Master of Revels
Neil Simon’s comic empire.
by John Lahr May 3, 2010
“The good mechanic knows how to take a car apart,” Simon said. “I love to take the human mind apart and see how it works.” Photograph by Irving Penn.
At the end of the 1984 play “Biloxi Blues,” Neil Simon’s semi-autobiographical account of his induction into both the Army and adulthood, the wide-eyed nineteen-year-old hero, Eugene, is handed a book as a farewell gift by his first love, Daisy. “It’s blank pages,” she tells him. “For your memoirs.” The playwright, as it turned out, needed more than one book. At present count, Simon, who is eighty-two, has written two volumes of memoirs, thirty plays, more than twenty screenplays, and five musicals, one of the most successful of which—“Promises, Promises” (1968), with music by Burt Bacharach and lyrics by Hal David—is now in revival (at the Broadway).
Although Simon had spent more than a decade in television, pioneering, among other things, the genre of situation comedy—Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” and “The Phil Silvers Show” were two of his assignments—it took him no fewer than twenty drafts to get his first play, “Come Blow Your Horn,” Broadway-ready, in 1961. “There were very few blind alleys I missed,” he told Playboy in 1979. But he found his theatrical voice soon enough—an audience member actually died laughing on opening night—and since 1970 almost no day has gone by without a professional production of a Neil Simon comedy playing somewhere in the country. Even in the current economy, demand for his plays hasn’t dipped. Last year alone, more than twelve hundred amateur licenses and a hundred and fifty-three professional licenses were granted.
There have been comic playwrights who were more daring (George Kelly), more witty (S. N. Behrman), more rebarbative (S. J. Perelman), and more up-to-the-minute (George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart), but no playwright in Broadway’s long and raucous history has so dominated the boulevard as the softly astringent Simon. For almost half a century, his comedies have offered light at the end of whatever dark tunnel America has found itself in. “I don’t write social and political plays, because I’ve always thought the family was the microcosm of what goes on in the world,” he told The Paris Review, in 1992. “I write about the small wars that eventually become the big wars.” Simon’s characters may attack one another, but he has no interest in smacking down their beliefs. He does not think against society; he thinks with it, observing and recording the sorrows and deliriums of the middle class, like a sort of swami of tsuris. For him and for his avid audience, his plays work as a kind of non-friction. Humor is not a weapon but a wink: a recognition from the stage, according to Simon, of “how absurdly we all live our lives.” In “Broadway Bound” (1986), an account of how Simon and his older brother, Danny, got their start as a comedy-writing team, in the late forties, the boys’ Trotskyite grandfather spouts the left-wing critique that has often been levelled at Simon’s comedies. The routines, the old man says of his show-biz progeny’s début, on a radio variety show, “have nothing to say.” “They’re looking for laughs, not an uprising,” one of the brothers replies.
Nobody has ever gone broke selling escape to the American public. “Funny is money,” one of the jokemeisters observes in Simon’s 1993 play “Laughter on the 23rd Floor.” His spruce entertainments have racked up sensational numbers on Broadway: “Barefoot in the Park” (1963) ran for 1,530 performances; “Brighton Beach Memoirs” (1982) for 1,299; “Plaza Suite” (1968) for 1,097; and “The Odd Couple” (1965) for 966. And the list of fine actors for whom Simon’s plays have been both a platform and a paycheck is very long indeed: included are Walter Matthau, Joel Grey, Jason Alexander, Robert Redford, Woody Harrelson, George Burns, Robert Sean Leonard, Elizabeth Ashley, Art Carney, Jack Lemmon, George C. Scott, Tony Randall, Jack Klugman, Maureen Stapleton, Peter Falk, Lee Grant, Matthew Broderick, and Nathan Lane. Since “Plaza Suite” premièred, Simon has been the sole or main investor in almost all his plays. From 1968 to 1982, he was the owner of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, where many of his hits débuted. “It was like a negotiation in a mirror—you were talking to yourself,” Emanuel Azenberg, Simon’s long-time friend and frequent producer, said of mounting his plays. In the sixties, at the height of his success, with four plays running on Broadway, Simon was earning about sixty thousand dollars a week. Throw in the royalties from touring productions, foreign productions, and movie deals, and his takings were easily double that. (In an average year, not counting Broadway, Simon’s plays still gross about seven million dollars in the United States; his foreign box-office is ten million.) When Simon went Off-Broadway for the first time, in 1995, with “London Suite,” the Broadway stagehands’ union picketed him for endangering their income.
