted them warmly. "At first it seemed strange to find
ourselves on a program with dancers, acrobats, and trained animals,"
Keller later wrote. "But the very difference between ourselves and the
other actors gave novelty and interest to our work." Keller and Sullivan
were paid in the top tier for vaudevillians -$2,000 per week.
After
a show in Syracuse, New York, Keller wrote in a letter to her mother:
"The audience was interested in me, they were so silent, paying the
closest attention. Indeed, some days there wasn't a clap and yet we knew
they were deeply interested. After a while, they found their tongue and
asked more questions than we could answer." Other times, Keller wasn't
as pleased with the crowds: "Although I love the people, they appear so
superficial. They are peculiar in that you must say a good thing in your
first sentence, or they won't listen, much less laugh. Still, they have
shown us such friendliness. I'm grateful to them."
SIGNING OUT
Keller
quite the vaudeville circuit in 1924 when Sullivan's sight and overall
health became too poor for her to continue. Besides, Keller had bigger
plans. Now under the care of Sullivan's secretary, Polly Thompson, she
amped up her advocacy. That same year she became a spokesperson for the
American Foundation for the Blind and was already a founding member of
the American Civil Liberties Union. She then began traveling the world
to advocate for people who faced discrimination or any other blows that
life dealt them. During World War II, she visited disabled veterans to
demonstrate -through her mere presence- that they could still accomplish
great things. In 1948 she toured the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki just three years after the atomic bombs were dropped. In all,
Keller traveled to 39 countries and met with every president from Grover
Cleveland in 1888 to to Lyndon Johnson, who awarded her the
Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.
By the time Keller died
peacefully in her sleep in 1968, her stint in vaudeville was a mere blip
in her 87 years, but she remembered it with fondness. "I found the
world of vaudeville much more amusing than the world I always lived in. I
like to feel the warm pulse of human life pulsing round and round me."
Which
American president has been portrayed on film the most? Slate combed
through IMDb to provide this list, which only counts actors playing the
role of a president -no cameos or archival footage. However, several
presidents are played as they were at a time before reaching the White
House. Washington and Lincoln are no surprises, but George W. Bush and
Barack Obama have been characters in way more films than you'd expect in
the short amount of time since their inaugurations!
One of my all-time favorite films is Tombstone (1993), the
greatest Western ever made -in my opinion (and with all due respect to
the great John Wayne, who I love and am a major fan of). Tombstone
being my favorite Western, I developed an interest in the film's
central character, Wyatt Earp. I have recently read my first proper
biographies of Earp, and man, this guy just blows my socks off! What a
fascinating, bigger-than-life character, right out of a great Western
novel. I have read hundreds and hundreds of biographies and
autobiographies of men and women of every possible stripe, but this guy
is, without a doubt, one of the most incredible characters I have ever
read about.
Okay, let me tell you twelve things you may not have known about that legendary lawman from the Old West, Mr. Wyatt Earp.
1. Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp (yep, that's his full name) ran away from home several times
and tried to enlist in the Union Army in the Civil War. He was
unsuccessful and was sent back home every time, as he was only 13 years
old.
2. He loved ice cream. He wasn't a hard
drinker. In fact, he wasn't a drinker at all. No, the great Wyatt Earp,
as macho as they come, never let liquor touch his lips. But he did have a
vice: his love of ice cream. Every day in Tombstone, he would stop into
the local ice cream parlor and indulge in a scoop.
3. He was arrested for horse theft along with two other men.
Wyatt and the other men were accused of stealing two horses (each worth
$100) and jailed. Instead of waiting for his trial, Wyatt broke out of
jail and escaped through the jail roof.
4. He never was hit or injured during a gun fight. No, not in any gunfight he was ever involved in, which contributed to his legend. 5. He once accidentally shot himself
(actually his coat). Although Wyatt was never hit by the bullet of an
opponent, once, his single-action revolver fell out of his holster while
he was leaning back in a chair and discharged. Embarrassingly, the
discharged bullet went through his coat and out the ceiling.
6. He loved hookers and prostitutes.
Wyatt may not have been a drinker, but he loved the ladies (ladies of
the evening, that is). In one year (1872) Wyatt was arrested three times
for "keeping and being found in a house of ill-repute."
Wyatt
was listed as living in a brothel with Jane Haspiel in February of 1872.
It is not known whether he was a pimp, an enforcer, or a bouncer in the
establishment. Later, in 1876, when his brother James opened a brothel
in Dodge City, Wyatt went along with him.
7. He was once fined for slapping a prostitute.
Wyatt was fined the sum of $1.00 for slapping a muscular prostitute
named Frankie Bell. Frankie had "heaped epithets" on Wyatt and he got
upset and slapped her. Frankie spent the night in jail and was fined $20
(Wyatt's $1 fine was the legal minimum).
8. His second wife was probably an ex-prostitute. Wyatt's common-law wife, Celia Anne "Matty" Blaylock, who Wyatt lived with until 1881, was reputedly an ex-hooker.
9. He loved Dick Naylor. Wyatt's favorite horse, a racehorse, was named Dick Naylor.
10. He was put on trial for murder.
After Wyatt's signature moment, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, he was
tried for murder, along with his best pal, Doc Holliday. If convicted,
the two would have been hanged. Fortunately for Wyatt and his legend, he
and Doc were both acquitted.
11. He was a pal of John Wayne.
In Wyatt's later years, he lived in Los Angeles and was a technical
advisor on several silent cowboy films. He befriended a young actor
named Marion Morrison (who later changed his name to John Wayne) and
regaled the young thespian with tales of the Old West. Enthralled, the
young Duke used to fetch Wyatt cups of coffee. Wayne later claimed his
portrayals of cowboys and Western lawmen were based on these
conversations with Wyatt Earp.
