Interview from 2000
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Friday, April 2, 2010
H. Edward Roberts, PC Pioneer, Dies at 68
By STEVE LOHR
Not many people in the computer world remembered H. Edward Roberts, not after he walked away from the industry more than three decades ago to become a country doctor in Georgia. Bill Gates remembered him, though.
As Dr. Roberts lay dying last week in a hospital in Macon, Ga., suffering from pneumonia, Mr. Gates flew down to be at his bedside.
Mr. Gates knew what many had forgotten: that Dr. Roberts had made an early and enduring contribution to modern computing. He created the MITS Altair, the first inexpensive general-purpose microcomputer, a device that could be programmed to do all manner of tasks. For that achievement, some historians say Dr. Roberts deserves to be recognized as the inventor of the personal computer.
For Mr. Gates, the connection to Dr. Roberts was also personal. It was writing software for the MITS Altair that gave Mr. Gates, a student at Harvard at the time, and his Microsoft partner, Paul G. Allen, their start. Later, they moved to Albuquerque, where Dr. Roberts had set up shop.
Dr. Roberts died Thursday at the Medical Center of Middle Georgia, his son Martin said. He was 68.
When the Altair was introduced in the mid-1970s, personal computers — then called microcomputers — were mainly intriguing electronic gadgets for hobbyists, the sort of people who tinkered with ham radio kits.
Dr. Roberts, it seems, was a classic hobbyist entrepreneur. He left his mark on computing, built a nice little business, sold it and moved on — well before personal computers moved into the mainstream of business and society.
Mr. Gates, as history proved, had far larger ambitions.
Over the years, there was some lingering animosity between the two men, and Dr. Roberts pointedly kept his distance from industry events — like the 20th anniversary celebration in Silicon Valley of the introduction of the I.B.M. PC in 1981, which signaled the corporate endorsement of PCs.
But in recent months, after learning that Dr. Roberts was ill, Mr. Gates made a point of reaching out to his former boss and customer. Mr. Gates sent Dr. Roberts a letter last December and followed up with phone calls, another son, Dr. John David Roberts, said. Eight days ago, Mr. Gates visited the elder Dr. Roberts at his bedside in Macon.
“Any past problems between those two were long since forgotten,” said Dr. John David Roberts, who had accompanied Mr. Gates to the hospital. He added that Mr. Allen, the other Microsoft founder, had also called the elder Dr. Roberts frequently in recent months.
On his Web site, Mr. Gates and Mr. Allen posted a joint statement, saying they were saddened by the death of “our friend and early mentor.”
“Ed was willing to take a chance on us — two young guys interested in computers long before they were commonplace — and we have always been grateful to him,” the statement said.
When the small MITS Altair appeared on the January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics, Mr. Gates and Mr. Allen plunged into writing a version of the Basic programming language that could run on the machine.
Mr. Gates dropped out of Harvard, and Mr. Allen left his job at Honeywell in Boston. The product they created for Dr. Roberts’s machine, Microsoft Basic, was the beginning of what would become the world’s largest software company and would make its founders billionaires many times over.
MITS was the kingpin of the fledgling personal computer business only briefly. In 1977, Mr. Roberts sold his company. He walked away a millionaire. But as a part of the sale, he agreed not to design computers for five years, an eternity in computing. It was a condition that Mr. Roberts, looking for a change, accepted.
He first invested in farmland in Georgia. After a few years, he switched course and decided to revive a childhood dream of becoming a physician, earning his medical degree in 1986 from Mercer University in Macon. He became a general practitioner in Cochran, 35 miles northwest of the university.
In Albuquerque, Dr. Roberts, a burly, 6-foot-4 former Air Force officer, often clashed with Mr. Gates, the skinny college dropout. Mr. Gates was “a very bright kid, but he was a constant headache at MITS,” Dr. Roberts said in an interview with The New York Times at his office in 2001.
“You couldn’t reason with him,” he added. “He did things his way or not at all.”
His former MITS colleagues recalled that Dr. Roberts could be hardheaded as well. “Unlike the rest of us, Bill never backed down from Ed Roberts face to face,” David Bunnell, a former MITS employee, said in 2001. “When they disagreed, sparks flew.”
Over the years, people have credited others with inventing the personal computer, including the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Apple and I.B.M. But Paul E. Ceruzzi, a technology historian at the Smithsonian Institution, wrote in “ History of Modern Computing” (MIT Press, 1998) that “H. Edward Roberts, the Altair’s designer, deserves credit as the inventor of the personal computer.”
Mr. Ceruzzi noted the “utter improbability and unpredictability” of having one of the most significant inventions of the 20th century come to life from such a seemingly obscure origin. “But Albuquerque it was,” Mr. Ceruzzi wrote, “for it was only at MITS that the technical and social components of personal computing converged.”
H. Edward Roberts was born in Miami on Sept. 13, 1941. His father, Henry Melvin Roberts, ran a household appliance repair service, and his mother, Edna Wilcher Roberts, was a nurse. As a young man, he wanted to be a doctor and, in fact, became intrigued by electronics working with doctors at the University of Miami who were doing experimental heart surgery. He built the electronics for a heart-lung machine. “That’s how I got into it,” Dr. Roberts recalled in 2001.
So he abandoned his intended field and majored in electrical engineering at Oklahoma State University. Then, he worked on a room-size I.B.M. computer. But the power of computing, Dr. Roberts recalled, “opened up a whole new world. And I began thinking, What if you gave everyone a computer?”
In addition to his sons Martin, of Glenwood, Ga., and John David, of Eastman, Ga., Dr. Roberts is survived by his mother, Edna Wilcher Roberts, of Dublin, Ga., his wife, Rosa Roberts of Cochran; his sons Edward, of Atlanta, and Melvin and Clark, both of Athens, Ga.; his daughter, Dawn Roberts, of Warner Robins, Ga.; three grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
His previous two marriages, to Donna Mauldin Roberts and Joan C. Roberts, ended in divorce.
His sons said Dr. Roberts never gave up his love for making things, for tinkering and invention. He was an accomplished woodworker, making furniture for his household, family and friends. He made a Star Wars-style light saber for a neighbor’s son, using light-emitting diodes. And several years ago he designed his own electronic medical records software, though he never tried to market it, his son Dr. Roberts said.
“Once he figured something out,” he added, “he was on to the next thing.”
Not many people in the computer world remembered H. Edward Roberts, not after he walked away from the industry more than three decades ago to become a country doctor in Georgia. Bill Gates remembered him, though.
As Dr. Roberts lay dying last week in a hospital in Macon, Ga., suffering from pneumonia, Mr. Gates flew down to be at his bedside.
Mr. Gates knew what many had forgotten: that Dr. Roberts had made an early and enduring contribution to modern computing. He created the MITS Altair, the first inexpensive general-purpose microcomputer, a device that could be programmed to do all manner of tasks. For that achievement, some historians say Dr. Roberts deserves to be recognized as the inventor of the personal computer.
For Mr. Gates, the connection to Dr. Roberts was also personal. It was writing software for the MITS Altair that gave Mr. Gates, a student at Harvard at the time, and his Microsoft partner, Paul G. Allen, their start. Later, they moved to Albuquerque, where Dr. Roberts had set up shop.
Dr. Roberts died Thursday at the Medical Center of Middle Georgia, his son Martin said. He was 68.
When the Altair was introduced in the mid-1970s, personal computers — then called microcomputers — were mainly intriguing electronic gadgets for hobbyists, the sort of people who tinkered with ham radio kits.
Dr. Roberts, it seems, was a classic hobbyist entrepreneur. He left his mark on computing, built a nice little business, sold it and moved on — well before personal computers moved into the mainstream of business and society.
Mr. Gates, as history proved, had far larger ambitions.
Over the years, there was some lingering animosity between the two men, and Dr. Roberts pointedly kept his distance from industry events — like the 20th anniversary celebration in Silicon Valley of the introduction of the I.B.M. PC in 1981, which signaled the corporate endorsement of PCs.
But in recent months, after learning that Dr. Roberts was ill, Mr. Gates made a point of reaching out to his former boss and customer. Mr. Gates sent Dr. Roberts a letter last December and followed up with phone calls, another son, Dr. John David Roberts, said. Eight days ago, Mr. Gates visited the elder Dr. Roberts at his bedside in Macon.
“Any past problems between those two were long since forgotten,” said Dr. John David Roberts, who had accompanied Mr. Gates to the hospital. He added that Mr. Allen, the other Microsoft founder, had also called the elder Dr. Roberts frequently in recent months.
On his Web site, Mr. Gates and Mr. Allen posted a joint statement, saying they were saddened by the death of “our friend and early mentor.”
“Ed was willing to take a chance on us — two young guys interested in computers long before they were commonplace — and we have always been grateful to him,” the statement said.
When the small MITS Altair appeared on the January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics, Mr. Gates and Mr. Allen plunged into writing a version of the Basic programming language that could run on the machine.
Mr. Gates dropped out of Harvard, and Mr. Allen left his job at Honeywell in Boston. The product they created for Dr. Roberts’s machine, Microsoft Basic, was the beginning of what would become the world’s largest software company and would make its founders billionaires many times over.
MITS was the kingpin of the fledgling personal computer business only briefly. In 1977, Mr. Roberts sold his company. He walked away a millionaire. But as a part of the sale, he agreed not to design computers for five years, an eternity in computing. It was a condition that Mr. Roberts, looking for a change, accepted.
He first invested in farmland in Georgia. After a few years, he switched course and decided to revive a childhood dream of becoming a physician, earning his medical degree in 1986 from Mercer University in Macon. He became a general practitioner in Cochran, 35 miles northwest of the university.
In Albuquerque, Dr. Roberts, a burly, 6-foot-4 former Air Force officer, often clashed with Mr. Gates, the skinny college dropout. Mr. Gates was “a very bright kid, but he was a constant headache at MITS,” Dr. Roberts said in an interview with The New York Times at his office in 2001.
“You couldn’t reason with him,” he added. “He did things his way or not at all.”
His former MITS colleagues recalled that Dr. Roberts could be hardheaded as well. “Unlike the rest of us, Bill never backed down from Ed Roberts face to face,” David Bunnell, a former MITS employee, said in 2001. “When they disagreed, sparks flew.”
Over the years, people have credited others with inventing the personal computer, including the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Apple and I.B.M. But Paul E. Ceruzzi, a technology historian at the Smithsonian Institution, wrote in “ History of Modern Computing” (MIT Press, 1998) that “H. Edward Roberts, the Altair’s designer, deserves credit as the inventor of the personal computer.”