Just about the only thing that Simon’s playwriting hasn’t earned him in America is the honorific of “artist.” “I didn’t write Art,” Simon noted in his 1996 memoir “Rewrites.” Comedy is often relegated to the kids’ table of American theatre, and critics have rarely given Simon his creative due. In this regard, he is one in a long list of comic maestros of the mainstream, including Georges Feydeau and Noël Coward, whose artistry could be distinguished from their popularity only with the passage of time. “He doesn’t have his credentials,” Mel Brooks once quipped. “And he will not be allowed into Serious Land.”
Simon has always felt that every play he writes is a drama with “comic moments.” He doesn’t write jokes or particularly like telling them. (On occasion, however, he doesn’t mind borrowing them. “My wife’s a woman”—a joke in “Laughter on the 23rd Floor”—can also be found in works by Oscar Wilde and Joe Orton.) His laughs are character laughs: they emerge from the distilled reality of personality. “The good mechanic knows how to take a car apart,” he told The Paris Review. “I love to take the human mind apart and see how it works.” Simon said that when he started writing he was warned by people like Lillian Hellman not to mix comedy with drama. “But my theory was, if it’s mixed in life, why can’t you do it in a play?” he said. The characters in his works face challenges worthy of any tragedy: Evy Meara (“The Gingerbread Lady”) struggles with alcoholism; Willie Clark (“The Sunshine Boys”) with desolation and revenge; Felix Ungar (“The Odd Couple”) with loneliness; Mel Edison (“The Prisoner of Second Avenue”) with disillusion and unfulfillment. “I find that what is most poignant is often most funny,” Simon said. When he was writing his masterpiece “The Odd Couple”—which was turned into a movie and a TV series that ran from 1970 to 1975—Simon thought it was “a grim, dark play about two lonely men” that “would probably be the end of my career.”
Simon’s comedy lies as much in structure as in dialogue. His setups have what Mike Nichols, who has won four Tony Awards for directing Simon’s comedies, calls “recognizability”: hilarity is teased out of the ordinary. Simon often notices audiences sighing in recognition at certain lines in his plays. “You’d hear an ‘aah’ from the audience, a sound of ‘My God, that’s me,’ ” he told me. “ ‘That’s me, that’s you, that’s Uncle Joe, that’s Pop.’ ” In “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” (1971), for instance, the dyspeptic Mel Edison, demented by the pressures of city living, flops down on a sofa stacked with pillows. “You can’t even sit in here,” he bellows at his wife, pulling a puffy pillow out from behind him and throwing it on the floor. “Why do you keep these ugly little pillows on here? You spend eight hundred dollars for chairs and then you can’t sit on it because you got ugly little pillows shoved up your back.” “There is no joke there,” Simon said. “Yet, it was an enormous laugh—because the audience identified. That, more or less, is what is funny to me: saying something that’s instantly identifiable to everybody. . . . It’s a shared secret between you and the audience.”
Simon’s characters don’t analyze themselves; their psychology is evident in their behavior, and the audience gets the pleasure of connecting the dots. In “The Odd Couple,” Felix, devastated by the news that his wife, Frances, is done with their marriage, is talked out of committing suicide by his poker-playing friend Oscar, with whom he decides to move in. “Oscar! I’m going to be all right! It’s going to take me a couple of days, but I’m going to be all right,” Felix says. “Good!” Oscar says. “Well, good night, Felix.” “Good night, Frances,” Felix says, as the curtain falls on Act I. The precision of Simon’s characterizations invites laughter. “When people care, even the slightest joke will get a big laugh, for they’ll be so caught up in what’s going on,” he told Playboy. “If they don’t care and are not caught up, you need blockbusters every two minutes and even that won’t fulfill an audience.” In “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” for instance, the teen-age narrator, Eugene, is forbidden to eat cookies by his put-upon mother, Kate. He bounds past her on his way out of the kitchen. “Good night,” he says. Without turning around, Kate says, “Put the cookie on the table.” There is no joke on the page; on the stage, it’s a huge laugh. “I asked him, ‘Did you know that was funny when you wrote it?’ ” Azenberg said. “He said, ‘Yes—it’s an organic moment.’ ”
The notion that comic drama is created by the friction between opposites is Simon’s greatest theatrical legacy. “Dilemma is the key word,” he has said of writing character-driven comedy. “It is always a dilemma, not a situation.” In Simon’s comic calculus, the greater the pressure of the dilemma the more outrageous the behavior. “By the time you know the conflicts, the play is already written,” Simon said in The Paris Review. “All you have to do is put the words down. . . . One thing follows the other. But it all starts with that first seed, conflict.” When Simon finds himself at a narrative impasse, he goes back to a play’s opening scenes, where he has mapped out his landscape of opposites. “The foundation of the play is set in those first fifteen or twenty minutes,” he said. “The answers always lie there.” In his weaker work, this trope can seem glib and schematic. In “Last of the Red Hot Lovers” (1969), for instance, the repressed, married restaurateur, Barney Cashman, full of Weltschmerz and lust, contends in vain with three potential hookups at his trysting pad, his mother’s apartment. Cashman’s dilemma never changes; only the eccentricities of the women do. His itch to get laid fights a series of losing battles against clear-eyed rapacity, ditzy psychopathy, and corrosive depression, allowing Simon easy laughs at the expense of his cartoon Lothario. One woman speaks of physical cravings that need immediate satisfaction. “You mean like after an hour of handball, a cold Pepsi,” Cashman says.