12. His last words were enigmatic.
According to his wife of 47 years, Wyatt's last words, just before he
died in January of 1929 were "Suppose, suppose…" Wyatt's wife, friends,
and biographers all have only made guesses at what he was about to say
to complete his though before he passed away.
Shulamith Firestone, a widely quoted feminist writer who published her arresting first book, “The Dialectic of Sex,”
at 25, only to withdraw from public life soon afterward, was found dead
on Tuesday in her apartment in the East Village neighborhood of
Manhattan. She was 67.
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Ms. Firestone apparently died of natural causes, her sister Laya Firestone Seghi said.
Subtitled “The Case for Feminist Revolution,” “The Dialectic of Sex” was
published by William Morrow & Company in 1970. In it, Ms. Firestone
extended Marxist theories of class oppression to offer a radical
analysis of the oppression of women, arguing that sexual inequity
springs from the onus of childbearing, which devolves on women by pure
biological happenstance.
“Just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the
elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class
distinction itself,” Ms. Firestone wrote, “so the end goal of feminist
revolution must be ... not just the elimination of male privilege but of
the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings
would no longer matter culturally.”
In the utopian future Ms. Firestone envisioned, reproduction would be
utterly divorced from sex: conception would be accomplished through
artificial insemination, with gestation taking place outside the body in
an artificial womb. While some critics found her proposals visionary,
others deemed them quixotic at best.
Reviewing “The Dialectic of Sex” in The New York Times, John Leonard
wrote, “A sharp and often brilliant mind is at work here.” But, he
added, “Miss Firestone is preposterous in asserting that ‘men can’t
love.’ ”
The book, which was translated into several languages, hurtled Ms.
Firestone into the front ranks of second-wave feminists, alongside women
like Betty Friedan, Kate Millett and Germaine Greer. It remains widely
taught in college women’s-studies courses.
A painter by training, Ms. Firestone never anticipated a high-profile
career as a writer; she had come to writing through preparing
manifestoes for several feminist organizations she had helped found.
The crush of attention, positive and negative, that her book engendered
soon proved unbearable, her sister said. In the years that followed, Ms.
Firestone retreated into a quiet, largely solitary life of painting and
writing, though she published little.
Her only other book, “Airless Spaces,”
was issued in 1998 by the experimental publisher Semiotext(e). A
memoir-in-stories that employs fictional forms to recount real-life
events, it describes Ms. Firestone’s hospitalization with schizophrenia,
which by the 1980s had overtaken her.
The second of six children of Orthodox Jewish parents, Shulamith Bath
Shmuel Ben Ari Feuerstein was born in Ottawa on Jan. 7, 1945, and reared
in Kansas City, Mo., and St. Louis.
The family Americanized its surname to Firestone when Shulamith was a
child; Ms. Firestone pronounced her first name shoo-LAH-mith but was
familiarly known as Shuley or Shulie.
After attending Washington University in St. Louis, Ms. Firestone earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
in 1967. Around that time she helped found the Westside Group, a
Chicago feminist organization, before moving to New York.
Ms. Firestone came to renewed attention in 1997 with the release of “Shulie,” an independent film by Elisabeth Subrin. Ms. Subrin’s 37-minute film is a shot-for-shot remake of an earlier, little-seen documentary, also titled “Shulie,” made in 1967 by four male graduate students at Northwestern University.
The 1967 film, part of a documentary series on the younger generation,
profiles Ms. Firestone, then an unknown art student, as she paints,
talks about her life as a young woman and undergoes a grueling review of
her work by a panel of male professors.
In the 1997 remake, conceived as a backward look at a social landscape
that seemed to have changed strikingly little in 30 years, Ms. Firestone
is portrayed by an actress, Kim Soss. Her dialogue is uttered verbatim
from the original documentary.
Ms. Subrin’s film, which was shown at the New York Film Festival,
the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial and elsewhere, was well
received by critics. But it distressed Ms. Firestone, who said she was
upset that she had not been consulted in the course of its creation, her
sister said this week.
In an interview on Thursday, Ms. Subrin said that she had sent Ms.
Firestone a rough cut of her film through an intermediary. The
intermediary later told her, she said, that Ms. Firestone “could
appreciate it as a labor of love, but she hated the original film and
didn’t see how my film was different.”
Besides her sister Laya, Ms. Firestone is survived by her mother, Kate
Firestone Shiftan; two brothers, Ezra and Nechemia; and another sister,
Miriam Tirzah Firestone.
In “Airless Spaces,” Ms. Firestone writes of life after hospitalization,
on psychiatric medication. The account is in the third person, but the
story is her own:
“She had been reading Dante’s ‘Inferno’ when first she went into the
hospital, she remembered, and at quite a good clip too, but when she
came out she couldn’t even get down a fashion rag. ... That left getting
through the blank days as comfortably as possible, trying not to sink
under the boredom and total loss of hope.”
The story continues: “She was lucid, yes, at what price. She sometimes
recognized on the faces of others joy and ambition and other emotions
she could recall having had once, long ago. But her life was ruined, and
she had no salvage plan.”
Eisenstaedt was born in Dirschau (Tczew) in West Prussia, Imperial Germany in 1898. His family moved to Berlin
in 1906. Eisenstaedt was fascinated by photography from his youth and
began taking pictures at age 14 when he was given his first camera, an
Eastman Kodak Folding Camera with roll film. Eisenstaedt served in the German Army's artillery during World War I, and was wounded in 1918. While working as a belt and button salesman in the 1920s in Weimar Germany, Eisenstaedt began taking photographs as a freelancer for the Pacific and Atlantic Photos' Berlin office in 1928. The office was taken over by Associated Press in 1931.