Mr. Ceruzzi noted the “utter improbability and unpredictability” of having one of the most significant inventions of the 20th century come to life from such a seemingly obscure origin. “But Albuquerque it was,” Mr. Ceruzzi wrote, “for it was only at MITS that the technical and social components of personal computing converged.”
H. Edward Roberts was born in Miami on Sept. 13, 1941. His father, Henry Melvin Roberts, ran a household appliance repair service, and his mother, Edna Wilcher Roberts, was a nurse. As a young man, he wanted to be a doctor and, in fact, became intrigued by electronics working with doctors at the University of Miami who were doing experimental heart surgery. He built the electronics for a heart-lung machine. “That’s how I got into it,” Dr. Roberts recalled in 2001.
So he abandoned his intended field and majored in electrical engineering at Oklahoma State University. Then, he worked on a room-size I.B.M. computer. But the power of computing, Dr. Roberts recalled, “opened up a whole new world. And I began thinking, What if you gave everyone a computer?”
In addition to his sons Martin, of Glenwood, Ga., and John David, of Eastman, Ga., Dr. Roberts is survived by his mother, Edna Wilcher Roberts, of Dublin, Ga., his wife, Rosa Roberts of Cochran; his sons Edward, of Atlanta, and Melvin and Clark, both of Athens, Ga.; his daughter, Dawn Roberts, of Warner Robins, Ga.; three grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
His previous two marriages, to Donna Mauldin Roberts and Joan C. Roberts, ended in divorce.
His sons said Dr. Roberts never gave up his love for making things, for tinkering and invention. He was an accomplished woodworker, making furniture for his household, family and friends. He made a Star Wars-style light saber for a neighbor’s son, using light-emitting diodes. And several years ago he designed his own electronic medical records software, though he never tried to market it, his son Dr. Roberts said.
“Once he figured something out,” he added, “he was on to the next thing.”
Friday, March 19, 2010
Fess Parker, Who as Davy Crockett Set Off Coonskin Cap Craze, Dies at 85
By RICHARD SEVERO
Fess Parker, whose television portrayal of the American frontiersman Davy Crockett catapulted him to stardom in the mid-1950s and inspired millions of children to wear coonskin caps in one of America’s greatest merchandising fads, died on Thursday at his home in the Santa Ynez Valley in California, where he ran a successful winery. He was 85.
A family spokeswoman, Sao Anash, said Mr. Parker died of natural causes.
Mr. Parker went rustic once again in the 1960s to play Daniel Boone for a new wave of young television watchers, but by the mid-1970s he had largely given up acting and become a successful businessman and real estate developer. In 1987, he and his son, Eli, purchased a 714-acre ranch and established the Fess Parker Winery and Vineyard.
Mr. Parker was a genial, handsome, imposingly tall but somewhat obscure Hollywood actor when he was discovered by Walt Disney, whose company was about to produce a series of Davy Crockett episodes for “Disneyland,” his new ABC television show.
Disney had been searching for a quintessential American type to play the rough-hewn hero of the Alamo and had considered established stars like Glenn Ford, Sterling Hayden and Ronald Reagan before deciding against them. When someone suggested James Arness, Disney went to see “Them!,” a well-regarded 1954 science-fiction movie in which Mr. Arness — who later went on to TV stardom on “Gunsmoke” — had a major role. Mr. Parker had a small but visible part in the film, and when Disney saw him — rugged-looking and well over 6 feet tall — he was said to have exclaimed, “There’s our Davy Crockett!”
The scriptwriter for the series, Tom W. Blackburn, and the head staff composer for the Disney organization, George Bruns, came up with a title song, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” and it was introduced on the first episode of “Disneyland” on Oct. 27, 1954, to publicize the coming Crockett episodes.
The song, with multiple choruses, began:
Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee
Greenest state in the land of the free
Raised in the woods so he knew every tree
Kilt him a b’ar when he was only 3
Davy, Davy Crockett
King of the wild frontier
“The Ballad of Davy Crockett” would become stamped in the memories of a generation of young viewers. A number of artists, including Mr. Parker himself, recorded the song, and it sold in the millions. Bill Hayes’s version reached No. 1 on the pop charts. Tennessee Ernie Ford, Eddy Arnold, Burl Ives and Mitch Miller were among the others to come out with recordings.
The first episode of the Davy Crockett trilogy, “Davy Crockett: Indian Fighter,” with Buddy Ebsen as Mr. Parker’s sidekick, George, was shown on Dec. 15, 1954. “Davy Crockett Goes to Congress” appeared on Jan. 26, 1955. By the time the last episode, “Davy Crockett at the Alamo,” was broadcast, on Feb. 23, 1955, the country was in a Crockett frenzy.
Children wore coonskin caps to school and wore them to bed. They wore them with their Davy Crockett plastic fringe frontier costumes while they played with their Crockett trading cards, their Crockett board games and puzzles, their Crockett color slide sets and their Crockett powder horns. They pestered their parents for Crockett toy muskets and Crockett bubble gum and Crockett rings and comic books.
By the end of 1955, The New York Times reported, American children had their choice of more than 3,000 different Davy Crockett toys, lunch boxes, thermoses and coloring books.
The Disney studio also turned episodes from the series into two feature films — “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier” in 1955 and “Davy Crockett and the River Pirates” the following year.
If the Disney scripts stretched the truth about Crockett, the final episode remained faithful to at least one historical fact. The real-life Crockett died at the Alamo in 1836 at the age of 49, and Mr. Parker’s Crockett fell there, too. But Disney, responding to a public outcry, brought him back for episodes in the 1955-56 season, including “Davy Crockett’s Keelboat Race.”
“Take off those black armbands, kids,” the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper wrote, “and put on your coonskin caps, for Davy Crockett will hit the trail again.”
But not for long. By early 1956 interest had begun to flag, and as suddenly as it had begun, the craze ended.
Mr. Parker had brought a quiet, manly dignity to his portrayal of Davy Crockett. Paul Andrew Hutton, a historian at the University of New Mexico, said the character had given young children “an appreciation not only of history but of a kind of patriotism and self-sacrifice.”
Years later, Mr. Parker said, Vietnam veterans told him that watching his Crockett deal with fear when they were young had influenced their conduct in battle.
Mr. Parker continued to star for Disney in films like “The Great Locomotive Chase” (1956), “Westward Ho the Wagons!” (1956), “Old Yeller” (1957) and “The Light in the Forest” (1958).
But he began to chafe at the roles the Disney organization was offering him, and when he refused to appear in “Tonka,” the studio suspended him. He was unhappy, too, that Walt Disney had discouraged his being cast in “The Searchers,” the John Ford classic starring John Wayne, and “Bus Stop,” with Marilyn Monroe.
In 1963, Mr. Parker took to the stage as Curly in a touring production of “Oklahoma!” But the movie roles he wanted didn’t come his way.
In 1964 he put on buckskin again in the title role of “Daniel Boone.” That series ran for six years, but it didn’t capture the public’s imagination the way “Davy Crockett” had.
Fess Elisha Parker II was born in Fort Worth on Aug. 16, 1924, and grew up in San Angelo, where his family raised watermelons, peanuts and cattle. He attended Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Tex., before joining the Navy in World War II and participating in mopping-up operations in the Philippines. Afterward he attended the University of Texas and the University of Southern California.
He began acting professionally in 1951, in the national company of “Mister Roberts.” Shortly afterward, he made his film debut in “Untamed Frontier” (1952), with Joseph Cotten and Shelley Winters, and appeared in small roles in other films.
Over the years Mr. Parker made many guest appearances on television variety shows. He also had a short-lived series in 1962 called “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” based on the 1939 Frank Capra movie that starred James Stewart.
Mr. Parker married Marcella Rinehart in 1960 and died on her 84th birthday, Ms. Anash, the family spokeswoman, told The Associated Press. Besides his wife, he is survived by his son, Fess Elisha Parker III; his daughter, Ashley Parker-Snyder; and 11 grandchildren.
As a developer and entrepreneur, Mr. Parker had interests in luxury hotels and a mobile home park in addition to his winery, which had its first harvest in 1989. He also acquired a reputation for being sure of himself and determined to get his way. Playing Davy Crockett, he said, had made him that way.
And if Crockett had a shrewd side, so did the businessman in Mr. Parker, who understood the character’s continuing marketing power long after the ’50s craze had become a memory.
At his winery visitors almost invariably asked him about Crockett, and he was sure to direct them to the gift shop, where coonskin caps were for sale. And though he politely but consistently refused to wear one for their cameras, he was always happy to sign a Fess Parker wine label, bearing its familiar trademark: a tiny picture of a coonskin cap.
Fess Parker, whose television portrayal of the American frontiersman Davy Crockett catapulted him to stardom in the mid-1950s and inspired millions of children to wear coonskin caps in one of America’s greatest merchandising fads, died on Thursday at his home in the Santa Ynez Valley in California, where he ran a successful winery. He was 85.
A family spokeswoman, Sao Anash, said Mr. Parker died of natural causes.
Mr. Parker went rustic once again in the 1960s to play Daniel Boone for a new wave of young television watchers, but by the mid-1970s he had largely given up acting and become a successful businessman and real estate developer. In 1987, he and his son, Eli, purchased a 714-acre ranch and established the Fess Parker Winery and Vineyard.
Mr. Parker was a genial, handsome, imposingly tall but somewhat obscure Hollywood actor when he was discovered by Walt Disney, whose company was about to produce a series of Davy Crockett episodes for “Disneyland,” his new ABC television show.
Disney had been searching for a quintessential American type to play the rough-hewn hero of the Alamo and had considered established stars like Glenn Ford, Sterling Hayden and Ronald Reagan before deciding against them. When someone suggested James Arness, Disney went to see “Them!,” a well-regarded 1954 science-fiction movie in which Mr. Arness — who later went on to TV stardom on “Gunsmoke” — had a major role. Mr. Parker had a small but visible part in the film, and when Disney saw him — rugged-looking and well over 6 feet tall — he was said to have exclaimed, “There’s our Davy Crockett!”
The scriptwriter for the series, Tom W. Blackburn, and the head staff composer for the Disney organization, George Bruns, came up with a title song, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” and it was introduced on the first episode of “Disneyland” on Oct. 27, 1954, to publicize the coming Crockett episodes.
The song, with multiple choruses, began:
Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee
Greenest state in the land of the free
Raised in the woods so he knew every tree
Kilt him a b’ar when he was only 3
Davy, Davy Crockett
King of the wild frontier
“The Ballad of Davy Crockett” would become stamped in the memories of a generation of young viewers. A number of artists, including Mr. Parker himself, recorded the song, and it sold in the millions. Bill Hayes’s version reached No. 1 on the pop charts. Tennessee Ernie Ford, Eddy Arnold, Burl Ives and Mitch Miller were among the others to come out with recordings.
