By Joan Walsh for The Nation

There is no way to do justice to the 92 astonishing years of the incomparable feminist Gloria Steinem, who died at home, surrounded by friends, Wednesday night. I knew she had been weakening, and yet I still regularly heard of her meeting with women leaders and helping anyplace and anytime she could.

Most recently, I got invited to a small New York reception with Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan and actor-activist Jane Fonda, that I hoped might include Steinem. Flanagan slipped over to Steinem’s home early for a private meeting with the Ms. founder and Fonda. That was Steinem, I thought: always making time for new women leaders, in this case the 46-year-old progressive who will become the first Native senator if she is elected in November.

Today, social media has been full of women, young and old, of every race, posting photos with Steinem taken over the last few years. She had not been well; I hadn’t seen her in a little while. But if you had a feminist book out, a documentary, a cause, or if you were a woman running for a major office, Steinem made time for you.

The author, organizer, feminist and friend to so many grew up, struggling, in East Toledo, Ohio, caring for her ill mother. It made her a many-splendored feminist, a gorgeous woman who traveled in elite circles but championed the working class, the vulnerable, women who weren’t white, and women who weren’t straight. (Her AOL email name was EastToledo; whenever that address graced my inbox, I felt thrilled.) Caring for her mother, Steinem didn’t finish a full year of school until the sixth grade but was a voracious reader. She eventually followed her sister Suzanne to Smith College, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

Steinem ultimately wrote 11 books and in addition to founding Ms. she was a co-founder of New York magazine, along with Clay Felker, who also backed Ms. Felker famously told a reporter he gave Steinem her first assignment because she had “great legs.” Cataloguing the list of sexist slurs, sometimes dressed up as compliments, that she suffered is not worth my time or yours. She mostly got over them.

Steinem often said she was awakened to the feminist cause by covering a meeting of women discussing their illegal abortions. She’d had one herself in 1957, in England. The experience of listening to what these women suffered for what would later (until the Dobbs decision) be a right led to her famous essay, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.” She was one of the first prominent white feminists to make a point of reaching out to and including Black women, from Flo Kennedy to Dorothy Pittman Hughes to Alice Walker to the legendary Rep. Shirley Chisholm, for whom she was a delegate to the 1972 Democratic presidential nominating convention.

On the other hand, Steinem drew a lot of criticism for supporting Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama for president in 2008, and writing in The New York Times that gender was a greater barrier than race in running for president. “What worries me is that she is accused of ‘playing the gender card’ when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations,” she wrote. Like Steinem, I supported Clinton in 2008; and in 2016 we were united behind her again. That year, Steinem made a rare stumble by suggesting young women were supporting Bernie Sanders because “that’s where the boys are,” an error she was led into by non-feminist Bill Maher during an appearance on Real Time but for which she fervently apologized. (There were some sympathetic emails between me and “EastToledo” in those years.)

Maybe it seems odd that the woman who wrote “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” in 1969 would support Clinton over Obama roughly 40 years later. Not to me. I would later wonder if I’d been on the wrong side in that race, and of course Steinem and I would fervently support Obama in 2008 and 2012. But the obstinacy of gender barriers, the enduring double standards facing women politicians, and lately the absolute erosion of women’s rights have made me understand even more deeply her frustration with the way women supporting Clinton “were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.” Since then, Steinem (and I) have supported another woman for president, Vice President Kamala Harris; since then, we have been disappointed again.

Also since then, Steinem and I have gotten to support the historic Senate candidacy of Peggy Flanagan, and I wish she could have lived to see what I expect to be her victory. Here’s what Flanagan wrote me this morning:

“Gloria Steinem spent her life changing this country for the better. She helped generations of women believe they belonged in rooms where decisions are made, and she never stopped fighting for equality, dignity, and opportunity for everyone. It has been an incredible honor to get to know her over the last year and I’m forever grateful for her friendship, her courage, and the example she set. I’ll keep doing the work she dedicated her life to – for my daughter and for generations of women to come.”

(Reprinted with permission)

From The New York Times of June 11, 1978, by Robert Berkvist.

On the floor of Barnard Hughes's dressing room at the Morosco Theater sits a pair of shoes. They are old‐fashioned, high-topped shoes, black and creased with wear, and to look at them is to hear the voice of their owner, “Da,” the lovable but maddening old Irish rascal who is the centerpiece of Hugh I.eonard's play. Mr. Hughes, who wears them as the star of “Da,” is not by nature a superstitious man, but by this time he tends to eye those shoes with the respectful affection of someone who knows he has stepped into a good thing.

After all, “Da” has just won the Tony Award as best new play of the season. Its director, Melvin Bernhardt, won a Tony for his efforts. Another went to Lester Rawlins, a featured player in “Da.” And Mr. Hughes, a veteran of 43 years in the theater, overcame some stiff competition and took the Tony for best actor in a play.

For Mr. Hughes, at 62, “Da's” triumphs bear out the anticipatory tingle he felt on his first encounter with Hugh Leonard's autobiographical play. “That was a couple of years ago,” he told a questioner the other day, settling himself into a chair in front of his makeup table. “I read it and loved it, but knew I couldn't do it at the time. But ‘Da’ was gold, obviously, and the part was very right for me, so my wife suggested I take an option on the play and hold it for a while. First time I'd ever done anything like that.” He looked around at the walls and dressing‐room mirror, festooned with congratulatory telegrams and letters from friends and theatergoers. “Now, of course, I'm very glad I did. I am very, very gratified.”

“The strange thing is, the play had been kicking around for years before that,” he went on. “Most everybody knew about it. In fact, I think David Merrick actually optioned it twice. But nothing happened until Gil Parker, who is Hugh Leonard's agent, approached Craig Anderson at the Hudson Guild with the idea of my doing ‘Da’ down there. I suppose that in the back of all our minds was the thought that it might come to Broadway. But my feeling was that, even if that didn't happen, at least ‘Da’ was something I wanted to be seen in. To have it all turn out like this is, well, serendipitous!”

Mr. Hughes's long career seems to have been launched in much the same way. As the child of Irish immigrants, growing up in New York, he had acquired a taste for theatergoing by the time he was a student in high school. One day, after attending a play with a friend, he spoke scornfully of the performance he'd seen. “I said something like, ‘Well, if I couldn't do better than that, I'd quit,’ “ he recalled. About a week later, he received a letter from a producer confirming his appointment for an audition. “My friend had seen the producer's casting announcement and had put my name in without telling me. Anyway, I auditioned and got the job.”

That first job was with a troupe that traveled around the New York area, playing Shakespeare to high‐school audiences. Hughes was 19, had spent “one brief year” in college and had been working as a proofreader on Wall street. Acting took over his life. He stayed with the company for two years, playing most of the parts in “Taming of the Shrew,” “Twelfth Night,” “A Midsummer Night's Dream” and “Julius Caesar.” “I played Cassius, Marc Antony and Brutus in ‘Caesar,’ “ he said, laughing. “It was very good training.”

His apprenticeship continued, first with a repertory company that divided his time between Chicago and California. (“We played Ibsen, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Shaw—everything under the sun”), then with a troupe of farceurs he toured the South. “I learned a lot about comedy timing with that group,” he said. “Actually, I never had any formal acting lessons, but I've been lucky enough to work with some very good people. And I was always able to apply what I'd learned, right away, for the next audience.”

•

By his own estimate, Mr. Hughes has applied himself to more than 400 plays. “I'm probably being modest with that figure,” he said, running a hand through his wisps of gray hair. Then there have been lots of movies and television shows, most recently a series called “Doc,” in which he played an avuncular neighborhood physician. “Doc” was canceled and its failure made room in his life for “Da.” So many wonderful accidents happen to you,” he said. “I guess I've made some wise decisions in my time— becoming an actor was one of them— but there's been a lot of fate at work, too.”

He remembers with wry humor a period during his forties when most of the parts he was given could have been played “without pants. I was always sitting behind something like a desk, was a judge, or a businessman, or a lawyer or doctor. Nobody ever saw my bottom half.”

But Mr. Hughes worked regularly, becoming one of those actors whose face is familiar but whose name never quite stays in the public consciousness. He demonstrated his range in a wide variety of roles, from a lecherous but preoccupied stockbroker in the dismal musical comedy “How Now, Dow Jones,” in 1967, to an aging homosexual in John Schlesinger's 1969 film “Midnight Cowboy.” “I never lacked for a change of pace,” he observed.

He is an actor proud of his craft and aware of his strengths and limitations. “‘Da’ sits very comfortably on me” he said softly. “On the other hand, when I did Shaw'S ‘The Devil's Disciple’ at the Brooklyn Academy earlier this season, I thought I made a pretty good try at it; but the role of Parson Anderson didn't sit as well on my shoulders as some others I've played.”

If Mr. Hughes has any formal philosophy about acting, it was probably expressed in his next remark, which came after a reflective pause. “As an actor,” he said firmly, “you're supposed to be able to play anything that comes along, with intelligence and technique and energy.” He takes more time to prepare a role now, he added. “As a young man I used to simply jump in and let things happen. I'm still inclined to believe in the value of first impressions, but lately I've come to appreciate second and third thoughts, too.”

Did his Irish heritage help him get into the character of “Da”? “Well, I suppose my background was no handicap at all,” he said, eyes twinkling through steel‐rimmed spectacles. “For the flavor mainly. I've always had a great feeling for Ireland and I have a lot of relatives over there. God knows I'm no Irishman, but I do feel close to my family and traditions. It takes a long time to get the bog out of your system, I guess. Surprisingly, my accent is nothing like my parents, but more like Dublin, I'm told, and pretty authentic, too.”

Mr. Hughes said he never did anything “very immediate” in the way of preparing to act “Da.” “I read it, put it down and thought about it, and then read it again. You keep on working on something in the back of your head, you know, even when you're not thinking about it. You're storing it all up, up there, ready to feed into the computer.”

Does he, then, favor an intellectual approach to his roles? On the contrary. “I'm a feeler,” he said, slapping his knee for emphasis. “As a matter of fact, I think if we had more feelers and less thinkers we'd be a hell of a lot better off—not only in the theater, either.”

At this point, the entire Hughes family is theater‐oriented, he said. His wife, actress Helen Stenborg, is currently appearing in Lanford Wilson's “The Fifth of July” at the Circle Repertory. His 19-year-old daughter, Laura, is an aspiring actress who has just been accepted for her second season of apprenticeship at Williamstown Theater Festival. Meanwhile, Douglas, 23, has produced and directed a revue called “Caught in the Act” which has been well received in Charlestown, S.C. “It's on the fringe of the Spoleto Festival,” Mr. Hughes said proudly.

He and his wife met shortly after his discharge from the army after World War II. He began touring military hospitals in a show called “Laugh That Off,” in which his wife-to-be was the ingenue. They have acted together frequently during their 30 years of married life, most recently in a summer theater production of “Tobacco Road” in Chicago. “We were Jeeter Lester and wife,” he said grinning wickedly at the memory of that dissolute redneck couple. “God, but that's a wonderful piece of Americana! I think it would make a great opera.”

This was Mr. Hughes's second Tony nomination. He was nominated, but did not win, for his performance as Chief Constable Dogberry in Joseph Papp's production of “Much Ado About Nothing” in 1972. “You can't help thinking about your nomination,” he admitted, “even though you try not to. A couple of times, as I sat there on stage in ‘Da’ in my Morris chair, while Brian Murray or somebody else played a scene, I'd suddenly think to myself, ‘Don't just sit there! You've been nominated for a Tony—do something!’ Seriously, though, I wish the four of us [the other nominees for best actor were Jason Robards, Hume Cronyn and Frank Langella] could walk hand in hand into the sunset. The important thing about the Tonys is that the awards call attention to the theater and all the wonderful work being done by the people who serve it.”

Among the mementos hanging from Mr. Hughes's dressing‐room mirror is a large salted pretzel with a ribbon on it. “That's a Hughes family tradition,” he said, smiling. “It started when my son was about four years old. One day I was about to open in a play and he spent his nickle allowance on a present for me. He bought me a pretzel from a street vendor. It was the first of a long line, and now we give them to each other. We even got one down to Charlestown for Doug. Didn't the Barrymores give one another apples on opening nights? Well, alongside the Barrymore apples are the Hughes pretzels.” It was a homely touch that Da himself would have approved of—that, and those comfortable old shoes.

Photographs of Mr. Hughes and Brian Murray by Martha Swope.

By James Kirchick for The Free Press

Where’s my Roy Cohn?” President Donald Trump demanded in March 2017, barely two months into his first administration. Trump was just given the unwelcome news that his attorney general had recused himself from the Justice Department investigation into his campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia, and he needed someone to rescue him.

The plaintive cry—later adopted by director Matt Tyrnauer as the title for his revelatory 2019 documentary about Cohn—spoke to the singular importance that the late lawyer and political fixer held in Trump’s life. Like many powerful men of dubious morality, Trump had relied on Cohn to extricate him from messes of his own making. During his heyday as a real-estate tycoon, Trump kept a framed photograph of Cohn in his office; during contentious meetings, he would point to it and ask—not so much as a question but as a threat—“Would you rather deal with him?”

There has never been, nor will there ever be, anyone like Roy Cohn. Who else could work as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s henchman and rent a cottage on the Provincetown property of Norman Mailer? Who else would allow for the filming of a pornographic movie in his Upper East Side town house and count the archbishop of New York as one of his closest acquaintances? Who else could sit for the avant-garde photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (whose homoerotic images set off a national firestorm over public funding of the arts) and call upon William F. Buckley Jr. as a character witness at his disbarment hearing?

Roy Cohn, that’s who. Notorious is the word most often used to describe Cohn, so much so that an image of his face ought to sit adjacent to it in the dictionary. It was a face, write Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark in American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, that “possessed the kind of ugliness that made you take a second look.” Behind the droopy eyelids and misshapen nose—ravined by a scar resulting from a botched childhood surgery—resided an even uglier soul.

Bird, co-author of the J. Robert Oppenheimer biography that Christopher Nolan used as the basis for his biopic, and Goldmark, his wife and researcher, describe Cohn as “a power broker unlike any fixer in American life,” a man who was “a nefarious actor in one unseemly drama after another from the dark side of the American Century.” Beginning with his rise to prominence working for McCarthy, and ending with his death during the AIDS crisis, the public life of the “famously infamous” Cohn offers vital perspective on the current president of the United States and the political era he continues to shape.

Cohn became addicted to power at a young age. If he had a face only a mother could love, Cohn’s mother, Dora, the social-climbing daughter of a wealthy Eastern European Jewish businessman, was unstinting. Cohn’s father, Albert, was a New York City prosecutor who steadily rose to become a powerful state Supreme Court judge. Their marriage was a compromise: Dora’s wealth enabled Al’s rise, while Al’s professional reputation smoothed the edges of Dora’s harsh personality. From such a loveless union was Cohn born. In the words of one relative, “The child of that compromise is already compromised, morally.” Doted on like the only child he was, young Roy came to expect that he could always get what he wanted, rules be damned.

Cohn learned the ways of politics at the feet of his father. It was at Al’s dinner parties where Cohn met Democratic Party bigwigs like Carmine DeSapio, the last leader of the Tammany Hall political machine, and learned how political power is accumulated and exercised. “Hanging out in this world reinforced the notion that most everyone was corrupt and that what mattered were your connections,” Bird and Goldmark write.

In 1937, at the precocious age of 10, Roy accompanied Al to a meeting with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Oval Office, where the younger Cohn offered his support for FDR’s court-packing scheme. (Nearly half a century later, Cohn himself would be invited to the Oval Office, introducing his male lover to Ronald and Nancy Reagan.) At Horace Mann, the elite private school from which he graduated a year early, Cohn’s car pool included S.I. Newhouse Jr. (heir to the Condé Nast publishing empire), Generoso Pope Jr. (future creator of the National Enquirer), and Anthony Lewis (future journalist for The New York Times).

The imprisonment of his Uncle Bernie in 1933 for bank fraud had a major impact on Cohn. Every month, Dora brought Cohn with her to Sing Sing prison to visit her brother, whom Cohn believed had been unjustly persecuted because he was Jewish. The government disguised its prejudicial motivation, Cohn later claimed, by assigning a Jewish prosecutor to the case. “In the great tradition of antisemitism,” Cohn told a biographer many years later, “a Jew was put to catch a Jew.” It was a doubly ironic statement given the role Cohn would play two decades hence prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges, and also expelling gay people from the federal government on the specious grounds that they represented “security risks.”

Cohn’s successful prosecution of the Rosenbergs brought him to the attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and McCarthy, who promptly hired him to serve as chief counsel on his committee investigating alleged communist infiltration of the U.S. military. Presaging Trump, McCarthy had a penchant for assigning disparaging nicknames to his adversaries. Missouri Senator Stuart Symington was “Sanctimonious Stu” and Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith (his earliest critic in the Republican Party) was “Snow White.” Cohn took after his boss, and his unfounded allegations of communist attachments helped drive at least one man, United Nations general counsel Abraham Feller, to die by suicide, by jumping out the window of his apartment building.

Though commentators could only refer to it obliquely at the time, it was Cohn’s unrequited homosexual yearning that brought McCarthy down. At Cohn’s urging, McCarthy had hired as a “consultant” David Schine, a young hotel-chain heir of modest intelligence whose main qualification, in the words of Time, seemed to be his possession of the “build and features of a junior-grade Greek god.” When Schine was drafted for compulsory military service, Cohn fought a vituperative behind-the-scenes battle against the Army to win him a deferment and, failing that, an officer’s commission.

Demonstrating another trait that he would later impart to Trump, Cohn acted like a crybully, privately berating Army officials while publicly portraying himself as a victim of their machinations. When he delivered a speech at a Madison Square Garden rally protesting the Senate’s censure motion against McCarthy, a Life magazine photographer was identified by the crowd, resulting in shouts of “Throw her out” and “Hang the communist.” Some 80 million people—half the country—watched the 36-day spectacle that was the Army-McCarthy hearings, quite the audience for the 24-year-old chief counsel.

Cohn’s outrageous behavior toward the Army—driven by what Vermont Republican senator Ralph Flanders mischievously called his “passionate” attachment to Schine—ultimately ended McCarthy’s reign of terror. He was censured by his Senate colleagues and died in 1957.

His stint in Washington done, Cohn moved back to New York to begin what would become an extremely lucrative legal career. He became a prominent social fixture, squiring Barbara Walters, whom he helped land her first job in television, around as his beard. According to a cousin, in a single day at the Upper East Side town house where Cohn lived and worked, one might bump into DeSapio, Genovese mob boss Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, Francis Cardinal Spellman (whom Cohn jokingly referred to as “Cardinal Feldman” for his close relationship with the Jewish community), or New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. On sunny days, he slathered himself in vinegar and laid out on the terrace to tan. He was constantly on the phone, speaking frequently with writers for Page Six, the New York Post’s fabled gossip column, to which he was a frequent contributor of information. (Sound familiar?)

While his mother was alive, Cohn went to great lengths to conceal his homosexuality. Bird and Goldmark unfortunately give credence to an old yarn, originally published in a salacious 1993 biography of Hoover, that Cohn participated in an orgy at The Plaza hotel with the FBI director and two young blond men in 1958. The single source for this claim was the embittered ex-wife of one of Cohn’s clients, who claimed to have been present during said event.

One shouldn’t have to speak from personal experience to infer that the last thing a group of gay men engaged in carnal relations would want to see is a middle-aged woman, and it’s notable that so many of the journalists and historians who repeat this tale are straight. It also stretches the imagination that Hoover, a man so paranoid about being perceived as gay that he sent FBI agents to knock on the doors of private citizens who were overheard to have called him a “queer,” would dress up in “a fluffy black dress, very fluffy, with flounces and lace stockings and high heels, and a black curly wig” in front of a voluble New York socialite.

If Cohn’s exaggerated, almost cartoonish anti-communist stance was overcompensation for his insecurity regarding the prevalence of Jews on the left, the furtive way he dealt with his gayness came from a similar place of self-doubt. Yet while Cohn wore his Jewish identity proudly (once welcoming Buckley on a dock in Bermuda wearing a Speedo and a T-shirt emblazoned with “SUPERJEW,”) he denied to his death the other facet of his humanity. Part of Cohn’s shame had to do with his overbearing mother, with whom he lived until her death in 1967. Another element was his association of homosexuality with weakness and the fear that his reputation for ruthlessness would be fatally undermined were the world to know that he was a “fairy.”

By the time he met a young real estate developer from Queens named Donald Trump in 1973, Cohn was known as much for his extensive political and media connections as for his defense of various mafiosos. (Over the course of his career, Cohn would attain the rare distinction of representing all of the city’s Five Families.) Although Cohn had served as an obsequious protégé for many a macher, he had yet to take on an apprentice of his own. He must have seen something promising in the outer-borough striver, whose entrée into Manhattan society he would be crucial in facilitating. It also didn’t hurt that the young Trump—tall, blond, blue-eyed—fit Cohn’s “type” to a T.

Reading American Scoundrel, we discover many things, large and small, that Trump learned from his mentor. The first is tackiness. Cohn was the kind of guy who, caught stealing a bath mat from a Tokyo hotel, told the receptionist, “You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve talking about a bath mat after you bombed Pearl Harbor.” Cohn was also notorious for never paying his bills, racking up massive tabs at restaurants and private clubs, or his taxes, leaving his mortal coil owing $7 million to the IRS. Until his death at 59 from AIDS (which he always denied having), Cohn was also a remarkable survivor, somehow managing to emerge victorious from all sorts of scrapes that would have crushed men of lesser tenacity (and ethics).

Federally indicted three times, he was acquitted in each case. Despite decades of legal chicanery and unethical behavior, he was not disbarred until a few weeks before he died. The one Cohn trait Trump didn’t acquire was loyalty. At Cohn’s last birthday party, Trump gifted him a pair of diamond cuff links which turned out to be fake.