Professional photographer
Eisenstaedt successfully became a full-time photographer in 1929. Four years later he photographed a meeting between Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Italy. Other notable, early pictures by Eisenstaedt include his depiction of a waiter at the ice rink of the Grand Hotel in St. Moritz in 1932 and Joseph Goebbels at the League of Nations in Geneva in 1933. Although initially friendly, Goebbels scowled for the photograph when he learned that Eisenstaedt was Jewish.[3]
Because of oppression in Hitler's Nazi Germany, Eisenstaedt emigrated to the United States in 1935 where he lived in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, for the rest of his life.[4] He worked as a staff photographer for Life magazine from 1936 to 1972. His photos of news events and celebrities, such as Dagmar, Sophia Loren and Ernest Hemingway, appeared on 90 Life covers.[2] Eisenstaedt was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1989 by President George Bush in a ceremony on the White House lawn.[5]
Martha's Vineyard
Alfred Eisenstaedt photographing the Clinton family - the last photos of his life.
Eisenstaedt, known as "Eisie" to his close friends, enjoyed his annual August vacations on the island of Martha's Vineyard
for 50 years. During these summers, he would conduct photographic
experiments, working with different lenses, filters, and prisms in
natural light. Eisenstaedt was fond of Martha's Vineyard's photogenic
lighthouses, and was the focus of lighthouse fundraisers organized by
Vineyard Environmental Research, Institute (VERI).
Eisenstaedt's last photographs were of President Bill Clinton with wife, Hillary, and daughter, Chelsea, in August 1993, at the Granary Gallery in West Tisbury on Martha's Vineyard.[citation needed]
Eisenstaedt died in his bed at midnight at his beloved Menemsha Inn cottage known as the "Pilot House" at age 96.[2]
Eisenstaedt's most famous photograph is of an American sailor kissing a young woman on August 14, 1945 in Times Square. (The photograph is known under various names: V–J Day in Times Square, V–Day, etc.[6]) Because Eisenstaedt was photographing rapidly changing events during the V-J Day celebrations, he stated that he didn't get a chance to obtain names and details, which has encouraged a number of mutually incompatible claims to the identity of the subjects.
Portraits of Sophia Loren
The portraits of Sophia Loren have a wonderful spark of
mischievousness or, as in the more formal color portraits, a dignity and
love that is brought to the picture by both sitter and photographer.
Ice Skating Waiter, St. Moritz
1932 photograph depicts a waiter at the ice rink of the Grand Hotel.
"I did one smashing picture," Eisenstaedt has written, "of the skating
headwaiter. To be sure the picture was sharp, I put a chair on the ice
and asked the waiter to skate by it. I had a Miroflex camera and focused
on the chair."
Children follow the Drum Major at the University of Michigan, 1950
Awards
Since 1999, the Alfred Eisenstaedt Awards for Magazine Photography have been administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.[7]
Jack Twyman was a Hall of Fame basketball player who once scored 59
points in an N.B.A. game. In 1959-60 he and Wilt Chamberlain became the
first players to average more than 30 points a game in a season. He went
on to become an analyst for the N.B.A. game of the week on ABC and a
food company executive who pocketed more than $3 million when he sold
the company in 1996.
But Twyman’s greatest fame came from simply helping out a friend. After
his Cincinnati Royals teammate Maurice Stokes had a paralyzing brain
injury in the final regular-season game of the 1958 season, Twyman
learned he was nearly destitute.
So he became Stokes’s legal guardian. He helped him get workers’
compensation; raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for medical
care, partly through organizing an annual charity game of basketball
superstars; and helped him learn to communicate by blinking his eyes to
denote individual letters.
And for decades Twyman pressed the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of
Fame in Springfield, Mass., to induct Stokes, a power forward who once
grabbed 38 rebounds in a game. When the Hall of Fame finally did so, in
2004, 21 years after Twyman’s admission, Twyman accepted the award for
his friend.
Twyman died in Cincinnati on Wednesday, more than 40 years after Stokes
died of a heart attack. Twyman’s daughter Lisa Bessone said her father
died of complications of blood cancer. He was 78.
On March 12, 1958, the Royals were playing their season finale, against
the Minneapolis Lakers. Stokes went over the shoulder of an opponent and
hit his head on the floor so hard that he was knocked out. In those
days, teams had no trainers, much less doctors, and scant knowledge of
head injuries. He continued to play.
Three days later, Stokes, who was 24, went into a coma. When he came out
of it, he could not move or talk. The diagnosis was brain damage.
Stokes, whose family lived in Pittsburgh, had to stay in Cincinnati to
be eligible for workers’ compensation.
“Maurice was on his own,” Twyman told The New York Post in 2008.
“Something had to be done and someone had to do it. I was the only one
there, so I became that someone.”
Twyman always insisted that any teammate would have done the same.
Others saw something special. On the occasion of Stokes’s death in 1970,
the sports columnist Arthur Daley of The New York Times wrote that he
saw “nobility and grandeur” in Twyman’s actions, likening him to the
biblical good Samaritan.
“What gives it a quality of extra warmth,” he wrote, “is the
pigmentation of the two principals.” Stokes was black, Twyman white.
John Kennedy Twyman, the son of a steel company foreman, was born in
Pittsburgh on May 21, 1934, and grew up playing against Stokes in summer
leagues. Twyman went to the University of Cincinnati and Stokes to St.