The first episode of the Davy Crockett trilogy, “Davy Crockett: Indian Fighter,” with Buddy Ebsen as Mr. Parker’s sidekick, George, was shown on Dec. 15, 1954. “Davy Crockett Goes to Congress” appeared on Jan. 26, 1955. By the time the last episode, “Davy Crockett at the Alamo,” was broadcast, on Feb. 23, 1955, the country was in a Crockett frenzy.
Children wore coonskin caps to school and wore them to bed. They wore them with their Davy Crockett plastic fringe frontier costumes while they played with their Crockett trading cards, their Crockett board games and puzzles, their Crockett color slide sets and their Crockett powder horns. They pestered their parents for Crockett toy muskets and Crockett bubble gum and Crockett rings and comic books.
By the end of 1955, The New York Times reported, American children had their choice of more than 3,000 different Davy Crockett toys, lunch boxes, thermoses and coloring books.
The Disney studio also turned episodes from the series into two feature films — “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier” in 1955 and “Davy Crockett and the River Pirates” the following year.
If the Disney scripts stretched the truth about Crockett, the final episode remained faithful to at least one historical fact. The real-life Crockett died at the Alamo in 1836 at the age of 49, and Mr. Parker’s Crockett fell there, too. But Disney, responding to a public outcry, brought him back for episodes in the 1955-56 season, including “Davy Crockett’s Keelboat Race.”
“Take off those black armbands, kids,” the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper wrote, “and put on your coonskin caps, for Davy Crockett will hit the trail again.”
But not for long. By early 1956 interest had begun to flag, and as suddenly as it had begun, the craze ended.
Mr. Parker had brought a quiet, manly dignity to his portrayal of Davy Crockett. Paul Andrew Hutton, a historian at the University of New Mexico, said the character had given young children “an appreciation not only of history but of a kind of patriotism and self-sacrifice.”
Years later, Mr. Parker said, Vietnam veterans told him that watching his Crockett deal with fear when they were young had influenced their conduct in battle.
Mr. Parker continued to star for Disney in films like “The Great Locomotive Chase” (1956), “Westward Ho the Wagons!” (1956), “Old Yeller” (1957) and “The Light in the Forest” (1958).
But he began to chafe at the roles the Disney organization was offering him, and when he refused to appear in “Tonka,” the studio suspended him. He was unhappy, too, that Walt Disney had discouraged his being cast in “The Searchers,” the John Ford classic starring John Wayne, and “Bus Stop,” with Marilyn Monroe.
In 1963, Mr. Parker took to the stage as Curly in a touring production of “Oklahoma!” But the movie roles he wanted didn’t come his way.
In 1964 he put on buckskin again in the title role of “Daniel Boone.” That series ran for six years, but it didn’t capture the public’s imagination the way “Davy Crockett” had.
Fess Elisha Parker II was born in Fort Worth on Aug. 16, 1924, and grew up in San Angelo, where his family raised watermelons, peanuts and cattle. He attended Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Tex., before joining the Navy in World War II and participating in mopping-up operations in the Philippines. Afterward he attended the University of Texas and the University of Southern California.
He began acting professionally in 1951, in the national company of “Mister Roberts.” Shortly afterward, he made his film debut in “Untamed Frontier” (1952), with Joseph Cotten and Shelley Winters, and appeared in small roles in other films.
Over the years Mr. Parker made many guest appearances on television variety shows. He also had a short-lived series in 1962 called “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” based on the 1939 Frank Capra movie that starred James Stewart.
Mr. Parker married Marcella Rinehart in 1960 and died on her 84th birthday, Ms. Anash, the family spokeswoman, told The Associated Press. Besides his wife, he is survived by his son, Fess Elisha Parker III; his daughter, Ashley Parker-Snyder; and 11 grandchildren.
As a developer and entrepreneur, Mr. Parker had interests in luxury hotels and a mobile home park in addition to his winery, which had its first harvest in 1989. He also acquired a reputation for being sure of himself and determined to get his way. Playing Davy Crockett, he said, had made him that way.
And if Crockett had a shrewd side, so did the businessman in Mr. Parker, who understood the character’s continuing marketing power long after the ’50s craze had become a memory.
At his winery visitors almost invariably asked him about Crockett, and he was sure to direct them to the gift shop, where coonskin caps were for sale. And though he politely but consistently refused to wear one for their cameras, he was always happy to sign a Fess Parker wine label, bearing its familiar trademark: a tiny picture of a coonskin cap.
Monday, February 15, 2010
The dark secrets about Charlie Chaplin's mother
Ill-fated: The tragic decline of Hannah Chaplin haunted the star all his life
Notorious for his under-age mistresses and pilloried for his Leftwing views, Charlie Chaplin will forever be remembered for his tear-jerking performances as the vulnerable Little Tramp - the icon he created in silent movie days.
The endearing figure with his bowler hat, cane and slapstick routines was inspired by Chaplin's poverty stricken childhood in the grim back-streets of Victorian London and the British music halls where he first performed.
And it has always been assumed that the pathos that made the character so memorable had its origins in his father's tragic early death from alcoholism and his own incarceration in a Dickensian-style orphanage at the age of seven.
But now a new book by the renowned psychiatrist Dr Stephen Weissman claims that the real source of Chaplin's sorrow, and therefore his creative juices, was not so much the loss of his feckless father, but the terrible and hitherto untold story of his beautiful mother, Hannah.
Instead of being the loving and glamorous parent Chaplin always claimed she had been, new evidence suggests that Hannah - a minor music hall star who performed under the name of Lily Harley - spent part of her youth working as a prostitute with tragic longterm consequences.
For Weissman claims that she contracted syphilis - a disease not readily curable in the late 19th century - and that it triggered a harrowing descent into madness, witnessed by the young Chaplin who would never be able to forget it.
According to one of his mistresses, silent film star Louise Brooks, it left him so scarred he would never have sex without first painting the appropriate part of his body with iodine to try to prevent any possible infection.
Hannah's fate was so horrible that, until now, Chaplin biographers have fought shy of revealing the details.
Chaplin's own autobiography, published in 1964, has a deeply moving first chapter about the travails of his South London childhood, but he ascribes his mother's mental decay and subsequent incarceration to malnutrition brought about by depriving herself of food in order to feed her sons.
As a result, even Chaplin's children have remained ignorant of the whole truth. Indeed, when his eldest daughter Geraldine, herself a famous actress, learned that a new book was being written delving into her grandmother's sad decline, she first tried to ban publication.
Little Tramp: The character was shaped by Chaplin's hard upbringing
But she soon realised that the new information unearthed by Weissman would cast invaluable light on the source of Charlie Chaplin's genius.
So what was Hannah's story? The daughter of a shoemaker of gipsy stock, she ran away from home at 16 and, naming herself after the famous Victorian music hall star Lillie Langtry, went on the stage.
Soon she had fallen in love with Charles Chaplin Snr, a butcher's son turned actor, whom she met when they were both playing in a popular comic opera.
Always a dreamer and enchanted by the rags-to-riches story of Napoleon's wife Josephine, Hannah said she was drawn to Charlie senior because of his resemblance to the French Emperor.
But three years later she abandoned him and, still a teenager, ran off to South Africa with another lover, Sydney Hawkes, a cockney conman who posed as a rich aristocrat with vast colonial estates.
New research has convinced Weissman that Hawkes was in fact a pimp who took her off to the gold rush boomtown of Witwatersrand and forced her, like many other gullible cockney girls of the time, to work as a prostitute in dance halls servicing the sex-starved gold miners.
Life among the fortune seekers who rushed to the dusty outpost from all over the world was tough, cut-throat and dangerous.
By 1884 Hannah had had enough, and although pregnant by Hawkes, decided to return home to England and look up her old sweetheart, Charles Chaplin.
Hawkes's son, also called Sydney, was born the following year, yet she and Chaplin resumed their romantic relationship and worked together on the London stage.
In 1886 they married and in due course had their own child, the comic genius Charlie Chaplin, born in 1889.
The little boy, who inherited his mother's fantasising streak, would later romanticise his early childhood and the strength of his parents' bond.
He adored his mother, recalling her as dainty and beautiful with violet eyes and fair hair so long that she could sit on it. He loved the way she dressed him in velvet and remembered fondly how she would enact imaginary scenes from the life of one of her many heroines, the 17th century courtesan Nell Gwyn, mistress of Charles II.
But Hannah was not the fashionable actress or the faithful wife that her young son had imagined.
Even Chaplin's children never knew the truth
Soon she had left Charlie's father yet again, this time for a fling with a more famous actor, Leo Dryden, by whom she had a third son.
Hannah now had three boys by three different men, but had managed to fall out with all their fathers.
After Dryden abandoned her, taking their baby with him, she was forced to take stage jobs in ever smaller theatres to feed her two other children. She even had to pawn her glamorous stage gowns to pay the rent.
Her faltering career finally ground to a halt one night when her singing voice cracked and sank to a whisper in the middle of her act and the audience cruelly laughed her off stage.
Charlie, aged five, was listening in the wings, appalled by her humiliation. But, already a talented mimic, the little boy took his mother's place under the spotlight and finished her act.
Film star: Chaplin in City Lights with Virginia Cherrill
In the following months, he would have to cope with far worse. Soon his mother started to develop blinding migraines, accompanied by terrifying hallucinations.
The headaches, which lasted up to a month, made it impossible for her to look after her boys and they were taken into the poorhouse.
When Charlie was seven, he was moved into the orphanage he hated.
This time Hannah recovered sufficiently to get her children back, but from now on she was a changed character.
Obsessed with her failing health she took up religion in an attempt to find a cure. Now, instead of going on stage, she would spend her evenings acting out scenes from the Bible for her boys at home.
Charlie, of course, had no idea at this point what was wrong with his mother and concluded her bizarre behaviour was designed specifically to hurt him.
Not according to his biographer Weissman, who learned Hannah's devastating secret from newly discovered contemporary medical records.
In 1898 she was diagnosed as syphilitic and suffering from the violent psychotic episodes characteristic of the tertiary stage of the disease.
Suddenly, says Weissman, everything fits into place. Syphilis would also have been the cause of her terrible headaches, for they too are a symptom of the ailment.
They can occur up to ten years after the initial infection and Hananh must have contracted it while she was working as a prostitute in South Africa.
Left untreated, the disease took such a toll on Chaplin's mother that by the time she was 35 she was confined to the grim Cane Hill Lunatic Asylum on the outskirts of London, where she had to be kept in a padded room.