In the best plays, however, Simon’s schema enables him to dole out the contradiction of personality in small hints, keeping the conflicts surprising until they attain a critical mass. At that point, toward the end of the evening, a character will often explode in a comic summation of events, a sort of aria that Simon calls his “fingerprint.” “The character has reached the point where he can’t contain himself anymore, and everything comes spurting out . . . a cascade of irritations,” Simon said. “Just mentioning one of them wouldn’t be funny, but to mention all the irritations wraps up a man’s life in one paragraph.” In “Plaza Suite,” Roy, the father of a bride who locks herself in a hotel bathroom and refuses to come out for her wedding, finally erupts at his wife:
Do you know what I’m going to do now? Do you have any idea? I’m going to wash my hands of the entire Eisler-Hubley wedding. You can take all the Eislers and all the hors d’oeuvres and go to Central Park and have an eight thousand dollar picnic. . . . I’m going down to the Oak Room with my broken arm, with my drenched rented ripped suit—and I’m gonna get blind! . . . I don’t mean drunk, I mean totally blind . . . because I don’t want to see you or your crazy daughter again, if I live to be a thousand.
In “The Odd Couple,” Oscar is a carefree, sloppy, fun-loving, louche spendthrift; Felix is a nervous, fastidious, compulsive, bourgeois penny-pincher. Once Felix takes up residence in Oscar’s West Side pigsty and starts trying to transform it into House Beautiful, their differences quickly lead to a war, which is summed up in Act III:
OSCAR: I’ll tell you exactly what it is. It’s the cooking, cleaning and crying. It’s the talking in your sleep, it’s the moose calls that open your ears at two o’clock in the morning. I can’t take it anymore, Felix. I’m crackin’ up. Everything you do irritates me. And when you’re not here, the things I know you’re gonna do when you come in irritate me. You leave me little notes on my pillow. I told you a hundred times, I can’t stand little notes on my pillow. “We’re all out of Corn Flakes. F.U.” It took me three hours to figure out that F.U. was Felix Ungar. It’s not your fault, Felix. It’s a rotten combination.
FELIX: I get the picture.
OSCAR: That’s just the frame. The picture I haven’t even painted yet.
Simon struggled with this rant, especially the note about Corn Flakes. “I said to myself, ‘How would he sign it? I know he’d do something that would annoy Oscar,’ ” Simon recalled. “So I signed it ‘Mr. Ungar.’ Then I tried ‘Felix Ungar.’ Then I tried ‘F.U.’ and it was as if a bomb had exploded in the room.”
“The Odd Couple” is a classic of American comedy. Two other Simon works—“The Sunshine Boys” (1972) and the underrated “Laughter on the 23rd Floor”—match its exquisite precision and, it seems to me, share the same pantheon: “The Sunshine Boys,” which pays homage to vaudeville comedians, and “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” which gives us a fictionalized look at the talented zanies who worked on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” in the early fifties: Simon, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Mel Tolkin, and Mike Stewart. (It was “like a cocktail party without cocktails,” Simon said.) In these inspired and brilliantly structured comedies, the inciting incidents are strong, the characterization is meticulous, even uncanny, and the aggression is allowed to let rip. The hostile outrageousness of all three plays lifts them beyond the geniality and the safety of Simon’s other work, calling out of him a different kind of license, something deeper, darker, and more thrilling. They chronicle the fierce heart, not the winded one.
“Laughter on the 23rd Floor” is one of the rare Simon plays in which politics encroaches on the comedy. Into the happy melee of the writing room Simon introduces the unhappy facts of the day, and shows how the anarchic enterprise of the writers deflects them. “How do you feel about McCarthy, Max?” Val, one of the writers, asks the star of the show. Max turns and smashes his fist through a wall. “There! That’s how I feel,” he says. When Val asks him if he can get his hand back out of the hole, Max shouts, “LEAVE IT THERE!! Get a knife. Cut it off. Send it in a box to that no good bastard. Let him know what I think of him.”
