Tag: Celebrities

Oh, for the tart wit of the Algonquin Round Table   

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Whatever happened to the art of witty retorts? For that matter, the cozy gathering places of sophisticated regulars in urban centers, where at least one of the participants slyly made note of the ongoings?

Does this have anyone else evoking a picture of the New Yorker crowd at their daily luncheons at Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel, where Noel Coward, Harpo Marx, and Dorothy Parker, among others, held forth. I’m surprised to see that cartoonist James Thurber wasn’t among them, especially since he resided in the hotel, nor was Cole Porter diddling away at a piano. Well, Thurber didn’t enjoy their penchant for practical jokes.

Still, on other occasions, the Algonks delighted in charades and the “I can give you a sentence” game, which spawned Parker’s memorable sentence using the word horticulture: “You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.”

I’m assuming you groaned there.

Now, let’s consider ten more caustic wisecracks from Dorothy herself:

  1. “Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.”
  2. “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”
  3. “The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”
  4. “Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.”
  5. “I don’t know much about being a millionaire, but I’ll bet I’d be darling at it.”
  6. “Tell him I was too fucking busy – or vice versa.”
  7. “Heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common.”
  8. “Brevity is the soul of lingerie,” along with, “I require three things in a man: he must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.”
  9. “I hate writing, I love having written.”
  10. “That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.”

Let’s not overlook her classic verse:

I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
after four I’m under my host.

Slatkins and the Hollywood String Quartet

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

From what I saw of the classical music scene in America when I was growing up, the West Coast in general and Los Angeles, in particular as its primary metropolis, were seen as something of a backwater, despite some of the city’s celebrity musicians such as violinist Jascha Heifetz, pianist/composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, and serialist composer Arnold Schoenberg.

In the classical field, the city’s music-making was dismissed as subservient to the film industry. There wasn’t even any opera, in contrast to San Francisco.

That perception has changed, especially since the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall along with the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s rise under Esa-Pekka Salonen and Gustavo Dudamel to what prominent critics have deemed the most important orchestra in the nation.

Meanwhile, LA’s earlier life is getting reconsideration these days, thanks to the Slatkin family and its history that centers, especially, on the Hollywood String Quartet.

Here’s why.

  1. The quartet, drawn from film industry musicians but known largely through its recordings on Capitol Records, was critically acclaimed as the best string quartet ever in America. But because of conflicting schedule demands among its four members, it was unable to tour outside of California except on rare occasion. That did dampen their awareness in the larger artistic world. Listen to their recordings, though, or view their only video performance on YouTube, and the case is compelling. We can argue about the amazing American ensembles that have come since. These days, I’ll say simply the Hollywood Four remain unsurpassed but are now rivalled, which I see as a blessing. And here I had dismissed their name as somehow celebrity gloss.
  2. Let’s start with the first violinist, Felix Slatkin. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Jewish family from Ukraine, he studied violin under Efrem Zimbalist and conducting under Fritz Reiner at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. It doesn’t get any better than that. At age 17 he joined the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra as assistant principal violinist before becoming concertmaster for Twentieth Century Fox Studios, where he soloed in several acclaimed soundtracks. He and his new wife also cofounded the quartet in 1939. As a conductor, he founded the Concert Arts Orchestra, comprised largely of studio musicians, and led the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, local professionals in the summer season. He recorded widely on the Capitol label with both the quartet and the two orchestras. He was also Frank Sinatra’s concertmaster and conductor of choice. He died of a heart attack at age 47.
  3. His wife was a New York native of Russian Jewish extraction, Eleanor Aller, the principal cellist of the Warner Bros. Studio Orchestra. Not only was she the first woman to hold a principal chair in a studio orchestra, hers was a position no woman held in any of the major orchestras of Europe or America, due to her sex. Kudos on the breakthrough. Oh, yes, she did make her mark as a soloist on major soundtracks as well as on the concert stage. Shortly after their marriage, the couple established the Grammy-winning quartet while continuing to work as studio musicians.
  4. Today, their son Leonard is the best-known family member. American conductors have faced an uphill battle against Europeans when it comes to prestigious positions, but this Slatkin has earned a well-placed distinction. At the early age of 33, he was offered the music directorship of three fine American orchestras and chose St. Louis over Minnesota and Cincinnati, in part because of the support the management offered in his development. As he led St. Louis to world-class recognition, many highly acclaimed recordings followed. Later appointments had him heading the National Symphony of Washington and those of Detroit, Nashville, and Lyon, France, as well as the BBC Symphony. He also had significant roles in Chicago, at the Aspin festival in Colorado and Blossom festival in Ohio, and even in Las Vegas. It’s quite a resume, even before getting to opera.
  5. Over its 22-year span, the quartet had two second fiddles and two violists. The original second violinist was Joachim Chassman, joined by violist Paul Robyn. With the outbreak of World War II, the quartet disbanded when the three males enlisted in the military. When the quartet resumed in 1947, Paul Shure replaced Chassman. Alvin Dinkin took over the viola chair in 1955.
  6. All of the members were leading studio musicians during a period noted for its vibrant, lush movie scores. How could that not influence their chamber music as well? They were all Jewish, trained at either Juilliard or Curtis, and of relatively the same age.
  7. Frank Sinatra, yes, Ol’ Blue Eyes, was accompanied by the quartet on several acclaimed records during the ‘50s. He even became a close professional and personal family friend of the Slatkins. For perspective, listen to Chuck Granata’s contention that “In Slatkin, Sinatra found a kindred spirit, as the violinist’s immaculate playing paralleled what Sinatra sought to achieve with his voice; serious listeners will note many similarities comparing Sinatra’s and Slatkin’s individual approaches to musical interpretation. One hallmark of the HSQ was its long, smooth phrasing which was accomplished through controlled bowing techniques; Sinatra utilized breath control to realize the same effect. Likewise, where Felix would frequently add slight upward portamento to a critical note and neatly strike an emotional chord, the singer would often inflect a note upward or downward or seamlessly glide from one key to another.” Friends, that’s real music-making.
  8. Capitol Records played a supportive role. Based in Hollywood, the label recorded not just Sinatra during this period but also most of the quartet’s albums and Felix’s Hollywood Bowl and Concert Arts Orchestra vinyl disks. It’s an impressive list.
  9. The parents did have a rivalry. Son Leonard was awed by his father’s being able to pick up the violin after three or four weeks of neglect (due to conducting demands) and still polish off the Tchaikovsky concerto or some other demanding solo work in contrast to his mother, who practiced up to five hours a day just to maintain level. He said it was a cause of resentment. Understandably. He also pointed out that his father’s bowing arm control was unsurpassed, something the video confirms.
  10. Victor Aller, Eleanor’s brother, appeared with the quartet as pianist. He studied at Juilliard under Josef Lhevinne and became a distinguished film industry pianist and manager.

