Buffett's performance came from a combination of relentless drive,
ruthless self-interest, boundless curiosity about a narrow subject,
record-breaking parsimony, social climbing, complex financial maneuvers,
occasional bullying, a keen understanding of the tax code, ceaseless
study of financial and business arcana, the critical insight that
running a hedge fund created low risk almost zero-cost leverage, the
critical insight that insurance float created low risk zero-cost
leverage, and the gradual accumulation of personal and institutional
advantages from the repeated application of all of these things. I may
have left a few things out, but this is the gist. Like most great
performances, Buffett's success is to be admired for its scale,
audacity, creativity, and ambition -- although not necessarily emulated
in every respect.
Monday, December 19, 2011
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
The Jack Kerouac of Junk
The Jack Kerouac of Junk
By STEVEN KURUTZ
LECLAIRE, Iowa
MIKE WOLFE, the co-star of “American Pickers,” the popular antiques show, is known for driving the country’s back roads and pulling old signage, bicycles, gasoline pumps and other “rusty gold,” to use his term, out of people’s barns and garages. So it’s not entirely surprising to walk into his house and find a 1913 Harley-Davidson parked in the dining room.
Like everything Mr. Wolfe “picks,” the motorcycle has a story. He bought it in upstate New York from a man whose father ran a classified ad that Mr. Wolfe came across 30 years later. After establishing that the bike was still in the family, he recalled, “I drove all the way to New York, slept in the guy’s driveway and knocked on his door the next morning.”
Fast-talking and persistent, Mr. Wolfe, 46, can sniff out unique or valuable antiques like a bloodhound. He persuaded the reluctant owner to sell him the bike for $25,000, although “it’s worth 55 grand, easily,” he said, holding the handlebars protectively, as if a visitor might jump on and drive away.
On “American Pickers” (and in “American Pickers Guide to Picking,” a book out next month from Hyperion), Mr. Wolfe and his childhood friend, Frank Fritz, 47, show a similar enthusiasm for wheeling and dealing with eccentric collectors or, more often, “freestyling,” their word for driving around in search of homes with lawns that look like junkyards and may contain treasures. As pickers, they are middlemen in the antiques food chain, buying items they can sell quickly, at a markup, to dealers and collectors.
The History cable-network reality series draws about 5.5 million viewers a week, and its success lies in its rugged approach to the traditionally genteel antiques world. As Mr. Wolfe put it, “We don’t wear blue blazers and have 10 cats and talk about Ming Dynasty vases.” Seeing him pull a dirt-caked crock from a farmer’s field with giddy excitement, one might assume Mr. Wolfe lives in the kind of pack-rat nest he visits on the show.
In fact, he owns one of the prettiest buildings on the main street of this small town on the Mississippi River, and the duplex apartment on the top floors that he shares with his girlfriend, Jodi Faeth, is furnished with Mission-style pieces, comfy chairs and a few carefully edited picks, like the 1913 Harley and a weather vane pulled from a Nebraska barn.
Their third-floor bedroom has large windows with a sweeping view of the river. “I can sit right here, dude,” Mr. Wolfe said, hopping onto the bed with his boots on. “I can watch the river, I got the fireplace raging. It’s like a treehouse up here.”
Following the advice in his book, which suggests avoiding “fresh paint jobs,” “landscaping” and “shiny new cars,” his house wouldn’t rate a second look from a picker. What gives?
“I love this stuff, but I would never live in a place that looks like the places we pick,” Mr. Wolfe said, leading a visitor around the building, a former grocery and boardinghouse built in 1860 that was a “dump,” he said, when he bought it seven years ago.
It doesn’t look like that now. Mr. Wolfe refurbished the ground floor and rents it to a pair of home décor stores. Upstairs, he gutted the space to the studs, widening doorways and windows to open the floor plan. “There were four fireplaces in this building — so all that soot,” he said. “I still have a cough.”
The original window trim and hardwood floors retain the building’s historic feel, but Mr. Wolfe installed a modern kitchen and bathrooms.
Still, one thinks of “American Pickers” and envisions Mr. Wolfe on an old farm, tinkering with machinery. “I want to be in the thick of things downtown,” he countered. “See, that’s the beauty of this property, man. I’ve got a two-car garage, a courtyard and I’m on the river side. I’ve really created my own environment.”
It appears the building is one of Mr. Wolfe’s picks, and to pay for it, and its renovation, he sold several of his other picks, including rare motorcycles. (In typical fashion, he also negotiated the $325,000 asking price down to $175,000.)
Mr. Wolfe, who has lived in LeClaire for 15 years, owns several buildings in town and would like to see the riverfront community become a tourist destination. Speaking as if the town itself were a pick, he said, “I used to wander around down here at night and say, ‘This could be something.’ ”
His store, Antique Archaeology, is a few blocks away. On “American Pickers,” the men return there at the end of each episode and present their finds to the third cast member, Danielle Colby, 35, a sassy tattooed woman who minds the store. Mr. Wolfe’s home, on the other hand, doesn’t play a role on the show, and his personal life isn’t discussed, either.
Perhaps owing to a stereotype about the antiques business, rumors circulate on the Internet that Mr. Wolfe and Mr. Fritz are gay. In fact, both men are straight; for the last 17 years, Mr. Wolfe has dated Ms. Faeth, an accountant with a laid-back manner that complements what Ms. Colby described as her boss’s “firecracker” personality.
Ms. Faeth, 40, learned of his picking early on.
“When I met him, he used to disguise picks as dates,” she said. “He’d say, ‘We’re going to Wisconsin to a bed-and-breakfast.’ We were really going to Wisconsin to meet Speedo Joe.”
She doesn’t take issue with the things Mr. Wolfe brings home (“Obviously, I let a motorcycle in the living room,” she said), but on occasion she boils over when he sells a favorite piece, like the vintage tobacco ad depicting a American Indian woman that hung in their living room. “I came home and it was gone,” she said. “He’s like, ‘What? Property taxes are due.’ ”
Referring to the success of “American Pickers,” she added: “I’m happy to say things have changed and pieces are staying around longer.”
As for Mr. Wolfe, he is still making the adjustment. “I was sleeping in my van on buying trips two years ago,” he said. “Now people are coming up to me and saying ‘We love your show.’ It’s trippy.”
MR. WOLFE grew up in Bettendorf, Iowa, just downriver from LeClaire, and began picking at age 6. “I found a bicycle in the garbage, and I sold it in two days for $5,” he recalled. “I was hooked.”
The family didn’t have much money (his single mother raised three children) so Mr. Wolfe learned to barter his picks for things he wanted, like his first motorcycle. “I traded a guy a pair of stereo speakers for it,” he said.
By the late 1990s, he owned two bicycle shops, but he began to focus on picking professionally. He started with antique bicycles (“I was pulling bikes out of barns for 10 bucks and selling them for 500 bucks,” he said). Then, after meeting two antiques dealers who quizzed him about what else was in those barns, he expanded into furniture, lighting and items that evoked the machine age.
Eventually, he said, “I’m sitting in the bicycle shop going: ‘What am I doing in here, man? I need to be on the road.’ So I closed the shop, bought a cargo van and hit the back roads. I was a full-on hobo — a Jack Kerouac of junk.”
At the suggestion of a friend, Mr. Wolfe bought a video camera and began filming his picking trips. Sometimes Mr. Fritz came along. Mr. Wolfe thought their adventures would make great TV because “antiques are all about the story, the treasure hunt,” he said, and pickers are “in the trenches finding this stuff.”
But he spent four and a half years trying to convince a network of that, and failing. Finally, History bought “American Pickers,” and the show began early last year.
Since the first episode, viewers have been coming in droves to Mr. Wolfe’s Antique Archaeology shop, a converted garage in an alley that once functioned as his man cave and warehouse. (In the beginning, he said, “we didn’t even own a cash register.”) Ms. Colby, who meets many of them, reasoned that they “develop a crush on the lifestyle and the cool stuff we find” and get “sucked into Mike’s fantasy world.” These days, the store is a curious hybrid of retail operation and unofficial “American Pickers” museum.