In “The Sunshine Boys,” the pigheaded and ancient Willie Clark is persuaded to reunite for a TV special with his former vaudeville partner, Al Lewis, who put him out of business by retiring eleven years earlier. Of Simon’s many running gags, the argument between these two bickering old-timers over whether to say “enter” or “come in” as they perform a doctor sketch from their act is Simon’s best, acquiring metaphoric weight right up to the end of the play. “ ‘Come in’ I’ll stay. ‘Enter,’ I go,” Al tells Willie, ready to walk out of the seedy hotel room where they meet to rehearse at the end of Act I:
AL: Don’t fool around with me. I got enough pains in my neck. Are you going to say “Come in”?
WILLIE: Ask me “Knock, knock, knock”!
AL: I know you, you bastard!
WILLIE: ASK ME “KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK”!
AL: KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK!
WILLIE: (Grinding it in) EN-TERRR!
AL: BEDBUG! CRAZY BEDBUG!
(He starts to run out)
WILLIE: (Big smile) ENNN-TERRRRR!
(The curtain starts down)
AL: (Heading for the door) LUNATIC BASTARD!
WILLIE: ENNN-TERRRR!
(Curtain)
The battle continues even as they run through their routine in front of the TV cameras. Apoplectic in the midst of the argument, Willie collapses, and, in a masterly piece of comic construction, the next time Al knocks on Willie’s door real doctors are involved; Willie has had a heart attack. “Aha! This is it! . . . This was worth getting sick for!” he says, hearing Al outside his door. “Come on, knock again. En-terr!” Willie has had his chair pushed to the farthest corner of the room. “I want that son-of-a-bitch to have a long walk,” he says, envisioning a pageant of humiliation for Al, whose expected apology, of course, never comes. Willie, with his fragility and his fury, has a terrific humanity; he is coming to the end of both his career and his time on earth.
The world of “The Sunshine Boys” and “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” is wittier, freer, crueller, and more original than that of the stranded bourgeois souls in most of Simon’s other comedies. The freewheeling sharpshooters in these works are an antidote both to Simon’s sentimentality and to his habit in his later plays—“Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “Biloxi Blues,” “Broadway Bound”—of using a narrator to make his themes explicit and to take the edge off the pain. The life we see onstage in those plays may be uncomfortable, but we never are; we never have to work for meaning, which is half the fun of theatre’s game of show-and-tell. The device curries favor with the audience and insures that Simon’s words, like a fly line, go below the surface but only so far.
When I first saw “The Sunshine Boys,” on Broadway, in 1972, Willie’s combination of hurt and hostility felt eerily familiar to me. At the beginning of the play, Willie tells of going up for a potato-chip commercial and being unable to remember the name of the brand, Frito-Lay. “Because it’s not funny,” he explains to his nephew, an agent, who sent him up for the job. “If it’s funny, I remember it. Alka-Seltzer is funny.” Willie didn’t get the commercial, but, as it happens, my father, Bert Lahr, a former vaudeville headliner in a famous double act, did. I wrote to Simon back then to ask about the source of his inspiration. He replied:
My father who prided himself in the fact that no one could make him laugh (which any Freudian will tell you was the reason that I have been hell-bent on trying to make the whole world laugh) succumbed to only one man’s talents: Bert Lahr. Bert was physically very much like my father and when I watched him on the stage or screen I both loved and feared him at the same time—(father transference, if I’ve ever seen it).
Simon, who had once worked with my father, on a TV special, went on:
I couldn’t help noticing . . . how little joy Bert “appeared” to be getting for himself as the rest of us were convulsed. It is not difficult to see therefore, where much of the heart of “Sunshine Boys” springs from . . . especially the line late in the play where Sam Levene says, “Willie, you’ve done comedy on the stage for 45 years and I don’t think you’ve enjoyed it once.” To which Willie replies, “If I were there to enjoy it, I would buy a ticket.”
Simon, too, works out of a melancholy climate, which his therapist called “sad enough to be sad, but not happy enough to be happy.” “I always need that escape hatch,” he told The Paris Review, “that place to go that’s within myself.” From an early age, he found in laughter a refuge from his impoverished and impoverishing family. He and Danny, who was almost nine years older, grew up in the vortex of their parents’ stormy marriage in a two-bedroom apartment on 185th Street in Upper Manhattan—“the squalid world of [my] unhappiness,” as he called it. Simon’s father, Irving, an unworldly piece-goods salesman, made frequent traumatic exits from the family for “anywhere from a month to a year at a time.” “It was like coming from five broken families,” Simon said. “That pain lingers.” Simon’s mother, Mamie, had no skills and no means of earning a living. “We never knew where our next meal was coming from,” Simon told Playboy. To keep Danny from quitting school in order to support the family, Mamie slept on the sofa and rented her bedroom to two local butchers, “who paid most of their rent in lamb chops and liver.” For an extra six or seven dollars, she also rented out her kitchen for a ladies’ card game. Mamie was often at a loss in difficult situations. “It was when she felt helpless, as when my fever rose to a hundred and five, that I felt my own helplessness,” he remembered in “Rewrites.” “She would curse my father for his absence and run out to the hallway, banging on the doors of neighbors to help her find a remedy, screaming up to a God who had once again abandoned her. . . . Listening to her . . . frightened me more than my own illness. . . . I vowed, even at that early age, that if I could take care of myself, I would spare such painful remorse.”