On this occasion her sons were sent to live with Chaplin Senior, and though young Charlie amused himself by perfecting impressions of his drunken father and his wayward mistress Louise, he was pining all the while for his absent mother.
The sensitive boy was horrified by her condition
Eventually, Hannah was released from Cane Hill and mother and sons were reunited in a cheap top-floor room next to a slaughterhouse in London's Kennington, where she made a living as a seamstress, setting herself up with a borrowed sewing machine.
This time her income was supplemented by Charlie's father, who had begun to take his paternal responsibilities more seriously.
Young Charlie, too, was encouraged to contribute to the family income by doing what he loved best - performing. Once more, however, his happiness was to be short-lived.
In 1901, his father died of cirrhosis of the liver, aged just 37, and was buried in a pauper's grave.
Then, two years later, his mother had a nervous breakdown and was again hospitalised.
Charlie, by now a sensitive 14-year-old, was profoundly shocked to see her ravings and hallucinations accompanied by an apparently drunken gait - all characteristic of the ravages of tertiary syphilis.
To make matters worse, this time Charlie was left completely on his own in the family flat and was rescued from the squalor in which he was living only by the return to London of his half brother Sydney, now a 19-year-old ship's steward.
The elder lad spruced up the young urchin and took him round the theatrical agencies.
Adored around the world: Chaplin waves to the crowds in Canning Town in 1931
Soon they both had acting jobs and could afford to send money to their mother. But within a year she was found wandering the streets again and was sent back to hospital.
She was now such a pathetic figure that Charlie could scarcely bear to visit her.
Instead, he threw himself into his work, serving an apprenticeship in music halls all over the country and learning the slapstick, burlesque routines that would make him a star.
Though he suffered many setbacks - often booed off stage, just as his mother had been - he finally landed a lucrative contract with the great impresario Fred Karno.
But though Charlie's acting talent was not in doubt, his relations with women were affected permanently by his mother's instability. For a long time he had no idea how to treat girls and his only companions were Piccadilly whores.
And when he finally fell in love with 15-year-old showgirl Hetty Kelly in 1908, he scared her away by proposing immediately.
Then, when Hetty turned him down, he spent the rest of his life fantasising about a rapturous reunion with her.
In the end one of Fred Karno's productions earned Chaplin a ticket to America, where he would make his fortune.
He was now 21, just 5ft 4in tall and weighed little more than 9st, yet so supremely confident that when his ship approached the docks in Manhattan he took his hat off and shouted: 'America, I'm coming to conquer you! Every man, woman and child shall have my name on their lips - Charles Spencer Chaplin!'
The little comic crossed the Atlantic twice before his boast came true. He toured America from coast to coast and claimed to have bedded 2,000 women en route.
Then one night in 1912, his act was seen in New York by legendary producer Mack Sennett, who ran the famous Keystone studios in California. Sennett lured Chaplin West by doubling his salary.
And so, on a rainy day in February, the scrawny newcomer to the Keystone film company started rummaging idly through the communal wardrobe.
There he came across silent star Fatty Arbuckle's huge pantaloons and bowler hat; trimmed down comedian Mack Swain's false moustache; put Keystone Cop Ford Sterling's size 14 boots on his feet and wrapped himself in director Charles Avery's cutaway jacket.
He brought her to America and hired expert carers
Chaplin looked in the mirror and saw the transformation that would make him world famous.
He said he knew the Little Tramp intimately: 'He was myself, a comic spirit, something within me that said I must express myself.'
This was the character formed of his turbulent childhood, of all the roles he had played in the English music halls and of the acute sense of loss he had felt when separated from his mother.
As for Hannah, she never recovered. By 1921, just as her gifted son was starting to make his most famous movies, she was in the irreversible throes of dementia.
Desperate to be reunited with her despite her illness, Chaplin brought her to Hollywood to join himself, her first-born Sydney and her long-lost third son Wheeler Dryden, who was working for Chaplin.
Fourth time lucky: Chaplin finally found happiness with wife Oona
He bought her a house in California and engaged round-the-clock carers. Then he started work on his 1925 film The Gold Rush, almost certainly inspired, according to psychiatrist Weissman, by his mother's early South African escapades.
Weissman believes, too, that Chaplin was prompted to embark on the most poignant of all his movies, City Lights as a direct consequence of Hannah's death aged 65 in 1928.
In it, the Little Tramp falls in love with a blind flowerseller and, putting aside his own feelings, tries to engineer a reunion between her and the millionaire benefactor she prefers - an indication, says his psychiatrist biographer, that the little comic was still yearning for a reunion between his parents more than 30 years after his childhood was torn apart by their separation.
In real life Chaplin himself was unable to settle down until many years later. He famously had affairs with most of his leading ladies - and married three of them, Mildred Harris, 16-year-old Lita Gray and Paulette Goddard.
But he did finally recreate the happy family life he had always wanted. In 1943 when he was 54, Chaplin married 18-year-old Oona, daughter of the great playwright Eugene O'Neill, and fathered eight more children.
One of those was daughter Geraldine, who played her grandmother, Hannah, in Richard Attenborough's 1992 film about Chaplin's genius.
For Geraldine, Weissman's extraordinary revelations have proved particularly heart-wrenching. For, as happens with so many comic stars, her father's bravest of faces hid a truly haunting story.
Notorious for his under-age mistresses and pilloried for his Leftwing views, Charlie Chaplin will forever be remembered for his tear-jerking performances as the vulnerable Little Tramp - the icon he created in silent movie days.
The endearing figure with his bowler hat, cane and slapstick routines was inspired by Chaplin's poverty stricken childhood in the grim back-streets of Victorian London and the British music halls where he first performed.
And it has always been assumed that the pathos that made the character so memorable had its origins in his father's tragic early death from alcoholism and his own incarceration in a Dickensian-style orphanage at the age of seven.
But now a new book by the renowned psychiatrist Dr Stephen Weissman claims that the real source of Chaplin's sorrow, and therefore his creative juices, was not so much the loss of his feckless father, but the terrible and hitherto untold story of his beautiful mother, Hannah.
Instead of being the loving and glamorous parent Chaplin always claimed she had been, new evidence suggests that Hannah - a minor music hall star who performed under the name of Lily Harley - spent part of her youth working as a prostitute with tragic longterm consequences.
For Weissman claims that she contracted syphilis - a disease not readily curable in the late 19th century - and that it triggered a harrowing descent into madness, witnessed by the young Chaplin who would never be able to forget it.
According to one of his mistresses, silent film star Louise Brooks, it left him so scarred he would never have sex without first painting the appropriate part of his body with iodine to try to prevent any possible infection.
Hannah's fate was so horrible that, until now, Chaplin biographers have fought shy of revealing the details.
Chaplin's own autobiography, published in 1964, has a deeply moving first chapter about the travails of his South London childhood, but he ascribes his mother's mental decay and subsequent incarceration to malnutrition brought about by depriving herself of food in order to feed her sons.
As a result, even Chaplin's children have remained ignorant of the whole truth. Indeed, when his eldest daughter Geraldine, herself a famous actress, learned that a new book was being written delving into her grandmother's sad decline, she first tried to ban publication.
Little Tramp: The character was shaped by Chaplin's hard upbringing
But she soon realised that the new information unearthed by Weissman would cast invaluable light on the source of Charlie Chaplin's genius.
So what was Hannah's story? The daughter of a shoemaker of gipsy stock, she ran away from home at 16 and, naming herself after the famous Victorian music hall star Lillie Langtry, went on the stage.
Soon she had fallen in love with Charles Chaplin Snr, a butcher's son turned actor, whom she met when they were both playing in a popular comic opera.
Always a dreamer and enchanted by the rags-to-riches story of Napoleon's wife Josephine, Hannah said she was drawn to Charlie senior because of his resemblance to the French Emperor.
But three years later she abandoned him and, still a teenager, ran off to South Africa with another lover, Sydney Hawkes, a cockney conman who posed as a rich aristocrat with vast colonial estates.
New research has convinced Weissman that Hawkes was in fact a pimp who took her off to the gold rush boomtown of Witwatersrand and forced her, like many other gullible cockney girls of the time, to work as a prostitute in dance halls servicing the sex-starved gold miners.
Life among the fortune seekers who rushed to the dusty outpost from all over the world was tough, cut-throat and dangerous.
By 1884 Hannah had had enough, and although pregnant by Hawkes, decided to return home to England and look up her old sweetheart, Charles Chaplin.
Hawkes's son, also called Sydney, was born the following year, yet she and Chaplin resumed their romantic relationship and worked together on the London stage.
In 1886 they married and in due course had their own child, the comic genius Charlie Chaplin, born in 1889.
The little boy, who inherited his mother's fantasising streak, would later romanticise his early childhood and the strength of his parents' bond.
He adored his mother, recalling her as dainty and beautiful with violet eyes and fair hair so long that she could sit on it. He loved the way she dressed him in velvet and remembered fondly how she would enact imaginary scenes from the life of one of her many heroines, the 17th century courtesan Nell Gwyn, mistress of Charles II.
But Hannah was not the fashionable actress or the faithful wife that her young son had imagined.
Even Chaplin's children never knew the truth
Soon she had left Charlie's father yet again, this time for a fling with a more famous actor, Leo Dryden, by whom she had a third son.
Hannah now had three boys by three different men, but had managed to fall out with all their fathers.
After Dryden abandoned her, taking their baby with him, she was forced to take stage jobs in ever smaller theatres to feed her two other children. She even had to pawn her glamorous stage gowns to pay the rent.
Her faltering career finally ground to a halt one night when her singing voice cracked and sank to a whisper in the middle of her act and the audience cruelly laughed her off stage.
Charlie, aged five, was listening in the wings, appalled by her humiliation. But, already a talented mimic, the little boy took his mother's place under the spotlight and finished her act.
Film star: Chaplin in City Lights with Virginia Cherrill
In the following months, he would have to cope with far worse. Soon his mother started to develop blinding migraines, accompanied by terrifying hallucinations.
The headaches, which lasted up to a month, made it impossible for her to look after her boys and they were taken into the poorhouse.
When Charlie was seven, he was moved into the orphanage he hated.
This time Hannah recovered sufficiently to get her children back, but from now on she was a changed character.
Obsessed with her failing health she took up religion in an attempt to find a cure. Now, instead of going on stage, she would spend her evenings acting out scenes from the Bible for her boys at home.
Charlie, of course, had no idea at this point what was wrong with his mother and concluded her bizarre behaviour was designed specifically to hurt him.