Francis College (now University) in Loretto, Pa. Their teams met in the
semifinals of the 1954 National Invitation Tournament, and Twyman
outscored Stokes, 27-26.
“I never let him forget about that,” Twyman told The Post.
Both were genuine stars. Stokes, at 6 feet 7 inches and 232 pounds, was
the N.B.A. rookie of the year in 1956. The next year he set a league
rebounding record, and he became a three-time All-Star. The Boston
Celtics star Bob Cousy called him “the first great, athletic power
forward.”
Twyman was a skinny 6-6 forward who in 11 seasons with the Royals (now the Sacramento Kings) was a six-time All-Star.
He shot 45 percent over his career, and when he retired in 1966 he
trailed only Chamberlain in points scored, with 15,840. In their
record-setting season of averaging more than 30 points a game,
Chamberlain edged Twyman, 32.1 to 31.2. Twyman’s 59-point game came with
the Royals against the Minneapolis Lakers on Jan. 15, 1960.
Twyman sometimes worried that his wife and family might become upset
over the amount of time he devoted to Stokes over 12 years, but his
daughter said in an interview that they had come to look forward to
Stokes’s Sunday visits from the hospital. Twyman’s wife of 57 years, the
former Carole Frey, became, with her husband, a co-trustee of the
Maurice Stokes Foundation, which was set up to defray Stokes’s hospital
costs but grew to help other needy N.B.A. veterans as well.
The charity basketball tournament they began at Kutsher’s Hotel in the
Catskills drew stars like Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson and, of course,
Chamberlain.
Twyman, who had an insurance business even while playing basketball, was
an analyst for “The NBA on ABC” in the late 1960s and early ’70s,
working with Chris Schenkel. In the moments before Game 7 of the 1970
N.B.A. championship between the Knicks and the Los Angeles Lakers,
Twyman saw the injured Knicks center Willis Reed limping toward the
Madison Square Garden court. “I think we see Willis coming out,” he told
viewers.
Reed’s appearance is credited with inspiring the Knicks to their 113-99 victory over the Lakers.
From 1972 to 1996, Twyman was chairman and chief executive of Super Food
Services, a food wholesaler based in Dayton, Ohio. During the 1980s, he
quintupled its earnings.
In addition to his daughter Lisa, Twyman is survived by his wife as well
as a son, Jay; two other daughters, Julie Twyman Brockhoff and Michele
Guttman; and 14 grandchildren.
Years after his accident, when Stokes had recovered enough finger
flexibility to type, his first message was: “Dear Jack, How can I ever
thank you?”
Twyman shrugged this off, saying that whenever he felt down, he
“selfishly” visited the always cheerful Stokes. “He never failed to pump
me up,” he said.
April 1, 1976: Alfred Hitchcock in his
suite at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. “After knighthood,” the
caption read, quoting Hitchcock, ” ‘all that was left was to await
death, a few vodkas hastening its advent.’ ” A note on the back of the
photograph clarified who was directing the photo shoot: “The picture
showing Mr. Hitchcock creeping his way through the plant in his room was
his idea.” Hitchcock died the following year.
The biggest female box-office star in Hollywood
history, Doris Day started singing and dancing when she was a teenager,
and made her first film when she was 24. After nearly 40 movies, she
walked away from that part of her life in 1968, and started rescuing and
caring for animals.
Now 87, the actress lives in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif. Last year, she released My Heart, her first record since 1967's The Love Album.
She's also the subject of a new four-DVD box set of her films — and was
named TCM's star of the month for April, which means 28 of her movies
will air during prime time this week on the network.
EnlargeSony Picture Archives Doris Day's hits include "Sentimental Journey," "Till The End of Time" and "I Got the Sun in the Mornin'."
The Making Of A Star
Day
started her career as a teenage dancer in Cincinnati. She was spotted
by a Paramount Pictures talent scout who wanted to fly her out to
Hollywood, but a car accident on the night of her going-away party
shattered her leg and her dreams of being a professional dancer. As Day
recovered from her injuries, she listened to the radio and discovered
she had a talent for singing.
"I had to lie
down, and I was just laying down all the time, and a couple of years
went by. And the bones in my right leg from the knee down were not
healing," she tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And that went on
for a few years. ... And [then] when I started to heal, that's when I
started to sing — by myself — in a beautiful club in Cincinnati at the
age of 16."
The club was 18-and-up, so Day's
bandleader lied to the club owners and told them that his young singer
was, in fact, a legal adult.
"I kept
forgetting that I wasn't two years older for years," she says. "As the
years go on, and my mother said to me, 'You know what, it just occurred
to me. You're not really 30. You're 28.' And I looked at her and said,
'Oh my gosh, I forgot all about that.'" 'Romance On The High Seas'
Day's singing career eventually led her to Hollywood, where she got a part in the 1948 film Romance on the High Seas, without knowing she was auditioning for the role.
"I
was just out in Hollywood singing, and my manager was with me, and we
were going to have lunch," she says. "And he drove out to the studio,
and I knew nothing about that. We were standing around, and I said,
'What are we doing?' and he said, 'I'm arranging something.'"
Day's
manager told her that a young man was auditioning for a role in a movie
and she needed to help him out. That man, unbeknownst to Day, was
actually the film's director.
"So I read my
lines, and after that, he came up and took my hands and said, 'Darling,
you were very good' and I thought, 'How funny' and said, 'Thank you so
much, it was nice to meet you.' And with that, we left," she says.
Doris Day Collection
The Doris Day DVD
Collection from TCM contains four of Day's movies, including 'April in
Paris' and 'Starlift.' The CD collection, pictured below, features songs
curated by Day herself.
Day was due to leave Los Angeles the following morning, but received a phone call in her hotel room. It was actor Jack Carson.