My first encounter with the quartet was, I vaguely remember, on a Contemporary Records release I found at the Dayton Public Library, perhaps with a very young Andre Previn on piano. Alas, I find no reference to it now. Son Leonard’s rise as a conductor would have come much later.

She did have quite the tongue

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In the official statement marking the death of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, President Jimmy Carter observed, “She had style, she had grace, and she had a sense of humor that kept generations of political newcomers to Washington wondering which was worse – to be skewered by her wit or to be ignored by her.”

Just listen.

  1. When her father was governor of New York, he and her stepmother planned to send her to a conservative school for girls in New York City. Curtly, Alice responded, “If you send me, I will humiliate you. I will do something that will shame you. I tell you I will.”
  2. When her father became president after the 1901 assassination of William McKinley in Buffalo, she greeted the event with “sheer rapture.”
  3. She later said of her father, “He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening.”
  4. When a prominent Washington senator was discovered having an affair with a young woman less than half his age, Alice quipped, “You can’t make a souffle rise twice.”
  5. Most famously, “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.” She had that one embroidered on a pillow kept in her living room.
  6. On Calvin Coolidge: “He sprang from the grass roots of the country clubs of America.”
  7. Another quick character sketch: “He looks as though he’s been weaned on a pickle.”
  8. And one more: “Never trust a man who combs his hair straight from his left armpit.”
  9. As for Washington, D.C: “A town of successful men and the women they married before they were successful.”
  10. Through it all: “I’ve always believed that if you’ve got a good sense of humor, you can get through anything.”

Do note, her father was quoted: “I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both.”

The original wild child of the White House

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The eldest child of Theodore Roosevelt was renowned for her wit and unconventional ways even before she married Nicholas Longworth III, a Republican leader from Cincinnati who eventually became the 38th speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Here I was, planning to sample some of her sharp retorts but now feel compelled to offer ten points about her remarkable and long life to age 96 as a most remarkable observer of life in the nation’s capital.

Please consider this cut-and-paste biography.