Not according to his biographer Weissman, who learned Hannah's devastating secret from newly discovered contemporary medical records.
In 1898 she was diagnosed as syphilitic and suffering from the violent psychotic episodes characteristic of the tertiary stage of the disease.
Suddenly, says Weissman, everything fits into place. Syphilis would also have been the cause of her terrible headaches, for they too are a symptom of the ailment.
They can occur up to ten years after the initial infection and Hananh must have contracted it while she was working as a prostitute in South Africa.
Left untreated, the disease took such a toll on Chaplin's mother that by the time she was 35 she was confined to the grim Cane Hill Lunatic Asylum on the outskirts of London, where she had to be kept in a padded room.
On this occasion her sons were sent to live with Chaplin Senior, and though young Charlie amused himself by perfecting impressions of his drunken father and his wayward mistress Louise, he was pining all the while for his absent mother.
The sensitive boy was horrified by her condition
Eventually, Hannah was released from Cane Hill and mother and sons were reunited in a cheap top-floor room next to a slaughterhouse in London's Kennington, where she made a living as a seamstress, setting herself up with a borrowed sewing machine.
This time her income was supplemented by Charlie's father, who had begun to take his paternal responsibilities more seriously.
Young Charlie, too, was encouraged to contribute to the family income by doing what he loved best - performing. Once more, however, his happiness was to be short-lived.
In 1901, his father died of cirrhosis of the liver, aged just 37, and was buried in a pauper's grave.
Then, two years later, his mother had a nervous breakdown and was again hospitalised.
Charlie, by now a sensitive 14-year-old, was profoundly shocked to see her ravings and hallucinations accompanied by an apparently drunken gait - all characteristic of the ravages of tertiary syphilis.
To make matters worse, this time Charlie was left completely on his own in the family flat and was rescued from the squalor in which he was living only by the return to London of his half brother Sydney, now a 19-year-old ship's steward.
The elder lad spruced up the young urchin and took him round the theatrical agencies.
Adored around the world: Chaplin waves to the crowds in Canning Town in 1931
Soon they both had acting jobs and could afford to send money to their mother. But within a year she was found wandering the streets again and was sent back to hospital.
She was now such a pathetic figure that Charlie could scarcely bear to visit her.
Instead, he threw himself into his work, serving an apprenticeship in music halls all over the country and learning the slapstick, burlesque routines that would make him a star.
Though he suffered many setbacks - often booed off stage, just as his mother had been - he finally landed a lucrative contract with the great impresario Fred Karno.
But though Charlie's acting talent was not in doubt, his relations with women were affected permanently by his mother's instability. For a long time he had no idea how to treat girls and his only companions were Piccadilly whores.
And when he finally fell in love with 15-year-old showgirl Hetty Kelly in 1908, he scared her away by proposing immediately.
Then, when Hetty turned him down, he spent the rest of his life fantasising about a rapturous reunion with her.
In the end one of Fred Karno's productions earned Chaplin a ticket to America, where he would make his fortune.
He was now 21, just 5ft 4in tall and weighed little more than 9st, yet so supremely confident that when his ship approached the docks in Manhattan he took his hat off and shouted: 'America, I'm coming to conquer you! Every man, woman and child shall have my name on their lips - Charles Spencer Chaplin!'
The little comic crossed the Atlantic twice before his boast came true. He toured America from coast to coast and claimed to have bedded 2,000 women en route.
Then one night in 1912, his act was seen in New York by legendary producer Mack Sennett, who ran the famous Keystone studios in California. Sennett lured Chaplin West by doubling his salary.
And so, on a rainy day in February, the scrawny newcomer to the Keystone film company started rummaging idly through the communal wardrobe.
There he came across silent star Fatty Arbuckle's huge pantaloons and bowler hat; trimmed down comedian Mack Swain's false moustache; put Keystone Cop Ford Sterling's size 14 boots on his feet and wrapped himself in director Charles Avery's cutaway jacket.
He brought her to America and hired expert carers
Chaplin looked in the mirror and saw the transformation that would make him world famous.
He said he knew the Little Tramp intimately: 'He was myself, a comic spirit, something within me that said I must express myself.'
This was the character formed of his turbulent childhood, of all the roles he had played in the English music halls and of the acute sense of loss he had felt when separated from his mother.
As for Hannah, she never recovered. By 1921, just as her gifted son was starting to make his most famous movies, she was in the irreversible throes of dementia.
Desperate to be reunited with her despite her illness, Chaplin brought her to Hollywood to join himself, her first-born Sydney and her long-lost third son Wheeler Dryden, who was working for Chaplin.
Fourth time lucky: Chaplin finally found happiness with wife Oona
He bought her a house in California and engaged round-the-clock carers. Then he started work on his 1925 film The Gold Rush, almost certainly inspired, according to psychiatrist Weissman, by his mother's early South African escapades.
Weissman believes, too, that Chaplin was prompted to embark on the most poignant of all his movies, City Lights as a direct consequence of Hannah's death aged 65 in 1928.
In it, the Little Tramp falls in love with a blind flowerseller and, putting aside his own feelings, tries to engineer a reunion between her and the millionaire benefactor she prefers - an indication, says his psychiatrist biographer, that the little comic was still yearning for a reunion between his parents more than 30 years after his childhood was torn apart by their separation.
In real life Chaplin himself was unable to settle down until many years later. He famously had affairs with most of his leading ladies - and married three of them, Mildred Harris, 16-year-old Lita Gray and Paulette Goddard.
But he did finally recreate the happy family life he had always wanted. In 1943 when he was 54, Chaplin married 18-year-old Oona, daughter of the great playwright Eugene O'Neill, and fathered eight more children.
One of those was daughter Geraldine, who played her grandmother, Hannah, in Richard Attenborough's 1992 film about Chaplin's genius.
For Geraldine, Weissman's extraordinary revelations have proved particularly heart-wrenching. For, as happens with so many comic stars, her father's bravest of faces hid a truly haunting story.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Orson Welles's funeral was a tawdry and chaotic affair
In My Father's Shadow: a Daughter Remembers Orson Welles by Chris Welles Feder: review
By Linda Christmas
The opening of this book is haunting. It contains a description of Orson Welles’s funeral. This was supposed to be a simple service for close family members, but when it was discovered that Welles left no money, it shrank to a dismal affair in a destitute part of LA. The funeral parlour, from the outside, looked like a “hot-sheets motel” and inside offered a small “crummy” room with plastic covered sofas, and no flowers. The speeches were unplanned and meandering.
Welles’s eldest daughter, Chris, says it reminded her of Mozart being dumped in a pauper’s grave. Worse, it was a cremation that Welles said he did not want.
What had he done to deserve this? The book’s opening pages stink of revenge. Welles’s last partner, with whom he lived for 20 years, was at home in Croatia when he died and had no hand in the preparations for the funeral, nor was she invited. His third wife, Paola Mori, to whom he was still married, took charge and tossed his body into oblivion.
His three children by different wives were there, but they hardly knew each other. Early on in the book you get the message: Welles might have been a genius but he messed up his personal life and those of the people close to him. In fact, he messed up his professional life, too. He was a child prodigy, a star of the Dublin stage at 17, a fine film actor (Citizen Kane, The Third Man, Othello, Jane Eyre) and a maverick film producer, but most of his success happened early in his life. For much of the rest he ploughed his huge earnings into his own projects, many of which failed. He died at the age of 70, in 1985.
Chris (christened Christopher because Orson liked the sound of the name) was besotted with her father. One of her teachers told her that the feelings she had for him were unnatural. She claims to remember everything he told her and every moment of everything they did together. This enables her to construct dialogues with her father and enables us to see how desperately she clung to the magic moments he brought to her life. These were plentiful in her early years and then dwindled until years passed without seeing him.
She was there when Welles, billed as Orson the Magnificent, sawed Rita Hayworth in half in August 1943. It was a show for the benefit of servicemen who were about to be shipped to the Pacific. After the show’s opening night Columbia pictures forced Rita Hayworth to withdraw. Marlene Dietrich took her place. Welles married Hayworth a month later and was bewildered to discover that in real life she was not a screen goddess. She was merely a rather dumb Brooklyn girl with a Spanish mother and an Irish father. Chris adored her and preferred her company to that of her embittered mother, Virginia Nicholson, who, it seems to me, did her as much harm as her absent father. Nicholson and her various partners did not much like the precocious and puffed-up girl and did their best to trample her spirit and squash her ambitions and keep her away from her father.
That makes it easy to see why Chris is so generous in her view of Welles’s other women, particularly the last whom she met only after her father died. Chris says that Oja Kodar, with whom he spent the last 20 years, was the only woman who didn’t bore him. She was far more intelligent than his other women and understood that his work was his life.
Orson Welles told his daughter that when making films about villains (which are more interesting than heroes) it was important that the audience retain some sympathy for the villain. Welles wasn’t a true villain, merely a lousy husband and father, and I ended up feeling sorry for him: more sorry for him than I did for his daughter. That’s probably because she seems to have had an exciting childhood, a decent enough career and a happy second marriage. And maybe it’s also because we have had a surfeit of sour sagas of what it is like growing up in the shadow of neglectful celebrity parents. Basking in the glow is never enough.
By Linda Christmas
The opening of this book is haunting. It contains a description of Orson Welles’s funeral. This was supposed to be a simple service for close family members, but when it was discovered that Welles left no money, it shrank to a dismal affair in a destitute part of LA. The funeral parlour, from the outside, looked like a “hot-sheets motel” and inside offered a small “crummy” room with plastic covered sofas, and no flowers. The speeches were unplanned and meandering.
Welles’s eldest daughter, Chris, says it reminded her of Mozart being dumped in a pauper’s grave. Worse, it was a cremation that Welles said he did not want.
What had he done to deserve this? The book’s opening pages stink of revenge. Welles’s last partner, with whom he lived for 20 years, was at home in Croatia when he died and had no hand in the preparations for the funeral, nor was she invited. His third wife, Paola Mori, to whom he was still married, took charge and tossed his body into oblivion.
His three children by different wives were there, but they hardly knew each other. Early on in the book you get the message: Welles might have been a genius but he messed up his personal life and those of the people close to him. In fact, he messed up his professional life, too. He was a child prodigy, a star of the Dublin stage at 17, a fine film actor (Citizen Kane, The Third Man, Othello, Jane Eyre) and a maverick film producer, but most of his success happened early in his life. For much of the rest he ploughed his huge earnings into his own projects, many of which failed. He died at the age of 70, in 1985.