On a recent afternoon there, an older couple from northern Iowa took photos while other fans bought Antique Archaeology T-shirts and pointed to oddball items picked on the show, like oversize Laurel and Hardy heads made of plastic. Most of them asked, “Where’s Mike and Frank?” or “Where’s Danielle?” and seemed surprised by their absence.
Adam Hurlburt, an employee, kept repeating, “Mike was here yesterday” and “You just missed him.”
As a small-town guy, Mr. Wolfe is in the strange position of being a TV star who is also accessible. He limits visits to the shop now because it’s difficult to get work done. Sitting on the fireplace hearth in his bedroom, he admitted that the show’s popularity caught him off guard. “I never thought about how busy the store would be,” he said. “I was so naïve to all of this.”
But he appears to be learning quickly. He joked that his store’s logo now appears so often on television, “it’s like I have the advertising budget of Ford.”
In addition to the “Guide to Picking,” which he worked on with Mr. Fritz, Ms. Colby and Libby Callaway, a freelance writer, he is one of the authors of a children’s book, with the working title “Kid Picker,” because a lot of children watch the show. And last month, he opened a second Antique Archaeology store, in Nashville.
Mr. Wolfe has also started to move from finding cool stuff to designing it. At the new store, he sells lighting made from materials he picked, created with David Phillips, a designer in Nashville. The next step, he said, is to produce antique-looking home pieces, similar to those sold by Restoration Hardware.
“I can never pick enough stuff — it’s physically impossible,” he said. “I have to make stuff to sell, and I want to do that because I’m into décor.”
Mr. Wolfe was interrupted by a text message, and he disappeared into another room to conduct business. Lazy afternoons around the house are rare. He had just returned from a two-week picking trip to South Dakota, and the next day he and Ms. Faeth were driving to Nashville with a van full of fresh picks. The couple bought a historic home there last year, something they were able to afford because of the show’s success.
“Hopefully, we’re doing some porch time,” Ms. Faeth said.
But the work schedule Mr. Wolfe rattled off for the coming week made that seem unlikely.
“I’m always busy,” he said. Then, as if summing up the itinerant life of a picker, he added, “Sometimes it feels like I don’t live anywhere.”
By STEVEN KURUTZ
LECLAIRE, Iowa
MIKE WOLFE, the co-star of “American Pickers,” the popular antiques show, is known for driving the country’s back roads and pulling old signage, bicycles, gasoline pumps and other “rusty gold,” to use his term, out of people’s barns and garages. So it’s not entirely surprising to walk into his house and find a 1913 Harley-Davidson parked in the dining room.
Like everything Mr. Wolfe “picks,” the motorcycle has a story. He bought it in upstate New York from a man whose father ran a classified ad that Mr. Wolfe came across 30 years later. After establishing that the bike was still in the family, he recalled, “I drove all the way to New York, slept in the guy’s driveway and knocked on his door the next morning.”
Fast-talking and persistent, Mr. Wolfe, 46, can sniff out unique or valuable antiques like a bloodhound. He persuaded the reluctant owner to sell him the bike for $25,000, although “it’s worth 55 grand, easily,” he said, holding the handlebars protectively, as if a visitor might jump on and drive away.
On “American Pickers” (and in “American Pickers Guide to Picking,” a book out next month from Hyperion), Mr. Wolfe and his childhood friend, Frank Fritz, 47, show a similar enthusiasm for wheeling and dealing with eccentric collectors or, more often, “freestyling,” their word for driving around in search of homes with lawns that look like junkyards and may contain treasures. As pickers, they are middlemen in the antiques food chain, buying items they can sell quickly, at a markup, to dealers and collectors.
The History cable-network reality series draws about 5.5 million viewers a week, and its success lies in its rugged approach to the traditionally genteel antiques world. As Mr. Wolfe put it, “We don’t wear blue blazers and have 10 cats and talk about Ming Dynasty vases.” Seeing him pull a dirt-caked crock from a farmer’s field with giddy excitement, one might assume Mr. Wolfe lives in the kind of pack-rat nest he visits on the show.
In fact, he owns one of the prettiest buildings on the main street of this small town on the Mississippi River, and the duplex apartment on the top floors that he shares with his girlfriend, Jodi Faeth, is furnished with Mission-style pieces, comfy chairs and a few carefully edited picks, like the 1913 Harley and a weather vane pulled from a Nebraska barn.
Their third-floor bedroom has large windows with a sweeping view of the river. “I can sit right here, dude,” Mr. Wolfe said, hopping onto the bed with his boots on. “I can watch the river, I got the fireplace raging. It’s like a treehouse up here.”
Following the advice in his book, which suggests avoiding “fresh paint jobs,” “landscaping” and “shiny new cars,” his house wouldn’t rate a second look from a picker. What gives?
“I love this stuff, but I would never live in a place that looks like the places we pick,” Mr. Wolfe said, leading a visitor around the building, a former grocery and boardinghouse built in 1860 that was a “dump,” he said, when he bought it seven years ago.
It doesn’t look like that now. Mr. Wolfe refurbished the ground floor and rents it to a pair of home décor stores. Upstairs, he gutted the space to the studs, widening doorways and windows to open the floor plan. “There were four fireplaces in this building — so all that soot,” he said. “I still have a cough.”
The original window trim and hardwood floors retain the building’s historic feel, but Mr. Wolfe installed a modern kitchen and bathrooms.
Still, one thinks of “American Pickers” and envisions Mr. Wolfe on an old farm, tinkering with machinery. “I want to be in the thick of things downtown,” he countered. “See, that’s the beauty of this property, man. I’ve got a two-car garage, a courtyard and I’m on the river side. I’ve really created my own environment.”
It appears the building is one of Mr. Wolfe’s picks, and to pay for it, and its renovation, he sold several of his other picks, including rare motorcycles. (In typical fashion, he also negotiated the $325,000 asking price down to $175,000.)
Mr. Wolfe, who has lived in LeClaire for 15 years, owns several buildings in town and would like to see the riverfront community become a tourist destination. Speaking as if the town itself were a pick, he said, “I used to wander around down here at night and say, ‘This could be something.’ ”
His store, Antique Archaeology, is a few blocks away. On “American Pickers,” the men return there at the end of each episode and present their finds to the third cast member, Danielle Colby, 35, a sassy tattooed woman who minds the store. Mr. Wolfe’s home, on the other hand, doesn’t play a role on the show, and his personal life isn’t discussed, either.
Perhaps owing to a stereotype about the antiques business, rumors circulate on the Internet that Mr. Wolfe and Mr. Fritz are gay. In fact, both men are straight; for the last 17 years, Mr. Wolfe has dated Ms. Faeth, an accountant with a laid-back manner that complements what Ms. Colby described as her boss’s “firecracker” personality.
Ms. Faeth, 40, learned of his picking early on.
“When I met him, he used to disguise picks as dates,” she said. “He’d say, ‘We’re going to Wisconsin to a bed-and-breakfast.’ We were really going to Wisconsin to meet Speedo Joe.”
She doesn’t take issue with the things Mr. Wolfe brings home (“Obviously, I let a motorcycle in the living room,” she said), but on occasion she boils over when he sells a favorite piece, like the vintage tobacco ad depicting a American Indian woman that hung in their living room. “I came home and it was gone,” she said. “He’s like, ‘What? Property taxes are due.’ ”
Referring to the success of “American Pickers,” she added: “I’m happy to say things have changed and pieces are staying around longer.”
As for Mr. Wolfe, he is still making the adjustment. “I was sleeping in my van on buying trips two years ago,” he said. “Now people are coming up to me and saying ‘We love your show.’ It’s trippy.”
MR. WOLFE grew up in Bettendorf, Iowa, just downriver from LeClaire, and began picking at age 6. “I found a bicycle in the garbage, and I sold it in two days for $5,” he recalled. “I was hooked.”
The family didn’t have much money (his single mother raised three children) so Mr. Wolfe learned to barter his picks for things he wanted, like his first motorcycle. “I traded a guy a pair of stereo speakers for it,” he said.