Like Trump, Cohn claimed to be driven by his hatred for the establishment, an animosity borne from the persecution of his Uncle Bernie. He saw his defense of mobsters—scrappy Italian Americans trying to eke out a living in a world ruled by wealthy WASPs—in this context. Asked once by a journalist if he had not become part of the very establishment he claimed to despise, Cohn responded defensively, “I’m not part of the establishment. God forbid. I can’t stand those people. I dislike them as much as they dislike me. See, I don’t like to be the only Jew. I’m not impressed by the fact I could get into X club; I don’t want to get into X club if they don’t approve of Jews and so forth.” It was an admirable perspective, if cynically employed.

Despite his material wealth and busy social calendar, Cohn was a lonely man. Much of his life can be summed up in the pathetic observation of an acquaintance recounting an evening with Cohn at a Provincetown lounge: “We all stood around the piano. Roy sang three choruses of ‘God Bless America,’ got a hard-on, and went home to bed.”

The major question I had going into American Scoundrel was, How the hell did Cohn get away with it? How did he manage to stay in the good graces of so many powerful people, many of whom absolutely hated his politics? The answer, according to Bird and Goldmark, was charm. Hiding behind that ugly face was a roguish charisma that intrigued and confounded many people.

Jason Epstein, the legendary co-founding editor of The New York Review of Books and longtime editorial director at Random House, got to know Cohn while exploring the potential publication of his memoirs. “There was something going for him, I don’t know, the way movie stars get that way,” Epstein said.

“It’s about money,” Peter Osnos, another liberal man of arts and letters, told Bird and Goldmark. “It’s about access. It’s about a certain kind of glamour. You want to always be identified with the red-hot center.”

Despite being a public figure who was widely written about, Cohn presented a challenge to the authors as a biographical subject because he did not leave behind any personal papers or even a legal archive. Citizen Cohn, the one previous biography of Cohn, written by the former Washington Post reporter Nicholas von Hoffman and published in 1988, relied largely upon anonymous sources. Stupidly, Columbia University’s Oral History project rejected von Hoffman’s offer to donate his interview tapes, and he unloaded all his research materials into a dumpster. Bird and Goldmark make up for this incalculable loss by bringing to bear other historical artifacts, including a “treasure trove” of Cohn ephemera purchased by R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe at auction. Several cold calls to Trump were successful, though the president declined a full sit-down interview. (“I just can’t,” he told the co-authors. “I can’t. I’m the president. I’m very busy. I have China calling. I have Russia calling. I cannot do it.”)

It’s hard to think of another figure who has had such a profound and lasting impact on Trump as Cohn, whose aggressive style and amoral bearing continue to impact our world. In 2023, Steve Bannon reissued Citizen Cohn under his War Room Books imprint, writing in the preface that Cohn was “one of the most extraordinary, demonized, and misunderstood figures of 20th-century politics.” Everywhere one looks today, Cohn’s epigones are abundant, from the most powerful man in the world to his many imitators in media and politics. To Trump’s eternal question, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?,” the answer is: all around us.

*****

James Kirchick is the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.

From Harper’s, 2018.

My son was born on the night of November 8, 2016. Because he was three weeks early, I had not voted absentee. All day I repeated, “I can’t believe this man is preventing me from voting for our first female president.” A few hours after the birth, I instructed my husband to look at his phone and find out what was happening with “my main bitch Hillary.” Concern crossed the nurse’s face. “You know, it’s not looking good,” she said. “I’m so sick of this liberal anxiety!” I replied. “She’s got this in the bag!” The nurse raised her eyebrows and fiddled with the IV; a trained professional does not argue with a woman who is recovering from a thirty-seven-hour labor. From across the room, my husband cleared his throat. “Trump won Ohio,” he said.

The hospital was swamped with babies. The doula said there was a supermoon. There were no beds available in the maternity ward, so we were moved to the inside half of a double on a general floor, approximately the size of a broom closet. “He won North Carolina.” The closet was not big enough for my husband and the bassinet, so I sent him home and asked the nurse to wheel the bassinet next to my bed. The cafeteria was closed. I was very hungry. I looked at my phone. Trump had won Florida. In the night, the baby on the other side of the curtain cried, which made my baby mewl. I was too weak to pick him up, so I rubbed his stomach and said, “Sh, sh.” I looked at my phone. Trump had won the election. I fell asleep. In the morning, I had a text from a friend: “CONGRATULATIONS YOURE A MOM IN A NEW FASCIST AMERICA!!!! But seriously all my love.”

My husband showed up. I was starving, stitched, bleeding, unable to walk, and my abdominal muscles had separated, but he had been up alone all night and looked crazed. He handed me some nuts. My mother arrived, and my in-laws. They took photos. A lactation consultant came through and watched the baby fool around. Through the curtain, we heard our roommates basking in Trump’s victory and mocking the distressed posts of their Facebook friends. My husband swears that the other dad cooed to his daughter, “You’re going to make America great again!” We petitioned for an early discharge, and at one in the morning loaded up the car, like criminals.

I heard that other people who had babies around the same time became fixated on politics, obsessed with making the world better for the new life they had made. Their social media feeds grew ever more fervent and passionate, and they took their infants to protests and marches. I skipped the protests. I read the news all the time, but I couldn’t figure out what it had to do with me. Other people were mourning the rise of nationalism, xenophobia; Rudy Giuliani was going to be secretary of state. I had never been happier. I was high on oxytocin. Sometimes I cried when I looked at my baby. He was perfect. I had gone to hell and come back with him. Sometimes I nodded off and woke up screaming because I feared I had dropped him off the side of the bed. At other times I joked that he was going to grow up, build a time machine, travel back to the day of his birth, change the outcome of the election, and get himself born, but that was just a way of trying to connect two unrelated events.

There was an ugly hematoma on the back of my baby’s crushed, pointy head, and whenever I looked at it I felt guilty for not getting him out sooner. During labor, when things were hardest, I’d said over and over, “I can’t.” In the days after, the shame of having wanted to give up haunted me. Now I think that’s what being a mother is: it is something that you can’t possibly do, and yet you keep doing it anyway. That doesn’t mean you do it well — or maybe it’s just that doing it well doesn’t look as you expected it to. According to D. W. Winnicott’s concept of the “good enough” mother, it is important to fail at mothering, or else your child will not pass from illusion to reality. The mother teaches the child to handle frustrations by being one.

Jacqueline Rose, a British literary critic who writes often about psychoanalysis and feminist theory, is interested in maternal failure writ large. In her new book, Mothers, which extends an essay she published in the London Review of Books in 2014, she laments the undue symbolic burdens we place on mothers. We scapegoat mothers for “our personal and political failings . . . which it becomes the task — unrealisable, of course — of mothers to repair.” We want mothers to “hold up the skies,” to make things “bright and innocent and safe,” to “carry the burden of everything that is hardest to contemplate about our society and ourselves.” They can’t. We must let them fail at what we ask so that we can learn to ask for something else.

Mothers receive too little and too much attention, or the wrong kind of attention. They are ordered to “return to their instincts and stay home” or “to make their stand in the boardroom,” but in either case are excluded from “public, political space,” where “the shameful debris of the human body is unwelcome.” Mothers bring mess with them everywhere they go — spilled milk, sticky fingers, too many tote bags. A friend of mine who is not a mother recently complained that her seatmate on a long international flight had changed a diaper on the tray table, as if it were a public health hazard. Yesterday, while my son was screaming himself to sleep on a short domestic flight, I realized that tears are another form of human debris. A mother receives pity and disgust for bringing them into public view. But far worse is the conflict that arises within a mother when a child cries in public: the feeling of failure and anxiety, the concern for the child, the effort not to shame him, and her attempts to remind herself that there is nothing wrong with crying, even if it’s bothersome for whoever else is around. What are tears but the universal expression of frustration and rage?

Mothers themselves are expected to feel only along a narrowly approved continuum, and to accept, with mournful resignation, sacrificing their children for higher ends. (Rose admires a novella by Colm Tóibín in which Mary runs away from the sight of Jesus on the cross.) But mothers can “see the reality of the cruel political world they are being asked to gestate” and thus “expose misfortune as injustice.” Rose cites as examples the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, whose children were “disappeared” in Argentina’s Dirty War; Doreen Lawrence, whose son was murdered by London’s Metropolitan Police in 1993; and British women who demanded suffrage during the First World War “as the fair if partial recompense for having been expected to send their sons to war.”

I assume that there are those who think that mothers have too much social or public authority. It’s lose-lose-lose: the culture deifies and loathes mothers in equal measure, and treats childless (or, as some would have it, “child-free”) women with suspicion and contempt. It wasn’t enough for Hillary Clinton to be secretary of state; she was also “a mother and a grandmother.” But the world is not set up for women with children to succeed professionally. In the United States and Europe, women with children make less money than men and women without children. Rose cites startling statistics: 54,000 women lose their jobs every year in the UK because of pregnancy; 77 percent of pregnant women and new mothers experience workplace discrimination.

So often mothers are accused of retreating, narcissistically, from the political world to protect and care for their offspring. (This was Rebecca Solnit’s argument in her essay “The Mother of All Questions,” which appeared in these pages: that she chose a life of public activism over the retreat of the family.) Rose, however, thinks that motherhood can be a model for a broad and inclusive politics. “To be a mother . . . is to welcome a foreigner,” she writes, a notion that she connects to migrant crises and other international emergencies, and in which she sees a possible “foundation for a different ethics, and, perhaps, a different world.” Rose is not naïvely suggesting that holding someone else’s baby makes you feel the same as holding your own. She’s asking us to see “a mother’s body and the public world all around her” as “indissolubly linked.”

Rose adopted a daughter from China, and this experience helps her see a fundamental truth that the intimacy of birth can hide: “An adopting mother knows somewhere deep down that she does not own her child, something I have always seen as a caution, a truth and a gift.” Even children who were umbilically attached to their mothers are radically distinct. One of the terrors of pregnancy is the feeling that something is growing inside you of its own volition. You are joined with it, which is to say that it is separate. From a very early age, the child has his own goals, agendas, projects, and desires. Rose quotes Simone de Beauvoir:

The child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without reversion to herself, seeks to go beyond her own experience.

A mother’s job is to love her child in such a way that he can love other people, specifically other people who treat him with kindness. It is an insane task to undertake, to give (almost) everything to someone who will, without thanks and probably with some rudeness, depart and go live his life elsewhere. It becomes easier to bear if one takes up Rose’s image, seeing the child not as a thing you own but as a person passing through, in need of temporary refuge. That you will fail at providing this refuge is part of the deal.

Mothers, for Rose, are the “original subversives”; they give the lie to the clichés and myths that would suffocate them. One myth: that they exist only for their children. Another: that they neither hate nor desire. (Rose is very good on the romance of breastfeeding.) Yet another, the most awful of all: that they can fix everything, make everything okay. Children slip, trip, fall, and worse. I think of the mothers who watched, unknowing, while their daughters were molested by Larry Nassar. I think of “bland American” Charlotte Haze, who cottons on to Humbert Humbert’s schemes just before a hit-and-run removes her from the plot. Was she a bad mother? Or only helpless, in Rose’s terms, incapable of making the world safe? Is a mother responsible for the dirty water in the tap, for the bullets that fly over her kid’s route to school? Is she in charge of school funding, health care costs, job growth? Opioids, bullies, toxic friendships, school shooters? Mall shooters? Movie-theater shooters? Nightclub shooters?

To be a mother is to struggle to save — while also knowing that you will fail to save — your child. To be faced with the prospect that the world is not getting better, that there will not be a better life for the lives you have made.

But seriously all my love.

Barbara and I have begun our Montgomery Clift film festival—in her apartment, catered by Zabar’s, and with frequent Zoom calls with her daughter.

Barbara fell in love with Montgomery Clift in 1962, when she saw The Heiress in the movie theatre in her college theatre. “I fell hard,” she said. “He was my type. Then I wanted to see everything he did, but I had to wait for his movies to show up on campus or on television. Remember TV Guide? [Oh, yes.] I would look through that and the television section of the newspaper. Remember those? With the grid and those great descriptions? [Yes.] My friends and I would alert each other when there was a Montgomery Clift movie.”

Barbara’s daughter, via Zoom, chimes in: “Tell Jim about when you were told that Clift was gay.”

“I was so mad,” Barbara said. “I heard this after he died, and he died when I was out of college and dating my husband, who was in graduate school. Guys used to say this about all the handsome men. They were jealous. They were threatened. So all the handsome men were gay, so they said. I didn’t care. What does it matter? His acting wasn’t gay acting: It was great acting.”

Barbara shifts her attention to her laptop and her daughter’s face. “You know,” she says, “your father never did that sort of thing. He never felt any jealousy toward other men, or if he did, he never showed it. He was okay with my love affair with Clift and other actors.”

What is your favorite Montgomery Clift movie?

“A Place in the Sun,” she answers immediately. “I love that movie.”

“She has seen it a lot,” her daughter interjects. “I have seen it a lot.”

“I never get tired of it.”

We watch A Place in the Sun. Barbara’s daughter “watches” with us for about twenty minutes. “This is like old times,” she says. “I’ll be in New York in two weeks. Save some movies for me.”

Barbara has what she calls “musculoskeletal-system adventures.” “Things don’t connect,” she says. “I don’t always hurt. Not always. But I think I’m going to put my foot on the floor and walk to the kitchen, and I fall. My legs seem to say, ‘Not today!’ and I plop back in the bed. I used that cane. Sometimes I use a walker. I don’t trust myself outside. I had a battery of tests. That’s what they call it: A battery of tests. What is wrong with me? I wanted to know. They’re vague. There is no one thing. Finally, one doctor said, ‘Here’s what’s wrong with you: You’re eighty years old. That was two years ago. There’s no word for what I have. I’m just old. It’s like what you said: The fray. I’m fraying. We’re all fraying. What was that you wrote about your actress friend?”

I had written of Mildred Natwick that I saw her and realized something was off. Natwick was always so elegant and composed and in control, but at this event (the memorial service for Helen Hayes), it was as if she were a beautiful marionette whose strings had been cut or loosened. The limbs didn’t work together. Her head was almost always at an odd angle. She was…

“Fraying,” Barbara interrupted. “Well, that’s how I feel. My strings to my legs have been cut or loosened. The strings are fraying.”

What is the hardest thing about growing old?

“Connection,” she says. “I’ve lost my husband and most of my friends and all of my family—my parents and my two brothers. Gone. I can’t believe how much I forget until I talk to you or my daughter and things come back. Vacations. Holidays. Riding in the back of our station wagon on trips. When we all got transistor radios and would listen late at night beneath our covers, until our mother made us turn them off and go to bed. The memories fade in and out, but they come back.

“It reminds me of when I went back home [Philadelphia, her birthplace], and this is the early 1980s. My husband and I had gone to see Silkwood. When was that? [1983.] So I’m driving around in our car—I’m alone—and I see one of my oldest friends walking on the sidewalk in our old neighborhood. I think she must be visiting her family too. I go to honk my horn to get her attention, but there’s no sound. I press harder, but there’s no sound. I don’t get her attention. I’m thinking I’ll call her parents when I get home and try to see her. I get to my parents’ house, and I take things out of the trunk, and I go into the house. I think, I won’t call: I’ll just drive over to the house and see if she can visit. But the car will not start. It’s dead. Completely dead. Now we call AAA, and they come, and they say it needs to go into a shop. They tow it to a shop. The electrical system is down. Did I know that car had an electrical system? No. I’m dumb that way. Anyway, in all of this drama over the car, I lose track of my friend, and by the time I call her mother, she has left town. We made plans for a later date.

“That’s how age feels to me. My legs don’t work, but my mind sometimes does, but in a strange way. My mind is sometimes like the electrical system of that old Chevrolet. I go to honk the horn and it doesn’t work. There’s no connection. I go to remember something, and there’s no connection. I get a new connection when I talk about things or write things down. Things come back. The horn works, and I can call out to a friend or a memory. Age is just having to work harder to remember who I am and what I have.”

“But I watch this movie or other movies, and I remember where I was and who I was with. I remember how old my daughter was, or I remember that I saw that movie when my husband was sick, and we watched it together. Or I remember that my daughter was away and I was worried about her, and I watched something late at night to take my mind off things. I remember those things and the horn works, and I can reach someone (me) and something over there walking along the road.”

Thank you, Barbara.

By Peter Bogdanovich/From Esquire, 1972

When comedy was king, he was an emperor.

I was speaking with Jack Benny the other day and he told me about working with Ernst Lubitsch. The director had called Benny in 1939 and asked if he’d be available to do a film. “I said, ‘I’ll do it!’ And he said, ‘But you haven’t read the script?’ And I said, “I don’t have to read the script. If you want me for a picture, I want to be in it!’ I’d have been an idiot to say anything else. It was always impossible for comedians like me or Hope to get a good director for a movie—that’s why we made lousy movies—and here was Ernst Lubitsch, for God’s sake, calling to ask if I’d do a picture with him. Who cares what the script is!”

The film became To Be or Not To Be (Carole Lombard’s last—she died in a plane crash before release) and it caused not a little controversy at the time for being a purportedly frivolous look at Nazism, dealing as it did with a troupe of Polish actors in occupied Warsaw and their comical confrontations with Hitler’s gauleiters. But those who objected missed the point, having forgotten Thomas De Quincey’s famous maxim: “If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.” For Lubitsch, the Nazis’ most damning sin was their bad manners, and To Be or Not To Be survives not only as satire but as a glorification of man’s indomitable good spirits in the face of disaster— survives in a way that many more serious and high-toned works about the war do not. Lubitsch had a habit of establishing his European locales by showing a series of stores, each featuring a more unpronounceable name on its facade. He does this in To Be or Not To Be, then follows it with an identical sequence of the same shops as they looked after the bombing. The simplicity of this is deeply affecting, especially realizing the significance it must have held for Lubitsch, who was, after all, a European and to whom those “funny” names—like his own—meant more than the easy laugh he enjoyed giving his American audiences.

“The Lubitsch Touch” —-it was as famous a moniker as Hitchcock’s “Master of Suspense”—but perhaps not as superficial. The phrase does connote something light, strangely indefinable, yet nonetheless tangible, and seeing Lubitsch’s films—more than in almost any other director’s work—one can feel this spirit: not only in the tactful and impeccably appropriate placement of camera, the subtle economy of his plotting, the oblique dialogue which had a way of saying everything through indirection, but also—and particularly —in the performance of every single player, no matter how small the role. Jack Benny told me that Lubitsch would act out in detail exactly how he wanted something done—often broadly but always succinctly— knowing, the comedian said, that he would translate the direction into his own manner and make it work. Clearly, this must have been Lubitsch’s method with all his actors because everyone in a Lubitsch movie— whether it’s Benny or Gary Cooper, Lombard or Kay Francis, Maurice Chevalier or Don Ameche, Jeanette MacDonald or Claudette Colbert—performs in the same unmistakable style. Despite their individual personalities—and Lubitsch never stifled these—they are imbued with the director’s private view of the world, which made them behave very differently than they did in other films.

This was, in its own way, inimitable—though Lubitsch has had many imitators through the years— yet none has succeeded in capturing the soul of that attitude, which is as difficult to describe as only the best styles are, because they come from some fine inner workings of the heart and mind and not from something as apparent as, for instance, a tendency to dwell on inanimate objects as counterpoint to his characters’ machinations. Certainly Lubitsch was famous for holding on a closed door while some silent or barely overheard crisis played out within, or for observing his people in dumb show through closed windows. This was surely as much a part of his style as it was an indication of his sense of delicacy and good taste, the boundless affection and respect he had for the often flighty and frivolous men and women who played out their charades for us in his glorious comedies and musicals.

No, closer to the heart of it (but not the real secret, because that, I believe, died with him—as every great artist’s secret does) was his miraculous ability to mock and celebrate both at once and to such perfection that it was never quite possible to tell where the satirizing ended and the glorification began—so inseparably were they combined in Lubitsch’s attitude and manner. In Monte Carlo, alone in her train compartment, Jeannette MacDonald sings “Beyond the Blue Horizon” in that pseudo-operatic, sometimes not far from ludicrous way of hers, and you feel right from the start that Lubitsch loves her not despite the fragility of her talents but because of it—because her way of singing was something irrevocably linked to an era that would soon be dead and whose gentle beauties Lubitsch longed to preserve and to praise, though he could also transcend them. For while her singing may be dated (but see her in the Nelson Eddy pictures she did and note the difference), Lubitsch’s handling of the number is among the greatest of movie sequences. As she leans out the train window, her scarf wafting in the wind, she waves to the farmers along the countryside and they—in a magical display of art over reality—wave back and join in the chorus to her song. Of course, Lubitsch is making fun of it as much as he is having fun with it—indeed, it’s this tension between his affection for those old-fashioned operetta forms and his awareness of their absurdity that gives his musicals such unpretentious charm, as well as a wise and pervasive wit. And he is never patronizing, either to his audience or to his characters, and when Miss MacDonald and the brittle and ingratiating Jack Buchanan sing a reprise of that song at the close of Monte Carlo—leaning together now from their train window—their fond wave to the people they pass can be enjoyed both for its innocence and gaiety as for the deeper sense of farewell to old times that Lubitsch’s ineffable touch imparts.

Of course, it follows that Lubitsch made the very best of musical movies—not just the first great one in the first full year of sound—-The Love Parade (1929)—but also just the best period—Monte Carlo, The Smiling Lieutenant, One Hour with You, The Merry Widow— no one has quite equaled or surpassed their special glow. (I guess Singin’ in the Rain, directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly and written by Comden and Green, is the best of the “modern” ones, and I love it, but really it’s of another breed.) Truth to tell, no one even came close: the Astaire-Rogers shows of the Thirties—and I’m quite fond of Mark Sandrich’s Top Hat and George Stevens’ Swing Time—seem tawdry by comparison, and Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight—a forthright imitation of Lubitsch with his usual stars, Chevalier and MacDonald—though remembered fondly by many, looks pretty labored today next to the genuine article.