"And
he said, 'Miss Day, this is Jack Carson. I know it's early in the day
to be calling you, and I heard that you were leaving for New York. I
want to tell you something — you are going to be in the best part, the
most important part, in the movie I'm doing next. And I want you to be
in it,'" she says.
Day accepted the offer and
soon began working on the film. On her second day of work, she was
invited into a studio to watch herself on the screen for the first time.
"I
went in and I just stood there, and Jack came up to me and he put his
arms around me," she says. "And he said, 'Everything is just perfect.
And you're the one. And I really enjoyed it today.' And he gave me a big
hug."
In the '50s and '60s, Day starred in a
string of romantic comedies, but frequently played an independent
working woman. In 1959's Pillow Talk, she played an independent interior designer opposite Rock Hudson. In Love Come Back, she worked in the advertising world. In Touch of Mink, with Cary Grant, she played a career woman.
"I
didn't feel different in any of them," she says, "even though they were
different. I loved being married, and I loved not being married but
working on it. And doing what I was supposed to do and be. That's the
way I worked." Working With Animals
Day stopped making movies in 1968, in part because she wanted a quieter lifestyle than what was available in Los Angeles.
"I came out to Carmel and it was so nice, and I have so many doggies," she says. "And I thought that this would really be nice."
In
1971, Day co-founded Actors and Others for Animals, and began to take
an active role in animal rescue work with the SPCA. She placed dozens of
rescue dogs in people's homes and rescued many on her own. At one
point, she had 30 dogs living in her house.
"It
was another area of the house," she says. "There was a lovely outside
place to eat, and it was so pretty and lovely with the fountain and
everything. And on the other side of that was where I had the dogs. And
they had a big area to run and they had a huge area to play. They were
just fabulous and I kept them all."
Day currently has six dogs and four cats.
"If
I come across a doggie who needs a home, that's when I take them," she
says. "They're in a special area — an outdoor area — but the ceiling is
all glass and they look up there and see the trees. They have two big
rooms inside and then one outside. They just love it."
TREADING
WATER IN OUR MEDIA OCEAN it is difficult, if not impossible, to
imagine the frenzy that surrounded Charlie Chaplin in his early years,
when movies were all there was, and Chaplin had become, in critic
Gilbert Seldes's words, "the universal symbol for laughter." In 1921,
when he finally came home to London, crowds camped out for two nights
to watch him drive from Waterloo station to the Ritz, and when he
cruised by, they greeted him with more enthusiasm than their heroes
marching home from war.
It
wasn't Chaplin they cheered, of course; it was the Tramp. From his
first pictures for producer Mack Sennett, who didn't credit actors, in a
Los Angeles where the Times didn't take movie ads, the Tramp
was an instant sensation. As Seldes remembers, he leapt to fame as a
splay-foot cardboard cutout hung outside the theaters, beckoning young
and old, first in America, but soon around the world.
Chaplin look-alike contest: J.W. Sandison Collection, Whatcom Museum of History and Art
Once
Charlie found the Tramp, he only played the Tramp. Why not? Who'd have
let him play anything else? This "many sided fellow," as Chaplin put
it, "a tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always
hopeful of romance and adventure," freed him to explore his complicated
talent, and bound him to his audience. The Tramp touched his
followers in a way only movie stars could when movies were new.
Splashed huge on the screen, he was bigger than they were but they
knew him like a brother. Their modest emotions, projected on the
silver Tramp, expanded into passions deeper, subtler, and seemingly
more important. Chaplin rubbed together greed and generosity, lust and
love, triumph and disappointment, igniting a hotter, brighter
laughter than they'd known before. They loved the Tramp with a
superhuman love.
Sennett
admitted he didn't see much potential in Chaplin when he hired him.
As he wrote, "Charlie revealed most of the trade skills of the
music-hall people. He could fall, trip, stumble, summersault, slap,
and make faces. These were stock in trade items we could use. I did
not see then, and I do not know anyone who claims to have seen then,
the subtleties and the pathos of the small, hard-pressed man in a
dilemma which a few years later were known as the genius marks of
Chaplin's art." In his first film, Making a Living, Chaplin played his music-hall persona, the burlesque dude, in the role of con man and aspiring reporter.
Shoving
the newsboy isn't funny. Chaplin's Tramp is a bum who believes he's an
aristocrat; Chaplin's dude is a bum conning others into believing it.
There's a hint of Tramp charm when he adjusts his clothing, but Chaplin
comes across as vain, mean-spirited, stiff and mannered. We root against
him.
Chaplin
wasn't happy, nor were Sennett or director Henry "Pathé" Lehrman.
Lehrman, Sennett's top man, earned his nickname pretending to come from
France. Sennett hated a picture that "drooled along" and liked Lehrman
because he pushed pace and pushed his bang-bang gags to the edge and
occasionally beyond. His actors, who paid the price for Lehrman's
enthusiasm, called him "Mr. Suicide." In Making a Living the director also played Chaplin's straight-man competitor.
Lehrman
hated Chaplin's meandering rhythms. He hectored him about movie timing.
Chaplin fought back. Sennett backed Lehrman, and suspended Chaplin for a
week "to force him to follow instructions." Chaplin said he was close
to quitting. His drunk act was a vaudeville staple; pictures were canned
comedy. He'd had enough of them.
Then,
on January 6, 1914, three weeks after Chaplin first walked in front of
Lehrman's camera, the Tramp waddled onto the hotel set for Mabel's Strange Predicament.