Thinking funny was part of Simon’s campaign of self-sufficiency. “I’m usually funniest when there’s trouble,” he said in “Rewrites.” His comic impulse was the opposite of iconoclastic: instead of smashing, it wanted to bind; instead of subverting, it wanted to contain. Laughter served Simon as a kind of “nourishment,” engineering in public the embrace he rarely received from his parents. “When an audience laughed, I felt fulfilled,” he wrote in “Rewrites.” “It was a sign of approval, of being accepted.” At the same time, like most comedians, he used comedy as a kind of armor that allowed him to maintain a certain distance from others and from himself. At one point during his first marriage, his wife, Joan Baim, in the middle of a vicious argument, picked up a defrosting veal chop and threw it at his head. “I was so stunned I could barely react; stunned not by the blow nor the intent, but by the absurdity that I, a grown man, had just been hit in the head with a frozen veal chop,” he wrote. “A faint flicker of a smile crossed my face. Suddenly the anger and hostility drained from me and I found myself outside the situation looking in, no longer involved as a man in conflict but as an observer, an audience so to speak.”
Simon’s ability to stand outside himself and to observe the folly of Homo sapiens is both his honey and his cross: instead of working through the emotion he sets up in some of his plays, he deflects it with laughs. “Do you know what you are?” the newly married Corie says, indicting her workaholic husband, in “Barefoot in the Park.” “You’re a Watcher. There are Watchers in this world and there are Do-ers. And the Watchers sit around watching the Do-ers do.”
Framed on the wall of Azenberg’s office on the top floor of the Neil Simon Theatre are two notes that Simon passed to Azenberg during read-throughs of his plays. One says, “Don’t worry, I know how to fix it,” the resulting “it” being the most memorable scene in “Broadway Bound.” The other note says, “Worry—I don’t know how to fix it,” which signalled the collapse of a musical based on the Gershwin catalogue. Revising is a lifelong habit for Simon, one he learned from his brother in their early sketch-writing days. “Danny was a relentlessly, compulsively dissatisfied person,” Woody Allen, who started writing with Danny when he was nineteen, after the brothers broke up, in 1954, told me. “He was constantly starting over, constantly rewriting, always explaining to me helpful things, like, The punch line is not what makes the joke, it’s the straight line. What you have to have is a great straight line—completely natural, what the character would say—then your obligation is to find the joke within that line.” (With a few notable exceptions, Simon’s plays are also an ongoing rewrite of his own story, and he considers it his greatest weakness that he is unable “to write outside my own experience.” It’s no coincidence that his latest play, like his first memoir, is called “Rewrites.”)
“He rewrote and rewrote and rewrote because he wanted to,” Mike Nichols recalled. “For ‘The Odd Couple,’ we had so many endings I don’t remember how the play ends. Walter [Matthau] kept saying, ‘What do you care? It’s gonna run for years anyway.’ It was that he knew he could do better.” In the case of “The Gingerbread Lady” (1970), a play about Maureen Stapleton, in which she starred, the notices were so bad in Boston that the producer decided to close the show. “This is a potentially wonderful play,” Stapleton told Simon. “It needs work, but don’t walk away from it.” Simon took the challenge. Within a week, he’d written thirty-five new pages, and the play subsequently ran for more than five months on Broadway, won Stapleton a Tony, and was turned into the movie “Only When I Laugh,” which was nominated for three Academy Awards in 1982.
Simon’s gifts for construction and for reconstruction make him an ideal collaborator for the Broadway musical, the epitome of the business of show. With the exception of “A Chorus Line,” some of which he punched up without credit, Simon has never collaborated on an innovative musical; nonetheless, he’s written the books for a number of slick, successful ones—“Sweet Charity,” “Little Me,” “The Goodbye Girl,” “They’re Playing Our Song.” The job of the librettist is to throw soft pitches to the musical team, to toss dramatic scenes to the songwriters so that they can belt the most emotional moments into the stands. “I wouldn’t want to write musicals all the time,” Simon told the Chicago Tribune. But when, in the late sixties, the producer David Merrick asked him what musical he’d like to make, he chose the elements that became “Promises, Promises.”