Lubitsch had a terrific impact on American movies. Jean Renoir was exaggerating only slightly when he told me recently, “Lubitsch invented the modern Hollywood,” for his influence was felt, and continues to be, in the work of many of even the most individualistic directors. Hitchcock has admitted as much to me and a look at Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise and Hitchcock’s To Catch A Thief (both plots deal with jewel thieves so the comparisons are easy) will reveal how well he learned, though each is distinctly the work of the man who signed it. Billy Wilder, who was a writer on a couple of Lubitsch films— including the marvelous Ninotchka—has made several respectful forays into the world of Lubitsch, as have many others, with less noteworthy results. Even two such distinctive film makers as Frank Borzage and Otto Preminger, directing pictures which Lubitsch only produced— Desire (Borzage), A Royal Scandal and That Lady in Ermine (Preminger)—found themselves almost entirely in the service of his unique attitudes, and these movies are certainly far more memorable for those qualities than for ones usually associated with their credited directors. (Actually, Lubitsch is credited for That Lady in Ermine, but this was a sentimental gesture since he suffered a fatal heart attack and only shot eight days of it before Preminger took over.)

Lubitsch brought a maturity to the handling of sex in pictures that was not dimmed by the dimness of the censors that took over in the early Thirties because his method was so circuitous and light that he could get away with almost anything. And that was true in everything he did. No other director, for example, has managed to let a character talk directly to the audience (as Chevalier did in The Love Parade and One Hour with You) and pull it off. There is always something coy and studied in it, but Lubitsch managed just the right balance between reality and theatricality—making the most outrageous device seem natural and easy; his movies flowed effortlessly and though his hand was felt, even seen, it was never intrusive.

But finally, of course, it was another world; it’s no coincidence that several of Lubitsch’s films were set in mythical Ruritanian countries, and that those set in “real” places have the same fanciful quality. Lubitsch achieved what only the best artists can—a singular universe where he sets all the rules and behavior. As Jean Renoir said in a recent interview: “Reality may be very interesting, but a work of art must be a creation. If you copy nature without adding the influence of your own personality, it is not a work of art. . . . Reality is merely a springboard for the artist. . . . But the final result must not be reality. It must only be what the actors and the director or author of the film selected of reality to reveal.” Lubitsch had his own way of putting it; he once told Garson Kanin, “I’ve been to Paris, France, and I’ve been to Paris, Paramount. I think I prefer Paris, Paramount. . . .”

Lubitsch had also the unique ability to take the lightest of material and give it substance and resonance far beyond the subject. The Shop Around the Corner, a charming story of love and mistaken identities in a Budapest department store, becomes under Lubitsch’s hand both a classic high comedy and a remarkably touching essay on human foibles and folly. Another movie, In the Good Old Summertime, and a stage musical, She Loves Me, both used the same story but they are to Lubitsch as George S. Kaufman is to Molière. The most profound expression of this particular aspect of his work is in Heaven Can Wait, which tells a ridiculously simple and unassuming story of one fairly insignificant man’s life—from birth to death—which Lubitsch turns into a moving testament to the inherent beauty behind our daily frivolousness and vanity, our petty crises, our indiscretions, our deep vulnerability. It is Lubitsch’s “divine comedy,” and no one has ever been more gentle or bemused by the weaknesses of humanity. When the hero of the picture dies behind (of course) a closed door, Lubitsch’s camera slowly retreats to take in a ballroom, and an old waltz the man loved begins to play, and death has no dominion. No other image I can think of more aptly conveys Lubitsch’s generosity or tolerance: the man has died—long live man.

After Lubitsch’s funeral in 1947, his friends Billy Wilder and William Wyler were walking sadly to their car. Finally, to break the silence, Wilder said, “No more Lubitsch,” and Wyler answered, “Worse than that—no more Lubitsch films.” The following year, the French director-critic, Jean-Georges Auriol, wrote a loving tribute that made the same point; titled “Chez Ernst,” it can be found in Herman Weinberg’s affectionate collection, The Lubitsch Touch (Dutton). After comparing the director’s world to an especially fine restaurant where the food was perfect and the service meticulous, the piece ends this way: “How can a child who cries at the end of the summer holidays be comforted? He can be told that another summer will come, which will be equally wonderful. But he cries even more at this, not knowing how to explain that he won’t be the same child again. Certainly Lubitsch’s public is as sentimental as this child; and it knows quite well that ‘Ernst’s’ is closed on account of death. This particular restaurant will never be open again.”

Article reprinted with permission.

©1972 Esquire

Three charitable organizations in New York City will place you in homes and apartments to sit with and provide company and conversation to people, and to perform minor tasks. Not all of the people seeking aid from these organizations are financially vulnerable. Not all of them are bed-bound. Some of these people, or their children, seek human contact. One daughter said she wanted her mother “To have a regular appointment that isn’t medical.” (You can find opportunities to give or to receive aid from Hope for New York and New York Cares, and the Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side. Links are at the end of this post.)

Late last week I met another woman who is eighty-three and frail, but whose mind is sharp. She has been widowed since 2008. Her daughter, based in Chicago, calls her regularly, and is scheduled to be in New York City on a regular basis by late September. The daughter is 52, and, like me, recalls watching movies on television with her mother, an activity they later transferred to a long-distance version, making telephone calls during an airing of one of their favorite movies. I did this with my mother (who died four years ago), so I understand how much this means to her. “I just want my mother to have contact,” the daughter tells me.

Here are some notes from this woman, whom I will call Barbara. Barbara’s husband was a teacher of English, and they lived in various states, including Texas, where her daughter was born.

Tell me a year you recall fondly.

“1974. The year my daughter was born. I remember being so pregnant, so huge, and my husband and I decided to go to a drive-in. In the summer. It was so hot. We hadn’t seen American Graffiti, so we went to this drive-in. We thought we could start up the car and the ac when it got too hot, but it was always too hot. I remember the stand sold a good hamburger and a candy that made me sick. Chocolate Babies. Do they still make that? It wasn’t the candy that made me sick. I just got sick after eating it, so I can’t think of it at all. We kept turning on the ac and we kept sweating, and at some point in the movie it became obvious that the baby was ready to be born, so we got out of there fast. My daughter was born the next day. June 13th. I have still not seen all of American Graffiti. I don’t know how the last half hour or so goes. Why don’t we watch it?”

We stream American Graffiti. Chocolate babies have been discontinued but were once made by the Heide Company. It can only be purchased as a “vintage” edible, a thought that nauseated both of us. We enjoyed Junior Mints.

Spotify brings up the songs of that time for Barbara, as she was learning to be a mother.

“I played Joni Mitchell a lot. And Elton John. There was a song they played on the radio too much. I hated it, and I would change the channel. ‘The Night Chicago Died.’ I just had a visceral reaction to it. It’s like ‘It Was a Very Good Year,’ which is like a tranquilizer for me. It depresses me. But ‘The Night Chicago Died’ is like a drill to my teeth.”

We do not play Paper Lace’s “The Night Chicago Died,” but we do call up Joni Mitchell’s “Court and Spark.”

Thanks to Spotify and Amazon Prime and Tubi and MUBI and the Criterion Channel, I can sit with people and call up the happy moments in their lives. In my life.

Barbara and I both have a favorite moment in a movie: The moment in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, when Claude Rains sits by the bed of his sleeping mother, Leopoldine Konstantin, who awakes and is told by her sorrowful son that he has married a spy. Konstantin then very slowly reaches over for a cigarette, which she must light and smoke, before she can advise her gullible son.

We watch the movie again. We fall down a movie rabbit hole. I now can see that a movie rabbit hole, or a music rabbit hole, is superior to a political rabbit hole or the favorite of social media—the gossip and slander rabbit hole, from which everyone emerges dirty.

Barbara and I find this article from The New York Times in 1946:

As the evil German mother who is exuding villainy all over the screen of the Music Hall in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious,” Mme. Leopoldine Konstantin would seem to be born to the role. She is tall and regal- looking, her accent is Germanic, she conducts herself as domineeringly as a villainess should. But, she would have you know immediately “When I came here to see the première of this film,” she remarked the other day, “I almost frightened myself. Never before have I attempted such a role. I thought to myself, ‘My God, I’m a female Boris Karloff! What will my friends ever think of me?’ But” she added hastily, “if that amazing Mr. Hitchcock should call me again for such a part, of course, I would leap at it.”

Her old friends, undoubtedly, are a little surprised at the change. But probably not amazed. The surprise would be understandable, for in Mme. Konstantin’s lifetime, which goes somewhat farther back than she cares to reveal, she has played in practically nothing but light and fanciful drawing-room pieces. But the lack of amazement would be natural, because they would recall that she began her career in Germany under the fabulous Max Reinhardt. In other words, she would have learned to put across any sort of character.

When she was 17 she got her first lead, in a play based on “Parsifal.” She was established, then, and Reinhardt had no trepidations in bringing her to New York for an important lead in “Sumurun,” an Arabian Nights play in pantomime, without dialogue, in 1912. Despite the unusual theme, it was a great artistic success, and even a financial one. ” Fraulein Konstantin stood out as by far the most interesting, picturesque and fluent of all the performers,” The New York Times critic noted in his review the next morning. “And in her dark make- up, with her graceful figure revealed through scanty drapings, she was a vibrantly beautiful picture. She is wonderfully plastic, has tremendous fire and passion and the movements of her body and her facial play are fluidly expressive.”

After her taste of the theatrical world outside of Berlin (not to mention her New York monthly salary of $2,500), Mme. Konstantin decided her 100-marks-per month contract with Reinhardt was a little too oppressive. So in 1915 she bought out the contract and formed her own repertory company in Vienna. She toured Europe with the troupe until 1935, when she made her second trip to America—merely a social visit. In between, she performed in silent and talking pictures in Berlin and Vienna, and a number of German-language movies in Paris.

In 1937 she came here to stay. She lived in retirement in Hollywood without ever attempting American films. She lost complete interest in everything when her only son was killed in a London air raid early in the war. But early this year Mr. Hitchcock was looking for someone to play the villainous German mother in “Notorious.” He tested 150 actresses without success. Then, one day, he met Mme. Konstantin, remembered having seen her perform in Munich years ago. He persuaded her to give up retirement and try the role. She was an instant success, and RKO tried to sign her to a seven-year contract.

“But I turned it down,” she admitted. “I was afraid I would be forever typed as an evil character. I prefer to free-lance, if some really good parts come along. At the moment, however, I’m interested in returning to Broadway after thirty-four years. I have bought the stage script of ‘The Dangerous Age,’ made from a Danish novel. There is a perfect part in it for me—great comedy, and deep emotion, too. But,” she added ruefully, “I still haven’t found a producer for it. I will, though—it simply can’t miss.”

*****

Barbara and I were sad to learn that “The Dangerous Age” was never produced, but Konstantin did star in a revival of Somerset Maugham’s The Constant Wife that was performed in German. (The title was Finden Sie, dass Constance sich richtig verhaelt?, and it ran for eight performances.)

Barbara wondered if Claude Rains ever won an Academy Award. He did not, I told her, but one of his four nominations was for Notorious. Another nominee was Clifton Webb for The Razor’s Edge. Both men lost to Harold Russell for The Best Years of Our Lives. “Oh, that poor man,” Barbara said, “I can see how that happened.”

*****

Reach out today to someone. Pay them a visit. Talk about books and movies and memories of your life. The day appears longer and fuller and worth living. Tomorrow Barbara and I will be watching The Heiress, a film she remembers loving so much from a college viewing in 1962. “I had such a crush on Montgomery Clift,” she tells me. I tell her that I saw it on a twelve-inch black and white television in my bedroom in Baton Rouge in 1975.

“Let’s do Montgomery Clift,” she says.

It’s what we’re doing. With Beef Bourguignon from Zabar’s. And the rice pudding.

“It’s the best, isn’t it?” Barbara asks. Yes, it is. I used to ship it to my mother.

Have a great day. What is one of your favorite years?

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To write a book—a long profile, a memoir, a biography—is to discover discrepancy, falsehood, embellishment, revision. When I wrote Follies of God, I was completing an assignment I had been given by Tennessee Williams in 1982: I would be his witness, and I would present the stories as he told them to me. There are frequent acknowledgments of how Tennessee altered facts to suit him. Remember, he had shaved some years off his life because he felt the time he had spent working in a shoe factory did not and should not count. Elizabeth Taylor said that none of Tenn’s memories of their times together were false, but they were “bigger,” the “lines around the people were drawn more starkly.” Lois Smith doesn’t remember Tennessee being as present as he claimed during the production of Orpheus Descending but found nothing incorrect in his assessments.

Jose Quintero was hurt by how diminished he felt he was by Tennessee, even as he acknowledged that he loved the man, and believed that he was loved in return. I chose not to include Tennessee’s harsh statements about what he felt were Quintero’s deficiencies on The Seven Descents of Myrtle and Clothes for a Summer Hotel. I did not—and I do not—feel that the failure of those plays, in their original productions and those done subsequently—rest at the feet of Jose Quintero or any of its cast members. However, Tenn continued to believe in those plays, as he should, and we now read or produce them with the flattering filter of nostalgia, as well as because they are flawed but so much superior to most plays written today. Diminishing returns; belated praise.

In notes from a 1986 interview with Jose Quintero, he tells me the same story he told in his memoir If You Don’t Dance, They Beat You: Tennessee was not only absent from the rehearsals for the 1952 production of Summer and Smoke, but he was disdainful of the very idea of it. (This was confirmed by Ted Mann, when I met him in 1989.) Tennessee felt that a production of his play—which had failed in its original Broadway presentation—was being subjected to the “squalid environs” of a “tacky” theatre. This quote is from Quintero, and he is referring to the Circle in the Square on Bleecker Street. The term off-Broadway was not in regular use at that time: Tennessee just thought the real estate presenting his play was sub-par.

Then the reviews came in.

Summer and Smoke was not only a critical success, but it altered the perception of Tennessee’s play and his talents. This promptly led to Tennessee rushing to the theatre and embracing the talent involved. It also led to Tennessee claiming he had been present at the creation of this production. This was not true, but Quintero, also casting doubt on the dreamy scenario Tennessee painted of he and Carson McCullers writing plays at opposite ends of a dining-room table or an ornate desk or on a field at Yaddo (the stories varied) was “romantic chronology.” Quintero loved Tennessee and did not want his contribution to my writing to be a takedown of what Tennessee remembered, and he praised the acuity of what Tenn said of the play and of Geraldine Page. “That is what matters,” he said.

The writer of a biography or a scholarly treatise on Summer and Smoke would have peppered the manuscript with parenthetical statements and footnotes countering statements made. That was not my assignment, nor was it the desire of Jose Quintero or of Geraldine Page, who told me in April of 1987, after a performance of Blithe Spirit, which I attended with Marian Seldes, that I should steer away from disputing Tennessee and let him speak of what his play meant to him, and of how he was grateful, if late and without grace, for the success of his play in that “squalid” space.

By the time I met Tennessee in 1982, he bemoaned the fact that his plays, once on Broadway, were now being done in basements and churches and by people “largely unbathed and untalented,” but he would have loved to have found himself in that Bleecker Street Circle in the Square, circa 1952. I thought Tennessee’s feelings were wrong and ungracious: Many talented people with great respect for Tennessee’s work presented his plays, and he attended and he smiled and he cajoled. Tennessee would also turn to other people and complain about his state in the theatre. This was typical of Tennessee. It is a form of hypocrisy found in many people, in and out of the theatre. We want to revise our failures and wipe away our pain. I did not choose to print—in the book or on my blog—the negative statements Tenn made about these productions or the players.

If I am to be accused of being “hagiographic” with Tennessee, I’ll take that charge.

We like to blame social media for the “click” culture: Writing or stating the most outrageous or defamatory comment to get “likes” and reposts and reactions. There was always a desire to inflame, and a primary example would be Arthur Laurents, whose fawning, obsequious letters to Katharine Hepburn I had the opportunity to see. Laurents was “overwhelmed” by her talent and her commitment to his play Time of the Cuckoo, which became David Lean’s Summertime. Wiser readers were stunned to read Laurents’ memoir Original Story By and see his vivisection of Hepburn as person and actress. Where did that come from? Laurents is also tough on Jerome Robbins, a toughness he did not present in real time, in real life, with the real Jerome Robbins.

These things happen.

I believe that Laurents wanted both the attention his comments would produce, and he wanted to hurt. I only wanted to present Tennessee’s memories, and when I discovered that his memories of Summer and Smoke were simply not true, I took them to Jose Quintero, who, like Donald Windham, vacillated between “beloved friend” and “certified snake” in Tennessee’s memories. “Present the notes about the performance,” Quintero told me. I did.

The irony of this is that forthcoming books—also seeking clicks and attention and controversy—will get some facts wrong, some perspectives wonky. Two of my friends—Pulitzer Prize—winning authors—lament that new documents were found years after their books had been published. They were not derelict in their duty: They simply did not have access to those records. They have been criticized for “missing” the story. Someone got clicks off their backs. This shit happens.

Patricia Bosworth came to lament that her biography of Montgomery Clift was not as full as she would have preferred, but documents and information unavailable to her in the 1970s came forth and altered, as she put it, “everything.” I think Bosworth’s biography of Clift is still excellent and has merit, even if she admits that there were things that would have changed her perspective on the man. Nonetheless, every book that has since been written on Montgomery Clift (or Diane Arbus, for that matter), rests on the work Bosworth gave us.

There is a lot of drivel written about Tennessee Williams. Gore Vidal decimated the biographies of Dotson Rader and Donald Spoto, taking apart the inaccuracies that concerned him and events at which he was present. The books are specious at best, even as some hold them up as canonical. Did I want to tackle that in my book? No. I didn’t want pissing inside or outside of the tent.

You all have a safe summer and read with caution. A wave of shit approaches.

Editor’s Note: This piece appeared in the June 11, 2026 issue of The New York Review of Books. It was adapted from a speech given by Zadie Smith to the American Academy of Arts and Letters the previous month. Many have posted links to the piece, and many have expressed to read it. I have received permission to reprint this from both the NYRB and the American Academy.

I wasn’t going to come today. Partly because the act of coming here—to America, as a non-American—is now a fraught, stressful, and even dangerous proposition for millions. Also: What’s the point? That’s what an old friend, another writer, asked me. By this he meant: Why talk about arts and letters when people are being gunned down in the streets? I’m going to answer the question as best I can, but I’ll say first that when I looked at the list of previous speakers and spotted the name E.M. Forster—and the year 1949—I was curious. I wondered what he could possibly have had to say to a room full of artists in the wreckage of World War II.

So I dug up Forster’s remarks. But it turned out I’d already read them—and dismissed them—years ago, when I found them in his collection Two Cheers for Democracy. The essay is called “Art for Art’s Sake.” I prepared to reread it, not expecting much. “Art for Art’s Sake.” Really? Nothing could be less fashionable. It wasn’t fashionable in 1949. It’s never been fashionable, actually. As an idea, it is always under attack. By fascists, yes, but also by all kinds of well-meaning literary utilitarians. Whenever things get bad—and things are always getting bad—any fool who raises the cry “Art for art’s sake!” only makes themselves ridiculous. They’re lucky, in fact, if they get the whole sentence out before being trampled underfoot by a stampede of their fellow artists, all keen to demonstrate that they believe no such thing. Who feel the best a novel can do, and all it should attempt—“in the current climate”—is the articulation of an argument or ideology or else the provision of an alibi. One of America’s most influential and beloved writers, Ayn Rand, achieved all three with The Fountainhead, written in the middle of a war.

Yet “art for art’s sake” is also, as Forster maintains, an idea “much misused and much abused.” He wants to dismiss, as he puts it, “a more dangerous heresy, namely the silly idea that only art matters…. Many things, besides art, matter.” This much established, he goes on to offer a concrete example of an artwork that matters: Macbeth. He notes its value as a source of Scottish history, as a study of power, and so on, although beyond the human and historical interest, he wants to defend “Macbeth for Macbeth’s sake…[as] a self-contained entity, with a life of its own imposed on it by its creator. It has internal order.” He contrasts this artistic order with our social and political lives, which represent, instead, “a series of disorders.” Ancient Athens, he thinks, “made a mess—but the Antigone stands up. Renaissance Rome made a mess—but the ceiling of the Sistine got painted. James I made a mess—but there was Macbeth.” The disorder and mess Forster blames on science. “We cannot reach social and political stability,” he writes,

for the reason that we continue to make scientific discoveries and to apply them…. If Science would discover rather than apply—if, in other words, men were more interested in knowledge than in power—mankind would be in a far safer position.

This is hard for us to compute, given what a religion we ourselves make of scientific progress. Not to mention that nowadays we are as likely to blame the artwork itself as the era from which it came. We feel that art does much to set the tone and create the mindset from which an era evolves. To really understand Forster, I think, you have to cast your mind back to 1949. Only four years earlier America had used an applied science to commit one of the greatest crimes in human history, in Japan. And when Forster goes on to suggest that our best chance of survival as a race might be via “inertia…[a] universal exhaustion”—well, that actually sounds familiar. How many of us today would prefer inertia to the planet-destroying fantasy of endless growth?

So much for my old friend Forster. There is, though, one part of his argument that I’d like to rescue from the twentieth century: the survival of the individual artwork. But instead of Macbeth I choose The Known World by the great African American author Edward P. Jones. The Known World is set in Manchester County, Virginia, around 1850. Within its pages we will find many plantations run by white people, as we’d expect, but also a few run by black people, which comes as a shock. The county is a creation—and all the characters are fictional—but the structural facts are sadly to be found in recorded history. It was published just as George W. Bush was making what Forster might call a mess and what I would call a disaster: the invasion of Iraq. It is a beautiful, disquieting, tragic novel. Like all novels, it is the product of a particular person, but because it is so affecting, it also has the force to change a person in particular ways. In my case, it forced me, as a young person, to recognize the world as a place of confounding moral complexity. I don’t know if Jones meant for that to happen, but it did.