By the late 1990s, he owned two bicycle shops, but he began to focus on picking professionally. He started with antique bicycles (“I was pulling bikes out of barns for 10 bucks and selling them for 500 bucks,” he said). Then, after meeting two antiques dealers who quizzed him about what else was in those barns, he expanded into furniture, lighting and items that evoked the machine age.
Eventually, he said, “I’m sitting in the bicycle shop going: ‘What am I doing in here, man? I need to be on the road.’ So I closed the shop, bought a cargo van and hit the back roads. I was a full-on hobo — a Jack Kerouac of junk.”
At the suggestion of a friend, Mr. Wolfe bought a video camera and began filming his picking trips. Sometimes Mr. Fritz came along. Mr. Wolfe thought their adventures would make great TV because “antiques are all about the story, the treasure hunt,” he said, and pickers are “in the trenches finding this stuff.”
But he spent four and a half years trying to convince a network of that, and failing. Finally, History bought “American Pickers,” and the show began early last year.
Since the first episode, viewers have been coming in droves to Mr. Wolfe’s Antique Archaeology shop, a converted garage in an alley that once functioned as his man cave and warehouse. (In the beginning, he said, “we didn’t even own a cash register.”) Ms. Colby, who meets many of them, reasoned that they “develop a crush on the lifestyle and the cool stuff we find” and get “sucked into Mike’s fantasy world.” These days, the store is a curious hybrid of retail operation and unofficial “American Pickers” museum.
On a recent afternoon there, an older couple from northern Iowa took photos while other fans bought Antique Archaeology T-shirts and pointed to oddball items picked on the show, like oversize Laurel and Hardy heads made of plastic. Most of them asked, “Where’s Mike and Frank?” or “Where’s Danielle?” and seemed surprised by their absence.
Adam Hurlburt, an employee, kept repeating, “Mike was here yesterday” and “You just missed him.”
As a small-town guy, Mr. Wolfe is in the strange position of being a TV star who is also accessible. He limits visits to the shop now because it’s difficult to get work done. Sitting on the fireplace hearth in his bedroom, he admitted that the show’s popularity caught him off guard. “I never thought about how busy the store would be,” he said. “I was so naïve to all of this.”
But he appears to be learning quickly. He joked that his store’s logo now appears so often on television, “it’s like I have the advertising budget of Ford.”
In addition to the “Guide to Picking,” which he worked on with Mr. Fritz, Ms. Colby and Libby Callaway, a freelance writer, he is one of the authors of a children’s book, with the working title “Kid Picker,” because a lot of children watch the show. And last month, he opened a second Antique Archaeology store, in Nashville.
Mr. Wolfe has also started to move from finding cool stuff to designing it. At the new store, he sells lighting made from materials he picked, created with David Phillips, a designer in Nashville. The next step, he said, is to produce antique-looking home pieces, similar to those sold by Restoration Hardware.
“I can never pick enough stuff — it’s physically impossible,” he said. “I have to make stuff to sell, and I want to do that because I’m into décor.”
Mr. Wolfe was interrupted by a text message, and he disappeared into another room to conduct business. Lazy afternoons around the house are rare. He had just returned from a two-week picking trip to South Dakota, and the next day he and Ms. Faeth were driving to Nashville with a van full of fresh picks. The couple bought a historic home there last year, something they were able to afford because of the show’s success.
“Hopefully, we’re doing some porch time,” Ms. Faeth said.
But the work schedule Mr. Wolfe rattled off for the coming week made that seem unlikely.
“I’m always busy,” he said. Then, as if summing up the itinerant life of a picker, he added, “Sometimes it feels like I don’t live anywhere.”
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Pierre de Beaumont, at 95; founder of Brookstone Co.
Pierre de Beaumont started Brookstone Company from his farmhouse parlor in the Berkshires in 1965. A former engineer for Packard Motor Car, he put a classified ad peddling special tools in Popular Mechanics magazine and filled orders the same day they landed in his mailbox.
Launching their business with an initial investment of $500, Mr. de Beaumont and his wife, Mary Deland (Robbins), eventually saw the venture mushroom into 300 retail outlets, where mall shoppers still plunk down in massage chairs and marvel at gizmos and gadgets for better living.
Named after their farm in the village of Worthington, Brookstone was sold in 1980 to the Quaker Oats Co. The de Beaumonts retired on their stock and put part of their fortune into foundations focused on education and communication needs in public health.
Mr. de Beaumont’s family recently announced that he died on Dec. 4 at his home in Manchester-by-the-Sea following a long illness. He was 95.
“He was an ingenious, experimental fellow, and he enjoyed working with his hands. He was a lot of fun to be with, and we all miss him,’’ said his brother-in-law Joseph C. Robbins of Cambridge.
Mr. de Beaumont had no experience in mail order when he launched Brookstone out of his frustration after combing hardware stores for the right tools for tinkering with ship models and other projects.
“Each time I went in, I could feel defeat staring me in the face,’’ he wrote in a 1976 essay titled “Ramblings on Brookstone History.’’ “The clerk would invariably look slightly bored and tell me that he had never heard of such a thing and turn to the next customer.’’
Born in New York City, Mr. de Beaumont was the son of the Countess de Beaumont, a Paris beauty queen who appeared in New York vaudeville in the 1920s under the stage name Gypsy Norman. His father was a French nobleman who died in World War I.
Mr. de Beaumont graduated from Harvard with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1938 and went to work for Packard, where he won patents for several designs. He also worked for General Motors.
When World War II hit, he served as an officer in the US Naval Reserve. He later worked for Apex Electrical Manufacturing Co. of Cleveland, and Bostitch Inc., of Westerly, R.I. He founded an Ohio regional chapter of the Antique Automobile Club of America and also was active in the Sports Car Club of America.
Mr. de Beaumont and his wife taught themselves the mail-order business and eventually expanded Brookstone to offer gifts and gourmet foods.
They took correspondence courses in accounting, and Mr. de Beaumont took the early catalog photographs himself. They sold their catalogs for 20 cents to “keep the children and lonely hearts from using up our small supply,’’ he wrote.
They drove their shipments to the post office daily in a 1961 Jeep station wagon. When they watched Walter Cronkite deliver the nightly news, Mr. de Beaumont would exercise the grip on a new stock of Brookstone pliers while his wife put labels on their catalogs. They sometimes called on family members to test grilled-cheese irons and other potential products.
“When I got to the point that I needed an electric opener to open all the envelopes that came, I knew I was on to something,’’ Mr. de Beaumont said, according to Robert M. Cabral Jr., who got his start in the mail-order gift business when the de Beaumonts included his scrimshaw jewelry in their 1978 gift catalog.
“He was a big, imposing guy. The thing I remember most about him was this cackling giggle and a twinkle in his eye. He just liked the fact that I was showing entrepreneurial spirit,’’ said Cabral, who later founded the mail-order brokerage Americraft.
In 1969, the de Beaumonts moved Brookstone out of their barn and into a warehouse in Peterborough, N.H. In 1979, the company’s sales topped $22 million.
Carol Massoni of Beverly, Mr. de Beaumont’s granddaughter, recalled learning his business wisdom. “I spent so many nights at their dinner table eating, conversing, and having a sip of wine. It seemed better than any MBA,’’ she said. “Pete would always tell us, ‘Enjoy what you’re doing, and do it well.’ ’’
The de Beaumonts were married 40 years. Mary Deland died in 2001. They both left their bodies to the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
Besides Massoni, Mr. de Beaumont leaves his stepdaughters Joan Kopperl of West Stockbridge and Kathleen McAllister of Arlington, Vt.; his stepson, Edward Kelley of North Fayston, Vt.; and seven stepgrandchildren.
Launching their business with an initial investment of $500, Mr. de Beaumont and his wife, Mary Deland (Robbins), eventually saw the venture mushroom into 300 retail outlets, where mall shoppers still plunk down in massage chairs and marvel at gizmos and gadgets for better living.