Chris (christened Christopher because Orson liked the sound of the name) was besotted with her father. One of her teachers told her that the feelings she had for him were unnatural. She claims to remember everything he told her and every moment of everything they did together. This enables her to construct dialogues with her father and enables us to see how desperately she clung to the magic moments he brought to her life. These were plentiful in her early years and then dwindled until years passed without seeing him.
She was there when Welles, billed as Orson the Magnificent, sawed Rita Hayworth in half in August 1943. It was a show for the benefit of servicemen who were about to be shipped to the Pacific. After the show’s opening night Columbia pictures forced Rita Hayworth to withdraw. Marlene Dietrich took her place. Welles married Hayworth a month later and was bewildered to discover that in real life she was not a screen goddess. She was merely a rather dumb Brooklyn girl with a Spanish mother and an Irish father. Chris adored her and preferred her company to that of her embittered mother, Virginia Nicholson, who, it seems to me, did her as much harm as her absent father. Nicholson and her various partners did not much like the precocious and puffed-up girl and did their best to trample her spirit and squash her ambitions and keep her away from her father.
That makes it easy to see why Chris is so generous in her view of Welles’s other women, particularly the last whom she met only after her father died. Chris says that Oja Kodar, with whom he spent the last 20 years, was the only woman who didn’t bore him. She was far more intelligent than his other women and understood that his work was his life.
Orson Welles told his daughter that when making films about villains (which are more interesting than heroes) it was important that the audience retain some sympathy for the villain. Welles wasn’t a true villain, merely a lousy husband and father, and I ended up feeling sorry for him: more sorry for him than I did for his daughter. That’s probably because she seems to have had an exciting childhood, a decent enough career and a happy second marriage. And maybe it’s also because we have had a surfeit of sour sagas of what it is like growing up in the shadow of neglectful celebrity parents. Basking in the glow is never enough.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
J. D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91
By CHARLES McGRATH
J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died on Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.
Mr. Salinger’s literary representative, Harold Ober Associates, announced the death, saying it was of natural causes. “Despite having broken his hip in May,” the agency said, “his health had been excellent until a rather sudden decline after the new year. He was not in any pain before or at the time of his death.”
Mr. Salinger’s literary reputation rests on a slender but enormously influential body of published work: the novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” the collection “Nine Stories” and two compilations, each with two long stories about the fictional Glass family: “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.”
“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
Though not everyone, teachers and librarians especially, was sure what to make of it, “Catcher” became an almost immediate best seller, and its narrator and main character, Holden Caulfield, a teenager newly expelled from prep school, became America’s best-known literary truant since Huckleberry Finn.
With its cynical, slangy vernacular voice (Holden’s two favorite expressions are “phony” and “goddam”), its sympathetic understanding of adolescence and its fierce if alienated sense of morality and distrust of the adult world, the novel struck a nerve in cold war America and quickly attained cult status, especially among the young. Reading “Catcher” used to be an essential rite of passage, almost as important as getting your learner’s permit.
The novel’s allure persists to this day, even if some of Holden’s preoccupations now seem a bit dated, and it continues to sell more than 250,000 copies a year in paperback. Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon in 1980, even said the explanation for his act could be found in the pages of “The Catcher in the Rye.” In 1974 Philip Roth wrote, “The response of college students to the work of J. D. Salinger indicates that he, more than anyone else, has not turned his back on the times but, instead, has managed to put his finger on whatever struggle of significance is going on today between self and culture.”
Many critics were more admiring of “Nine Stories,” which came out in 1953 and helped shape writers like Mr. Roth, John Updike and Harold Brodkey. The stories were remarkable for their sharp social observation, their pitch-perfect dialogue (Mr. Salinger, who used italics almost as a form of musical notation, was a master not of literary speech but of speech as people actually spoke it) and the way they demolished whatever was left of the traditional architecture of the short story — the old structure of beginning, middle, end — for an architecture of emotion, in which a story could turn on a tiny alteration of mood or irony. Mr. Updike said he admired “that open-ended Zen quality they have, the way they don’t snap shut.”
Mr. Salinger also perfected the great trick of literary irony — of validating what you mean by saying less than, or even the opposite of, what you intend. Orville Prescott wrote in The New York Times in 1963, “Rarely if ever in literary history has a handful of stories aroused so much discussion, controversy, praise, denunciation, mystification and interpretation.”
As a young man Mr. Salinger yearned ardently for just this kind of attention. He bragged in college about his literary talent and ambitions, and wrote swaggering letters to Whit Burnett, the editor of Story magazine. But success, once it arrived, paled quickly for him. He told the editors of Saturday Review that he was “good and sick” of seeing his photograph on the dust jacket of “The Catcher in the Rye” and demanded that it be removed from subsequent editions. He ordered his agent to burn any fan mail. In 1953 Mr. Salinger, who had been living on East 57th Street in Manhattan, fled the literary world altogether and moved to a 90-acre compound on a wooded hillside in Cornish. He seemed to be fulfilling Holden’s desire to build himself “a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life,” away from “any goddam stupid conversation with anybody.”
He seldom left, except occasionally to vacation in Florida or to visit William Shawn, the almost equally reclusive former editor of The New Yorker. Avoiding Mr. Shawn’s usual (and very public) table at the Algonquin Hotel, they would meet under the clock at the old Biltmore Hotel, the rendezvous for generations of prep-school and college students.
After Mr. Salinger moved to New Hampshire his publications slowed to a trickle and soon stopped completely. “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam,” both collections of material previously published in The New Yorker, came out in 1961 and 1963, and the last work of Mr. Salinger’s to appear in print was “Hapworth 16, 1924,” a 25,000-word story that took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker.
In 1997 Mr. Salinger agreed to let Orchises Press, a small publisher in Alexandria, Va., bring out “Hapworth” in book form, but he backed out of the deal at the last minute. He never collected the rest of his stories or allowed any of them to be reprinted in textbooks or anthologies. One story, “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” was turned into “My Foolish Heart,” a movie so bad that Mr. Salinger was never tempted to sell film rights again.
Befriended, Then Betrayed
In the fall of 1953 he befriended some local teenagers and allowed one of them to interview him for what he assumed would be an article on the high school page of a local paper, The Claremont Daily Eagle. The article appeared instead as a feature on the editorial page, and Mr. Salinger felt so betrayed that he broke off with the teenagers and built a six-and-a-half-foot fence around his property.
He seldom spoke to the press again, except in 1974 when, trying to fend off the unauthorized publication of his uncollected stories, he told a reporter from The Times: “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”
And yet the more he sought privacy, the more famous he became, especially after his appearance on the cover of Time in 1961. For years it was a sort of journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters to New Hampshire in hopes of a sighting. As a young man Mr. Salinger had a long, melancholy face and deep soulful eyes, but now, in the few photographs that surfaced, he looked gaunt and gray, like someone in an El Greco painting. He spent more time and energy avoiding the world, it was sometimes said, than most people do in embracing it, and his elusiveness only added to the mythology growing up around him.
Depending on one’s point of view, he was either a crackpot or the American Tolstoy, who had turned silence itself into his most eloquent work of art. Some believed he was publishing under an assumed name, and for a while in the late 1970s, William Wharton, author of “Birdy,” was rumored to be Mr. Salinger, writing under another name, until it turned out that William Wharton was instead a pen name for the writer Albert du Aime.
In 1984 the British literary critic Ian Hamilton approached Mr. Salinger with the notion of writing his biography. Not surprisingly, Mr. Salinger turned him down, saying he had “borne all the exploitation and loss of privacy I can possibly bear in a single lifetime.” Mr. Hamilton went ahead anyway, and in 1986, Mr. Salinger took him to court to prevent the use of quotations and paraphrases from unpublished letters. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and to the surprise of many, Mr. Salinger eventually won, though not without some cost to his cherished privacy. (In June 2009 he also sued Fredrik Colting, the Swedish author and publisher of a novel said to be a sequel to “The Catcher in the Rye.” In July a federal judge indefinitely enjoined publication of the book.)
Mr. Salinger’s privacy was further punctured in 1998 and again in 2000 with the publication of memoirs by, first, Joyce Maynard — with whom he had a 10-month affair in 1973, when Ms. Maynard was a college freshman — and then his daughter, Margaret. Some critics complained that both women were trying to exploit and profit from their history with Mr. Salinger, and Mr. Salinger’s son, Matthew, wrote in a letter to The New York Observer that his sister had “a troubled mind,” and that he didn’t recognize the man portrayed in her account. Both books nevertheless added a creepy, Howard Hughesish element to the Salinger legend.
Mr. Salinger was controlling and sexually manipulative, Ms. Maynard wrote, and a health nut obsessed with homeopathic medicine and with his diet (frozen peas for breakfast, undercooked lamb burger for dinner). Ms. Salinger said that her father was pathologically self-centered and abusive toward her mother, and to the homeopathy and food fads she added a long list of other enthusiasms: Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, Christian Science, Scientology and acupuncture. Mr. Salinger drank his own urine, she wrote, and sat for hours in an orgone box.
But was he writing? The question obsessed Salingerologists, and in the absence of real evidence, theories multiplied. He hadn’t written a word for years. Or, like the character in the Stanley Kubrick film “The Shining,” he wrote the same sentence over and over again. Or like Gogol at the end of his life, he wrote prolifically but then burned it all. Ms. Maynard said she believed there were at least two novels locked away in a safe, though she had never seen them.
Early Life
Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan on New Year’s Day, 1919, the second of two children. His sister, Doris, who died in 2001, was for many years a buyer in the dress department at Bloomingdale’s. Like the Glasses, the Salinger children were the product of a mixed marriage. Their father, Sol, was a Jew, the son of a rabbi, but sufficiently assimilated that he made his living importing both cheese and ham. Their mother, Marie Jillisch, was of Irish descent, born in Scotland, but changed her first name to Miriam to appease her in-laws. The family was living in Harlem when Mr. Salinger was born, but then, as Sol Salinger’s business prospered, moved to West 82nd Street and then to Park Avenue.
Never much of a student, Mr. Salinger, then known as Sonny, attended the progressive McBurney School on the Upper West Side. (He told the admissions office his interests were dramatics and tropical fish.) But he flunked out after two years and in 1934 was packed off to Valley Forge Military Academy, in Wayne, Pa., which became the model for Holden’s Pencey Prep. Like Holden, Mr. Salinger was the manager of the school fencing team, and he also became the literary editor of the school yearbook, Crossed Swords, and wrote a school song that was either a heartfelt pastiche of 19th-century sentiment or else a masterpiece of irony:
Hide not thy tears on this last day
Your sorrow has no shame;
To march no more midst lines of gray;
No longer play the game.