Great art has a long tail, mostly invisible to its creators. I know I wouldn’t feel so fondly toward humans, for example, if I hadn’t read Forster at an impressionable age. Of course, many other things could have created this affection. Art is in no sense the only way. But it is a way. When I finish The Known World—and return to the real world—it is with a refreshed attention to the notion of human value. And if we can extend our concern to the afflicted characters in a novel, how much more of our concern is due to those real people murdered in Palestine, in Sudan, in Ukraine, in Iran, and—as I write this—on the streets of Minneapolis?

Of course, we know there’s no guarantee that such art-induced fellow feeling will show up in our social and political lives. We know empathy to be a fallible, changeable quality. But it is also the case that in empathy’s complete absence fresh hells are born. It’s worth noting, I think, that the strain of literary thought that has in recent years flirted with a heavy disdain—even a florid contempt—for the concept of empathy happens to share that contempt with the late Charlie Kirk, who said of the concept, “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new-age term that…does a lot of damage.”

This is to be expected. The right has long argued that fellow feeling should be severely limited, nationally or genetically. The leftist objection initially appears more surprising—until you remember the context. The right naturally wishes to defend itself against the claims of other people, for that very recognition is the first step toward justice for all. The left, meanwhile, is substantially made up precisely of the “other people” making claims—and watching our claims fail, being serially disappointed, getting angry. Anger and disappointment are potentially useful emotions. Contempt is something else. You can drift so far into contempt that you find yourself echoing the sentiments of your ideological opposites. At that point it might be worth slowing down, thinking again.

We can agree that empathy’s no magical cure-all, least of all the literary kind, and that it won’t, by itself, change laws or bestow rights on anybody. When it came to ending slavery, for example, revolts and direct political action were the essential components. But Uncle Tom’s Cabin served its purpose. It’s not a great book, or even a good book. It still changed the mental climate. But I think I’ll stop there, at two cheers. These well-worn arguments about art and empathy bore me. I want to talk instead of another aspect of art that truly interests me: autonomy.

What kind of autonomy does art have? Ridiculous to imagine art as a separate world, divorced from culture, from politics, from its historical era. But two central ideas shape every era, and I believe art is significantly separate from both. The two ideas are: power and progress. That’s what I actually wanted to say to you today: art is not powerful, and it does not progress.

The first idea is familiar, I’m sure. The relative impotence of art is one of the few things everybody can agree on just now. It’s what my writer friend was getting at: What’s the point? In a world of sheer power, where might is right, art is obviously toothless. The artist has no weapons, makes no laws, imprisons nobody, wages war nowhere. Neither Shakespeare nor Edward P. Jones could order executions at home or abroad—that was the brutal prerogative of James I and George W. Bush. Meanwhile, both artists spent their time doing what? Playing make-believe. Was their art influential? Sure. Did it create empathy? Sometimes. But powerful? No. Not in the way that states and kings and presidents conceive of power.

And what of progress? Well, I put it to you that The Known World is neither a progression nor a devolution from Macbeth, no more than the music of Stevie Wonder is a devolution from or an advance upon, say, the work of Beethoven. Unlike science and technology, art is not subject to the logic of growth or Moore’s law. It won’t definitely get smaller or faster or bigger and more lethal. It is produced in strong and weak economies alike, during war and peace. When it is good, as Forster notes, it will tend to outlast the human disorders that surround it, but it doesn’t get any better or worse at doing that. The odds of making a piece of art that truly matters never really improve. And while we can certainly interpret Jones’s portrait of black people as a progressive leap forward from Shakespeare’s portrait of Othello, the gap between Macbeth and The Known World is still quite unlike the one between washing your clothes by hand in a stream and using a washing machine. The process of reading them both will require, from you, much the same human faculties. You’ll have to imagine, think, and engage with a make-believe world, created by a stranger. An analogy for this is love. Is the love I feel for my children an advance upon or a devolution from the love a fourteenth-century woman felt for hers? Not all human experiences are subject to progress.

One of the cornerstones of the American concept of progress is “convenience.” Things have progressed when they are faster, easier, frictionless, invisible. By this logic, it is progress to have your dinner delivered to your door by an underpaid and nonunionized stranger, rather than having it made by a human being whom you know and love and who then sits down to share that meal with you. Progress to have a machine write an essay, rather than undergoing whatever time-consuming strains, joys, and miseries writing that essay yourself would involve. It’s definitely the case that a machine might easily take a bushel of novels concerning slavery—take The Known World and Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Alex Wheatle’s Cane Warriors and even my own The Fraud—and use those data points to write a comprehensive, informative, and perhaps even aesthetically pleasing novel about the “peculiar institution,” and all in a matter of moments. It might even convince most people that the book was written by a human being. But the thing is: it wasn’t. And when I read, I want to be in relation with a human being. That’s why I read. Likewise, a machine instructed to make love to me might technically be excellent at making love to me, but that won’t do, either. I want to be wanted by a human. I want to be in relation with other humans. That’s what I believe I am on this earth to experience. I think we all feel that way in the end, even if it takes us our whole lives to realize it.

That convenience should be the highest aspiration of human existence happens to be one of the many uninterrogated assumptions of capitalist ideology. When we convince ourselves that art, too, must take the shortest route to its effects, then we’ve submitted to that ideology. Yet art can be enormously inconvenient! Art can luxuriate. Wander. It may embellish and decorate, or refuse to be convenient, dogmatic, obliging. Its distance from the prerogatives of the powerful is precisely where its force of resistance lies. And if Forster could insist on something like this vision of art in the wreckage of World War II, then that is the very least I can do now. I can say, without shame, that while Americans were being murdered in the street, I was writing not only this speech but also a novel. A novel that in no way deals directly with the hellscape in which we are living. In that sense, I am on the wrong side of history and always will be, along with any artist who reserves the right to make art for her own sake, for the sake of art itself, and for the sake of her fellow humans.

Edward P. Jones was likewise on the wrong side of history if art is to be judged solely by how urgently it responds to the present disorder. The Known World is not a novel about the invasion of Iraq. It’s a masterpiece about a corrupt system’s corrupting influence on everybody, including its primary victims. It has internal order. It’s beautiful and tragic. It is human, above all. Reading it reminded me what humans are, what they are capable of, why they do the things they do, and why it is they leave so many things undone. It encouraged me to come here today and speak as I have. Such art is made by us and for us. It is for our sakes. Its power is not of the kind this president recognizes, but it has its own kind of force. It will outlast both him and his regime. It will outlast us all.

This article appeared in The Nation, March 23, 2015. (Reprinted with permission)

Christmas, the day after, in 2004, following the presidential re-election of George W. Bush.

I am staring out of the window in an extremely dark mood, feeling helpless. Then a friend, a fellow artist, calls to wish me happy holidays. He asks, “How are you?” And instead of “Oh, fine—and you?” I blurt out the truth: “Not well. Not only am I depressed, I can’t seem to work, to write; it’s as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything more in the novel I’ve begun. I’ve never felt this way before, but the election….” I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting: “No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!”

I felt foolish the rest of the morning, especially when I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed.

The list—which covers centuries, not just the last one—is long. A short sample will include Paul Robeson, Primo Levi, Ai Weiwei, Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, Dashiell Hammett, Wole Soyinka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lillian Hellman, Salman Rushdie, Herta Müller, Walter Benjamin. An exhaustive list would run into the hundreds.

Dictators and tyrants routinely begin their reigns and sustain their power with the deliberate and calculated destruction of art: the censorship and book-burning of unpoliced prose, the harassment and detention of painters, journalists, poets, playwrights, novelists, essayists. This is the first step of a despot whose instinctive acts of malevolence are not simply mindless or evil; they are also perceptive. Such despots know very well that their strategy of repression will allow the real tools of oppressive power to flourish. Their plan is simple:

1. Select a useful enemy—an “Other”—to convert rage into conflict, even war.

2. Limit or erase the imagination that art provides, as well as the critical thinking of scholars and journalists.

3. Distract with toys, dreams of loot, and themes of superior religion or defiant national pride that enshrine past hurts and humiliations.

The Nation could never have existed or flourished in 1940s Spain, or 2014 Syria, or apartheid South Africa, or 1930s Germany. And the reason is clear. It was born in the United States in 1865, the year of Lincoln’s assassination, when political division was stark and lethal—during, as my friend said, times of dread. But no prince or king or dictator could interfere successfully or forever in a country that seriously prized freedom of the press. This is not to say there weren’t elements that tried censure, but they could not, over the long haul, win. The Nation, with its history of disruptive, probing, intelligent essays sharing wide space equally with art criticism, reviews, poetry and drama, is as crucial now as it has been for 150 years.

In this contemporary world of violent protests, internecine war, cries for food and peace, in which whole desert cities are thrown up to shelter the dispossessed, abandoned, terrified populations running for their lives and the breath of their children, what are we (the so-called civilized) to do?

The solutions gravitate toward military intervention and/or internment—killing or jailing. Any gesture other than those two in this debased political climate is understood to be a sign of weakness. One wonders why the label “weak” has become the ultimate and unforgivable sin. Is it because we have become a nation so frightened of others, itself and its citizens that it does not recognize true weakness: the cowardice in the insistence on guns everywhere, war anywhere? How adult, how manly is it to shoot abortion doctors, schoolchildren, pedestrians, fleeing black teenagers? How strong, how powerful is the feeling of having a murderous weapon in the pocket, on the hip, in the glove compartment of your car? How leaderly is it to threaten war in foreign affairs simply out of habit, manufactured fear or national ego? And how pitiful? Pitiful because we must know, at some level of consciousness, that the source of and reason for our instilled aggression is not only fear. It is also money: the profit motive of the weapons industry, the financial support of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about.

Forcing a nation to use force is easy when the citizenry is rife with discontent, experiencing feelings of a powerlessness that can be easily soothed by violence. And when the political discourse is shredded by an unreason and hatred so deep that vulgar abuse seems normal, disaffection rules. Our debates, for the most part, are examples unworthy of a playground: name-calling, verbal slaps, gossip, giggles, all while the swings and slides of governance remain empty.

For most of the last five centuries, Africa has been understood to be poor, desperately poor, in spite of the fact that it is outrageously rich in oil, gold, diamonds, precious metals, etc. But since those riches do not, in large part, belong to the people who have lived there all their lives, it has remained in the mind of the West worthy of disdain, sorrow and, of course, pillage. We sometimes forget that colonialism was and is war, a war to control and own another country’s resources—meaning money. We may also delude ourselves into thinking that our efforts to “civilize” or “pacify” other countries are not about money. Slavery was always about money: free labor producing money for owners and industries. The contemporary “working poor” and “jobless poor” are like the dormant riches of “darkest colonial Africa”—available for wage theft and property theft and owned by metastasizing corporations stifling dissident voices.

None of this bodes well for the future. Still, I remember the shout of my friend that day after Christmas: No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.

By Peter Bogdanovich for The New York Times, April 11, 1999

KNOWING that Alfred Hitchcock never previewed his movies, nor even saw them with audiences after they were released, I asked him in 1963 (when he was 64), if he didn’t ever miss hearing them scream.

‘’No,’‘ he told me with a tiny smile, ‘’I can hear them when I’m making the picture.’‘

The question was posed while I was preparing for the Museum of Modern Art’s first retrospective of Hitchcock’s films in the United States, and his answer seems all the more revealing and relevant today, nearly two decades after his death, as the museum begins, on Friday, its second, and more comprehensive, retrospective. This four-month commemoration of Hitchcock’s centennial will present more than 50 feature films, several shorts, documentaries, a gallery exhibition and even a Web site. Probably the most famous director in movie history, Hitchcock had a name that remains a synonym not only for suspense but for an entire film genre.

His response to me hints as well of his reticence and fear of any sort of confrontation; after all, what if they didn’t scream? But it also puts into a nutshell his essential method: He made his pictures first entirely in his head, then put them (with numerous writers) on paper, then shot them. He used to say he entered ‘’the area of compromise’‘ only when he entered the soundstage, so naturally that means the movies he made in his head were far more satisfying to him than the ones he actually had to complete with all those intangibles, like actors. Another time I asked if it was true that he’d once said, ‘’Actors are cattle,’‘ and he replied, ‘’No, I said they should be treated like cattle.’‘ Later, he amended himself further, saying that many ‘’actors are children, and they’re temperamental, and they need to be handled gently and sometimes’‘ -- a pause for emphasis -- ‘’slapped!’‘ But one way or another, he really didn’t particularly enjoy the working process, didn’t like the power actors automatically had and was often disappointed in a picture’s result, feeling that it had been miscast because of either producer or studio interference. He once told me that Walt Disney, as a cartoon maker, had ‘’the best casting: if he doesn’t like an actor he just tears him up!’‘

Certainly that’s what ‘’the master of suspense’‘ would have done to Paul Newman on ‘’Torn Curtain’‘ (1966). Coming to visit during shooting, I found Hitch sitting in his tall director’s chair in a mood of quiet outrage. What was the matter? I asked. ‘’Paul Newman sent me a memo,’‘ he said acidly, as if it might as well have been a letter bomb. A memo about what? ‘’The script!’‘ He was indignant. The four-page missive had evidently dealt with all the actor’s questions or misgivings, complaining about numerous things in the screenplay and how these would affect his character. ‘’His character!’‘ Hitch muttered under his breath. ‘’I thought to myself: ‘What does it matter about your character? It’s just going to be Paul Newman anyway.’ ‘’ The fact that Mr. Newman was known to write memos -- I recalled Otto Preminger telling me of the Newman memo he got on ‘’Exodus’‘ -- did nothing to placate Hitchcock. His was not, after all, any picture. More than whatever insult or irritation the actor’s notes gave, it was Hitchcock’s having to respond in some way that galled and even, I think, frightened him.

But he had a positive detestation of any sort of authority, perhaps dating back to that terrible moment when he was 5 years old and his father -- to punish the boy for some infraction -- sent young Alfred down to the father’s friend, the chief of police, with a note asking that the boy be put in a jail cell for five minutes to teach him a lesson. Five minutes can be an eternity. This was long before the days of identified child abuse, and Hitch himself told the story only to explain his lifelong fear of the police. Certainly that trauma would have been more far-reaching. Though he eventually endured the strictest education -- from Jesuit teachers -- and though he said this helped him to be extremely orderly and organized in his thinking, there was nevertheless the other, wild, side of the man, the one that drove him to make audiences suffer in suspense, that made him irritable and contemptuous of any power over him. His longstanding friendship, and immensely profitable business relationship, with the super-agent and Universal studio mogul Lew Wasserman never stopped him from making snide or sarcastic comments to me about ‘’the front office,’‘ even when that office was clearly Wasserman’s.

Naturally, there were many co-workers he admired, even a number of actors he cared for and enjoyed. Cary Grant, James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Anthony Perkins, Roscoe Lee Browne were some he spoke of with special fondness. Back in the 60’s, Grant had told me that Hitchcock was ‘’very patient,’‘ and illustrated this with an anecdote about making ‘’Notorious’‘ in 1946. Evidently, Ingrid Bergman had come on the set one morning and was simply out of it. ‘’We went over and over the scene,’‘ Grant said, ‘’and she was in some sort of haze. You know, she just wasn’t there. But Hitch, he didn’t say anything. He just sat there next to the camera, pulling on his cigar. Finally, around 11 A.M., I began to see in Ingrid’s eyes that she was starting to come around. And for the first time all morning, the lines were coming out right. And just then Hitchcock said, ‘Cut.’ And I thought, What on earth is he stopping for now? Hitch just sat and looked up at Ingrid and said, quietly, ‘Good morning, Ingrid.’ ‘’

Though certainly he was enormously successful -- his name a household word in England in the 30’s, in America from the mid-40’s, and an instantly recognizable personage from the mid-50’s when his popular television series began its 11-year run -- Hitchcock often recalled the sting of certain critical remarks. And he never concealed his resentment for being continually overlooked by the Oscars. When he was finally given a conciliatory Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for his body of work by the academy, he quite pointedly (and amusingly) made -- after a standing ovation -- the shortest speech in academy history: ‘’Thank you,’‘ he said and walked right off. When, several years after its release, I mentioned how delightfully satiric I felt ‘’North by Northwest’‘ was, he recalled with an annoyed incredulity that the critic for The New Yorker had referred to the movie as ‘’unconsciously funny.’‘ In fact, Hitch was always extremely sensitive to any kind of criticism -- another form of confrontation.

It’s worth recalling, in this regard, that perhaps no other major film director had so often been written off by critics, and generally taken so lightly and so much for granted through most of his career. After his third English feature, ‘’The Lodger’‘ (1926), established him as a talent to be reckoned with -- he liked to quote the headline that appeared over one review: ‘’Young Man With Master Mind’‘ -- his next six pictures were dismissed out of hand. After ‘’Blackmail’‘ (1929) became his and England’s first talkie and a big success, again his next six were used as examples of his deterioration. A return to form with the original ‘’The Man Who Knew Too Much’‘ (1934) followed by probably his best British film, ‘’The 39 Steps’‘ (1935), still did not stop critics from counting him out for his next three; or, after his extremely popular film ‘’The Lady Vanishes’‘ (1938), from saying he had sold out by going to Hollywood (in 1939), or subsequently from comparing unfavorably all his American work to the British beginnings.

In the early 50’s, when the French New Wave enthroned him in their pantheon, and later, when English-language critics like Andrew Sarris here or Robin Wood in London or in the Modern’s monograph I prepared said that Hitchcock’s American work was more mature, complex, challenging and far superior to the British, this was anything but common wisdom. Indeed, the opinion was considered highly unorthodox. What! Commercial Hollywood product like ‘’Foreign Correspondent’‘ (1940), ‘’Shadow of a Doubt’‘ (1943), ‘’Notorious’‘ (1946), ‘’Strangers on a Train’‘ (1951), ‘’Rear Window’‘ (1954), ‘’To Catch a Thief’‘ (1955), the remake of ‘’The Man Who Knew Too Much’‘ (1956), ‘’North by Northwest’‘ (1959), ‘’Psycho’‘ (1960) better than the precious, artistic British films? Impossible: the American Hitchcock was just a clever entertainer, not to be taken seriously. Actually, it wasn’t until Francois Truffaut’s marathon interview book, ‘’Hitchcock,’‘ published in the United States in 1967, that the establishment view began to shift, and the deeper, more ambiguous and troubling resonance of his work began to be understood. It was, however, almost the end of his career; he made only three more films.

Truffaut’s book had a much better title in France, the literal translation being ‘’The Cinema According to Hitchcock’‘ (as in ‘’The Gospel According to . . . ‘’) and, in fact, Hitch could have been an extraordinarily brilliant professor, which is the attitude he adopted with disciples like Truffaut and me: he seemed to derive pleasure laying down his view of the way movies should be made, what was good cinema and what wasn’t. And his advice, his perceptions, his basic rules all made an enormous impact on Truffaut as they did on me and many others. Would that more filmmakers today had his passion for precision and paid attention to what Hitchcock put forth so clearly about the craft of this art.

HIS famous maxim, for example, about the superiority of suspense over shock reverberates into every aspect of picture-making and is today the single least heeded and most needed. As he once explained it to me: ‘’We come to our old analogy of the bomb. You and I sit here talking. We’re having a very innocuous conversation about nothing. Boring. Doesn’t mean a thing. Suddenly, boom! A bomb goes off and the audience is shocked -- for 15 seconds. Now you change it. Play the same scene, show that a bomb has been placed there, establish that it’s going to go off at 1 P.M. -- it’s now a quarter of one, ten of one -- show a clock on the wall, back to the same scene. Now our conversation becomes very vital, by its sheer nonsense. Look under the table! You fool! Now the audience is working for 10 minutes, instead of being surprised for 15 seconds.’‘

Another well-known, yet generally misunderstood, rule of Hitchcock’s has nevertheless become fairly proverbial in the picture business -- the MacGuffin (which got its name from an old English shaggy-dog joke). ‘’A MacGuffin is something that the characters worry about but that the audience does not. You’ve got to have it in a spy story, but it really doesn’t matter. In ‘North by Northwest,’ I sort of bleached it out to its minimum. Cary Grant says, ‘What’s this man up to?’ And Leo G. Carroll answers, ‘Well, let’s say he’s an importer and exporter. What of? Government secrets.’ That was enough. But a lot of people think the MacGuffin is the most vital thing in a picture -- and it’s the least important.’‘

He was at his most exciting, most riveting, describing sequences he planned to shoot -- so vividly that you could see the scenes, shot for shot, as he took you through them. Even if he’d already made the film years before, his unbridled enthusiasm for the visual, as he spoke of its how and why, was contagious. His eyes would sparkle, his large hands molding the shape of each frame, his intonation sharp and evocative. You couldn’t help being swept along by the palpable joy of his telling. He would become a wonderfully mischievous boy at those times, the years slipping away to reveal a true child of the movies, born to be a crucial part of this amazing new medium that was almost exactly as old as he was.

My own favorite memory of Hitchcock comes from an incident at the St. Regis Hotel in New York in 1964. After some frozen daiquiris had left me a bit tipsy and Hitch quite red-faced and cheerful, we got on the elevator at the 25th floor and rode in silence to the 19th, where, when three people dressed for the evening entered, he suddenly turned to me and said, ‘’Well, it was quite shocking, I must say there was blood everywhere!’‘ I was confused, thinking that because of the daiquiris I’d missed something, but he just went right on: ‘’There was a stream of blood coming from his ear and another from his mouth.’‘ Of course, everyone in the elevator had recognized him but no one looked over. Two more people from the 19th floor entered as he continued: ‘’Of course, there was a huge pool of blood on the floor and his clothes were splattered with it. Oh! It was a horrible mess. Well, you can imagine . . . ‘’ It felt as if no one in the elevator, including me, was breathing. He now glanced at me, I nodded dumbly, and he resumed: ‘’Blood all around! Well, I looked at the poor fellow and I said, ‘Good God, man, what’s happened to you?’‘ And then, just as the elevator doors opened onto the lobby, Hitchcock said, ‘’And do you know what he told me?’‘ and paused. With reluctance, the passengers now all moved out of the elevator and looked anxiously at the director as we passed them in silence. After a few foggy moments, I asked, ‘’So what did he say?’‘ And Hitch smiled beatifically and answered, ‘’Oh, nothing -- that’s just my elevator story.’‘

(Reprinted with permission)

Brian Vincent’s Make Me Famous gives the viewer a contact high, and not just because so many of its scenes are in rooms or galleries or apartments where the smoke and the fumes and the detritus of various herbs and chemicals are in the air. Make Me Famous provides a careful and curated tour through the art scene of New York City in the early 1980s, and the care and control in the making of this film allows it to be as frenetic as the time and the people portrayed.