In “Promises, Promises,” an adaptation of the screenplay of “The Apartment,” by Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond, Simon buffs up the dominant character of his sixties comedies: the trapped bourgeois soul who finds that almost everything he yearns for is worthless. It’s a good story, and Simon tells it well. “Half as big as life, that’s me / But that’s not the way I always mean to be,” Chuck Baxter, the musical’s hapless and ambitious hero, sings. Baxter is a prisoner of his own inferiority and its corollary, grandiosity. In order to get a leg up on the corporate ladder, he lets company executives borrow his apartment to get a leg over. Baxter’s pad soon becomes so popular that he can hardly gain access to it, but by the finale he has overcome his inadequacy, regained his dignity, and won the girl of his daydreams. (“I don’t think I write happy endings,” Simon said. “I try never to end a play with two people in each other’s arms—unless it’s a musical.”) Simon never compromises the portrait of the naïve Baxter with a crowd-pleasing wisecrack; instead, he meets the show’s commercial requirement—love and goodness conquer all. In this sense, “Promises, Promises,” with its melodic score that includes the hit “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” adheres to Simon’s early musical formula: hilarity with heart. It is a sort of accessible irony-free, pre-Sondheim production, in which the big heart still dominates over the atrophied one.
In the past few years, Simon has had bad luck with his Broadway revivals. The 2005 production of “The Odd Couple” was miscast; the 2009 “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” well directed by David Cromer but without a star, didn’t find an audience to sustain it; “Broadway Bound,” which was supposed to play in repertoire with it, was cancelled before it began. “Promises, Promises” (directed and choreographed by Rob Ashford) brings Simon back to Broadway with the added candlepower of Kristin Chenoweth and Sean Hayes and the inclusion in the score of two extra Bacharach-David hits, “I Say a Little Prayer” and “A House Is Not a Home.” Simon told me recently that he doesn’t feel honored in his time. “Only from show to show,” he said. But what do you call someone who, over half a century, has brought millions of people together to tell them bittersweet stories that shed light and laughter on the follies of his small corner of the universe? I say you call him an artist, and the hell with it. ♦
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Pierre Bernard
Life in an Awkward Position
How an eccentric guru and charming hustler made yoga popular in America
By CHRISTINE ROSEN
Several decades ago, you would have received a baffled stare if you had asked a stranger what a "downward facing dog" was. Today most strangers would nod knowingly and point you to their yoga studio, where the "downward facing dog" (feet and hands planted on the ground, torso stretched into an inverted "V") and other poses are common practices for the more than 20 million people who study yoga in the U.S.
[BOOKREVIEW1] Bernard Collection, Historical Society of Rockland County
Doing yogo outdoors in New York.
But yoga wasn't always mainstream, as Robert Love informs us in "The Great Oom," his rollicking and well-researched history of yoga's early days in America. The spiritual discipline that has colonized America's gyms and trendy loft spaces was once a fringe practice, its advocates treated as charlatans and, occasionally, criminals. Yoga's cultural rise is a story of scandal, financial shenanigans, bodily discipline, oversize egos and bizarre love triangles, with a few performing elephants thrown in for good measure.
Mr. Love tells his story through the life of one of yoga's earliest promoters, Pierre Bernard—known as the "Great Oom"—a zany man whose talent for self-invention rivaled that of P.T. Barnum. Born Perry Baker in Leon, Iowa, in 1876, Bernard's early and serendipitous meeting with an Indian tutor in 1889 put him on the path to promoting yoga as his life's work.
The "hatha yoga" that Bernard learned from his tutor emphasized postures (called asanas) as well as controlled breathing techniques and a range of "meditative arts." His education also included "tantric yoga," whose goal is to "merge the individual's soul with the ultimate reality, divinity, or god." Yoga's origins reach back to ancient India, where it developed alongside Hindu and Buddhist traditions.
Becoming yoga's U.S. champion was not an obviously wise career move for Pierre Bernard. (He changed his name around 1896 to give himself a more mystical aura.) Over the course of his lifetime, Mr. Love writes, "yoga was labeled a criminal fraud and an abomination against the purity of American women. It was associated with sexual promiscuity and kicked to the fringes of society."
But Bernard was a believer. He soon became a lauded hypnotist in 1890s San Francisco. During one demonstration, he used "mind control" to put himself in a trance that he claimed left him immune to pain. As the crowd watched, a doctor pushed pins through Bernard's earlobes and cheeks and rammed a "large ladies hat pin" through his tongue—or so the newspapers reported. A bloodied Bernard awoke and showed his fitness by promptly hypnotizing someone else.