  1. Alice Roosevelt was the only child by the future president’s first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, a strikingly beautiful and charming Bostonian banking heiress of deep Brahmin roots who died at age 22 of previously undiagnosed kidney failure. This death came only two days after giving birth to Alice and 11 hours after Teddy’s mother also died, all in the same house.
  2. Grief-stricken, Teddy turned his daughter over to his unmarried, elder sister, Anna. The infant dwelled in “Bammie” or “Bye’s” book-filled Manhattan house while on her father recovered on Western adventures. Once the child back under his roof after he remarried when she was three, he never spoke to his daughter about her mother. So deep was his despair that he tore pages from his diary and burned letters. Alas. Can it get more gothic than this? Distraught after her death, he almost never spoke of her again and prohibited mention of her in his presence. His autobiography even – imagine this – omitted her name. His daughter reflected this practice after her own marriage, preferring to be called “Mrs. L” rather than “Alice.” We can only imagine what her therapist would have made of this, had she had one. Or, for that matter, how the psychological impact affected his politics.
  3. Bammie somehow remained a significant influence on young Alice, though eventually from a distance after marrying and moving to London. Alice later spoke of her admiringly: “If auntie Bye had been a man, she would have been president.” Got that? Over her own father?
  4. As the daughter became more independent and chafed against her father and stepmother, her Aunt Bye still provided needed structure and stability. Late in life, Alice said “There is always someone in every family who keeps it together. In ours, it was Auntie Bye.” Does anyone else sense a writing prompt here? A historical novel, perchance?
  5. A celebrity and fashion idol by age 17, Alice’s social debut in 1902 was highlighted by a gown made of what was soon dubbed “Alice’s blue.” The dress sparked both a women’s clothing trend and a popular song, “Alice’s blue gown.”
  6. Scandalously, Alice smoked cigarettes in public, rode in cars with men, stayed out late partying, was spotted placing bets with a bookie, and had a pet snake named Emily Spinach – named after a spinster aunt and the green vegetable. (Her five half-siblings added a badger, guinea pigs, birds, cats, and dogs to the menagerie.)
  7. Her wedding in February 1906 in the East Room of the White House was the social affair of the season. The groom was 14 years her senior, a scion of a socially prominent Ohio family, and widely whispered to be a Washington womanizer. The event was attended by more than a thousand guests while thousands more crowded outside hoping to glimpse the bride. Alice wore a blue wedding dress – not white – and theatrically sliced the wedding cake with a sword drawn from an unsuspecting military aide.
  8. When the Roosevelts moved from the White House, Alice buried a voodoo doll of Nellie Taft, the new First Lady, in the front yard. When the Taft White House later barred Alice from her former residence, it was the first but not the last administration to do so. Next in line was Woodrow Wilson, who barred her in 1916 for a bawdy joke where he was its butt.
  9. In 1912, Alice publicly supported her father’s Bull Moose presidential ticket while her husband remained loyal to his mentor and fellow Cincinnatian William Howard Taft. During that election cycle, Alice appeared on stage with her father’s vice presidential candidate in Longworth’s own district. When her husband narrowly lost his House seat that year to a Democratic challenger – by 101 votes – she joked that she was worth at least 100 votes. Although her husband recovered the seat in 1914 and stayed in the House of Representatives for the rest of his life, Alice’s campaign against him caused a permanent chill in their marriage.
  10. During their marriage, Alice carried on numerous affairs. Best known was her long, ongoing liaison with Senator William Borah of Idaho. When Alice’s diaries were opened to historical research, the pages indicated that Borah was the father of her daughter, Paulina Longworth (1925–1957). Even in this sensitive situation, Alice’s famed “brilliantly malicious” humor was inescapable: she had originally wanted to name her daughter “Deborah,” as in “de Borah.” And according to one family friend, “Everybody called [the daughter] ‘Aurora Borah Alice.’”

Important people linked to the Gem City

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In this case, they weren’t necessary born in Dayton, but the city did play a role in their success.

  1. Wright Brothers, inventors of the airplane
  2. Charles F. Kettering, prolific inventor
  3. John Henry Patterson, founder of the National Cash Register Company
  4. Thomas Watson Jr., of IBM fame after being fired – twice – by Patterson
  5. James Cox, Democratic presidential nominee and newspaper publisher
  6. Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Black poet
  7. Scotty Reston, editor of the New York Times
  8. Frank Stanton, head of Columbia Broadcasting Company (CBS)
  9. Milton Caniff, master cartoonist
  10. Mike Peters, freewheeling cartoonist

I should also mention Larry Flint, pornographer, who established Hustler magazine, named after his bar.