I was late to the particular cult of this film: Make Me Famous has been drawing large and devoted crowds at New Plaza Cinema for years. Friends of mine had seen it, but my first viewing was only a few weeks ago. I was alive during the time of the film, and I remember the impromptu galleries, the fervent drive for money and recognition and sex, and then the inexplicable stardom that attached to artists and their benefactors, but viewers much younger than I are also loving the film, its “vibe,” and its sweet memories of a time when New York City welcomed poor strivers and hustlers, and when it was easier to craft a new identity, a new goal. As one subject in the film tells us, he pretends to be a member of the gentry, and to maintain this illusion, he left NYC, left America, and now lives in grandeur in his castle. Reality cannot reach him, or he keeps it at arm’s length (unless there is a camera crew nearby to hear his tale). Make Me Famous is ironic, exuberant, and addictive. Its final summer screening at New Plaza Cinema will be Saturday, August 15^th at 1:45 p.m. in its current home at the Museum of Arts and Design (2 Columbus Circle). I urge you to experience this film in person, as it operates as a sort of aesthetic Stations of the Cross.

The fascination of Make Me Famous is its central character, Ed Brezinski, a footnote to the arts scene who was in the rooms with the breakout artists of the time (Haring, Basquiat, Scharf), but whose gift for self-sabotage, along with his aggressive self-promotion, kept him forever out of the hot center of the attention he craved. While some of the subjects in the film admit that there was a scabrous hucksterism in the water supply in that time, Brezinski managed to take it to an offensive level. There was no grudge too small for him to carry, and he felt slighted once and threw a glass of red wine on the white outfit of a prominent gallerist who had shown some initial interest in him. (The gallerist is Annina Nosei, and she will be part of a talkback session after the August 15^th screening. Her grudges have appeared to have faded, but not her memories.)

Brezinski was charismatic and sexy, not terribly handsome, but as one friend relates, he had “it.” Operating a gallery out of his crumbling apartment on East 3^rd Street (a place across from a men’s shelter that always smelled of piss and body odor), he welcomed anyone and everyone, and it soon became a salon, and I was stunned to learn from Make Me Famous that Miguel Piñero, the acclaimed playwright, had recited in this fetid space.

Brian Vincent came to my attention by way of his manager, David Williams, who also managed my close friend Marian Seldes. Vincent studied with Seldes at Juilliard, and we both love and emulate her, so in the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that I went in prepared to love this film.

Vincent is still an actor (he performed earlier this year), and he is married to Heather Spore, also an actress, and his tireless co-producer. I asked Vincent how he came to know about Ed Brezinski and his world, and he told me that he was between jobs, working as a caterer, and a fellow waiter (Lenny Kisko) told him about the artist. “Lenny said he collected one artist in the ‘80s,” Vincent told me, “and I should come check out the work. He lives in a railroad apartment with Brezinski paintings on every surface. I loved the art and Lenny’s devotion to his memory. I wondered why Brezinski didn’t get famous, and I thought it would be an interesting angle to investigate. Did he leave an impact even though he didn’t ‘make it’? Honestly, I could relate, so I began to study him.

“Brezinski proved to be an artist worth investigating,” Vincent continues. “First, there was the donut, an artwork by Robert Gober that Edward had gobbled up at Paula Cooper’s Gallery in 1989, a scandal that was written up on Page Six of the New York Post. (The bag of donuts sat there, waiting to be eaten, per Brezinski, but they were coated with a toxic resin. Brezinski was rushed to the hospital. Everything is copy.) Then, there was the discovery of mountains of videotapes filmed in Brezinski’s apartment by archival videographer, JimC. Together, these men ran ‘The Magic Gallery,’ a punk Sunday Salon. Among the video treasures is Miquel Pinero performing his famous “A Lower Eastside Poem,” and Gary Indiana breaking down over his obsession, David Wojnarowicz.”

A Pandora’s box of riches kept opening for Vincent. “There was photographer Kathy Dumas’ suitcase that artist Frank Holliday still had because she was killed in an accident in Rome,” Vincent says. “When Frank opened it, out came photos of Edward Brezinski. Then, photographer Marcus Leatherdale, living in India at the time, found multiple photo sessions with Edward. Then, photographer Allen Frame found a dozen pictures he took of Edward. And so it went, year after year, gathering stories from the art community, like from artist Peter McGough, who ‘knew Edward for sooooo long,’ And to Ireland to interview artist David McDermott [McGough’s former partner in art and life], who ‘needed to talk about Edward.’ And looming over it all was the grand mystery: Is Edward dead? Edward had an obituary in ArtNet but the US Government considered him a living person. All of these things attracted me.”

Vincent became aware of the NYC arts scene when he read Keith Haring’s diary in the 1990s. The art scene then was small and sexy and communal. You could see Haring on the streets of the city engaging kids and adults in his artworks. He was a jolly leader, and everyone was welcome. Vincent had been bitten as he lived among Haring’s words, but he concedes that he fully fell for that era reading Cynthia Carr’s exemplary “Fire in the Belly” about David Wojnarowicz. (I cannot recommend Carr’s book enough.) “I read Steven Hager’s “Art After Midnight,” Vincent recalls, “which mentions Brezinski several times. These books were a colorful introduction to the era. The art scene reminds me of being a Juilliard student in the 90s, putting on shows with musicians, actors and dancers. In the ‘80s, performers like Ann Magnuson and John Sex would combine shows from every art form; painters, photographers, poets, everyone, all together. Eric Bogosian said ‘The premium was on who could do the most creative things,’ and artist Richard Hambleton recalled that ‘There was an opening every night. Sometimes four or five.” It was a heady time, enviable, and Vincent loves the energy that throbs in the theatre after each screening. “It’s impossible not to be nostalgic for such a culturally rich, creative and affordable NYC,” he says. “That’s why I think Make Me Famous continues to draw crowds—people are savoring the nostalgia. I think there is also the question, If there’s another scene someday, how should it be, could it be different? Take out the heroin, AIDS, and the danger on the streets, obviously. It wasn’t perfect, but the testimony of the people in this film—and Ed’s life—prove that artists make the culture they need to survive in the city. NYC is a very special plot of land. Magic happens here that changes the world.”

Vincent learned to make films on the job: He is self-taught, driven, but he retains the sunny disposition of a well-raised Midwestern boy. His partner is his wife, Heather Spore, who was appearing in Wicked on Broadway and doing the homework to get the film together, making calls, booking subjects for interviews. Vincent was able to devise the form of Make Me Famous through what he’d learned of script study and structure at Juilliard. “Sometimes it’s easy to think that if you are a performer, your skills might not translate in other areas, but they do,” Vincent tells me. “This project required a boots-on- the- ground investigation. I’d never done this before, but as an actor I have made literary investigations of characters I’ve played. Edward Brezinski’s story wasn’t on the internet; he was in memories, suitcases, and closets. It meant reading art history and supporting artists that knew him well, like Marguerite Van Cook and James Romberger. I went to their shows and got to know them personally. The joy of a documentary is that you can go slow; you can be deliberate. Passion is a great fuel for staying motivated, but it wasn’t hard to remain passionate, because the artists were mesmerizing. People liked that I wasn’t asking them about Keith Haring or Basquiat for the thousandth time. Everything solidified when we discovered the archival video; and that’s when we knew we had a movie.”

Perhaps the secret to the sexy, funky energy of Make Me Famous has to do with Vincent’s admission that “I used Edward’s manic career as a way of showing the mania of the era.” That propulsive energy wafts over the film’s audience, and people around me had the feeling of wanting to get together and put on a show, any show. But where can we find a barn in an affordable neighborhood that would welcome such free and fluid people? Well, that’s another movie.

Make Me Famous failed to find a distributor, which devastated Vincent and Spore, but they now consider it a lucky break: The pair did their own distribution, and their film has only been screened in cinemas in which they have been part of the programming. After three years in over sixty cities, Make Me Famous has its fervent audiences and a Certified Fresh rating of 100 % on Rotten Tomatoes. I suggest inhaling at the screening on the 15^th.

Vincent and Spore are now at work on their next project—James Dean as New Yorker, a study of the young actor in the years of Upper West Side living, studying as an actor, and working on television and the stage. Vincent is working with Dean biographer Val Holley and film historian and writer Foster Hirsch. (Full disclosure: Hirsch has been an invaluable friend to me. Vincent moves in good circles.)

The James Dean documentary is not expected to be completed and shown until at least 2030, the 75^th anniversary of the actor’s death, but given what I’ve seen of Vincent’s study, I cannot wait. I expect more addicted and surprised crowds. It is so rare to see so many people jacked up and exhilarated by life and film and the arts.

The screening of MAKE ME FAMOUS on Aug 15th at 1:45 pm will be followed by a Q&A with Annina Nosei, Basquiat’s first Gallerist (and Brezinski’s wine target) and Claudia Summers, 80’s Punk “It” girl and widow of filmmaker Amos Poe, about whom a new documentary is required, I think.

For tickets and full film information, visit the website for MAKE ME FAMOUS at www.makemefamousmovie.com

From The New York Times, March 13, 1966

Every year they float into town from the Louisiana bayous or the Nebraska grain belt— the Elizabeth Ashleys and Sandy Dennises— descending on New York like fluffy, exuberant pussycats, knowing nothing about contract negotiations or pay scales or Actors Equity, but ready to lap up the glories of Broadway like so many saucers of milk. The ones who stick it out long enough to see their names in lights often have one thing in common: they become tough as shoe leather in the process.

Brenda Vaccaro, the 26- year-old sexy second banana to Lauren Bacall in “Cactus Flower,” who comes to her current hit status direct from 26 smashingly successful weeks at the New York State Unemployment Bureau (”where they got so tired of me they almost gave me my own office”), seems determined to shake the tradition. With a round jolly face like an unbaked johnnycake, eyes the color of brown African marbles and the kind of smoky voice it takes other actresses years of drinking Scotch to achieve, Brenda, on- stage, comes across—pow!— like an uptown version of Gittel Mosca. Offstage, the tough girl-sexy broad image does not exist.

Real Homebody

When Brenda opens the door, you are greeted by a little girl playing mommy—the round mouth, drawn up into a tight little doughnut shape, prattles on about the dangers of smoking cigarettes as the heavenly body it is attached to scuffs about rum- maging through drawers and the kitchen icebox in a size- too-big hostess gown of avocado and fuchsia triangles, while two funny-girl feet peep out from a pair of floppy Roman sandals. The sexy- girl apartment does not exist, either. Instead, Brenda lives with her husband, up-and- coming director Marty Fried (”The Coop”), and a dog named Woody (an Australian silkie with asthma that she purchased at the Farmers Market in Hollywood) in a sunny, high-ceilinged pad in an old building designed by Stanford White overlooking the Hudson River. When the sexy girl talks, the sentences usually begin, not with “Dah- ling . .” but with “I know I’m not Kim Stanley, but . . . The voice continues, from inside the icebox. “I was going through this depressing period, see. I hadn’t worked in months. I’d even forgotten how to read a script. I went to my dentist that day and he said, ‘I saw you on ‘The Defenders’. You don’t work enough, I would like to see you more’— all the wrong things an unemployed actress never wants to hear. So I went over to the St. James where Abe Burrows was holding auditions. I had no hope at all of getting the part. I mean, they had seen every gorgeous girl in town, so why pick me? I thought I’d read for this small part anyway, because what could I lose? I couldn’t stop thinking about that dentist. Anyway, the small part turned out to be an eight-page scene. I went onstage terrified. My husband had parked the car across the street. When we got home, there was a script in the elevator.”

Author-director Burrows himself assumes his best proud papa smile and tells it this way: “It was the end of the day, I’m sitting there with David Merrick, we’ve seen every gorgeous, antiseptic Miss America-type blonde in town, we’re exhausted from being polite. There’s one more girl. So this funny kid comes out with that marvelous hoarse voice. ‘I haven’t read this,’ she says defensively from the stage. She was exactly the opposite of everything we had been looking for; but when she read, Merrick gave me a nudge and said, ‘I believe her.’ I tell you she came on and brought the role with her. In my play, nobody’s dirty. I truly believe people are basically moral. Brenda plays this guy’s mistress, see, but like she says, ‘I’m no homewrecker. I may do a lot of bad things, but I’ve got standards.’ Well, that’s the quality Brenda has. A sexy broad, but watch out —she loves her husband.”

Oh, That Burrows

Further talk reveals that, aside from Kim Stanley, who is Brenda’s favorite actress, her current passion is Burrows. “If he sees you’re unhappy, he says, ‘I’m insecure too, so if vou know that about me and I know that about you, then what do we have to lose?’ He’s the only director I’ve had who ever admitted to his cast that he was insecure. The second day of rehearsal he called and said ‘Hello, Brenda?’” (imitating Burrows on the telephone) “‘this is Abe. I miss you already.’ He made us all feel like we were a family. There are no star complexes in the show, because he clears the air so fast. He would expose some private thing in Betty Bacall or Barry Nelson or me that would make everyone say, ‘I know you, you’re a friend.’ Even if you don’t like the show, you can’t go home saying, ‘Gee, it looked like this one hated that one, or so-and-so looked like she was about to cry during the curtain calls.’ Abe created an aura of bubbliness for us. That’s his stamp.”

Like “Cactus Flower,” Brenda’s life has been pretty funny, without her knowing it. She was born in Brooklyn, but when she was 2, her father moved the family to Dallas, Texas, because, although the Depression was on, the Texas division of the Vaccaros was making money in the restaurant business. “Daddy was a whaddyacall it- a gourmet. Before we got to Dallas, everybody ate barbecue and burned steak. Daddy pioneered good food there.” He opened an Italian restaurant called Mario’s, which recently won a Holiday magazine award for the sixth straight year.

Brenda lived on top of the restaurant and attended Dallas public schools, was later kicked out of Hockaday, the poshest boarding school for young ladies in Texas (“I was a lousy student, because I was always backstage”). She spent a brief time in a boarding school in upstate New York, then ended up back in Dallas in public high school, where she was miserable.

The Fat Girl

“I had no solid friends, and after New York the whole thing was very square. They didn’t play hockey, the girls wore pennies in their loafers and the boys, with blue jeans down to their hips, would take one look at me in my trench coat and turtleneck sweaters and drawl, Holy Moses!” The girls were gorgeous, but I was a freak to them. ‘Whadda y’all do up yonder in New York?’ they wanted to know. My only boy friend sized me up one day: ‘I bet chew gonna be one of them show-biz type people.’”

In July, 1958, Brenda’s father died, leaving her mother to manage Mario’s. The family wanted Brenda to work in the restaurant “like a nice Italian girl,” but the following September she said goodbye to veal parmesan, moved in with her Aunt Marge in Gramercy Park, and for the next two years rode the city bus to the Neighborhood Playhouse. “Elizabeth Ashley and Jessica Walter were in my class, and they were already like stars, always buzzing around to MCA and William Morris in false eyelashes. I was just a fat little Italian peasant girl nobody came to see. They played the leads. I played witches and old mothers in shawls. ‘Marvelous actress, but what does she look like?’ people asked. Finally an agent came and said, ‘Go home, honey, and lose 80 pounds.’ I was just a kid, knew nothing about the professional side of the business.”

She learned. When her family used “make money or come home” tactics, Brenda went to work for a Hungarian candy maker on Eighth Avenue, where she joined classmate Jessica Walter behind a curtain stirring peanut brittle. “We made the best butter crunch in town and in winter it kept sugar in our bloodstreams.”

Shortly after her boss was evicted in 1961, Brenda landed her first Broadway role in “Everybody Loves Opal.” It lasted three weeks and she was back on unemployment. Eileen Heckart, the star of “Opal,” wrote a note to her agent praising Brenda (“She was the kindest person I ever met in this business before Abe”), which led to a tour in “Tunnel of Love” with Bob Cummings, а Hollywood screen test (”They took one look and said ‘Don’t ever send her out here again.’”) and a role in the British import, “The Affair.” Marty Fried was the stage manager. “He used to leave pears on my dressing room table. I hate fruit. Then he’d stand in the wings when I came off and say, ‘You did that well today.’ I hated him on sight.”

“The Affair” closed four months later but Fried was just beginning a long run. “Mama was visiting me then. I’d come home and ask who phoned and she’d say so-and- so ‘and that drag of a stage manager.’ I couldn’t get rid of him.” They were married three years later.

No Loser Now

Arms flying, Brenda led the way through the kitchen, where she once more hijacked the icebox, and into the den, where Marty’s books, old theater posters and playbills crammed the walls and a jazz saxophone blared syrupy love songs on a hi-fi set. She sat in a full yoga-style lotus position in the center of the floor, eating cookies from a glass cookie jar and swilling down a glass of very unsexy cold milk. “There are days when I just know I’m not as good as Kim Stanley and it worries me. But I’m not con- fused any more. I like myself. I don’t feel like I’m a loser. Once I didn’t work for two years. Sure, I was depressed, but the will to be happy won out. The desire to become famous in this system can drive you up the wall, but if you have a fairly strong grip on yourself, you’ll survive.”

Her new success in “Cactus Flower” (back in Texas, her mother has become “the big- gest ticket broker in Dallas”) leaves her little time to be “just Brenda,” but the girl tries. She does her own shopping at the supermarket, has a great relationship with a little boy on West 70th Street who helps her with her groceries. At home, her closest friends are Sandy Dennis and Gerry Mulligan. Every Sunday morning, her Aunt Marge arrives with a big shopping bag containing a couple of chickens, vegetables and a salad, makes pancakes, and Brenda, Marty and Aunt Marge sit around reading the Sunday papers. The chickens start cooking at 4, then Sandy and Gerry usually drop by and everybody sits around on the floor watching TV “and talking about Kim Stanley.”

"I guess you could say my purpose in life is relating— to actors on a stage, to my husband at home, to whatever I'm doing. I just wouldn't be any good as a solo. I know I'm not Kim Stanley, but….” She gulped her milk, laughed her scotchy laugh and shook away the doubt by scratching one of her toes, and somehow, in some way, the “but” just didn't seem to matter.

The first time I saw Marlon Brando on-screen, in my teens, I was struck by libidinal lightning: Oh, my, I remember thinking, I'll have some of that. The occasion wasn't a particularly propitious one; it wasn't Brando at his noble-savage best, dressed in a trendsetting bad-boy outfit of T-shirt and skintight jeans, as in "Streetcar," or Brando at his most primally Brandoesque, as in "Last Tango in Paris," still gorgeous but already edging toward fleshy ruin, getting more naked than any actor had ever allowed himself to be despite remaining dressed. No, I caught him on a late-night television viewing of the overripe Tennessee Williams vehicle "The Fugitive Kind," in which he is called upon, somewhat implausibly, to make goo-goo eyes at an aging and desperate Anna Magnani rather than at a very young if crazy Joanne Woodward, and yet manages to cradle Magnani's ravaged face in his hands as if it were the only one that spoke to him. (Nevermind the disheartening truth of the matter, as revealed in Peter Manso's biography, which is that Brando went out of his way to reject Magnani's advances at every opportunity.) Years later, I would try to capture the combustible effect Brando had on me by composing a poem in a college writing class that transformed him into a verb. It was addressed to some love object of the moment, to whom I paid the highest compliment I could think of. "You Marlon Brando me," I wrote, meaning that the subject of the poem had bypassed all the subtle indexes of wit and sophistication by which I usually measured men and gone straight to the heart of my amorous craving.

It has always been floated that the erotic imagination of women -- in contrast to that of men -- is relatively immune to direct visual stimulus. Much to the chagrin of marketing mavens and the pornography industry, the gentler sex are supposed to require the lambent atmospherics of intimacy -- murmured endearments, gestures of affection, everything sweetly veiled -- to bring out their lusty side. Brando, it seems to me, put the lie to this cultural truism. He suggested that it was possible for an image of male beauty to arouse the female gaze solely on the basis of the aesthetics of desire. Brando was more than a male pinup, of course, but in some ways his complex emotional articulation -- his eloquently tongue-tied mixture of truculence and sensitivity -- was icing on the beefcake. To look the way he looked, with all the smoldering drama implied in just the contrast between his chiseled, poetic features (before he broke his nose during the run of "Streetcar," he was considered too pretty to play Stanley Kowalski) and his brawny, thick-necked body, was appetite-whetting enough, even before you got to the fascination of the inner Brando, with his sad childhood, his cruel streak and his magnetic bisexual allure. Brando, it should be said, was more at ease with the girlish, psychologically cross-dressing aspect of himself than any American actor before him. For evidence of this, you have only to look at the iconic scene in "On the Waterfront" when he picks up the white glove Eva Marie Saint has dropped and then, in an unscripted move, tries it on, wiggling his large paw into its delicate contours; or at the way he inhabited the role of the closeted gay major in "Reflections in a Golden Eye" not through a surface mincing around but by hinting at the foiled machismo of the man (although the provenance of the major's strangled, half Southern drawl and half plummy British lisp as Brando devised it correlates with no known geographical locale on this earth).