Four years have passed in joyful ways — Wouldst stay those old times dear?
Then cherish now these fleeting days,
The few while you are here.
In 1937, after a couple of unenthusiastic weeks at New York University, Mr. Salinger traveled with his father to Austria and Poland, where the father’s plan was for him to learn the ham business. Deciding that wasn’t for him, he returned to America and drifted through a term or so at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa. Fellow students remember him striding around campus in a black chesterfield with velvet collar and announcing that he was going to write the Great American Novel.
Mr. Salinger’s most sustained exposure to higher education was an evening class he took at Columbia in 1939, taught by Whit Burnett, and under Mr. Burnett’s tutelage he managed to sell a story, “The Young Folks,” to Story magazine. He subsequently sold stories to Esquire, Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post — formulaic work that gave little hint of real originality.
In 1941, after several rejections, Mr. Salinger finally cracked The New Yorker, the ultimate goal of any aspiring writer back then, with a story, “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” that was an early sketch of what became a scene in “The Catcher in the Rye.” But the magazine then had second thoughts, apparently worried about seeming to encourage young people to run away from school, and held the story for five years — an eternity even for The New Yorker — before finally publishing it in 1946, buried in the back of an issue.
Meanwhile Mr. Salinger had been drafted. He served with the Counter-Intelligence Corps of the Fourth Infantry Division, whose job was to interview Nazi deserters and sympathizers, and was stationed for a while in Tiverton, Devon, the setting of “For Esmé — with Love and Squalor,” probably the most deeply felt of the “Nine Stories.” On June 6, 1944, he landed at Utah Beach, and he later saw action during the Battle of the Bulge.
In 1945 he was hospitalized for “battle fatigue” — often a euphemism for a breakdown — and after recovering he stayed on in Europe past the end of the war, chasing Nazi functionaries. He married a German woman, very briefly — a doctor about whom biographers have been able to discover very little. Her name was Sylvia, Margaret Salinger said, but Mr. Salinger always called her Saliva.
A Different Kind of Writer
Back in New York, Mr. Salinger moved into his parents’ apartment and, having never stopped writing, even during the war, resumed his career. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” austere, mysterious and Mr. Salinger’s most famous and still most discussed story, appeared in The New Yorker in 1948 and suggested, not wrongly, that he had become a very different kind of writer. And like so many writers he eventually found in The New Yorker not just an outlet but a kind of home and developed a close relationship with the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, himself famously shy and agoraphobic — a kindred spirit. In 1961 Mr. Salinger dedicated “Franny and Zooey” to Shawn, writing, “I urge my editor, mentor and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genius domus of The New Yorker, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors, to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book.”
As a young writer Mr. Salinger was something of a ladies’ man and dated, among others, Oona O’Neill, the daughter of Eugene O’Neill and the future wife of Charlie Chaplin. In 1953 he met Claire Douglas, the daughter of the British art critic Robert Langdon Douglas, who was then a 19-year-old Radcliffe sophomore who in many ways resembled Franny Glass (or vice versa); they were married two years later. (Ms. Douglas had married and divorced in the meantime.) Margaret was born in 1955, and Matthew, now an actor and film producer, was born in 1960. But the marriage soon turned distant and isolating, and in 1966, Ms. Douglas sued for divorce, claiming that “a continuation of the marriage would seriously injure her health and endanger her reason.”
The affair with Ms. Maynard, then a Yale freshman, began in 1972, after Mr. Salinger read an article she had written for The New York Times Magazine titled “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life.” They moved in together but broke up abruptly after 10 months when Mr. Salinger said he had no desire for more children. For a while in the ’80s Mr. Salinger was involved with the actress Elaine Joyce, and late in that decade he married Colleen O’Neill, a nurse, who is considerably younger than he is. Not much is known about the marriage because Ms. O’Neill embraced her husband’s code of seclusion.
Besides his son, Matthew, Mr. Salinger is survived by Ms. O’Neill and his daughter, Margaret, as well as three grandsons. His literary agents said in a statement that “in keeping with his lifelong, uncompromising desire to protect and defend his privacy, there will be no service, and the family asks that people’s respect for him, his work and his privacy be extended to them, individually and collectively, during this time.”
“Salinger had remarked that he was in this world but not of it,” the statement said. “His body is gone but the family hopes that he is still with those he loves, whether they are religious or historical figures, personal friends or fictional characters.”
As for the fictional family the Glasses, Mr. Salinger had apparently been writing about them nonstop. Ms. Maynard said she saw shelves of notebooks devoted to the family. In Mr. Salinger’s fiction the Glasses first turn up in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” in which Seymour, the oldest son and family favorite, kills himself during his honeymoon. Characters who turn out in retrospect to have been Glasses appear glancingly in “Nine Stories,” but the family saga really begins to be elaborated upon in “Franny and Zooey,” “Raise High the Roof Beam” and “Hapworth,” the long short story, which is ostensibly a letter written by Seymour from camp when he is just 7 years old but already reading several languages and lusting after Mrs. Happy, wife of the camp owner.
Readers also began to learn about the parents, Les and Bessie, long-suffering ex-vaudevillians, and Seymour’s siblings Franny, Zooey, Buddy, Walt, Waker and Boo Boo; about the Glasses’ Upper West Side apartment; about the radio quiz show on which all the children appeared. Seldom has a fictional family been so lovingly or richly imagined.
Too lovingly, some critics complained. With the publication of “Franny and Zooey” even staunch Salinger admirers began to break ranks. John Updike wrote in The Times Book Review: “Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them. He loves them too exclusively. Their invention has become a hermitage for him. He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation.” Other readers hated the growing streak of Eastern mysticism in the saga, as Seymour evolved, in successive retellings, from a suicidal young man into a genius, a sage, even a saint of sorts.
But writing in The New York Review of Books in 2001, Janet Malcolm argued that the critics had all along been wrong about Mr. Salinger, just as short-sighted contemporaries were wrong about Manet and about Tolstoy. The very things people complain about, Ms. Malcolm contended, were the qualities that made Mr. Salinger great. That the Glasses (and, by implication, their creator) were not at home in the world was the whole point, Ms. Malcolm wrote, and it said as much about the world as about the kind of people who failed to get along there.
J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died on Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.
Mr. Salinger’s literary representative, Harold Ober Associates, announced the death, saying it was of natural causes. “Despite having broken his hip in May,” the agency said, “his health had been excellent until a rather sudden decline after the new year. He was not in any pain before or at the time of his death.”
Mr. Salinger’s literary reputation rests on a slender but enormously influential body of published work: the novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” the collection “Nine Stories” and two compilations, each with two long stories about the fictional Glass family: “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.”
“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
Though not everyone, teachers and librarians especially, was sure what to make of it, “Catcher” became an almost immediate best seller, and its narrator and main character, Holden Caulfield, a teenager newly expelled from prep school, became America’s best-known literary truant since Huckleberry Finn.
With its cynical, slangy vernacular voice (Holden’s two favorite expressions are “phony” and “goddam”), its sympathetic understanding of adolescence and its fierce if alienated sense of morality and distrust of the adult world, the novel struck a nerve in cold war America and quickly attained cult status, especially among the young. Reading “Catcher” used to be an essential rite of passage, almost as important as getting your learner’s permit.
The novel’s allure persists to this day, even if some of Holden’s preoccupations now seem a bit dated, and it continues to sell more than 250,000 copies a year in paperback. Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon in 1980, even said the explanation for his act could be found in the pages of “The Catcher in the Rye.” In 1974 Philip Roth wrote, “The response of college students to the work of J. D. Salinger indicates that he, more than anyone else, has not turned his back on the times but, instead, has managed to put his finger on whatever struggle of significance is going on today between self and culture.”
Many critics were more admiring of “Nine Stories,” which came out in 1953 and helped shape writers like Mr. Roth, John Updike and Harold Brodkey. The stories were remarkable for their sharp social observation, their pitch-perfect dialogue (Mr. Salinger, who used italics almost as a form of musical notation, was a master not of literary speech but of speech as people actually spoke it) and the way they demolished whatever was left of the traditional architecture of the short story — the old structure of beginning, middle, end — for an architecture of emotion, in which a story could turn on a tiny alteration of mood or irony. Mr. Updike said he admired “that open-ended Zen quality they have, the way they don’t snap shut.”
Mr. Salinger also perfected the great trick of literary irony — of validating what you mean by saying less than, or even the opposite of, what you intend. Orville Prescott wrote in The New York Times in 1963, “Rarely if ever in literary history has a handful of stories aroused so much discussion, controversy, praise, denunciation, mystification and interpretation.”
As a young man Mr. Salinger yearned ardently for just this kind of attention. He bragged in college about his literary talent and ambitions, and wrote swaggering letters to Whit Burnett, the editor of Story magazine. But success, once it arrived, paled quickly for him. He told the editors of Saturday Review that he was “good and sick” of seeing his photograph on the dust jacket of “The Catcher in the Rye” and demanded that it be removed from subsequent editions. He ordered his agent to burn any fan mail. In 1953 Mr. Salinger, who had been living on East 57th Street in Manhattan, fled the literary world altogether and moved to a 90-acre compound on a wooded hillside in Cornish. He seemed to be fulfilling Holden’s desire to build himself “a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life,” away from “any goddam stupid conversation with anybody.”
He seldom left, except occasionally to vacation in Florida or to visit William Shawn, the almost equally reclusive former editor of The New Yorker. Avoiding Mr. Shawn’s usual (and very public) table at the Algonquin Hotel, they would meet under the clock at the old Biltmore Hotel, the rendezvous for generations of prep-school and college students.
After Mr. Salinger moved to New Hampshire his publications slowed to a trickle and soon stopped completely. “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam,” both collections of material previously published in The New Yorker, came out in 1961 and 1963, and the last work of Mr. Salinger’s to appear in print was “Hapworth 16, 1924,” a 25,000-word story that took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker.
In 1997 Mr. Salinger agreed to let Orchises Press, a small publisher in Alexandria, Va., bring out “Hapworth” in book form, but he backed out of the deal at the last minute. He never collected the rest of his stories or allowed any of them to be reprinted in textbooks or anthologies. One story, “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” was turned into “My Foolish Heart,” a movie so bad that Mr. Salinger was never tempted to sell film rights again.
Befriended, Then Betrayed
In the fall of 1953 he befriended some local teenagers and allowed one of them to interview him for what he assumed would be an article on the high school page of a local paper, The Claremont Daily Eagle. The article appeared instead as a feature on the editorial page, and Mr. Salinger felt so betrayed that he broke off with the teenagers and built a six-and-a-half-foot fence around his property.