[BOOKREVIEW6] Bernard Collection, Historical Society of Rockland County
Pierre Bernard, yoga's American proselytizer.
As Bernard's reputation grew, he became a sought-after personal guru to wealthy San Francisco residents and established a "Tantrik Order" of disaffected socialites, artists and musicians who lived communally and practiced mystical rites—including yoga, which, Bernard promised, would bring its adherents a direct connection to the divine. Like many a guru before and since, he had his choice of sexual partners, from whom he demanded absolute loyalty and not a little forbearance, given his carefree attitude toward monogamy. Most of the women didn't seem to mind; one 19-year-old declared herself "cured of her heart trouble and in fine spirits" after a months-long involvement with the guru.
But Bernard's open sexual practices eventually cause trouble. In an era when hysteria over "white slavery" and prostitution dominated the news, his conduct fed into a "moral panic" (as Mr. Love puts it) fueled by yellow journalists and the purity crusader Anthony Comstock. In 1910, after relocating with his acolytes to New York City, Bernard was charged with having "inveigled and enticed" a young woman "for the purpose of sexual intercourse." Although the charges were eventually dismissed, the taint lingered, and Bernard—whom newspapers dubbed "the Great Oom" after the common yoga chant "Om"—and his yogic band fled to more bucolic prospects in Nyack, N.Y.
There, with financial support from the Vanderbilt family— especially Anne Vanderbilt, whose daughters studied yoga with Bernard—he established a yoga center on an old Nyack estate. According to Mr. Love, it catered to "the idle wealthy with recreation, parties, and celebrity buzz" and promoted a philosophy of "self-expression, diet, and an attention to inner cleanliness" that included a startling devotion to colonics.
As Bernard's fortunes improved so did his desire to bring his enterprise into the mainstream. He started calling his Nyack property the "Clarkstown Country Club" and sponsoring theater performances, circus-like entertainments (complete with elephants) and even a baseball team. His marriage to a former vaudevillian performer ensured that he had a partner in charming the needy heiresses on whom his fortunes often relied.
Bernard's luck faltered during the Depression, as did his relationship with the Vanderbilts. The club was soon in arrears. Yoga's appeal, however, was just beginning to spread. By the 1950s an increasing number of Americans were practicing yoga, seeing it less as a cultish practice than as a means of restoring one's health in the stressful modern world. Bernard became a Miss Havisham figure, spending his final years alone, wandering around his decaying manse in Nyack. He died in 1955, at age 79, but many of his devotees went on to become teachers themselves and trained a new generation of yoga students who in turn spread the gospel of good health through yoga.
Today yoga flourishes even in the Great Oom's home state of Iowa, and the yoga industrial complex has broadened to include magazines, books, clothing and celebrity followers. Eager students can study Christian yoga (or "Yahweh Yoga," as it is sometimes called) and Jewish Yoga, where students replace "om" with "shalom." What was once exotic is now simply part of America's multicultural mix.
Mr. Love has the gift of the good biographer: He has sympathy for his subject's "flamboyant weirdness" but the rigor to present him for what he was. Although yoga was an import, Pierre Bernard was an example of a fascinating American type: the spiritual entrepreneur. His life reminds us that the appeal of spiritual cures that promise practical results is not a new phenomenon; it is an enduring part of our country's history. If our current pursuit of "wellness" is any guide, it will remain so for the foreseeable future.
—Ms. Rosen is senior editor of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society.
How an eccentric guru and charming hustler made yoga popular in America
By CHRISTINE ROSEN
Several decades ago, you would have received a baffled stare if you had asked a stranger what a "downward facing dog" was. Today most strangers would nod knowingly and point you to their yoga studio, where the "downward facing dog" (feet and hands planted on the ground, torso stretched into an inverted "V") and other poses are common practices for the more than 20 million people who study yoga in the U.S.
[BOOKREVIEW1] Bernard Collection, Historical Society of Rockland County
Doing yogo outdoors in New York.
But yoga wasn't always mainstream, as Robert Love informs us in "The Great Oom," his rollicking and well-researched history of yoga's early days in America. The spiritual discipline that has colonized America's gyms and trendy loft spaces was once a fringe practice, its advocates treated as charlatans and, occasionally, criminals. Yoga's cultural rise is a story of scandal, financial shenanigans, bodily discipline, oversize egos and bizarre love triangles, with a few performing elephants thrown in for good measure.
Mr. Love tells his story through the life of one of yoga's earliest promoters, Pierre Bernard—known as the "Great Oom"—a zany man whose talent for self-invention rivaled that of P.T. Barnum. Born Perry Baker in Leon, Iowa, in 1876, Bernard's early and serendipitous meeting with an Indian tutor in 1889 put him on the path to promoting yoga as his life's work.