That we were prepared to love Brando for his supernal hunkiness alone must have been a source of unending conflict for a man who went by the uninspired nickname Bud as a kid and never went to college but who all the same fashioned himself a connoisseur of the human scene. An untutored philosophe who liked to dabble in half-baked political stands, he sent Sacheen Littlefeather to the Academy Awards in 1973 to lecture on the plight of American Indians before snubbing the Oscar on his behalf. Our readiness to embrace the superficial gift-from-the-gods Brando undoubtedly fueled the self-contempt that trailed him from the very beginning. It eventually led to the defiant obesity and moated existence that characterized his life from the 70's on, when he moved to his own atoll near Tahiti.

He lived out his last years as a swollen parody of himself, trading on his former glory and unfading mystique for a few overcompensated acting jobs, residing in a bunkerlike house on Mulholland Drive in Beverly Hills next door to a fellow Hollywood reprobate, Jack Nicholson, with whom he shared a love of pranks as well as a disdain for conventions. But unlike Nicholson, who appears always to be smirking in self-satisfaction behind his dark glasses, Brando seemed like a small boy chased by furies, which he tried to take refuge from in an unrestrained consumption of women, psychoanalysis and, most obviously, food. He also took on the unlikely role of a hyperactive paterfamilias -- married three times, he claimed nine children but probably fathered more -- with sometimes tragic results. (In 1990, his son Christian killed the boyfriend of his half-sister Cheyenne. In 1995, Cheyenne, after going in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years, hanged herself at her father's estate.)

Most of us feel insufficiently known, but being a celebrity traps you in a cage of alternately fawning and hostile misperception, particularly if you specialize in hiding in plain sight, as Brando did. Toward the end, he seemed lost behind his bulk, bewildered by the brutal turns his casually improvised life had taken, easily reduced to tears. If he squandered his talent and his beauty, who knows what effort it cost him to have made something triumphant of them in the first place, before the demons laid him waste. "We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement . . . inside our own lonely skins for as long as we live in this earth," muses Val, the drifter Brando plays in "The Fugitive Kind." As a statement of majestic desolation, it seems a fitting epitaph for a man who never quite escaped his own raw presence.

(From The New York Times, December 26, 2004)

Parts One and Two of a four-part assessment of Pauline Kael’s Raising Kane. Originally published in The Village Voice.

By Andrew Sarris

Part One: April 15, 1971

“‘Voice in the Wind,’ a heartfelt shoestring quickie shot in 13 days, is a pretty awful moving picture, I realize, but I was touched by its sincerity and by a number of things in it, and was sympathe­tically interested in a good deal more. It is being advertised as ‘a strange new kind of moving picture,’ and that makes me realize, as the excitement over the ‘originality’ of ‘Citizen Kane’ used to, that already I belong to a grizzling generation.”

— James Agee, the Nation, March 18, 1944, reprinted in “Agee on Film”

Pauline Kael’s two-part article on “Citizen Kane” (“Raising Kane” — The New Yorker, February 20 and 27, 1971) reportedly began as a brief introduction to the published screenplay, but, like Topsy, it just growed and growed into a 50,000-word digression from “Kane” itself into the life and times and loves and hates and love-hates of Pauline Kael.

My disagreement with her position begins with her very first sentence:

“‘Citizen Kane’ is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened.” I can think of hundreds of “American talking pictures” that seem as fresh now as the day they opened. Even fresher. “Citizen Kane” is certainly worthy of revival and reconsideration, but it hardly stands alone even among the directorial efforts of Orson Welles. To believe that “Citizen Kane” is a great American film in a morass of mediocre Hollywood movies is to misunderstand the transparent movieness of “Kane” itself from its Xanadu castle out of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” to its menagerie out of “King Kong” to its mirrored reflections out of old German doppleganger spectacles. Not that Miss Kael makes any extravagant claims about the supposed greatness of the film on which she has devoted so much newsprint. “It is a shallow work,” she decides, “a shallow masterpiece.”

One wonders what Miss Kael considers a deep masterpiece. “U-Boat 29” perhaps? Actually, the closest she comes to comparing “Kane” with the higher depths of cinema is in a parenthetical aside of dubious relevance: “Like most of the films of the sound era that are called masterpieces, ‘Citizen Kane’ has reached its audience gradually over the years rather than at the time of release. Yet, unlike the others, it is conceived and acted as entertainment in a popular style (unlike, say, ‘Rules of the Game’ or ‘Rashomon’ or ‘Man of Aran,’ which one does not think of in crowd-pleasing terms).”

“Man of Aran,” with its excessive sea-pounding on the soundtrack making it as falsely exotic in its own time as “Ramparts of Clay” is in ours, was certainly never conceived in crowd-pleasing terms. But “Rules of the Game” and “Rashomon” are something else again even in French and Japanese respectively. If anything, both films are more rousingly entertaining and more satisfyingly lucid than “Kane.” Their emotions are stronger, their gestures broader, their climaxes more violent, their narratives more vigorous, their visual styles less ostentatious, and, no small consideration, their women infinitely warmer and more sensual. Besides, the comparison is even factually questionable. “Rules of the Game” has never been too popular anywhere, but “Kane” and “Rashomon” were instant sensations when they reached the right audiences. It is no derogation to say that they were immediately impressive whereas “Rules of the Game” takes longer to appreciate because of the apparent artlessness of its ironies. Not that Miss Kael bothers to commit her own personal prestige to the greatness of any film. Note, for example, the cautiously impersonal construction of “films of the sound era that are called masterpieces.” Perhaps this tone of cold-fish objectivity is the price of a normally warm-blooded film critic must pay to climb Onward and Upward with the Arts at The New Yorker.

The plot thickens considerably when Miss Kael drifts away from a half-hearted analysis of “Kane” to the most lively gossip imaginable about the alleged birth-pangs and labor-pains of the script. Bit by bit, “Raising Kane” becomes an excuse to lower the boom on Orson Welles so as to resurrect the reputation of the late Herman J. Mankiewicz. By interviewing only the sworn enemies of Orson Welles, Miss Kael has made herself fair game for Mr. Welles and his more fervent admirers. At the very least, we may expect a reprise of the recriminations exchanged between Peter Bogdanovich and Charles Higham on the occasion of the publication of Mr. Higham’s “The Films of Orson Welles.”

How much of the final script of “Citizen Kane” was written by Herman J. Mankiewicz and how much by Orson Welles? I don’t know, and I don’t think Miss Kael, Mr. Bogdanovich, and Mr. Higham do either. Undoubtedly, there will be affidavits aplenty from all sides, but literary collaboration, like marriage, is a largely unwitnessed interpenetration of psyches. Miss Kael demonstrates conclusively that Mankiewicz could have written the entire script unaided, but she cannot possibly know where and when and how and from whom and from what derived all his ideas. As it happens, RKO was successfully sued in 1950 for plagiarism on the officially credited Mankiewicz-Welles script of “Kane” by Ferdinand Lundborg, author of “Imperial Hearst.” Miss Kael tries to pooh-pooh Lundborg’s lawsuit because of the shadow it casts on her own one-sided lawyer’s brief for Mankiewicz. RKO might just as well have been sued, Miss Kael contends, by John Dos Passos for the passages on Hearst in “USA.” Precisely. Who among us can claim complete originality in anything? “Raising Kane” itself bears the by-line of Pauline Kael and of Pauline Kael alone. Yet thousands of words are directly quoted from other writers, and thousands more are paraphrased without credit. Miss Kael deserves her byline because she has shaped her material, much of it unoriginal, into an article with a polemical thrust all her own. Her selection and arrangement of material constitutes a very significant portion of her personal style.

Similarly, Orson Welles is not significantly diminished as the auteur of “Citizen Kane” by Miss Kael’s breathless revelations about Herman J. Mankiewicz any more than he is diminished as the auteur of “The Magnificent Ambersons” by the fact that all the best lines and scenes were written by Booth Tarkington. It is only by virtually ignoring what “Citizen Kane” became as a film that Miss Kael can construct her bizarre theory of film history, namely that “Citizen Kane,” along with all the best moments in movies of the ’30s, must be credited to a consortium of New Yorker writers gathered together by Harold Ross at Chasen’s, the West Coast auxiliary of the Algonquin. Indeed, Miss Kael writes of Harold Ross in “Raising Kane” with much the same awed tone employed by General Lew Wallace in writing of Christ in “Ben Hur.” Writing of a Ross visit to Hearst’s San Simeon, Miss Kael lacks only a divinely capitalized “H” (“He” for “he”) to achieve a completely Biblical tone: “Harold Ross must have wondered what drew his old friends there, for he came, too, escorted by Robert Benchley.”

What is most startling about “Raising Kane” is how little it adds to old stories that have been circulating in film magazines with fewer readers than The New Yorker. For example, “Persistence of Vision,” edited by Joseph McBride and published by the Wisconsin Film Society Press in 1968, contains not only McBride’s “Kane” analysis, which Miss Kael snickers at in “Raising Kane” without bothering to identify the author, but also an extended quote from John Houseman to Penelope Houston out of the Sight and Sound of Autumn 1962: “… we had done some work together on ‘Heart of Darkness,’ which was to have been his first picture at RKO, and on something called ‘The Smiler with the Knife.’ After I’d gone back East, Orson continued trying to find a subject. We had a mutual and very brilliant friend, Herman Mankiewicz, a celebrated Hollywood figure, who had recently broken his leg under tragicomic circumstances that I haven’t time to go into. Having goaded each studio in turn into dismissing him, he had sunk to working on some of our radio shows. Orson arrived one night in New York, and over dinner told me that Mankiewicz had come up with an idea for a movie: a multi-faceted story about William Randolph Hearst in which [Welles] would play the title-part and direct. He asked me whether I would work with Mankiewicz as editor and collaborator on the script. I agreed and returned to Hollywood. After several conferences, at which Mankiewicz continued to develop his ideas, we moved him — nurse, plaster cast and all — up to a place in the mountains called Victorville, about a hundred miles from Los Angeles. There we installed ourselves on a guest ranch. Mankiewicz wrote, I mostly edited and the nurse was bored. Orson drove out once for dinner. At the end of three months we returned to Los Angeles with the 220-page script of ‘Kane,’ later called ‘Citizen Kane.’

“This is a delicate subject: I think Welles has always sincerely felt that he, single-handed, wrote ‘Kane’ and everything else that he has directed — except, possibly, the plays of Shakespeare. But the script of ‘Kane’ was especially Mankiewicz’s. The conception and the structure were his, all the dramatic Hearstian mythology and the journalistic and political wisdom which he had been carrying around with him for years which he now poured into the only serious job he ever did in a lifetime of film writing. But Orson turned ‘Kane’ into a film: the dynamics and the tensions are his and the brilliant cinematic effects — all those visual and aural inventions that add up to make ‘Citizen Kane’ one of the world’s great movies — those were pure Orson Welles.”

The Houseman-Houston interview reads like a digest of “Raising Kane,” and Joseph McBride was obviously aware of this interview when he analyzed “Kane” as “a tragedy in fugal form; thus … also the denial of tragedy.” Aside from cackling at still another film scholar for the benefit of the philistines, Miss Kael creates the impression that McBride and his ilk never had the foggiest notion that Herman J. Mankiewicz had written the screenplay. McBride’s greatest sin is apparently his willingness to consider “Citizen Kane” as a work of art rather than in Miss Kael’s terms as “kitsch redeemed,” a culturally defensive attitude for readers and editors who would be shocked to have any movie taken too seriously. Indeed, by the time Miss Kael is through taking “Kane” apart, it seems considerably more flawed than “The Owl and the Pussycat.” More important, “Kane” is viewed by Miss Kael almost exclusively as a product of the newspaper yarns that preceded it, and not at all as an influence on the inner space excursions of Fellini and Kubrick that followed it. McBride explicitly compares “Kane” to “8 1/2” and is not that comparison more apt than Miss Kael’s likening of “Kane” to “The Front Page,” for Pete’s sake. And what is the black slab in “2001,” but the burnt sled “Rosebud” of “Kane,” the black slab representing the memento of an old civilization, and “Rosebud” the memory of an old man.

Part Two: April 29, 1971

“‘Citizen Kane,’ The American Baroque” is the pretentious title of a solemn, pedantic, humorless re-evaluation of Kane on the occasion of its revival in 1956. The piece first appeared in the ninth issue of Film Culture (1956) and did not cause too much stir one way or another. The reviewer (or rather re-reviewer) was a 28-year­-old New York free-lancer (more free than lance) with a severely limited education in film history. He had just started reviewing movies in the mid-’50s, first under the name of Andrew George Sarris and then merely Andrew Sarris, and by 1956 he had decided that the three greatest films of all times were “Odd Man Out,” “Citizen Kane,” and “Sullivan’s Travels.” Then from 1961 through 1969 he held that the three greatest films of all time were “Lola Montes,” “Ugetsu,” and “La Regle du jeu, ” and now in 1970 he has replaced “Lola Montes” at the top with “Madame de … ” He still likes “Citizen Kane,” “Odd Man Out,” and “Sullivan’s Travels,” but not as much these days as “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “The Third Man,” and “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek,” “Hail the Conquering Hero” and “The Palm Beach Story,” not to mention “Sunrise,” “Liebelei,” “La Ronde,” “Day of Wrath,” “Ordet,” “Flowers of St. Francis,” “French CanCan,” “The Golden Coach,” “Psycho,” “Vertigo,” “The Diary of a Country Priest,” “Au Has­ard Balthazar,” “Brink of Life,” “Oharu,” “Seven Chances,” “Sherlock, Jr.,” “Steamboat Bill Jr.,” and “Shop Around the Corner.” Also, the Russians deserved a look-in at least for auld lang syne since there were more personal styles in heaven and earth than were dreamt of even in Orson Welles’s eclectic philosophy. No matter. “Citizen Kane” seemed infinitely less original and revolutionary in 1971 than it had in 1941 or even 1956, and not only because time had passed but also because the past had become more timely. If “Kane” once seemed like a tree in a clearing, it now seemed like a tree in a very large forest, and not even the topmost tree at that.

Nonetheless, despite the current reservations of its author, “Citizen Kane, The American Baroque” has been well received by acade­micians in recent years and repeatedly anthologized, most recently in a fascinating compendium entitled “Focus on Kane” (edited by Ron­ald Gottesman) with contributions by Gottesman, Juan Cobos, Miguel Rubio, J. A. Pruenda, William Johnson, John O’Hara, Bosley Crowther, Otis Ferguson, Cedric Belfrage, Tangye Lean, Orson Welles, Bernard Herrmann, Gregg Toland, Roy A. Fowler, Peter Cowie, Arthur Knight, Jorge Luis Borges, Andre Bazin, Francois Truffaut, Michael Stephanick, and Charles Higham. Some of these pieces constitute the kind of “incense-burning” against which Pau­line Kael’s wise-guy criticism seems to be directed in her wild-swinging mayhem-causing “Raising Kane,” but most of the pieces raise formal and philosophical questions far beyond the dimensions of gossip culled from old newspapers.

Borges (in 1945) interprets Kane, perhaps predictably, as that “centreless labyrinth” mentioned in Chesterton’s “The Head of Caesar.” But Borges is curiously dubious about the place of Kane in film history: “I dare predict, however, that ‘Citizen Kane’ will endure in the same way certain films of Griffith or of Pudovkin ‘endure’: no one denies their historic value, but no one sees them again. It suffers from grossness, pedantry, dullness. It is not intelligent; it is genial in the sombrest and most germanic sense of the word.”

Truffaut makes a curious reference to The New Yorker (no per­son’s name is given) description of Welles as “a genius without tal­ent.” One might just as aptly describe The New Yorker as talent without genius, and Miss Kael’s approach to “Kane” and Welles as more intelligent than insightful. She spends infinitely more time on preliminary (and subsequently discarded) drafts of the script than on the final form of the movie as it materialized on the screen. Her bias is thus as always inescapably literary rather than visual. And it follows that she would be impatient with the visual, aural and emotional coup represented by “Rosebud.” “The mystery in Kane is largely fake,” Miss Kael contends, “and the Gothic-thriller atmosphere and the Rosebud gimmickry (though fun) are such obvious penny-dreadful popular theatrics that they’re not so very different from the fake mysteries that Hearst’s American Weekly used to whip up — the haunted castles and the curses fulfilled.”

The operative words in the preceding passage are “though fun,” a familiarly quaint Kaelian reconciliation of what she can enjoy viscer­ally with what she can endorse cerebrally. As it happens, Miss Kael is not alone in being ashamed of “Rosebud.” Orson Welles has long since repudiated “Rosebud,” or at least since a 1963 interview with Miss Dilys Powell of the Sunday Times (London) excerpted by Peter Cowie in his “The Study of a Colossus”: “It’s a gimmick, really,” said Welles, “and rather dollar-book Freud.”

I disagree with both Miss Kael and Mr. Welles on “Rosebud,” with Miss Kael for the anti-genre prejudice her repudiation of “Rosebud” confirms and with Welles for — who knows — his canny instinct for self-preservation in repudiating “Rosebud” before it came out of Herman J. Mankiewicz’s ghostly past to haunt him.

When I interviewed Joseph L. Mankiewicz in 1970 for Show magazine, I had no idea that he would reveal to me the origin of “Rosebud” as a bike that Herman J. Mankiewicz once lost as a child in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Nor did I have any idea that there then was and always had been a bitter feud between the Herman J. and Joseph L. sides of the Mankiewicz family. All I knew was that I had forged a crucial link with the scenarist of a strangely compelling movie called “Ladies’ Man” and “Citizen Kane.” But my feeling of discovery was based first of all on my abiding attachment to “Rosebud,” as not only the key to but also the beating heart of “Citizen Kane” as a movie. It is “Rosebud” that structures Kane as a private-eye investi­gation of a citizen in the public eye, and thus brings us much closer to “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Big Sleep” and the burning R’s on the pillowcases of “Rebecca.”

The problem with defending “Rosebud” as a narrative device is that its very vividness makes it a running gag in our satirically ori­ented culture. How can we possibly take “Rosebud” seriously, Miss Kael complains, after Snoopy has called Lucy’s sled “Rosebud?” The same way, I suppose, we can take Potemkin seriously after Woody Allen has sent a baby carriage rolling down the steps of a Latin American palace in “Bananas.” Both Snoopy and Allen are paying homage to bits of film language transformed by the magical contexts of their medium into poetic metaphors. But whereas Eisenstein’s baby carriage moves from prop to agitprop as it becomes an arche­typal conveyance of revolutionary fervor, “Rosebud” reverberates ­with psychological overtones as it passes through the snows of child­hood (les neiges d’antan) into the fire, ashes and smoke of death. Indeed, the burning of “Rosebud” in Xanadu’s furnace represents the only instance in which the character of Kane can be seen subjec­tively by the audience. It is as if his mind and memory were being cremated before our eyes and we were too helpless to intervene and too incompetent to judge. It is an act of symbolic summation and transfiguration worthy of Truffaut’s passionately paradoxical tribute to the film itself: It is a demonstration of the force of power and an attack on the force of power, it is a hymn to youth and a meditation on old age, an essay on the vanity of all material ambition and at the same time a poem on old age and the solitude of exceptional beings, genius or monster or monstrous genius.”

The redeeming value of “Rosebud” is its suggestion that men of a certain size and scope and stature are not fully accountable even to history. This implied absence of accountability tends to slow the flow of moralistic molasses dumped over Kane on the most dubious pretexts. Through the years I have seen Kane about thirty times, but until very recently I never bothered to wonder what Kane’s side of the story might have been if there had been somewhat more of his story on the screen. What, for example, is Jed Leland so outraged about in his rambling reminiscences of a rich friend with feet of clay? That Kane’s two marriages failed? Leland’s apparently sexless existence hardly makes him more “human” on that score than Kane. Besides, Kane’s two wives never remotely suggest the stuff of which Rosebuds are made. Ruth Warwick’s Emily is frigid, prissy, conser­vative and, from her quietly hysterical aversion to the idea of Bern­stein in her son’s nursery, at least incipiently anti-Semitic. Dorothy Comingore’s Susan is harsh, raucous, vulgar and almost maniacally mediocre. Ray Collins’s embattled Tammany tiger seems every inch the thief and scoundrel Kane claimed him to be, and Leland himself seems to have no greater ambition in life than to be a drunken dilet­tante full of moral superiority. If Miss Kael had analyzed the Kane-­Leland relationship more fully on its own terms, she might have traced a parallel between Kane and Leland on one track and Hearst and Mankiewicz on the other. There is probably a great deal of Mankiewicz in Leland, and especially in that moment of alcoholic self-righteousness when Leland attacks Kane for not knowing how to get drunk. In vino veritas and all that. Hearst might even stand for all the Hollywood moguls in Mankiewicz moralistic rhetoric. But the Leland-Kane relationship doesn’t play so one-sidedly in the deli­cately pitched intimacy provided by Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles. Cotten is an actor who can swim under the surface of a characterization with less splash than Welles, and so when Cotten-­Leland talks about drinking with Welles-Kane, he could be talking also about acting. Welles can’t really lose himself in a part the way Cotten can, perhaps because Welles has so much more to lose. Even so, Welles and Cotten climb piggy-back on each other’s lines with such zestful expertness that there is less conflict than complicity in their big renunciation scene. Leland becomes Kane’s alter ego in the peculiarly Wellesian pattern which later couples Othello and Iago, Arkadin and Van Stratten, Falstaff and Hal, and Quinlan and Vargas, not to mention Welles and Cotten in repeat interperform­ances in “Journey into Fear” and Carol Reed’s “The Third Man.” Indeed when you add up everything Welles did after Kane and com­pare it with everything Mankiewicz did before and after “Kane,” the sour humor and intransigent ambiguity of “Citizen Kane” would seem to arise more from the personality of Welles than from that of Man­kiewicz. What Mankiewicz has provided is an apparently big subject with faint hints of scandal from one side and large helpings of social consciousness from the other. And “Rosebud,” a symbol that turned out to be more personal than social.