He seldom spoke to the press again, except in 1974 when, trying to fend off the unauthorized publication of his uncollected stories, he told a reporter from The Times: “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”
And yet the more he sought privacy, the more famous he became, especially after his appearance on the cover of Time in 1961. For years it was a sort of journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters to New Hampshire in hopes of a sighting. As a young man Mr. Salinger had a long, melancholy face and deep soulful eyes, but now, in the few photographs that surfaced, he looked gaunt and gray, like someone in an El Greco painting. He spent more time and energy avoiding the world, it was sometimes said, than most people do in embracing it, and his elusiveness only added to the mythology growing up around him.
Depending on one’s point of view, he was either a crackpot or the American Tolstoy, who had turned silence itself into his most eloquent work of art. Some believed he was publishing under an assumed name, and for a while in the late 1970s, William Wharton, author of “Birdy,” was rumored to be Mr. Salinger, writing under another name, until it turned out that William Wharton was instead a pen name for the writer Albert du Aime.
In 1984 the British literary critic Ian Hamilton approached Mr. Salinger with the notion of writing his biography. Not surprisingly, Mr. Salinger turned him down, saying he had “borne all the exploitation and loss of privacy I can possibly bear in a single lifetime.” Mr. Hamilton went ahead anyway, and in 1986, Mr. Salinger took him to court to prevent the use of quotations and paraphrases from unpublished letters. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and to the surprise of many, Mr. Salinger eventually won, though not without some cost to his cherished privacy. (In June 2009 he also sued Fredrik Colting, the Swedish author and publisher of a novel said to be a sequel to “The Catcher in the Rye.” In July a federal judge indefinitely enjoined publication of the book.)
Mr. Salinger’s privacy was further punctured in 1998 and again in 2000 with the publication of memoirs by, first, Joyce Maynard — with whom he had a 10-month affair in 1973, when Ms. Maynard was a college freshman — and then his daughter, Margaret. Some critics complained that both women were trying to exploit and profit from their history with Mr. Salinger, and Mr. Salinger’s son, Matthew, wrote in a letter to The New York Observer that his sister had “a troubled mind,” and that he didn’t recognize the man portrayed in her account. Both books nevertheless added a creepy, Howard Hughesish element to the Salinger legend.
Mr. Salinger was controlling and sexually manipulative, Ms. Maynard wrote, and a health nut obsessed with homeopathic medicine and with his diet (frozen peas for breakfast, undercooked lamb burger for dinner). Ms. Salinger said that her father was pathologically self-centered and abusive toward her mother, and to the homeopathy and food fads she added a long list of other enthusiasms: Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, Christian Science, Scientology and acupuncture. Mr. Salinger drank his own urine, she wrote, and sat for hours in an orgone box.
But was he writing? The question obsessed Salingerologists, and in the absence of real evidence, theories multiplied. He hadn’t written a word for years. Or, like the character in the Stanley Kubrick film “The Shining,” he wrote the same sentence over and over again. Or like Gogol at the end of his life, he wrote prolifically but then burned it all. Ms. Maynard said she believed there were at least two novels locked away in a safe, though she had never seen them.
Early Life
Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan on New Year’s Day, 1919, the second of two children. His sister, Doris, who died in 2001, was for many years a buyer in the dress department at Bloomingdale’s. Like the Glasses, the Salinger children were the product of a mixed marriage. Their father, Sol, was a Jew, the son of a rabbi, but sufficiently assimilated that he made his living importing both cheese and ham. Their mother, Marie Jillisch, was of Irish descent, born in Scotland, but changed her first name to Miriam to appease her in-laws. The family was living in Harlem when Mr. Salinger was born, but then, as Sol Salinger’s business prospered, moved to West 82nd Street and then to Park Avenue.
Never much of a student, Mr. Salinger, then known as Sonny, attended the progressive McBurney School on the Upper West Side. (He told the admissions office his interests were dramatics and tropical fish.) But he flunked out after two years and in 1934 was packed off to Valley Forge Military Academy, in Wayne, Pa., which became the model for Holden’s Pencey Prep. Like Holden, Mr. Salinger was the manager of the school fencing team, and he also became the literary editor of the school yearbook, Crossed Swords, and wrote a school song that was either a heartfelt pastiche of 19th-century sentiment or else a masterpiece of irony:
Hide not thy tears on this last day
Your sorrow has no shame;
To march no more midst lines of gray;
No longer play the game.
Four years have passed in joyful ways — Wouldst stay those old times dear?
Then cherish now these fleeting days,
The few while you are here.
In 1937, after a couple of unenthusiastic weeks at New York University, Mr. Salinger traveled with his father to Austria and Poland, where the father’s plan was for him to learn the ham business. Deciding that wasn’t for him, he returned to America and drifted through a term or so at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa. Fellow students remember him striding around campus in a black chesterfield with velvet collar and announcing that he was going to write the Great American Novel.
Mr. Salinger’s most sustained exposure to higher education was an evening class he took at Columbia in 1939, taught by Whit Burnett, and under Mr. Burnett’s tutelage he managed to sell a story, “The Young Folks,” to Story magazine. He subsequently sold stories to Esquire, Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post — formulaic work that gave little hint of real originality.
In 1941, after several rejections, Mr. Salinger finally cracked The New Yorker, the ultimate goal of any aspiring writer back then, with a story, “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” that was an early sketch of what became a scene in “The Catcher in the Rye.” But the magazine then had second thoughts, apparently worried about seeming to encourage young people to run away from school, and held the story for five years — an eternity even for The New Yorker — before finally publishing it in 1946, buried in the back of an issue.
Meanwhile Mr. Salinger had been drafted. He served with the Counter-Intelligence Corps of the Fourth Infantry Division, whose job was to interview Nazi deserters and sympathizers, and was stationed for a while in Tiverton, Devon, the setting of “For Esmé — with Love and Squalor,” probably the most deeply felt of the “Nine Stories.” On June 6, 1944, he landed at Utah Beach, and he later saw action during the Battle of the Bulge.
In 1945 he was hospitalized for “battle fatigue” — often a euphemism for a breakdown — and after recovering he stayed on in Europe past the end of the war, chasing Nazi functionaries. He married a German woman, very briefly — a doctor about whom biographers have been able to discover very little. Her name was Sylvia, Margaret Salinger said, but Mr. Salinger always called her Saliva.
A Different Kind of Writer
Back in New York, Mr. Salinger moved into his parents’ apartment and, having never stopped writing, even during the war, resumed his career. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” austere, mysterious and Mr. Salinger’s most famous and still most discussed story, appeared in The New Yorker in 1948 and suggested, not wrongly, that he had become a very different kind of writer. And like so many writers he eventually found in The New Yorker not just an outlet but a kind of home and developed a close relationship with the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, himself famously shy and agoraphobic — a kindred spirit. In 1961 Mr. Salinger dedicated “Franny and Zooey” to Shawn, writing, “I urge my editor, mentor and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genius domus of The New Yorker, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors, to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book.”
As a young writer Mr. Salinger was something of a ladies’ man and dated, among others, Oona O’Neill, the daughter of Eugene O’Neill and the future wife of Charlie Chaplin. In 1953 he met Claire Douglas, the daughter of the British art critic Robert Langdon Douglas, who was then a 19-year-old Radcliffe sophomore who in many ways resembled Franny Glass (or vice versa); they were married two years later. (Ms. Douglas had married and divorced in the meantime.) Margaret was born in 1955, and Matthew, now an actor and film producer, was born in 1960. But the marriage soon turned distant and isolating, and in 1966, Ms. Douglas sued for divorce, claiming that “a continuation of the marriage would seriously injure her health and endanger her reason.”
The affair with Ms. Maynard, then a Yale freshman, began in 1972, after Mr. Salinger read an article she had written for The New York Times Magazine titled “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life.” They moved in together but broke up abruptly after 10 months when Mr. Salinger said he had no desire for more children. For a while in the ’80s Mr. Salinger was involved with the actress Elaine Joyce, and late in that decade he married Colleen O’Neill, a nurse, who is considerably younger than he is. Not much is known about the marriage because Ms. O’Neill embraced her husband’s code of seclusion.
Besides his son, Matthew, Mr. Salinger is survived by Ms. O’Neill and his daughter, Margaret, as well as three grandsons. His literary agents said in a statement that “in keeping with his lifelong, uncompromising desire to protect and defend his privacy, there will be no service, and the family asks that people’s respect for him, his work and his privacy be extended to them, individually and collectively, during this time.”
“Salinger had remarked that he was in this world but not of it,” the statement said. “His body is gone but the family hopes that he is still with those he loves, whether they are religious or historical figures, personal friends or fictional characters.”
As for the fictional family the Glasses, Mr. Salinger had apparently been writing about them nonstop. Ms. Maynard said she saw shelves of notebooks devoted to the family. In Mr. Salinger’s fiction the Glasses first turn up in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” in which Seymour, the oldest son and family favorite, kills himself during his honeymoon. Characters who turn out in retrospect to have been Glasses appear glancingly in “Nine Stories,” but the family saga really begins to be elaborated upon in “Franny and Zooey,” “Raise High the Roof Beam” and “Hapworth,” the long short story, which is ostensibly a letter written by Seymour from camp when he is just 7 years old but already reading several languages and lusting after Mrs. Happy, wife of the camp owner.
Readers also began to learn about the parents, Les and Bessie, long-suffering ex-vaudevillians, and Seymour’s siblings Franny, Zooey, Buddy, Walt, Waker and Boo Boo; about the Glasses’ Upper West Side apartment; about the radio quiz show on which all the children appeared. Seldom has a fictional family been so lovingly or richly imagined.
Too lovingly, some critics complained. With the publication of “Franny and Zooey” even staunch Salinger admirers began to break ranks. John Updike wrote in The Times Book Review: “Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them. He loves them too exclusively. Their invention has become a hermitage for him. He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation.” Other readers hated the growing streak of Eastern mysticism in the saga, as Seymour evolved, in successive retellings, from a suicidal young man into a genius, a sage, even a saint of sorts.
But writing in The New York Review of Books in 2001, Janet Malcolm argued that the critics had all along been wrong about Mr. Salinger, just as short-sighted contemporaries were wrong about Manet and about Tolstoy. The very things people complain about, Ms. Malcolm contended, were the qualities that made Mr. Salinger great. That the Glasses (and, by implication, their creator) were not at home in the world was the whole point, Ms. Malcolm wrote, and it said as much about the world as about the kind of people who failed to get along there.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Pre-Beatles
Pre-Beatles: George Harrison is 14; John Lennon is 16; Paul McCartney is 15. The person on the far right is lost to history.
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