Named after their farm in the village of Worthington, Brookstone was sold in 1980 to the Quaker Oats Co. The de Beaumonts retired on their stock and put part of their fortune into foundations focused on education and communication needs in public health.
Mr. de Beaumont’s family recently announced that he died on Dec. 4 at his home in Manchester-by-the-Sea following a long illness. He was 95.
“He was an ingenious, experimental fellow, and he enjoyed working with his hands. He was a lot of fun to be with, and we all miss him,’’ said his brother-in-law Joseph C. Robbins of Cambridge.
Mr. de Beaumont had no experience in mail order when he launched Brookstone out of his frustration after combing hardware stores for the right tools for tinkering with ship models and other projects.
“Each time I went in, I could feel defeat staring me in the face,’’ he wrote in a 1976 essay titled “Ramblings on Brookstone History.’’ “The clerk would invariably look slightly bored and tell me that he had never heard of such a thing and turn to the next customer.’’
Born in New York City, Mr. de Beaumont was the son of the Countess de Beaumont, a Paris beauty queen who appeared in New York vaudeville in the 1920s under the stage name Gypsy Norman. His father was a French nobleman who died in World War I.
Mr. de Beaumont graduated from Harvard with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1938 and went to work for Packard, where he won patents for several designs. He also worked for General Motors.
When World War II hit, he served as an officer in the US Naval Reserve. He later worked for Apex Electrical Manufacturing Co. of Cleveland, and Bostitch Inc., of Westerly, R.I. He founded an Ohio regional chapter of the Antique Automobile Club of America and also was active in the Sports Car Club of America.
Mr. de Beaumont and his wife taught themselves the mail-order business and eventually expanded Brookstone to offer gifts and gourmet foods.
They took correspondence courses in accounting, and Mr. de Beaumont took the early catalog photographs himself. They sold their catalogs for 20 cents to “keep the children and lonely hearts from using up our small supply,’’ he wrote.
They drove their shipments to the post office daily in a 1961 Jeep station wagon. When they watched Walter Cronkite deliver the nightly news, Mr. de Beaumont would exercise the grip on a new stock of Brookstone pliers while his wife put labels on their catalogs. They sometimes called on family members to test grilled-cheese irons and other potential products.
“When I got to the point that I needed an electric opener to open all the envelopes that came, I knew I was on to something,’’ Mr. de Beaumont said, according to Robert M. Cabral Jr., who got his start in the mail-order gift business when the de Beaumonts included his scrimshaw jewelry in their 1978 gift catalog.
“He was a big, imposing guy. The thing I remember most about him was this cackling giggle and a twinkle in his eye. He just liked the fact that I was showing entrepreneurial spirit,’’ said Cabral, who later founded the mail-order brokerage Americraft.
In 1969, the de Beaumonts moved Brookstone out of their barn and into a warehouse in Peterborough, N.H. In 1979, the company’s sales topped $22 million.
Carol Massoni of Beverly, Mr. de Beaumont’s granddaughter, recalled learning his business wisdom. “I spent so many nights at their dinner table eating, conversing, and having a sip of wine. It seemed better than any MBA,’’ she said. “Pete would always tell us, ‘Enjoy what you’re doing, and do it well.’ ’’
The de Beaumonts were married 40 years. Mary Deland died in 2001. They both left their bodies to the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
Besides Massoni, Mr. de Beaumont leaves his stepdaughters Joan Kopperl of West Stockbridge and Kathleen McAllister of Arlington, Vt.; his stepson, Edward Kelley of North Fayston, Vt.; and seven stepgrandchildren.
Friday, October 1, 2010
R.I.P. Tony Curtis
Tony Curtis as magician and escape artist Harry Houdini in the 1953 Hollywood movie "Houdini."The first time I met Tony Curtis in Los Angeles to discuss co-writing his autobiography, I told him -- by way of clumsy introduction -- that at age 11, my best friend and I went to see his 1958 action film "The Vikings" three times in two days, adding, "We desperately wanted to BE Tony Curtis."
He nodded and replied: "So did I."
It was a typically wry, self-effacing, truthful thing to say. He was, after all, not really "Tony Curtis." He was Bernie Schwartz of the Bronx, born to Hungarian Jewish immigrants Manual and Helen on June 3, 1925.
He died Wednesday, at 85, of cardiac arrest at his home near Las Vegas. Being and becoming "Tony Curtis" would be a lifetime process that took him from the depths of poverty in the Depression to the heights of Hollywood stardom, and more fine performances than he was ever given credit for in some 120 films.
Mr. Curtis joined the Navy in 1943, serving in the South Pacific. After the war, he took acting classes at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School, where fellow students included Walter Matthau, Harry Belafonte and Bea Arthur. Spotted in an off-Broadway production, he was signed by a talent agent to a contract with Universal Pictures, who changed his name, taught him how to fence, and gave him the courage to approach starlets with the line, "I've been assigned by Universal to teach you how to kiss."
His pictures would generate bigger audiences and more money than all the "highbrow" actors combined. But he never won an Oscar. He was just too -- too what?
Too popular.
Mr. Curtis also was intensely emotional and great fun, as was my experience of working with him intimately for two years. Once at dinner in Manhattan, he introduced me to Bill Cosby with deadpan solemnity: "I never travel without my biographer -- in case I say something significant."
Another time, when I inquired about the young ages of the five women he married, his response was, "I'd never marry a woman old enough to be my wife."
The first of them was Janet Leigh, best known for her demise in the shower during Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960). They became one of the Hollywood's most glamorous couples, parenting actress-daughters Jamie Lee and Kelly. His issues with subsequent wives Christine Kaufmann and Leslie Allen helped fill the pages of our book. Drug and alcohol addiction comprised other issues.
But the most -- and best -- of his issues were the movies, those marvelous pieces of action entertainment: "Houdini," "The Great Imposter," the silly "Son of Ali Baba" (in which his line "Yondah lies the castle of my faddah, da caliph!" was much mocked), "Trapeze" with Burt Lancaster, "Operation Petticoat" with Cary Grant, "Taras Bulba" with Yul Brynner, "The Great Race."
Everyone has his or her favorite Tony Curtis films. Mine was his brilliant, terrifying performance in "The Boston Strangler" (1968) as serial killer Albert DeSalvo. He was deeply upset when overlooked for an Oscar nomination for it.
The rest of the world most remembers "Some Like It Hot," designated by the American Film Institute (and most public polls) as the "funniest American film of all-time." It's the 1959 classic in which two hapless musicians join an all-girls band to escape the Chicago Mob. Producer David O. Selznick told director Billy Wilder, "You want machine guns and dead bodies and drag gags in the same picture? Forget it, Billy. You'll never make it work."
With Marilyn Monroe singing and Mr. Curtis and Jack Lemmon in drag, it worked. Under Wilder's inspired direction, the stars gave the performances of their lives.
Curtis: "You play the market?"
Monroe: "No, the ukulele."
Marilyn got the raves, but the unsung hero of that film's success was Mr. Curtis, who played his drag "straight" (and does a brilliant Cary Grant imitation -- his own idea), while over-the-top Lemmon mugs and cavorts. But Lemmon got the Oscar nomination.
Mr. Curtis was never much recognized by Hollywood, in general. The Academy, in particular, never stopped thinking of him as a light-comedy leading man. But in fact, Mr. Curtis could and did do it all. Anyone who still doubts his abilities as a serious and versatile dramatic actor has never seen his amazing performances in "The Boston Strangler" or "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957) with Burt Lancaster, a box-office failure now acknowledged as an American noir masterpiece. Mr. Curtis played Sidney Falco, a sleazy publicist in service to Lancaster's corrupt newspaper columnist, modeled on Walter Winchell.
Mr. Curtis -- in and out of the Rat Pack -- was also on the cutting edge of the Civil Rights movement. In 1958, he co-starred with Sidney Poitier in "The Defiant Ones," as the escaped convict-heroes of a powerful "message" film for which they both received Best Actor nominations. At Curtis' insistence, Mr. Poitier was given co-equal billing in the credits -- the first black actor so credited.