Back in 1941, Bosley Crowther qualified his enthusiastic review of “Kane” with a complaint about “Rosebud” and the unsolved mystery of Kane: “And the final poignant identification of ‘Rosebud’ sheds little more than a vague, sentimental light upon his character. At the end Kubla Kane is still an enigma — a very confusing one.” Two days after his initial review, Crowther developed his reservations in a Sunday follow-up: “And when the significance of ‘Rosebud’ is made apparent in the final sequence of the film, it provides little more than a dramatic and poign­ant shock. It does not clarify, except by sentimental suggestion, the reason for Kane’s complexity. And so we are bound to conclude that this picture is not truly great, for its theme is basically vague and its significance depends upon circumstances. Unquestionably, Mr. Welles is the most dynamic newcomer in films and his talents are infinite. But the showman will have to acquire a good bit more discipline before he is thoroughly dependable.”

Crowther’s rejection of “Rosebud” as an explanation of Kane is consistent with his later pans of “Wild Strawberries” and “L’Avventura” for their apparent self-indulgence and obfuscation. Crowther’s most influential period in film criticism was the ’40s when his social approach to films coincided with the world-saving concerns of his readers. “Rosebud” is much closer to the arched fishing pole and line of the protagonist’s father in “Wild Strawberries” than to the out­stretched soldier’s hand crumpling up near a butterfly in “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

Few American films up to “Citizen Kane” had been grown up enough to suggest that we never really grow up, and a boy torn away from his mother at an early age, like Kane, like Welles, least of all. The grandeur of “Rosebud” as a memory is that it is meaningless and trivial to anyone but Kane. Its honor is its confirmation that we are isolated from each other by so much more than our politics and morals, by nothing less, in fact, than our very selves. The only way critics and audiences of the period could stomach the profound pes­simism of “Citizen Kane” was to misconstrue it as a detailed denunciation of a certain kind of American plutocrat. In this respect, the scenario is curiously sluggish and undeveloped next to a political hal­lucination like the Capra-Riskin “Meet John Doe,” which opened shortly before “Citizen Kane” and had about a million times more polemical Americana. Miss Kael never mentions “Meet John Doe” or “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” or “The Grapes of Wrath” or “The Great Dictator.” Why Hearst should have been a more daring target in 1940 than Hitler I have no idea, and, even today, the California lettuce growers seem to have lost few of their fangs from “The Grapes of Wrath.” By any standard, the few minutes of political talk sprinkled in “Citizen Kane” would seem fairly superficial in a high-­school civics textbook. But the mystical process by which the Mer­cury Players parade across a haunted screen never seems to lose its power to fascinate us.

Pauline Kael was compelled to speak to Sam Staggs for the porn mag MANDATE in 1983 to refute the accusation that she was a homophobe. Right there, between explicit nude spreads and sexual advice, the critic for The New Yorker addressed charges made by a fellow critic--Stuart Byron--in the Village Voice. Kael urged the readers to read her full review of the 1968 film “The Sergeant” and decide for themselves if she was homophobic. (Kael had also criticized the way Clint Eastwood had portrayed homosexuals in his films.) Kael was villainized along with Anita Bryant and Jerry Falwell and Normon Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Was the fracas earned?

Here is Kael’s full review of “The Sergeant.” She does make some broad assumptions, and her invocation of “a homosexual friend” was a tired New Yorker trope even then, as in the lady from Dubuque or a “friend writes.”

*****

A homosexual once told me how for weeks he was afraid to speak to a man he saw regularly in his cruising terrain, because the man looked so large and powerful and masculine that the homosexual was afraid he’d be slugged if he made any overtures. Finally, he approached the man and told him how terrified he felt, and the man replied wistfully, “I wish I could find somebody I’d feel that way about.” There is something ludicrous and at the same time poignant about many stories involving homosexuals. Inside the leather trappings and chains and emblems and Fascist insignia of homosexual “toughs” there is so often hidden our old acquaintance the high-school sissy, searching the streets for the man he doesn’t believe he is. The incessant, compulsive cruising is the true, mad romantic’s endless quest for love. Crazier than Don Juan, homosexuals pursue an ideal man, but once they have made a sexual conquest the partner is a homosexual like them, and they go on their self-defeating way, endlessly walking and looking, dreaming the impossible dream. In “The Sergeant,” Rod Steiger chases after John Phillip Law so long that when he grabs him and kisses him it’s the climax of the picture. Then Law slugs him and Steiger goes out and shoots himself, and that’s it. If Steiger had grabbed Law and been rebuffed an hour and a half earlier, he could have said, “All right, so I made a mistake,” and maybe the picture could have gone on and been about something.

What is wrong with “The Sergeant” is precisely that it takes the Army sergeant, played by Steiger, so long to make his pass that the picture keeps going just on the waiting level and we never learn what seems essential: Is he consciously or unconsciously homosexual? His character and his activities have no resonance; we don’t know anything about him except that he’s fat and domineering and chases the hero. He is a middle-aged man; what has he been doing all these years? If this flirtation is one in a series, why is he so inept? (And why does he kill himself?) And if it is his first crush, what set it off? Why this boy? What was there about him that attracted a homosexual response? It’s not merely Steiger’s character that seems to be newly minted for the purpose of setting the plot in motion; the whole movie lacks resonance. The script (by Dennis Murphy) is the kind of disciplined, workmanlike writing that is meant to be spare but is actually sparse. There isn’t a phrase of Army slang that one can take away; there isn’t a single imaginative or believable or (what would be blessedly welcome) irrelevant touch in the dialogue or the characters or the imagery that might give the story a sense of life. Nobody in it has any more character than is absolutely necessary for the plot. Every scene sticks to its bare little point, every line of dialogue stays on its impoverished course; things happen neatly one at a time. We never for a minute have the illusion that those people so obviously assembled to be “background” will go on doing what they’re doing when the camera cuts away.

The sergeant is not just homosexual—he’s a psychopathic personality. It would be unfair to accuse the movie of implying that one has to be crazy to be homosexual (that would be like accusing “Oedipus Rex” of implying that only kings can love their mothers), but one can legitimately ask: Why are all the other soldiers so incredibly, antiseptically straight that it really begins to look as if you did have to be crazy to be homosexual? In the French and German girls’-school movies of the thirties, it was perfectly obvious that lesbian feelings were implicit in the situation, but here in this Army situation there is nothing in the atmosphere that links up with the sergeant’s homosexuality, and when everyone is this one-dimensionally “normal,” and homosexuality is, to all appearances, unknown and without cause, it does begin to seem as if only a monster could have such aberrant impulses. Except for the sergeant’s, there is no passion or sexuality of any kind in this sterile movie, so a heterosexual display of love would seem just as crazy. (When the, nice hero and his nice girl are in bed together for the first time, she says “Hello” and he says “Hello.”)

This determinedly grim and “strong” movie, directed by John Flynn at a relentlessly unvarying tempo, is not without artistic flourishes. It’s “daring” in a “mature” way, and means to be taken very seriously. But wasn’t the idea behind the financing of the movie that the star must be an actor the public likes and thinks is a great actor, so they’ll know it’s not for real? Why else would Rod Steiger be cast in the lead—if those who made the movie had any sense of how an actor’s physical presence must make the right sexual connections for a role? Just on the face of it, I’d say that an actor who wears wigs like Steiger’s doesn’t have the kind of aesthetic sense to play a man drawn to a beautiful boy. He was used as a grotesque parody of a homosexual in “The Loved One” just because there’s something funny in the idea of a man who looks like Steiger as a homosexual; his hairdresser bit in “No Way to Treat a Lady” was preposterous. A repressed (if that’s what it’s meant to be) homosexual seems to be totally outside his range; he keeps his face prissy, with his lips pursed, throughout the movie, as if waiting for his emotional outbursts, so that he can let go, but the prissy face is a blank. Does playing a homosexual paralyze him as an actor? He gives such a tense, constricted performance it’s almost as if he didn’t want to convince anybody. He never looks at Law with love. (He looked at Poitier with more affection in “In the Heat of the Night.”) “The Sergeant” is so insufferably “tasteful” and controlled and careful about its homosexual theme that, ironically, it has less homosexuality in it than many movies have had unconsciously or by the accidents of casting or by carelessness or indifference—”Strangers on a Train,” for example, or “Purple Noon,” or any of those Westerns in which the manly friendships begin to suggest something that wasn’t intended. And there was that come-back- to - the - raft- ag’in - Huck-honey classic of a couple of years ago, “The Fortune Cookie,” with Jack Lemmon leaving his dirty wife for his clean, sweet Negro buddy, and with the memorable closing shot of the two of them playing ball together.

From the January 18, 1969 issue of The New Yorker

Photograph: The Social Gospel: The minister and reformer Graham Taylor, shown here addressing a crowd in Chicago in 1924, was one of the many activists who have sought to push this nation toward greater justice. Chicago Historical Society

By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber

I love America—the place where I was born, the people who have loved me, the songs that have shaped my soundscape, and the story in which I’ve had to negotiate my own existence. I also know America well enough to know her deepest flaws, and I know she will never be all that she aspires to be until she repents of the marginalization of some people from her beginning.

Langston Hughes wrote, “America never was America to me, / And yet I swear this oath— / America will be!” At this 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we have a nation we love, founded on a great dream and the words of men who, even when they signed their names, knew that they were empty phrases for poor men, women, Indigenous people, and Black people.

It is as though our great Declaration and Constitution represent a great political house with empty rooms. There have been empty promises and empty dreams for so many. The quill wrote “freedom” and “justice,” but the same quill enshrined counting an enslaved human as three-fifths of a person; it also lessened women and never ensured that the right to vote and the right to public education were guaranteed by the Constitution. Still, some people have always kept believing they could fill the house according to the instructions of the grand design.

For 250 years, every moral movement that has pushed this nation toward greater justice has tried to fill the house according to the promise on its deed. This was supposed to be a turnkey job, but so much was left undone and unfulfilled. So the abolitionists tried to fill the house with the justice and freedom promised to enslaved people through the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, and the work of the Reconstruction. The Social Gospel and labor movements tried to fill the house with equity for poor people, and the suffrage movement tried to fill the house for women. The civil-rights, women’s-rights, immigrants’-rights, and LGBTQ-rights movements all tried to fill the rooms of the house that remained empty for so many people. Today, movements for a living wage and healthcare and action to address the climate crisis are still pushing to fill the empty rooms.

All of these movements have been trying to fill the house with what was promised would define the house from the beginning—the rights that the founders said were endowed by God and thus inalienable. At times over these 250 years, we have been successful in partially filling this house, but we have also seen effort after effort to remove any progress and to reject what we thought was finally, permanently in this house called America.

As a theologian and student of Scripture, I want America to hear a message from Jesus right now. In the New Testament, Luke records that Jesus said:

“When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, “I will return to the house I left.” When it arrives, it finds the house swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first.”

Our Constitution and founding documents and creeds are clean and in order. They promise so much of what we all know to be right and good. This is why Dr. King was able to say he believed in a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. But unrealized and spoiled, this dream leaves some rooms of our body politic vacant and subject to other spirits that are wrong, unjust, mean, deceitful, fascist, authoritarian, and immoral. These spirits come in and take over the house with even greater malice than some of the former occupants.

Could this be the root of our crisis today? Because we didn’t fill the American house with fully secured voting rights and equal protection for all, immoral and mean spirits have swept in to reverse fundamental voting rights, birthright citizenship, and the basic civil rights of people on the streets, who are now subject to search and seizure by masked men. Because we didn’t fill the house with healthcare as a human right, now we have forces that want to take away Medicaid and SNAP and other basic protections that we thought were secured. Because we didn’t fill the house with living wages, a new political majority brought forces who give the greedy more tax cuts, who are overturning labor rights and have granted corporations the status of people, and who allow those corporations to pay unchecked amounts of money into our political system, treating people like things and corporations like people.

Could this be where we are? We once said we would be a nation that went to war only when we were attacked, but slowly this partial concept was removed and restraint on presidential powers was weakened, leaving the house open to someone abusing power and starting a war because of a feeling he has in his gut.

We must be honest and say we let in much of what we see now. And we must take responsibility for doing what we have the power to do to set our house in order. Religious leaders, progressive media, and movement activists must form a moral fusion movement strong enough to deep-clean our house. We need a Third Reconstruction to fill the house with policies that will guarantee a living wage, healthcare, fully funded public education, affordable housing, green jobs, justice for immigrants, and a peace economy. We must go to work now, in this 250th year, to build a coalition that will vote for a deep clean: a massive sweeping of corrupt political leaders, from the statehouse to the White House, who have either abused their power or refused to challenge those who did. And this deep cleaning must go on for a while, not just one sweep in an election.

And the sweepers don’t need to carry the title “liberal” or “conservative.” Like the great movements of our past that have attempted to fill the American house with justice, today’s sweepers must be justice sweepers, moral sweepers, love sweepers.

This year is also a voting year. We must deep-clean the American house if we hope to fill this house with the establishment of justice, the provision for the common defense, the promotion of the general welfare, domestic tranquility, and equal protection for all. We have to sweep out the powerful political forces that are the antithesis of this nation’s highest ideals, and each of us must become a broom. Almost 90 million Americans did not vote in the last federal election. It’s time for every young person, every poor person, every marginalized person who feels like no one represents them to link up with a movement that says, “There are more of us than there are of them” and declares together, “It’s sweeping time!”

In the 1920s, a writer influenced by the great Social Gospel movement of his day composed a hymn about the need to sweep the land. The sweeping he wrote about wasn’t just for one moment; sweeping, cleaning, and furnishing our shared house must be the constant work of hope. As I travel this country and hear all the sounds coming from the people in the streets, I find myself singing this old hymn. When I read courageous journalists who are asking the questions that must be asked and doing the investigations that need to be done, I find myself singing it again. When I hear prophetic voices rising in the public square and see my students full of fire, I join the hymn writer in saying again:

“Over the hilltops, down from the skies,
Coming from glory—lift up your eyes!
While we are watching, and while we pray,
A mighty revival is sweeping this way.

“Sweeping this way, yes, sweeping this way,
A mighty revival is sweeping this way.
Keep on believing, trust and obey;
A mighty revival is sweeping this way.”

Originally appeared in The Nation. Reprinted with permission

By Jed Perl for The New York Review of Books (reprinted with permission)

Jean Cocteau opened his 1918 polemic, Cock and Harlequin, with a zinger of an epigram: “Art is science in the flesh.” That’s probably the kind of intellectual provocation that Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, was aiming for with “Costume Art,” the show that inaugurates the museum’s Condé M. Nast Galleries. Designed by the Brooklyn-based Peterson Rich Office, these are now the first exhibition spaces visitors encounter after entering the Great Hall.

In the show, items of clothing are juxtaposed with works of art from the museum’s seventeen curatorial departments. “The study of dress,” Bolton explains in the catalog, “offers a privileged vantage point from which to reconsider the history of art itself.” He believes that “the history of aesthetics cannot be disentangled from the history of the body that clothes it.” Even if that’s true—I’m not so sure—“Costume Art” isn’t about the body but about the clothes. It’s an infomercial for the fashion industry.

The Condé M. Nast Galleries have the pale gray walls and crisp architectural details of a Madison Avenue boutique. The show is sterile—a plod. Even fashions that might originally have had some comic pizzazz (a dress by Batsheva Hay emblazoned with the word “HAG” or Jean Paul Gaultier’s jumpsuits ornamented with drawings of old-fashioned tattoos) are presented as if they demand serious consideration. Many of the mannequins loom high above us, an army of chic automatons. They’ve been specially designed in sizes that acknowledge that the world includes people with different physiques, but where their faces would be, there’s a mirror. Someone must have figured that the mirrored faces would encourage museumgoers to bond with the mannequins—la mode, c’est moi. As for the works of art included, they’re generally small and almost invariably overwhelmed by the clothes. A lot of them are tucked away in vitrines that serve as pedestals for dresses by some of the world’s most exclusive designers. An ancient Greek vase, a Dürer print, a sculpture by Jean Arp, and a Meiji-period hanging basket are given perfunctory presentations. They’re giveaways in an ultra-posh swag bag. The clothes are the heroes of the show.

There is much to be said not only about “Costume Art” but also about the Condé M. Nast Galleries, which are going to be dedicated to Costume Institute exhibitions, while occasionally available for other museum projects. How did rooms focused on fashion become the first galleries visitors now encounter on entering the Met? Why is this space being used in this way? I’m worried about what all of this portends for the future of one of the world’s greatest museums. But before grappling with the questions that are raised by the dedication of these premier spaces to fashion, I think it’s worth considering some of the important artistic issues that the show provokes, although it doesn’t do much to answer them. “Were I an art history professor,” Alex Greenberger wrote in ART news in one of the rare critical assessments of Bolton’s work, “I would have no choice but to give this show a failing grade.” Greenberger ascribes that failure to the often arbitrary juxtapositions of clothes and works of art as well as to the vague or poor labeling of many of the objects, but it goes much deeper. Bolton and his collaborators want to celebrate a synergy between fashion and art, which they view as equal partners in the evolution of style, at least when they’re not coming right out and arguing that fashion precipitates art. What’s missing is anything like a lucid account of style as a cultural phenomenon that shapes and is in turn shaped by the work that creative people do.

The question that looms over “Costume Art” is the question of causality. Where does style come from, whether in art or in fashion? Montesquieu, in his Spirit of the Laws (1748), was among the first to suggest that style and culture more generally are at least in part determined by factors such as geography, climate, and what, for lack of a better term, we think of as spirit of place. In the nineteenth century art historians, among them Alois Riegl and Heinrich Wölfflin, argued that particular periods generate particular formal elements, strategies, and qualities, which find expression in the greatest buildings, paintings, and sculptures but also perhaps in clothing and utilitarian objects. An interesting argument can be made—it’s not made in “Costume Art”—that whereas in the Western sculptural tradition originating in Egypt and Greece the essential form is the male body, in an Eastern sculptural tradition originating in India and Southeast Asia the essential form is the female body. If we choose to contemplate such an admittedly broad distinction, we’re immediately forced to consider not only what might have precipitated such divergent directions but also their implications for the development of conventions in the visual arts as well as in dress. Bolton would like us to believe that the way people choose to dress is somehow critical in the formation of a period’s or a group’s artistic understanding. There may be times when that’s true. But who’s to say that broader cultural or social forces aren’t shaping both clothing and painting? Or that styles in the fine arts aren’t affecting styles in dress?

Bolton and his collaborators get away with avoiding these challenging questions in part by acting as if they’re in a hell of a hurry, tossing around objects from across the Met. They would like us to imagine that almost everyone who has considered fashion in the setting of the museum or the classroom has regarded clothes as static objects. There’s an irony here, because that’s exactly how the clothes are displayed in “Costume Art,” while twenty years ago, in the exhibition “Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century,” on which Bolton also worked, clothed mannequins were set in dynamic situations in the museum’s period rooms. With “Costume Art,” Bolton sets out to demonstrate how our visceral experience of the clothed human body has shaped the creation and understanding of all sorts of works of art. It’s a daunting project—I think an impossible one—but he evinces neither the patience nor the erudition required to even get it off the ground. “Here,” he writes,

art is reexamined through the analytic lens of dress. Painting, sculpture, visual media, and decorative arts are approached not as autonomous forms but as practices in which clothing structures visibility and mediates subjectivity.

I don’t know what bothers me more about that word salad—the incoherence or the arrogance.

I’m surprised at how many serious attempts to understand the relationship between fashion and art (and fashion and life) Bolton and his collaborators have overlooked entirely or dismissed with a passing reference. While Bernard Rudofsky earns a couple of lines in the bibliography, the curators seem unaware of or indifferent to a show called “Are Clothes Modern?” that he organized at the Museum of Modern Art in 1944 along with a book of the same name published three years later. Rudofsky was interested in the anthropological dimensions of aesthetics—another show he mounted at MoMA, “Architecture Without Architects” (1964), was about indigenous building styles—and his thoughts about the body and how it’s clothed sometimes parallel concerns in “Costume Art,” such as when he speaks of the “enhancing and increasing of personality through the extension of the body with the help of clothing.” Quentin Bell’s On Human Finery, published a year after Rudofsky’s Are Clothes Modern?, goes unmentioned, despite its interesting discussion of Thorstein Veblen’s ideas about clothing. Anne Hollander’s Seeing Through Clothes (1978) is discussed a few times in passing in the catalog, but her second exploration of the relationship between clothing and culture, Sex and Suits (1994), is ignored, although her discussion of modern male dress touches on questions about the sartorial origins of modern aesthetics that would seem germane to “Costume Art.” (The preponderance of the clothing exhibited here was designed for women.)

“Costume Art” aims for an Olympian swagger, often with inadvertently comic results. Even before museumgoers enter the exhibition, they’re confronted with Bolton’s juxtaposition of Dürer’s print of Adam and Eve, leggings by Vivienne Westwood, and a bodysuit by Andrea Adamo, with shiny metallic fig leaves attached to the relevant parts of the flesh-colored clothing. An accompanying text—the first of dozens, each more ludicrous than the one before—informs visitors that both the artist and the designers are “navigat[ing] the friction between scriptural dogma and the viewer’s gaze.” Does anybody really imagine that that’s what Westwood had in mind? Nearby, Rudi Gernreich’s “Pubikini”—a kind of thong—is juxtaposed with a New Kingdom Egyptian statuette of a nude woman, which, a text informs us, “oscillates between naturalism and stylization.” This highfalutin talk also dominates the exhibition catalog. A single paragraph—the subject is tattoos—includes citations of Marshall McLuhan, Michel Foucault, and John Dewey. This kind of name checking is what passes here for intellectual discernment.

What’s entirely missing in both the exhibition and the catalog is any serious effort to identify the specific ways in which painters, sculptors, and other creative spirits have thought about the human body and the clothes people wear. Bolton may regard such questions as best left to academic grinds, while he polishes his reputation as the philosophe of the fashion industry. But this would have been a much stronger show if even a few of the following themes had been explored: the tradition, dating back to Vitruvius, of associating human bodies with certain fundamental architectural forms; the involvement of Renaissance and Baroque artists with costumes for performances and festivities of all kinds; the use of masks and facial masking both as costumes and as symbols in different times and places; the vogue for working-class dress among avant-gardists, including Picasso and Braque, and its relationship to their quotidian subjects; the collaboration of artists in ballet and modern dance, with Picasso and Derain going so far as to design the makeup for dancers in certain Ballets Russes productions and in at least one instance to actually apply the makeup; and Matisse’s fascination with fabrics and dresses, well documented in the Met’s 2005 show “Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams.” Bolton might respond that all of this—and there’s much more—has already been covered. Maybe so. But without these foundational studies, the questions he raises remain unanswerable.