What
wrought this miraculous transformation? How did Chaplin find such ease
before the camera, such patience riding his instincts? Did he need any
help? Chaplin claimed his costume was all he needed. "The moment I was
dressed," he wrote, 50 years later, "the clothes and the make-up made me
feel the person he was."
While
Chaplin's stage persona was a well-known type, the Tramp was not so
easily labeled. He wasn't faking wealthy, exactly, but he wasn't just
dressed poor, either. "Everything a contradiction," Chaplin said, "the
pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large." He may
have been rich at some time, or he may not. He was outside class, and
outside the standard ethnic types that dominated vaudeville. He was
American, the way anyone could be American, wherever they came from. We
could all be the Tramp, yet he was uniquely himself. The Tramp dressed
not to fit a type but to fill out a personal fantasy: formal on top,
comfortable down below, self-conscious and oblivious at the same time.
Chaplin
wrote that the Tramp came to him whole: "I began to know him, and by
the time I walked on stage he was fully born." Sennett remembered
otherwise: "It was a long time before he abandoned cruelty, venality,
treachery, larceny, and lechery as the main characteristics of the
tramp." Looking at the Tramp's early films, we have to agree with
Sennett. And yet, before the Tramp was pathetic or lovable, he was
wildly popular. His gentle nature let his audience enjoy his vices
without hating itself. He was lecherous but not threatening, venal but
not vicious, treacherous but somehow loyal.
The
contradictions that let the audience enjoy Chaplin's genius were bought
with screen time. The Tramp didn't exactly drool along, but he chewed
his mustache and swung his cane and second-guessed himself, and that
broke Sennett's First Rule of Funny: it stopped the story. How did the
Tramp, a secondary character at that, appear in the first frame of Mabel's Strange Predicament
and then take 30 seconds to sit down? Chaplin claimed he invented the
Tramp alone, but someone had to let him eat up film. Lehrman wouldn't
stand for it. Who freed up Chaplin to be the Tramp? Was it Sennett, who
had just suspended him for such shenanigans?
Was
Sennett even there? He was producing, not directing, and had three
pictures going at the same time. Fifty years later Sennett claimed that
Chester Conklin, who was there, said that when the actors were
laughing at Charlie, "we didn't notice that the Old Man had come down
from the tower and was standing in the rear. All of a sudden we heard
him. 'Chaplin, you do exactly what you're doing now in your next
picture. Remember to do it in that get-up. Otherwise, England is
beckoning.'" The words Sennett puts in Conklin's mouth say exactly what
he'd like us all, himself included, to believe.
Chaplin
remembered a different scenario. In his version, all three pictures
were being cranked on the same stage. Chaplin ambled out in his street
clothes, and he wrote, Sennett was "looking into a hotel lobby, biting
the end of a cigar. 'We need some gags here,' he said, then turned to
me. 'Put on a comedy make-up. Anything will do.'" Chaplin returned as
the Tramp. "The secret of Mack Sennett's success was his enthusiasm. He
was a great audience and laughed genuinely at what he thought funny. He
stood and giggled until his body began to shake." Then Chaplin explained
his character in detail, for 10 minutes or more, "keeping Sennett in
continuous chuckles. 'All right,' he said, 'get on the set and see what
you can do there.'"
Chaplin's
story honors Sennett, perhaps, but it also confirms Chaplin's version
of creating the Tramp whole, as a single stroke of genius. But Chaplin's
version ignores the fact that the character he plays in the picture is
essential to the story, not simply an add-on in the first scene. He
couldn't have just ambled into the story, because there was no story
without him.
Mabel Normand and Mack Sennett
These
two eyewitness accounts, sharpened by novelistic detail (the voice from
behind, the chomped cigar) can't both be true. Sennett's account is
hearsay, so perhaps Chaplin deserves precedence, but if Chaplin's
account were true, wouldn't Sennett have told it himself? Sennett says
he wasn't there until the Tramp showed up. Wouldn't he want to take
credit for ordering Chaplin into the scene? What if they both have it
wrong? How did the volcanic, dictatorial Mack Sennett let pesky,
supercilious (and by all reports, foul-smelling) Chaplin, coming off a
week's suspension for bloody-mindedness, violate his First Rule of
Funny?
Chaplin
hinted at Sennett's doubts when he wrote, "It was a long scene that ran
seventy-five feet. Later Mr. Sennett and Mr. Lehrman debated whether to
let it run its full length, as the average comedy scene rarely ran over
ten." But Lehrman had nothing to do with Mabel's Strange Predicament.
If someone fought Sennett over Chaplin's screen time, it wasn't Mr.
Suicide, and if Sennett was fighting, it wasn't because he wanted more
time for Chaplin, but less.
Mabel Normand on the set, 1919
Only
one person on the Keystone lot could shout down Mack Sennett, and her
name was on the title of the picture, the little lady with the big plume
who walks out on Chaplin. Mabel Normand was Sennett's meal ticket and
his perpetual fiancée. Sennett's Keystone didn't credit actors, because
they might want more money, but Sennett hung Normand's name on her
pictures, because Mabel on a picture brought in crowds. She started as a
Gibson girl in her early teens, pushing Coke. She met Sennett when he
was a failed opera singer making comedies at Biograph for tomb-faced
D.W. Griffith. Sennett took her to Los Angeles, and made her immensely
popular. She made him a fortune.
Normand
was an inventor of the movie star, the first woman allowed to be both
sexy and funny. She was a high diver, a bareback rider, a race car
driver, and a flapper a decade before flappers. Photoplay called her "a
kiss that explodes in a laugh, cherry bonbons in a clown's cap, sharing a
cream puff with your best girl, a slap from a perfumed hand, the sugar
in the Keystone grapefruit." By the time the man who would become the
Tramp walked onto her set, Normand had worked on sets for four years,
and made over a hundred pictures. She was 22.