The "hatha yoga" that Bernard learned from his tutor emphasized postures (called asanas) as well as controlled breathing techniques and a range of "meditative arts." His education also included "tantric yoga," whose goal is to "merge the individual's soul with the ultimate reality, divinity, or god." Yoga's origins reach back to ancient India, where it developed alongside Hindu and Buddhist traditions.
Becoming yoga's U.S. champion was not an obviously wise career move for Pierre Bernard. (He changed his name around 1896 to give himself a more mystical aura.) Over the course of his lifetime, Mr. Love writes, "yoga was labeled a criminal fraud and an abomination against the purity of American women. It was associated with sexual promiscuity and kicked to the fringes of society."
But Bernard was a believer. He soon became a lauded hypnotist in 1890s San Francisco. During one demonstration, he used "mind control" to put himself in a trance that he claimed left him immune to pain. As the crowd watched, a doctor pushed pins through Bernard's earlobes and cheeks and rammed a "large ladies hat pin" through his tongue—or so the newspapers reported. A bloodied Bernard awoke and showed his fitness by promptly hypnotizing someone else.
[BOOKREVIEW6] Bernard Collection, Historical Society of Rockland County
Pierre Bernard, yoga's American proselytizer.
As Bernard's reputation grew, he became a sought-after personal guru to wealthy San Francisco residents and established a "Tantrik Order" of disaffected socialites, artists and musicians who lived communally and practiced mystical rites—including yoga, which, Bernard promised, would bring its adherents a direct connection to the divine. Like many a guru before and since, he had his choice of sexual partners, from whom he demanded absolute loyalty and not a little forbearance, given his carefree attitude toward monogamy. Most of the women didn't seem to mind; one 19-year-old declared herself "cured of her heart trouble and in fine spirits" after a months-long involvement with the guru.
But Bernard's open sexual practices eventually cause trouble. In an era when hysteria over "white slavery" and prostitution dominated the news, his conduct fed into a "moral panic" (as Mr. Love puts it) fueled by yellow journalists and the purity crusader Anthony Comstock. In 1910, after relocating with his acolytes to New York City, Bernard was charged with having "inveigled and enticed" a young woman "for the purpose of sexual intercourse." Although the charges were eventually dismissed, the taint lingered, and Bernard—whom newspapers dubbed "the Great Oom" after the common yoga chant "Om"—and his yogic band fled to more bucolic prospects in Nyack, N.Y.
There, with financial support from the Vanderbilt family— especially Anne Vanderbilt, whose daughters studied yoga with Bernard—he established a yoga center on an old Nyack estate. According to Mr. Love, it catered to "the idle wealthy with recreation, parties, and celebrity buzz" and promoted a philosophy of "self-expression, diet, and an attention to inner cleanliness" that included a startling devotion to colonics.
As Bernard's fortunes improved so did his desire to bring his enterprise into the mainstream. He started calling his Nyack property the "Clarkstown Country Club" and sponsoring theater performances, circus-like entertainments (complete with elephants) and even a baseball team. His marriage to a former vaudevillian performer ensured that he had a partner in charming the needy heiresses on whom his fortunes often relied.
Bernard's luck faltered during the Depression, as did his relationship with the Vanderbilts. The club was soon in arrears. Yoga's appeal, however, was just beginning to spread. By the 1950s an increasing number of Americans were practicing yoga, seeing it less as a cultish practice than as a means of restoring one's health in the stressful modern world. Bernard became a Miss Havisham figure, spending his final years alone, wandering around his decaying manse in Nyack. He died in 1955, at age 79, but many of his devotees went on to become teachers themselves and trained a new generation of yoga students who in turn spread the gospel of good health through yoga.
Today yoga flourishes even in the Great Oom's home state of Iowa, and the yoga industrial complex has broadened to include magazines, books, clothing and celebrity followers. Eager students can study Christian yoga (or "Yahweh Yoga," as it is sometimes called) and Jewish Yoga, where students replace "om" with "shalom." What was once exotic is now simply part of America's multicultural mix.
Mr. Love has the gift of the good biographer: He has sympathy for his subject's "flamboyant weirdness" but the rigor to present him for what he was. Although yoga was an import, Pierre Bernard was an example of a fascinating American type: the spiritual entrepreneur. His life reminds us that the appeal of spiritual cures that promise practical results is not a new phenomenon; it is an enduring part of our country's history. If our current pursuit of "wellness" is any guide, it will remain so for the foreseeable future.
—Ms. Rosen is senior editor of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society.
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.
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