If there was a period in the history of art, fashion, and society in which the kind of interactions that interest Bolton might be demonstrated with relative ease, it’s probably early-eighteenth-century France. A new informality in human relations and style certainly influenced Antoine Watteau’s paintings, from the drawings he made from the model to the improvisational arrangement of those drawings in pictorial compositions and his easygoing way of handling paint. The freedom of Watteau’s art may well reflect new forms of bodily freedom—and sartorial freedom, too. But Watteau isn’t included in “Costume Art,” and in the catalog his name crops up only once, not as an artist but because his paintings influenced a late-nineteenth-century fashion called the “Watteau box pleat.” As it happens, when “Costume Art” opened there was still to be seen, on the second floor of the Met, a brilliant exhibition, “Fanmania,” that included a print after a drawing by Watteau of a woman holding a fan. The focus of “Fanmania,” organized by Ashley E. Dunn and Jane R. Becker, was nineteenth-century France, but the show reached in different directions, including the seventeenth-century printmaker Callot and Japanese prints and lacquer objects. This lucid, elegant show, which as far as I know received no attention in the press, highlighted the fascination of the decorated fan (including examples by Degas and Pissarro) as both portable painting and fashionable accoutrement, something to be regarded in its own right but also understood as part of a woman’s way of presenting herself to the world.

“Costume Art” is divided into a dozen sections, among them “Naked and Nude Body,” “Abstract Body,” “Reclaimed Body,” “Pregnant Body,” “Corpulent Body,” “Disabled Body,” “Anatomical Body,” “Vital Body,” “Aging Body,” and “Mortal Body.” The groupings can be almost absurdly obvious, with red clothing dominating “Anatomical Body” and “Vital Body”—that’s the color of blood—and lots of black and bones in “Mortal Body.” When the categories aren’t obvious, they’re obtuse. The trouble starts with the beginning section, “Naked and Nude Body,” which consists of a row of mannequins that are in fact clothed, decked out in diaphanous dresses or costumes with cutouts, including a dress by Pierre Cardin designed to show off a woman’s bare breasts. The accompanying catalog essay inevitably cites Kenneth Clark’s classic book The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956) and his elegant distinction between the naked and the nude. But nobody involved with this show can leave well enough alone, so within a page Clark has somehow given way to Gernreich, who we are told is “isolating and aestheticizing the culturally policed female form.” Once museumgoers have turned away from these not-so-naked naked bodies, they’re confronted with the “Classical Body,” featuring comparisons between dresses with flowing Grecian lines and pieces of ancient pottery with representations of figures in roughly similar outfits. Not only do these juxtapositions tell us nothing about how clothing might generate artistic style—it’s just designers, among them Madeleine Vionnet, Madame Grès, Martin Margiela, and John Galliano, copying classical paintings and sculptures—but it strikes me as amusing that a show that aims to break barriers begins with ancient Greece and Rome, the most old-fashioned starting point anybody could imagine.

“Costume Art” is an intellectual hodgepodge. Picasso’s Blue Period painting of a blind man reaching out his long-fingered hands to eat is set near a couple of dresses in heavily textured fabric, apparently designed to give a sensual experience to the hard of sight. A dress designed for the height-challenged is juxtaposed with an Egyptian statuette of a dancing dwarf. A gown designed by Daniel Roseberry for Schiaparelli, with an elaborate neck decoration in red Swarovski crystals that suggests a heart, is paired with a painting by Giovanni di Paolo, Saint Catherine of Siena Exchanging Her Heart with Christ. What’s the connection? “Di Paolo and Roseberry,” the wall text explains, “externalized vitality, transforming the heart into a mediator between spiritual intensity and corporeal form.” The pairing, in both the show and the catalog, of black-and-white works by de Kooning and a coat by Nadia Pinkney with a splashy black-and-white design derived from brain scans, is said to have something to do with the Alzheimer’s disease that afflicted both de Kooning and some of Pinkney’s relatives. But I’m left wondering if what really interested the curators was the snappy juxtaposition of black-and-white imagery.

Although the show claims to offer ways of thinking about art and fashion through the ages, more than one hundred of the roughly two hundred items included were produced after 2000 and something like a third of them after 2020. This is a show that for all the talk about what people wear—and how it affects the work that painters and sculptors and other artists do—has little or nothing to do with what most people have ever worn. My guess is that some of the work on display is the stuff designers dream up for the runway, scarcely imagining that it will go into production. “Costume Art” is little more than a show of recent fashion masquerading as a scholarly exhibition about the historical relationship between clothing and the arts more generally. But the masquerade cannot be ignored. Behind the fun and games there’s a fashion industry fat with money and prestige and apparently determined to have its way with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Fashion has long had a place at the Met. That makes perfect sense, because this is a museum dedicated to representing visual culture in all its variety, with important collections not only of European paintings, Asian pottery, and Islamic textiles but also of ancient coins, musical instruments, and nineteenth-century printed advertising ephemera. The Costume Institute, founded in 1946, is one element in a large, encyclopedic enterprise. And it’s no surprise that it has always been “supported,” as Bolton writes in the catalog, “by the enduring patronage of the American fashion industry.” Patrons often focus on areas with which they have some particular personal or professional affinity. But up until now, when it has come to exhibitions and exhibition spaces, the Costume Institute has been one among many departments at the Met competing for space and attention, which, despite all the museum’s resources, is limited. (This helps to explain why the Met’s important 2023 exhibition honoring the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso’s death—“Picasso: A Cubist Commission in Brooklyn”—was presented almost as an afterthought, in the very back of the permanent galleries for late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century art.)

What’s troubling isn’t that there are fashion exhibitions at the Met. What’s troubling is that there is reason to believe that the fashion industry has bought what amounts to prime real estate at the Met—and bought it for the foreseeable future. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a public trust. Its decision making should be subject to the same kind of scrutiny that investigative reporters regularly bring to all kinds of institutions. Named galleries are nothing new in museums, but naming the galleries devoted to fashion for Condé M. Nast, a publisher instrumental in the development of the fashion industry, is anything but disinterested. According to The New York Times, it was done “in recognition of an undisclosed lead gift from that media empire.” The cost of the galleries, estimated at something like $50 million, was covered by companies and individuals, all or nearly all of whom have ties to fashion.

Considering the justifiable outrage in the media world over Jeff Bezos’s cuts at The Washington Post and his hostility to cultural coverage there, I’m glad that some questions have been raised in the press about his involvement—along with that of his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos—in what we see unfolding at the Met. It’s stated in black-and-white at the entrance to “Costume Art”: “The exhibition is made possible by Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos.” The Met says that that’s the extent of their involvement with the Condé M. Nast Galleries. Fair enough. But we have every right to ask what their involvement might be in the future. I also wonder if anybody has questioned the wisdom of having several garments included in “Costume Art” by Thom Browne, the designer who donated money toward the construction of the galleries, one of which is named after him. Considering Browne’s importance in the fashion world, his inclusion in the show is understandable. But didn’t anybody worry about the impression of a quid pro quo? When it comes to fashion, does the Met regard this as business as usual?

It isn’t a coincidence that the new fashion galleries are named after the founder of a media empire that in recent years has been dominated by Anna Wintour, the longtime editor-in-chief of Vogue and currently the global chief content officer at Condé Nast. She’s a trustee of the Met and the force behind the Costume Institute Benefits, better known as the Met Galas, which in recent years have generated an entertainment-world buzz that rivals the Academy Awards; in 2014 the museum’s Costume Institute was renamed the Anna Wintour Costume Center. (I was a contributing editor at Vogue for a decade, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, and worked with Wintour.) As The New York Times reported last November when the name of the galleries was announced, “Met curators have long privately complained about how the Costume Institute’s starry red carpet on the museum steps eclipses the other exhibitions and scholarship inside.” Where are the cultural reporters who are willing to dig into these private complaints? What’s been done at the Met probably can’t be undone. But we need to know more about how it happened. There’s too much complacency in the cultural world.

However decisions are being made at the Met, the museum remains nothing less than extraordinary. That’s why this matters. Even as the Condé M. Nast Galleries were opening the museum was host to a couple of formidable shows, not only “Raphael: Sublime Poetry,” the blockbuster salute to the Renaissance master that the Met curator Carmen Bambach has been working on for many years, but also “Gothic by Design: The Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship,” a revelatory display of drawings, many of them very large, that served as preparatory studies for some of the greatest monuments of Gothic Europe. It was organized by Femke Speelberg, another Met curator, and the accompanying catalog is a beauty. “Fanmania” was a jewel of a show, as was “Lillian Bassman: Bazaar and Beyond,” devoted to the work of a photographer who brought her own kind of kinetic vigor to the fashion world. At the Met there are still curators carrying on the work of their predecessors, among them giants such as Roger Fry, John Pope-Hennessy, William Ivins, and A. Hyatt Mayor. Great museums can sustain a kind of curatorial DNA. We’ve seen it not only at the Met but also at the Museum of Modern Art, where despite many worrisome changes there are still curators who manage to mount shows as scrupulously imagined and executed as “Cézanne Drawing” (2021) and “Picasso in Fontainebleau” (2023–2024).

How can a museum that’s responsible for “Raphael: Sublime Poetry,” “Gothic by Design,” and “Fanmania” simultaneously give top billing to something as incoherent and pretentious as “Costume Art”? While the possibility has been left open that exhibitions of other kinds might be mounted in the Condé M. Nast Galleries, it’s understood that, to quote the Times, the museum is “putting fashion first. Literally.” Since everyone, including Max Hollein, the Met’s CEO and director, knows that the new galleries raise serious questions about the museum’s priorities, a sort of defense has been put in place. Rather than seeing here a capitulation to the razzamatazz of the Met Gala and the fundraising chops of the fashion community, Hollein and Wintour would like us to regard the Condé M. Nast Galleries as a way of attracting a supposedly reluctant public to the museum. According to reporting in the Times, Wintour believes that “the high visibility of the gala and the popularity of costume exhibitions make them a gateway for potential visitors who might not otherwise frequent the Met.” Hollein says that “this project presents an opportunity for us to invest even more in the visitor experience.”

These arguments are predicated on a set of assumptions—I believe false assumptions—that have become holy writ in the cultural world, among people involved not only with museums but also with the performing and literary arts. What Hollein and Wintour are suggesting is that the masterworks the Met is most famous for, sculptures and paintings and objects of all kinds from cultures around the world, aren’t enough of an attraction. This line of thinking didn’t begin with Hollein, who became director of the Met in 2018. But there’s now an assumption that it’s enthusiasm for fashion exhibitions, supercharged by the alliance with Vogue and the Met Gala, that’s pulling people in the door. I think Hollein, along with much of the rest of the cultural world, is falling into a trap. The growing attendance at these fashion shows is cited as the reason for foregrounding fashion. And now that fashion is front and center, the attendance figures could go even higher. I visited “Costume Art” on a weekday morning, and the galleries were packed. But these same galleries, if used to accommodate a wide range of temporary shows, might actually expand the audience for more frankly challenging work. “Gothic by Design” would have looked stunning in this space just off the Great Hall. What’s so frustrating is that the people who are running things at the Met underestimate the museumgoing public.

Behind all these questions there’s the more fundamental matter of how museums make sense of art and culture. Bolton is right to believe that all experience is visceral experience, whether we’re putting on a jacket or touching a sculpture or looking at a painting. Our bodies are fundamental to our understanding of our world—and that includes works of art. I think that’s what Cocteau was getting at when he announced that “art is science in the flesh.” We can all agree that an evening gown by Madame Grès or a suit by Chanel is a thing of consequence—a work of art. But behind “Costume Art” and the Condé M. Nast Galleries there lurks a bigger claim—one that must be denied. No piece of clothing can compare with the greatest works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whether a Sumerian statue of Gudea, Duccio’s Madonna and Child, or Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher. They’re still there on Fifth Avenue, but from now on you’re going to have to bypass the fashion show to get to them.

From The Village Voice, July 25, 1968

“ROSEMARY’S BABY” has been blessed with such extraordinary popularity from the printed page to the silver screen that it seems superfluous if not presumptuous for a critic to recommend the movie as good hot-weather-goose-pimply entertainment. Everybody read the book and now everybody’s going to the movie as book and movie are discussed interchangeably as media permutations of the same basic formula. Good luck and perfect timing have played a part in these proceedings. Certainly only luck can explain the fortuitous conjunction of a strong commercial property like Ira Levin’s novel with a strong directorial personality like Roman Polanski without the novel being distorted or the director diluted.

Indeed, Levin and Polanski actually reinforce each other, Levin being more a storyteller than a stylist and Polanski more a stylist than a storyteller. Even in “Rosemary’s Baby” there are moments of excessive embellishment in the beginning when good old Elisha Cooke, Jr., is showing Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes through the Dakota Apartments. Polanski’s camera seems a bit too jittery and his cutting a bit too jazzy and the overall effect a bit too ostentatiously ominous. But then Levin’s potent plot takes over, and Polanski sems to relax into a contemplative calm with only occasional touches and asides to remind us of his impish irreverence.

By now the plot of “Rosemary’s Baby” is familiar enough to analyze without spoiling anyone’s fun. In an age of themes, Ira Levin has come up with a plot so effectively original that it is deserving more of a patent than a copyright. The qualities of a good plot are simplicity, directness, and an oblique treatment of essentials. “Rosemary’s Baby” can be synopsized in one sentence as the adventures of an actor’s wife, delivered to the devil and his worshipers by her ambitious husband so that she might bear the devil’s baby which she does. The beauty of the plot is that it virtually conceals the real subject. On the surface “Rosemary’s Baby” seems merely a diabolical reversal of Mary’s Baby, a reversal made even more flagrantly sacrilegious by Polanski’s God-Is-Dead gaiety. A Catholic group has bitten on the bait by condemning the film though probably more for the director’s deftness with nudity than for his disrespect for the Sacraments. Many critics have missed the point of the story because of their prejudice against melodrama as a meaningful dramatic form, a prejudice traditionally diagnosed as the anti-Hitchcock syndrome.

“Rosemary’s Baby” is more than just a good yarn, however. Its power to terrify readers and viewers, particularly women, derives not from any disrespect toward the Deity nor from any literal fear of embodied evil. Ghosts, Holy or unholy, have ceased to haunt our dreams in their metaphysical majesty. The devil in “Rosemary’s Baby” is reduced to an unimaginative rapist performing a ridiculous ritual. It could not be otherwise in an age that proclaims God is Dead. Without God, the devil is pure camp, and his followers fugitives from a Charles Addams cartoon.

What is frightening about Rosemary’s condition is her suspicion that she is being used by other people for ulterior purposes. She has no family of her own to turn to but must rely on a husband who seems insensitive to her pain, neighbors who seem suspiciously solicitous, a doctor whose manner seems more reassuring than his medicine, and a world that seems curiously indifferent to her plight. When she tells her story to a disinterested doctor, he dismisses it as pure paranoia as most doctors would if a pregnant woman walked into their office and told them the plot of “Rosemary’s Baby.” The disinterested doctor calls the witch doctor and Rosemary is delivered to her satanic destiny. After spitting in her husband’s face, Rosemary approaches the rocker where her yellow-eyed baby is crying and by slowly rocking the infant to sleep acknowledges her maternal responsibility toward a being that is after all a baby and ultimately HER baby.

Thus, two universal fears run through “Rosemary’s Baby,” the fear of pregnancy, particularly as it consumes personality, and the fear of a deformed offspring with all the attendant moral and emotional complications.

Almost any film that dealt directly with these two fears would be unbearable to watch because of the matter-of-fact clinical horror involved. By dealing obliquely with these fears, the book and the movie penetrate deeper into the subconscious of the audience. It is when we least expect to identify with fictional characters that we identify most deeply. If Levin had been fully aware of the implications of what he had been writing, he would have been too self-conscious to write it. Conversely, Polanski, who is too aware of implications and overtones, could never have invented the plot of “Rosemary’s Baby.” Hence, the fruitful collaboration of instinct and intellect on this occasion.

Levin’s lady-in-distress mannerisms are misleading in that they are designed merely as plot devices to tighten the tension during the period of pregnancy, a period during which even witches and warlocks lack the ability to accelerate events. At times the suspense of the story is more rhetorical than real since we are always more curious about what Rosemary is trying to escape from (witchcraft) than what she is trying to escape to (the normal, neurotic everyday world). Consequently, Rosemary is infused with a feeling of helplessness and Zen passivity that creates in the reader and viewer a mood of voluptuous self-pity. Where the story does succeed as melodrama is on the level of persecution trying to prove that it is not paranoia, and of course the best way for an artist to project his own paranoia is to describe real persecution. The great stories are acts of faith in the reality of feelings. The wondrousness of a story or a movie is a plea to the audience to be less skeptical about the possibilities of human experience.

No movie succeeds without a reasonable number of casting coups, and “Rosemary’s Baby” is more fortunate than most in this regard. The biggest surprise is Mia Farrow as a Rosemary more ideal than anyone would have suspected after “A Dandy in Aspic.” Even her curiously pallid and awkward artificiality works to her advantage in a role for which it is desirable not to seem too credible to the outside world. Polanski is especially good in directing her physical movements of escape and evasion in a way that makes her plausibly but affectingly ineffective. And when she apologizes for her husband’s rudeness by observing that even Laurence Olivier must be self-centered, her gaucherie is heartwarming to the point of heartbreak.

The supporting people are uniformly excellent, Ralph Bellamy being the outstanding revelation as the bearded witch doctor and yet typical of a cast that plays against the strangeness of the situation with tenaciously tweedsy folksiness mixed with an air of perpetual preoccupation. Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer, and Maurice Evans match Bellamy with an energetic seriousness that is amusing without ever being ridiculous. John Cassavetes is somewhat miscast as the actor-husband, a part that would have been more appropriate for the narcissism Richard Chamberlain displayed so precisely in “Petulia.” Cassavetes is too intelligent and offbeat an actor to project self-absorption. Above all, he lacks the beautiful self-sacrifice mask of an actor capable of selling his wife to the devil for a good part. Cassavetes is simply more than his character calls for, but he too has his moment in an almost flawless entertainment.

The first time I saw Katharine Hepburn and Gary Grant (that was the billing) in Howard Hawks’ delirious 1938 screwball romantic comedy, Bringing Up Baby, I was pretty sure it was the wildest, most outrageously funny talking picture I had ever seen. To make certain, I saw it again later that same day, early in 1961 when the movie was already twenty-two years old, and I was convinced. In fact, it was even funnier the second time. Of course, I did see it on the big screen, which always makes a huge difference, but in this case even more so because of the film’s extraordinary speed and the often darkly lit scenes, two things that can prove exhausting on the small screen. So be rested and on your toes.

I once asked Hawks if the lighting wasn’t inordinately dark for a comedy and he drawled with a grin, “Well, it was a complete tragedy for Cary, wasn’t it?” He meant Grant’s character, a paleontologist who has just lost a key bone to the brontosaurus he is assembing for the natural history museum he works with: he’s lost it because of a superbly daffy society girl who has set her sights on him. She’s played with absolutely dizzying charm by Hepburn in the single most likable performance of her career. Grant takes the thickly bespectacled absentminded professor about as far as you can go yet is always entirely believable and hilarious in his helpless reaction to this female force of nature far beyond that represented by any of the skeletal remains with which he generally deals. In her cupid’s quiver Hepburn’s Susan has any number of pointed, if unknowing, assists from a rich aunt, wealthy friends, aggressive dog, and passive leopard. The “Baby” of the title, in fact, is the spotted leopard her aunt has acquired that is fond of music, in particular the song “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby,” which Kate and Cary sing to it once or twice as part of the lunatic circumstances of this uproarious adventure.

At one point, a slightly daft psychiatrist (Fritz Feld at his best) articulates the essential theme of the movie: “The love impulse in man often expresses itself in terms of conflict.” The Hepburn-Grant relationship here perfectly illustrates this throughout. I didn’t know until recently (from Barbara Leaming’s Hepburn biography) that Hawks and screenwriter Dudley Nichols were inspired in the creation of this movie by the lovingly antagonistic relationship between Hepburn and thickly bespectacled master director John Ford during the making in 1936 of Mary of Scotland, for which Nichols had also served as scenarist. Hepburn was the only person who had ever managed to kid Ford on the set and get away with it, and her own strong-mindedness matched his. They fell in love, Ford nearly left his wife and kids for her, but it wasn’t to be. Bringing Up Baby cheerfully takes this real relationship to farce level and gives it a happy ending.

For Hawks, the picture was actually about the breaking down of a hung-up guy. By the end, Grant’s character realizes that even though he seemed to be having the worst time, it was actually liberating and made him a larger human being; indeed, the film is a series of tests Grant must undergo to be worthy of a beautiful woman as adorable as Hepburn. Only a partial success in its day, and forgotten for years, Bringing Up Baby is among my most favorite pictures, and one of the great comic treasures of the American screen.

OTHER HOWARD HAWKS-GARY GRANT COMEDIES:

His Girl Friday (1940; with Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy).

I Was a Male War Bride (1949; with Ann Sheridan).

Monkey Business (1952; with Ginger Rogers, Marilyn Monroe, Charles Coburn).

OTHER HAWKS COMEDIES:

Fig Leaves (1926, with George O’Brien, Olive Borden).

Ball of Fire (1941; with Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck).

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953; with Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell)

Man’s Favorite Sport (1964; with Rock Hudson, Paula Prentiss).

From Peter Bogdanovich’s Movie of the Week: 52 Classic Films for One Full Year (Ballantine Books)