Shouldn't
we credit the director, the one who decided to shoot 75 feet, for the
success of the Tramp? Keystone didn't have writers in those days, but
did the director of Mabel's Strange Predicament unleash the
Tramp? Doesn't Sergio Leone deserve some credit for Clint Eastwood's Man
With No Name? Doesn't the director dictate tempo and decide who gets
the camera's attention? Isn't the director's job to seek out the hidden
talents of his actors and make sure they end up on screen? Doesn't a
good director jump on a happy accident like the Tramp and ride it with a
prayer of gratitude?
What
Sennett and Chaplin both neglect to mention in their memoirs is that
Mabel Normand was among the very first stars to direct their own films,
and Normand directed Mabel's Strange Predicament. Perhaps in the
intervening decades they forgot. It was certainly in their interest to
forget. Why diminish their own roles in creating the miracle of the
Tramp? Normand remembered it differently; she recalled Sennett's fury
after seeing Chaplin's performance, screaming that Lehrman "had hooked
himself up with a dead one." Normand said she begged him to give Charlie
another chance.
Sennett acknowledges her effect on Chaplin:
After
Mabel saw what Charlie could do in his new costume and tramp character,
she changed her mind about 'that Englisher.' She not only wanted to
work with him but wanted to help him. Charlie knew nothing about screen
acting. He did not know how to behave in front of a camera, or why he
was directed to move left to right in order to match a scene shot the
day before. He was baffled by instructions to react to someone off
camera — someone who would be inserted in the next day's shooting. Mabel
patiently explained these and other simple techniques to Charlie, who
had rebelled when Pathé Lehrman gave him orders.
I
submit that Normand did a good deal more. As director and star (and the
second most powerful person on the Keystone lot) she shaped Mabel's Strange Predicament.
She saw Chaplin's potential and worked to bring it out. Chaplin said he
was surrounded by rough and tumble types, admited he was anxious and
found Normand reassuring. He called it a "unique atmosphere of beauty
and the beast." Isn't it reasonable to believe that Normand, his
director and acting partner, loosened up Charlie? That she gave him
confidence in his own rhythms, and when she saw what she had, she knew
he was the key to making her picture work, and let him run on at
unprecedented length? He was a secondary character, but she built the
picture around him. Normand the star stepped back and let the Tramp take
over. Here she plays with Chaplin in the key scene of the picture, the
predicament scene, when she's locked out of her room wearing only her
pajamas, and the Tramp happens along. Notice how she plays to his tempo,
and gives himthe scene:
Normand
was known for a subtle comic style that isn't on display here. She
vamps along, buying time for Chaplin to wring his contradictions, from
surprising to calming her, to seeing they're alone, to eyeballing her,
to coming on to her, to chasing her tail. Sennett characters didn't have
time for such transitions, just as they didn't take 30 seconds to sit
down in a hotel lobby. I submit that Normand the director won Charlie's
confidence and drew this out of him, and that Mabel Normand the star
sacrificed her scene for the good of the picture.
Then
Normand the director protected what she had in the can. In his first
picture, Lehrman cut away from Chaplin whenever he could, so he could
snip out what he saw as dead time, returning only for what he saw as
action. These were the 10-foot scenes Chaplin talked about. Normand
guards Chaplin's rhythms and lets him breathe. Given Sennett's obsession
with pace, it is likely he had words with her during dailies. When
they edited the picture, it is likely he wanted to chop up Chaplin as
Lehrman had done. If so, Normand the director fought him on that, and
made sure Chaplin's pregnant pauses stayed in the picture. Could Sennett
have denied his director, his fiancé, his biggest star?
Unless
you've made a movie, it's to hard to conceive how difficult it is to
read your own picture before an audience sees it. This was as true for Star Wars and Casablanca as it was for Howard the Duck and Ishtar.
In fact, as William Goldman put it, nobody knows. Alan Pakula said he
could write the good review and the bad review, but which is the
audience writing? Once an audience sees the picture, all comes clear.
Once audiences saw Mabel's Strange Predicament and loved their
Tramp, Normand's insights became obvious and her strength of conviction
just good sense. But that doesn't diminish the courage or vision it
required before the fact.
When
Chaplin became the Tramp on Normand's watch, he also learned to be a
movie actor. As Sennett put it, Normand, "the greatest motion-picture
comedienne of any day, was as deft in pantomime as Chaplin was... She
worked in slapstick, but her stage business and her gestures were
subtle, not broad." Normand, the first movie star actress who wasn't
stage trained, hadn't been taught the comic conventions of the theater,
or to project to the back of the house. She had a movie-bred patience
for living in the moment. She was a movie star because while she was
beautiful, she let you see inside, and people liked what they saw.
Movies are supremely intimate, and Normand was consummate at drawing
people in, and holding them. We can watch Chaplin learning Normand's
delicate skills.
Three
months after the Tramp showed up, Sennett was cranking the first
feature-length comedy ever made, and Normand and Chaplin were part of
it, though neither one was above the title. Sennett's old boss was
making his first magnum opus, The Clansman, later called The Birth of a Nation,
and so Sennett wanted to match him. Smart money said a movie audience
couldn't laugh for more than half an hour, and Sennett bought insurance
in the form of Marie Dressler, star of the Broadway hit Tillie's Nightmare.
She would bring in the middle-class audience that was only beginning
to warm to cloth-cap darling Normand. Sennett paid Dressler her stage
rate, $2500 a week, or 10 times what Normand earned.
Dressler
was a skilled comedienne in the pre-Normand pattern of the grotesque
who thought herself a beauty, and she transferred well to pictures.