"That's how I got top billing for the first time in my life," Mr. Poitier told me. "I think that speaks a lot of Tony."
His personal and professional nadir came in 1984, when -- after a family intervention -- he entered the Betty Ford Center for substance abuse. Soon after, he was nobly and successfully recovering for the rest of his life. His last and happiest marriage, in 1998, was to "Sweet Jilly" -- Jill VandenBerg, the statuesque blonde who delighted him and made his life cozy in their scenic ranch home outside Vegas.
A lifelong artist, Mr. Curtis painted colorful Matisse-like acrylic canvases and assembled brilliant box constructions inspired by Joseph Cornell (whom he befriended and supported in the 1950s). He attributed his recovery in large part to the energy he put into his art.
You can tell a classy one from a boorish one by the way he treats his fans: One day on our book tour in Chicago, Mr. Curtis and I went for a walk down Michigan Avenue and halted at a big intersection, waiting for the traffic light to change. I pointed over to a huge chartered bus -- also stopped for the light -- in which dozens of excited tourists were jammed up against the windows, waving at him and mouthing his name.
Without a moment's hesitation, he went up to the door of the bus, the driver opened it, everybody cheered, Mr. Curtis stuck his head in and said: "Good afternoon! You must thank your tour guide for arranging this nice meeting for us."
He nodded and replied: "So did I."
It was a typically wry, self-effacing, truthful thing to say. He was, after all, not really "Tony Curtis." He was Bernie Schwartz of the Bronx, born to Hungarian Jewish immigrants Manual and Helen on June 3, 1925.
He died Wednesday, at 85, of cardiac arrest at his home near Las Vegas. Being and becoming "Tony Curtis" would be a lifetime process that took him from the depths of poverty in the Depression to the heights of Hollywood stardom, and more fine performances than he was ever given credit for in some 120 films.
Mr. Curtis joined the Navy in 1943, serving in the South Pacific. After the war, he took acting classes at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School, where fellow students included Walter Matthau, Harry Belafonte and Bea Arthur. Spotted in an off-Broadway production, he was signed by a talent agent to a contract with Universal Pictures, who changed his name, taught him how to fence, and gave him the courage to approach starlets with the line, "I've been assigned by Universal to teach you how to kiss."
His pictures would generate bigger audiences and more money than all the "highbrow" actors combined. But he never won an Oscar. He was just too -- too what?
Too popular.
Mr. Curtis also was intensely emotional and great fun, as was my experience of working with him intimately for two years. Once at dinner in Manhattan, he introduced me to Bill Cosby with deadpan solemnity: "I never travel without my biographer -- in case I say something significant."
Another time, when I inquired about the young ages of the five women he married, his response was, "I'd never marry a woman old enough to be my wife."
The first of them was Janet Leigh, best known for her demise in the shower during Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960). They became one of the Hollywood's most glamorous couples, parenting actress-daughters Jamie Lee and Kelly. His issues with subsequent wives Christine Kaufmann and Leslie Allen helped fill the pages of our book. Drug and alcohol addiction comprised other issues.
But the most -- and best -- of his issues were the movies, those marvelous pieces of action entertainment: "Houdini," "The Great Imposter," the silly "Son of Ali Baba" (in which his line "Yondah lies the castle of my faddah, da caliph!" was much mocked), "Trapeze" with Burt Lancaster, "Operation Petticoat" with Cary Grant, "Taras Bulba" with Yul Brynner, "The Great Race."
Everyone has his or her favorite Tony Curtis films. Mine was his brilliant, terrifying performance in "The Boston Strangler" (1968) as serial killer Albert DeSalvo. He was deeply upset when overlooked for an Oscar nomination for it.
The rest of the world most remembers "Some Like It Hot," designated by the American Film Institute (and most public polls) as the "funniest American film of all-time." It's the 1959 classic in which two hapless musicians join an all-girls band to escape the Chicago Mob. Producer David O. Selznick told director Billy Wilder, "You want machine guns and dead bodies and drag gags in the same picture? Forget it, Billy. You'll never make it work."
With Marilyn Monroe singing and Mr. Curtis and Jack Lemmon in drag, it worked. Under Wilder's inspired direction, the stars gave the performances of their lives.
Curtis: "You play the market?"
Monroe: "No, the ukulele."
Marilyn got the raves, but the unsung hero of that film's success was Mr. Curtis, who played his drag "straight" (and does a brilliant Cary Grant imitation -- his own idea), while over-the-top Lemmon mugs and cavorts. But Lemmon got the Oscar nomination.
Mr. Curtis was never much recognized by Hollywood, in general. The Academy, in particular, never stopped thinking of him as a light-comedy leading man. But in fact, Mr. Curtis could and did do it all. Anyone who still doubts his abilities as a serious and versatile dramatic actor has never seen his amazing performances in "The Boston Strangler" or "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957) with Burt Lancaster, a box-office failure now acknowledged as an American noir masterpiece. Mr. Curtis played Sidney Falco, a sleazy publicist in service to Lancaster's corrupt newspaper columnist, modeled on Walter Winchell.
Mr. Curtis -- in and out of the Rat Pack -- was also on the cutting edge of the Civil Rights movement. In 1958, he co-starred with Sidney Poitier in "The Defiant Ones," as the escaped convict-heroes of a powerful "message" film for which they both received Best Actor nominations. At Curtis' insistence, Mr. Poitier was given co-equal billing in the credits -- the first black actor so credited.
"That's how I got top billing for the first time in my life," Mr. Poitier told me. "I think that speaks a lot of Tony."
His personal and professional nadir came in 1984, when -- after a family intervention -- he entered the Betty Ford Center for substance abuse. Soon after, he was nobly and successfully recovering for the rest of his life. His last and happiest marriage, in 1998, was to "Sweet Jilly" -- Jill VandenBerg, the statuesque blonde who delighted him and made his life cozy in their scenic ranch home outside Vegas.
A lifelong artist, Mr. Curtis painted colorful Matisse-like acrylic canvases and assembled brilliant box constructions inspired by Joseph Cornell (whom he befriended and supported in the 1950s). He attributed his recovery in large part to the energy he put into his art.
You can tell a classy one from a boorish one by the way he treats his fans: One day on our book tour in Chicago, Mr. Curtis and I went for a walk down Michigan Avenue and halted at a big intersection, waiting for the traffic light to change. I pointed over to a huge chartered bus -- also stopped for the light -- in which dozens of excited tourists were jammed up against the windows, waving at him and mouthing his name.
Without a moment's hesitation, he went up to the door of the bus, the driver opened it, everybody cheered, Mr. Curtis stuck his head in and said: "Good afternoon! You must thank your tour guide for arranging this nice meeting for us."
Saturday, September 25, 2010
At MadCon, an ailing Harlan Ellison will say goodbye
At MadCon, an ailing Harlan Ellison will say goodbye
Farewell to the fans
Josh Wimmer on Thursday 09/23/2010,
Ellison: 'The truth of what's going on here is that I'm dying.'
Fans of fantastic fiction -- or just some of the finest damn writing to be put on paper -- take heed: If you've ever wanted to talk to Harlan Ellison, this weekend's MadCon 2010 is your last chance.
The 76-year-old writer, cultural critic and longtime den mother of the genre he'd prefer you didn't call "science fiction" is the guest of honor at the convention, happening Sept. 24-26 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. Ellison is the winner of multiple Hugo, Nebula and Edgar awards and the author of such oftreprinted short stories as "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" and "The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore," as well as the mind behind the original screenplay for what many consider Star Trek's best episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever." Other scheduled notables at MadCon include writers Gene Wolfe, Peter David and Patrick Rothfuss, and Doctor Who's Sophie Aldred.
Due to his failing health, there had been some doubt about whether Ellison would show up in person or participate in panels, readings and other events by telephone from his home in Sherman Oaks, Calif. But at press time he affirmed he was coming. He is also adamant that MadCon will be the final convention he ever attends, in any fashion.
"The truth of what's going on here is that I'm dying," says Ellison, by phone. "I'm like the Wicked Witch of the West -- I'm melting. I began to sense it back in January. By that time, I had agreed to do the convention. And I said, I can make it. I can make it.'"