 

Ten big prize winners I’ve known or at least met

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments
  1. Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize, economics
  2. Clarence Page, Pulitzer Prize, commentary
  3. Dick Locher, Pulitzer Prize, editorial cartoonist
  4. Gary Snyder, Pulitzer Prize, poetry
  5. Jeff MacNally, Pulitzer Prize, editorial cartoonist
  6. Jesse Haines, Baseball Hall of Fame, pitcher
  7. Jesse Owens, Olympic gold medalist, runner
  8. Marcy Nighswander, Pulitzer Prize, photography
  9. Ritter Collett, Baseball Hall of Fame, sportswriter
  10. Steve Curwood, Pulitzer Prize, investigative reporting

On photographer Francesca Woodman

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Is she daring us? To what? Her self-portraits from her intense, brief life burn with some secret hunger. Do her images contain clues for answers? How I wish she could speak or at least listen.

In contrast, she leaves us baffled by her short career, ended when she leaped to her death from an open window at age 22.

She can be seen as fascinated with death itself. A few images, such as those with her arms wrapped in bandages or holding a knife, may be from a suicide attempt that’s mentioned in passing.

Her images are infused with a gothic premonition of death – the Romantic obsession with tragic, youthful demise, and lost opportunity. To speak of an eroticism of death is eerily heightened by knowing of her suicide to come – the images of her holding a knife or extending her bandaged forearms or climbing (sometimes naked) through Victorian gravestones become eerily chilling, leaving the viewer with a morbid fascination.

Her shots appear to surface from the birth of photography itself, an homage enhanced by black-and-white – often scratchy – prints.

And then there’s the matter of her family – both of her parents and her brother were artists, each in a different medium.

Consider the sense of self-entombment in her photographic legacy.

As I delved into the images her family had released (there’s criticism they’re withholding much more), I pondered alternative directions my What’s Left novel could have gone. These photos, to me, could have been by Cassia’s father if he hadn’t taken up the Tibetan Buddhism and then been granted the support he received from his wife’s family.

In contrast, I encounter her after three of my novels followed a hippie-era photographer, and the newest tale picked up on his legacy nearly a half-century later. This time, it’s told by his daughter, Cassia, who’s trying to uncover his essence after he vanished in a Himalayan mountains avalanche when she’s eleven. Her biggest evidence as an investigator stems from his cache of photographic negatives. The way we do with Woodman.

Cassia’s research paradoxically forces her to reconstruct her mother’s side of the family in depth and all of the reasons her father found refuge among its members.

His, I’ll presume, are professionally competent and moving increasingly into color as the technology advances. Woodman’s work turns inward; his ranges outward, through the changing times around him. His death comes unexpectedly, in a period of blissful encounters, among the monks and mountains who expand his vision.

So I return to the darkness of her vision and the imagined brightness of his. Both, in their own ways, tragic.

A nod to famous Maine artists, most of them ‘summer people’

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

The Pine Tree State has long inspired painters and other visual artists, most of them attracted from elsewhere.

Here’s a sampling:

  1. Marsden Hartley, an American Modernist master born in Lewiston and died in Ellsworth. What the desert was for Georgia O’Keeffe, Maine was for Hartley.
  2. Neil Welliver, a Pennsylvanian who moved permanently to Lincolnville. Renowned for his large, square interior Maine nature studies – and a life of controversy and tragedy.
  3. Three generations of Wyeths – N.C., Andy, and Jamie. The most famous, even as summer residents.
  4. Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper. Led a parade of summer people who made the state’s rugged surf iconic.
  5. Alex Katz, a New Yorker who forged a strong Maine connection from 1954 on in Lincolnville. Best known as a precursor to Pop art.
  6. Frederic Church and Thomas Cole of the Hudson Valley School. Made their way to the Pine Tree State, too.
  7. As a child, sculptor Louise Nevelson came from Russia to Rockland. As an adult, she relocated to New York City, something of a reversal of most artists.
  8. Rockwell Kent. Spent five prolific summers on Monhegan Island.
  9. Charles Herbert Woodbury. Founded the Ogunquit colony.
  10. Lithuanian-born William Zorach. His family bought a farm on Georgetown Island in 1923 where they lived, worked, and entertained guests, juggling between New York City. Daughter Dahlov Ipcar also became a noted artist.

 

Thinking of Tim Gunn and those young fashion designers

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Binge watching the episodes of the runway project, I’ve been struck by how many times his sage advice included basic English words the younger generation totally missed.

Well, words that seem basic in our household.

Look, kids: A big vocabulary takes you from black-and-white to full, vivid color. And then beyond. It’s full of nuance and possibility. A spice of life, even.

It’s kinda like that fabric store you raid. And one more reason your mentor on the show is as remarkable as he is.