Later, Chaplin preferred ingénues to comediennes, but in Tillie's Punctured Romance
he plays against two of the best. Watching Chaplin play with
stage-trained Dressler and with movie-star Normand, we can see how
Normand's subtler style toned down Chaplin, and brought him closer to
the mature Tramp. Here, in Tillie, Chaplin doesn't play the Tramp. He's a low-life con man, after Dressler for her money. Sennett directs.
Here are Chaplin and Normand in the
same picture. Normand is Chaplin's moll. They've stolen Dressler's money
and spent it on fancy clothes, and they're watching a movie about a
pair of low-lifes like themselves doing the same thing. Sennett cut up
their close shot into 10-foot bits, but even in bits we can see they
have a comfort with each other that allows for nuance and grounds the
scene. Would Chaplin have found his subtle style without Normand, with
Sennet pushing pace?
Sennett
wrote about what Normand taught Chaplin, but Chaplin is mute on the
subject. In his autobiography Mabel is pretty, Mabel is sweet, Mabel is
reassuring, but Mabel is not an experienced professional who helps
perfect his art. Why is Chaplin so dismissive? In part because she's a
woman but more, I think, because Chaplin needed to portray Normand as
incompetent to justify the shabby way he treated her.
Before Tillie began, only six weeks after the Tramp first walked on stage, just as Mabel's Strange Predicament
came out in the East and the Tramp first captured the public
imagination, Sennett put Chaplin in a picture where he didn't play the
Tramp. Lehrman had absconded to Universal with Ford Sterling, Sennett's
most popular male star, and Sennett decided that Chaplin would play a
Sterling role in his next picture. This had the double virtue of
plugging the hole left by Sterling's departure and putting Chaplin in
the kind of role Sennett could appreciate, because unfortunately for
Chaplin, Sterling played the consummate scenery-chewing villain, a
vaudeville Dutch with the volume jacked to 11. Chaplin despised his style but went along with the gag. Perhaps suspension did its job.
To fans
of the Tramp, a spectacularly bad idea. Oddly, when Chaplin recalls
this picture he omits the fact that he played Ford Sterling. Here is his
account. Chaplin was 24, and had acted in pictures for all of 10 weeks:
Now
I was anxious to write and direct my own comedies, so I talked to
Sennett about it. But he would not hear of it; instead he assigned me to
Mabel Normand who had just started directing her own pictures. This
nettled me, for, charming as Mabel was, I doubted her competence as a
director; so the first day there came the inevitable blow-up ... Mabel
wanted me to stand with a hose and water down the road so the villain's
car would skid over it. [In fact Chaplin was the villain; Mabel drove
the car.] I suggested standing on the hose so that the water can't come
out, and when I look down the nozzle I unconsciously step off the hose
and the water squirts in my face. But she shut me up quickly: 'We have
no time! We have no time! Do what you're told.'
'I'm
sorry, Miss Normand,'" Chaplin says he replied, "'I don't think you are
competent to tell me what to do,'" and he walked off the set.
Sweet
Mabel — at the time she was only twenty [she was 22], pretty and
charming, everybody's favorite, everybody loved her. Now she sat by the
camera bewildered; nobody had ever talked to her so directly before.
Chaplin
said that his solution to their impasse was to strike a deal with
Sennett: he offered to let Normand finish this picture in exchange for
the right to direct his own picture next. Chaplin, a notorious tightwad,
had saved up $1500, and to allay Sennett's very reasonable misgivings
he offered it all to Keystone if his picture was unreleasable. Sennett,
pressured by East Coast reports of Chaplin's instant popularity, took
the deal. The rest, as they say, is history.
As
Chaplin biographer David Robinson points out, the spritz-in-the-eye bit
that Chaplin proposed was the oldest joke in movies, dating back to the
Lumière brothers in 1896. Normand probably wanted something fresher. Not
only had she already directed Chaplin well in Mabel's Strange Predicament, a few weeks later they'd partner up to direct Caught In a Cabaret together.
The
deeper truth is that Chaplin was set on directing his own pictures, and
Sennett wouldn't let him. The God Griffith could have helmed Mabel at the Wheel,
but Chaplin knew he was popular back East, knew this was his chance to
leverage himself into directing. To justify his dirty dealing, he had to
paint Normand as incompetent. As he put it, "this was my work."
In 10
weeks Chaplin had gone from rank amateur to auteur. If he had anyone but
himself to thank, it was probably Mabel Normand. He was lucky she was
directing when he decided to take home his football. According to Mabel,
a couple of extras offered to beat him up, and she talked them out of
it. Had Mr. Suicide been talking to those extras, Chaplin might have had
more painful memories.
Do we
know what really happened? No. But absence of evidence is not evidence
of absence. To understand what happened, we have to play with the facts
until we find the story that fits them together most comfortably. Mabel
Normand is the missing piece that knits together the invention of
Chaplin's Tramp.
We owe
it to Normand to speculate. She didn't have her say decades later like
the others. She was mortally ill by the time sound came to the movies,
and she died soon thereafter. It's easy to forget her brilliance,
because most of her pictures are gone as well. Chaplin's remain.
We need
to honor Normand for larger reasons. We all need genius. It's essential
to know that Great Souls are out there, revealing the potential of the
species, and we want to believe that true genius creates itself, and
forces itself on the world. But we only know those geniuses who have
broken through, and when we look at their stories, we often find that a
random stroke of luck or a passionate believer made all the difference.
If ever there was a movie genius, it was Charlie Chaplin. But anyone who
works in movies will tell you that when it comes to pictures, nobody
does anything alone.