Besides giving several talks and sitting on panels, Ellison has a book signing with David scheduled for 3 p.m. Friday at Frugal Muse's west-side location. His Sept. 26 event at the Barrymore Theatre is up in the air; check MadCon2010.com for updates.
The legendarily opinionated author says there is no question he will not answer. (Although he'd prefer not to hear the one about whether he threw a fan down an elevator shaft -- answer: he didn't -- again. "That will follow me to my grave," he mutters.) And he strongly encourages fans to attend.
"This is gonna be the biggest fucking science-fiction convention ever," Ellison says, "because no con has ever had a guest of honor drop dead while performing for the goddamn audience. The only comparison is the death of Patrick Troughton, at a Doctor Who convention. And I don't think he was even onstage."
Never one to hold back, Harlan Ellison shared his thoughts and feelings freely in a 90-minute conversation from his California home, the Lost Aztec Temple of Mars.
On how he knows he's dying
"An old dog senses when it's his time -- dogs have that capacity; nobody doubts that. Nobody. But everybody doubts when you say, 'I'm dying.' They think you're being a Victorian actress. They think you're doing Bernhardt."
On mortality
"I'm not afraid of death, and there is not one iota of suicide in me. All I want to make sure is that when the paper comes out, it says, 'Harlan Ellison died in his sleep.' You're talking to, essentially, a pretty happy guy. No, not 'pretty' happy -- that's television talk. I am inordinately happy. I am wonderfully happy. I am Icarus-flying-to-the-sun happy. I have led a magical life. I have led exactly the life I would wish to lead. I have led the life I guess that everybody in their heart of hearts wants to lead."
On days gone by
"I loved writing. I loved the word. I loved movies, and we had no television when I was a kid, but I loved books, and I read book after book after book after book. Unlike many another writer who was educated and had college, I was on the road at age 13. Not because of anything bad with my family -- it was just, I had a wanderlust. I was like the great writer Jim Tully or Jack London. I stood there at age 10 in Paynesville, Ohio, and I said, 'This is all mine! All I gotta do is go and get it.' And so I started running away. After a while, my mother said, 'I'll pack you sandwiches. Would you like peanut butter-and-jelly?' Sometimes I'd get as far away as Kansas City and wind up working as carny and then wind up in jail, and get sent home. And I'd go back to school and I'd do very well, and then I'd run away again, and I'd run away to way up into Canada and work in a logging camp."
On current projects
"I just finished my last piece, which is an introduction to a book called The Discarded, based on the short story I wrote and then the teleplay I wrote with Josh Olson, the Academy Award nominee for The History of Violence, the film directed by Cronenberg. Josh and I wrote the script and then they did it on Masters of Science Fiction, and that'll be available for sale -- dun-unh, he said, hustling -- at the convention. Josh wrote a little introduction, and then I was going to write a little introduction. Well, I got into it in May, and it took me through August to finish it, and it's 15,000 words. It's the longest piece I've written in a long while, and it's called 'Riding the Rails in Atlantis.' And somehow, somehow or other, the book is all together. And The Discarded is going to be my last book."
On discovering his destiny
"When I was a little kid, and I was going to East High in Cleveland -- my dad had died in '49, and my mom and I were living there -- I cut school one morning and I went to, I think it was Halle Brothers, down in the public terminal, the Cleveland Terminal Tower. And John Steinbeck was on tour, and he was speaking. And I was this little bitty kid clutching my schoolbooks, and I couldn't get through the crowd -- it was deep. John Steinbeck was standing on a little riser, and I crawled through people's feet, and I got to, literally, the feet of John Steinbeck.
"And I listened to him, and then I turned and looked at the faces, and I said, 'Oh. Boy. Now I know what famous is. Now I know what it is to be a mensch.' Because there stood John Steinbeck, who was an ex-prizefighter -- I mean, he looked like a fire plug! He was a tough guy. He worked like I had worked! I had ridden on boxcars, worked on demolition teams, and driving truck, and crops, and all that shit. But I was a little skinny squirt of a thing.
"And it was an epiphany. If I had stood under the Sistine Chapel ceiling, if I had finally reached Petra, a crimson city half as old as time, as they said of it, I would not have been more impressed. And that set the first part of my destiny. I was on the road, and I was doing my job, and my job was to tell stories."
On conventions
"I had withdrawn from conventions, not because I didn't like seeing my friends -- I did. But goddammit, man, when you're up in your 70s, you don't need to keep being trotted out like an old warhorse. Like, they trotted out Lionel Richie on America's Got Talent last night, and I felt sorry for him."
On being nominated for his second Grammy, for Best Spoken Word Album For Children, earlier this year
"I was up against Ed Asner, David Hyde Pierce, Nelson Mandela, another very, very fine reader and a guy named Buck Howdy. And if you're in the audience at MadCon, you can ask me, 'Who did you lose to?' And I'll say, 'Very short story, interesting story.' See, how I lost my first Grammy -- the first time I lost, I lost to Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud doing a Harold Pinter play, and people say, oh, yeah, boy, that's good. I lost! But I was on the royal robe with both feet, and I was dragged a bit by having lost to them.
"But with this one, people say, my god, you were up with Mandela? Who did you lose to? And I say, 'Uh, Buck Howdy.' And they go, 'What?!' [Mumbles.] 'Who? What?' 'Buck. Howdy.' They say, 'Who the fuck is Buck Howdy?'"
On his present appearance
"I weigh 154 now. I look like Gollum. I was great-looking when I was younger -- I was hot. All the pictures of me, they're very hot."
On his unfinished work
"My wife has instructions that the instant I die, she has to burn all the unfinished stories. And there may be a hundred unfinished stories in this house, maybe more than that. There's three quarters of a novel. No, these things are not to be finished by other writers, no matter how good they are. It could be Paul Di Filippo, who is just about the best writer in America, as far as I'm concerned. Or God forbid, James Patterson or Judith Krantz should get a hold of The Man Who Looked for Sweetness, which is sitting up on my desk, and try to finish it, anticipating what Ellison was thinking -- no! Goddammit. If Fred Pohl wants to finish all of C.M. Kornbluth's stories, that's his business. If somebody wants to take the unfinished Edgar Allan Poe story, which has now gone into the public domain, and write an ending that is not as good as Poe would have written, let 'em do whatever they want! But not with my shit, Jack. When I'm gone, that's it. What's down on the paper, it says 'The End,' that's it. 'Cause right now I'm busy writing the end of the longest story I've ever written, which is me."
Farewell to the fans
Josh Wimmer on Thursday 09/23/2010,
Ellison: 'The truth of what's going on here is that I'm dying.'
Fans of fantastic fiction -- or just some of the finest damn writing to be put on paper -- take heed: If you've ever wanted to talk to Harlan Ellison, this weekend's MadCon 2010 is your last chance.
The 76-year-old writer, cultural critic and longtime den mother of the genre he'd prefer you didn't call "science fiction" is the guest of honor at the convention, happening Sept. 24-26 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. Ellison is the winner of multiple Hugo, Nebula and Edgar awards and the author of such oftreprinted short stories as "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" and "The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore," as well as the mind behind the original screenplay for what many consider Star Trek's best episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever." Other scheduled notables at MadCon include writers Gene Wolfe, Peter David and Patrick Rothfuss, and Doctor Who's Sophie Aldred.
Due to his failing health, there had been some doubt about whether Ellison would show up in person or participate in panels, readings and other events by telephone from his home in Sherman Oaks, Calif. But at press time he affirmed he was coming. He is also adamant that MadCon will be the final convention he ever attends, in any fashion.
"The truth of what's going on here is that I'm dying," says Ellison, by phone. "I'm like the Wicked Witch of the West -- I'm melting. I began to sense it back in January. By that time, I had agreed to do the convention. And I said, I can make it. I can make it.'"
Besides giving several talks and sitting on panels, Ellison has a book signing with David scheduled for 3 p.m. Friday at Frugal Muse's west-side location. His Sept. 26 event at the Barrymore Theatre is up in the air; check MadCon2010.com for updates.
The legendarily opinionated author says there is no question he will not answer. (Although he'd prefer not to hear the one about whether he threw a fan down an elevator shaft -- answer: he didn't -- again. "That will follow me to my grave," he mutters.) And he strongly encourages fans to attend.
"This is gonna be the biggest fucking science-fiction convention ever," Ellison says, "because no con has ever had a guest of honor drop dead while performing for the goddamn audience. The only comparison is the death of Patrick Troughton, at a Doctor Who convention. And I don't think he was even onstage."
Never one to hold back, Harlan Ellison shared his thoughts and feelings freely in a 90-minute conversation from his California home, the Lost Aztec Temple of Mars.
On how he knows he's dying
"An old dog senses when it's his time -- dogs have that capacity; nobody doubts that. Nobody. But everybody doubts when you say, 'I'm dying.' They think you're being a Victorian actress. They think you're doing Bernhardt."
On mortality
"I'm not afraid of death, and there is not one iota of suicide in me. All I want to make sure is that when the paper comes out, it says, 'Harlan Ellison died in his sleep.' You're talking to, essentially, a pretty happy guy. No, not 'pretty' happy -- that's television talk. I am inordinately happy. I am wonderfully happy. I am Icarus-flying-to-the-sun happy. I have led a magical life. I have led exactly the life I would wish to lead. I have led the life I guess that everybody in their heart of hearts wants to lead."
On days gone by
"I loved writing. I loved the word. I loved movies, and we had no television when I was a kid, but I loved books, and I read book after book after book after book. Unlike many another writer who was educated and had college, I was on the road at age 13. Not because of anything bad with my family -- it was just, I had a wanderlust. I was like the great writer Jim Tully or Jack London. I stood there at age 10 in Paynesville, Ohio, and I said, 'This is all mine! All I gotta do is go and get it.' And so I started running away. After a while, my mother said, 'I'll pack you sandwiches. Would you like peanut butter-and-jelly?' Sometimes I'd get as far away as Kansas City and wind up working as carny and then wind up in jail, and get sent home. And I'd go back to school and I'd do very well, and then I'd run away again, and I'd run away to way up into Canada and work in a logging camp."
On current projects
"I just finished my last piece, which is an introduction to a book called The Discarded, based on the short story I wrote and then the teleplay I wrote with Josh Olson, the Academy Award nominee for The History of Violence, the film directed by Cronenberg. Josh and I wrote the script and then they did it on Masters of Science Fiction, and that'll be available for sale -- dun-unh, he said, hustling -- at the convention. Josh wrote a little introduction, and then I was going to write a little introduction. Well, I got into it in May, and it took me through August to finish it, and it's 15,000 words. It's the longest piece I've written in a long while, and it's called 'Riding the Rails in Atlantis.' And somehow, somehow or other, the book is all together. And The Discarded is going to be my last book."
On discovering his destiny
"When I was a little kid, and I was going to East High in Cleveland -- my dad had died in '49, and my mom and I were living there -- I cut school one morning and I went to, I think it was Halle Brothers, down in the public terminal, the Cleveland Terminal Tower. And John Steinbeck was on tour, and he was speaking. And I was this little bitty kid clutching my schoolbooks, and I couldn't get through the crowd -- it was deep. John Steinbeck was standing on a little riser, and I crawled through people's feet, and I got to, literally, the feet of John Steinbeck.
"And I listened to him, and then I turned and looked at the faces, and I said, 'Oh. Boy. Now I know what famous is. Now I know what it is to be a mensch.' Because there stood John Steinbeck, who was an ex-prizefighter -- I mean, he looked like a fire plug! He was a tough guy. He worked like I had worked! I had ridden on boxcars, worked on demolition teams, and driving truck, and crops, and all that shit. But I was a little skinny squirt of a thing.
"And it was an epiphany. If I had stood under the Sistine Chapel ceiling, if I had finally reached Petra, a crimson city half as old as time, as they said of it, I would not have been more impressed. And that set the first part of my destiny. I was on the road, and I was doing my job, and my job was to tell stories."
On conventions
"I had withdrawn from conventions, not because I didn't like seeing my friends -- I did. But goddammit, man, when you're up in your 70s, you don't need to keep being trotted out like an old warhorse. Like, they trotted out Lionel Richie on America's Got Talent last night, and I felt sorry for him."
On being nominated for his second Grammy, for Best Spoken Word Album For Children, earlier this year
"I was up against Ed Asner, David Hyde Pierce, Nelson Mandela, another very, very fine reader and a guy named Buck Howdy. And if you're in the audience at MadCon, you can ask me, 'Who did you lose to?' And I'll say, 'Very short story, interesting story.' See, how I lost my first Grammy -- the first time I lost, I lost to Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud doing a Harold Pinter play, and people say, oh, yeah, boy, that's good. I lost! But I was on the royal robe with both feet, and I was dragged a bit by having lost to them.
"But with this one, people say, my god, you were up with Mandela? Who did you lose to? And I say, 'Uh, Buck Howdy.' And they go, 'What?!' [Mumbles.] 'Who? What?' 'Buck. Howdy.' They say, 'Who the fuck is Buck Howdy?'"
On his present appearance
"I weigh 154 now. I look like Gollum. I was great-looking when I was younger -- I was hot. All the pictures of me, they're very hot."
On his unfinished work
"My wife has instructions that the instant I die, she has to burn all the unfinished stories. And there may be a hundred unfinished stories in this house, maybe more than that. There's three quarters of a novel. No, these things are not to be finished by other writers, no matter how good they are. It could be Paul Di Filippo, who is just about the best writer in America, as far as I'm concerned. Or God forbid, James Patterson or Judith Krantz should get a hold of The Man Who Looked for Sweetness, which is sitting up on my desk, and try to finish it, anticipating what Ellison was thinking -- no! Goddammit. If Fred Pohl wants to finish all of C.M. Kornbluth's stories, that's his business. If somebody wants to take the unfinished Edgar Allan Poe story, which has now gone into the public domain, and write an ending that is not as good as Poe would have written, let 'em do whatever they want! But not with my shit, Jack. When I'm gone, that's it. What's down on the paper, it says 'The End,' that's it. 'Cause right now I'm busy writing the end of the longest story I've ever written, which is me."
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Mitch Miller, Maestro of the Singalong, Dies at 99
By RICHARD SEVERO
Mitch Miller, an influential record producer who became a hugely popular recording artist and an unlikely television star a half century ago by leading a choral group in familiar old songs and inviting people to sing along, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 99.
His daughter Margaret Miller Reuther confirmed the death Monday morning, saying her father had died after a short illness at Lenox Hill Hospital. Mr. Miller lived in Manhattan.
Mr. Miller, a Rochester native who was born on the Fourth of July, had been an accomplished oboist and was still a force in the recording industry when he came up with the idea of recording old standards with a chorus of some two dozen male voices and printing the lyrics on album covers.
The “Sing Along With Mitch” album series, which began in 1958, was an immense success, finding an eager audience among older listeners looking for an alternative to rock ’n’ roll. Mitch Miller and the Gang serenaded them with chestnuts like “Home on the Range,” “That Old Gang of Mine,” “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”
When the concept was adapted for television in 1961, with the lyrics appearing at the bottom of the screen, Mr. Miller, with his beaming smile and neatly trimmed mustache and goatee, became a national celebrity.
By then he had established himself as a hit maker for Columbia Records and a career shaper for singers like Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Johnny Mathis, Doris Day, Patti Page and Frankie Laine. First at Mercury Records and then at Columbia, he helped define American popular music in the postwar, pre-rock era, carefully matching singers with songs and choosing often unorthodox but almost always catchy instrumental accompaniment.
Mr. Bennett’s career took off after Mr. Miller persuaded him to record the ballad “Because of You,” backing him with a lush orchestral arrangement by Percy Faith. It reached No. 1 on the pop charts in 1951.
Ms. Clooney was making a mere $50 a recording session when Mr. Miller asked her to record “Come On-a My House,” an oddity based on an Armenian folk melody written by the playwright and novelist William Saroyan and his cousin Ross Bagdasarian, who later went on to create Alvin and the Chipmunks. Ms. Clooney was dubious. “I damn near fell on the floor,” she recalled.
They had a heated argument. But in the end Ms. Clooney agreed to record the song, and it became a giant hit, establishing her as a major artist.
“Nothing happened to me until I met Mitch,” she later said.
By the end of the 1950s Mr. Miller’s eye and ear for talent and songs had been critical in making Columbia the top-selling record company in the nation.
Mr. Miller was the Midas of novelty music, storming the charts with records like Jimmy Boyd’s “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus and providing singers with unusual instrumental backing: a harpsichord for Ms. Clooney, French horns for Guy Mitchell. One of his earliest hits, “Mule Train,” was recorded by the muscular-voiced Frankie Laine with three electric guitars, and Mr. Miller himself using a wood block to simulate the snapping of a whip.
Mr. Miller was a studio innovator. Along with the guitarist Les Paul and a few others, he helped pioneer overdubbing, the technique by which different tracks are laid over one another to produce a richer effect; he employed it memorably with Ms. Page, whose close-harmony “duets” with herself became her signature. He also achieved what he called a sonic “halo” on numerous recordings by the use of what came to be called an echo chamber — actually an effect an engineer produced by placing a speaker and a microphone in a tiled restroom.
One Miller specialty was developing crossovers from country to pop. He had particular success with Hank Williams’s songs: he transformed “Hey, Good Lookin’ ” into a hit for Mr. Laine and Jo Stafford and did the same for Mr. Bennett (“Cold, Cold Heart”), Ms. Clooney (“Half as Much”) and Ms. Stafford on her own (“Jambalaya”).
His touch was not always sure. When he had bagpipes accompany Dinah Shore on a song called “Scottish Samba” the result was, in Mr. Miller’s own words, “a dog.” And probably the nadir of Frank Sinatra’s recording career came after Mr. Miller left Mercury and took over pop production at Columbia in 1950.
Sinatra complained that Mr. Miller forced him to record inferior material like “Bim Bam Baby,” “Tennessee Newsboy” and, perhaps most notoriously, “Mama Will Bark,” a 1951 novelty duet with the television personality Dagmar that included dog imitations. Sinatra even sent a telegram to a Congressional subcommittee complaining that Mr. Miller had denied him “freedom of selection.” (Sinatra did sometimes veto Mr. Miller’s song choices. When he refused to record “The Roving Kind” and “My Heart Cries for You,” Mr. Miller replaced him in the studio with a young singer named Guy Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell’s versions of both those songs became hits and made him a star.)
Interviewed by Time magazine in 1951, Mr. Miller was less than enthusiastic about the kind of gimmicky pop records that had become his specialty. “I wouldn’t buy that stuff for myself,” he said. “There’s no real artistic satisfaction in this job. I satisfy my musical ego elsewhere.”
Mr. Miller came up with the idea for his singalong albums in 1958, drawing on a repertory that ordinary people had sung in churches and parlors for decades. By the time he recorded the first “Sing Along With Mitch” album, he had already had success with this approach on the singles chart, scoring a No. 1 hit in 1955 with an arrangement of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”
Mitch Miller and the Gang eventually recorded more than 20 long-playing discs, many of which made the Top 40. By 1966 they had sold about 17 million copies.
In 1960 his singalong concept was given a one-time television test on NBC. The response was so favorable that “Sing Along With Mitch” became a mainstay of family television, running — every other week at first, then weekly — from 1961 to 1964, then returning in reruns in the summer of 1966. Viewers were encouraged to sing along and instructed to “follow the bouncing ball” — a large dot that bounced from word to word as the lyrics were superimposed on the screen. Among the singers featured, in addition to the male chorus, was a young Leslie Uggams.
The ratings were good, but the critics were mostly unimpressed. Brooks Atkinson, writing in The New York Times, suggested in 1962 that “Sing Along With Mitch” might best be viewed with the sound turned off.
Even at the singalongs’ height, many Americans considered them hopelessly corny. That sense only intensified as a younger generation came of age in the 1960s and musical tastes changed. There were news reports that shopping malls had begun piping Mitch Miller music on their sound systems as a way to discourage teenagers from congregating. Years later, in 1993, when David Koresh and members of his Branch Davidian cult were holed up in their compound in Waco, Tex., F.B.I. agents tried to flush them out by blasting “Sing Along With Mitch” Christmas carols.
By the time Mr. Miller’s television show left the air, his era of popular music had largely ended with the emergence of rock. He was sympathetic to blues and folk music and had one of his biggest hits in 1951 with Johnnie Ray’s “Cry,” a histrionic performance often cited as a rock ’n’ roll precursor. He had also tried to sign Elvis Presley for Columbia before being outbid by RCA. But he turned down an opportunity to sign Buddy Holly, and he was outspoken in his dislike of rock ’n’ roll in general. “It’s not music,” he was quoted as saying, “it’s a disease.” When Bob Dylan, soon to become one of rock’s most influential artists, joined the Columbia roster in 1961, it was not Mr. Miller but another label executive, John Hammond, who signed him.
Mr. Miller told Audio magazine in 1985 that his opposition to rock ’n’ roll had been based more on principle than on taste. The so-called payola scandal, in which record companies were found to have paid disc jockeys to play rock ’n’ roll records, had dismayed him, he said. He also complained about “British-accented youths ripping off black American artists and, because they’re white, being accepted by the American audience” — although that hardly explained his opposition to rock ’n’ roll in the ’50s, a decade before the advent of the Beatles and other British bands.
His wife of 65 years, the former Frances Alexander, died in 2000.
In addition to his daughter Ms. Miller Reuther, Mr. Miller is survived by another daughter, Andrea Miller; a son, Mitchell; two brothers, Leon and Joseph; two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Mitchell William Miller was born on July 4, 1911, in Rochester, one of five children of Abram Calmen Miller, an immigrant from Russia and a wrought-iron worker, and Hinda Rosenblum Miller, a former seamstress.
Mr. Miller’s own musical career began with the oboe. The composer Virgil Thomson called him “an absolutely first-rate oboist — one of the two or three great ones at that time in the world.”
He took up the oboe almost by chance. Seeking to join the orchestra at Washington Junior High School in Rochester, he showed up late for the tryouts and found it was the only one of the instruments, offered free to students, that had not been claimed.
By the age of 15 Mr. Miller was playing with the Syracuse Symphony. After high school he went to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, graduating cum laude in 1932.
He played with the Rochester Philharmonic and then made his way to New York City, where he played oboe for a season under David Mannes in concerts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He later got a job with the CBS Symphony, performing with it during the notorious Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in 1938.
He also played in orchestras under Andre Kostelanetz and Percy Faith and performed in another that accompanied George Gershwin on a concert tour as a pianist. When Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” opened on Broadway in 1935, Mr. Miller was in the pit orchestra. He continued to play the oboe after he became a record producer, most notably on the recordings the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker made with a string orchestra.
Mr. Miller went to work for Mercury Records in the late ’40s, initially as a producer of classical music and then as head of artists and repertory in the pop division. In 1950, at the invitation of a former Eastman classmate, Goddard Lieberson, executive vice president of Columbia Records, he took the equivalent position there. In the early 1950s he was also musical director of Little Golden Records, which made widely popular recordings for children.
After rock came to dominate the record business and the singalong craze ran its course, Mr. Miller left Columbia and ventured into the Broadway theater, with limited success. He produced “Here’s Where I Belong,” a 1968 musical based on John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden,” which closed after one performance. He was later involved in the production of several other Broadway shows, few of them hits. In the 1980s and ’90s he was a frequent guest conductor of symphony orchestras.
“What pleased me the most,” he said in an interview with The Times in 1981, “was a fellow who came up to me after a concert in Chicago and said, ‘You know, there’s nobody in this whole country who hasn’t been touched by your music in some way.’
“That really made me feel good.”
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