Vital Viewing (Races Racing Edition)

Four-time Olympic gold medal winner Jesse Owens was born on this day in 1913. Now, winning all that precious metal would have been quite an achievement under any circumstance, but it's where and when the track-and-field athlete won all that precious metal that makes it particularly noteworthy:

Above is the official poster of the Games of the XI Olympiad, but as with anything official, it doesn't tell the whole...

...story.

So, what in the world was the International Olympic Committee thinking when it chose that regime to host the games? Well, that wasn't quite what was chosen. Berlin won its bid in 1931, at which time the nation as large wasn't Nazi Germany but what's now referred to as the Weimar Republic, and I guess the IOC assumed it would still be a republic five years later. It probably would have had there not been a worldwide depression that hit the Deutschland particularly hard, creating an opportunity for Hitler and his team of martinets to goosestep up to the plate as the Weimar players were booed out of the game. Once the antidemocratic and anti-Semitic nature of the new regime became apparent to the rest of the world, there was much talk within the IOC and outside as well about taking the games away from the Germans, with some civil libertarians and social justice advocates calling on their governments to boycott the games were they to go ahead as scheduled. Well, the games did go ahead as scheduled, while a boycott did not, and most countries sent their best athletes, including the United States, which sent, among others, Jesse Owens.

Owens earned his first Gold Medal on August 3 in the 100-meter dash:

 

On August 4, a second Gold for the long jump:

Nice to hear "U-S-A! U-S-A!" as sounding like something other than a racist rant. Indeed, anything but.

On August 5, Owens won the 200-meter sprint:

On August 9, Owens won his fourth and final Gold in the relay: 

Track and field is hardly the be-all and the end-all in the Olympics. There were lots of other events, and lots of other winners, but you can't win four medals and not be the guy that everybody is talking about...

...and everybody was talking about Jesse.

It wasn't supposed to be this way--according to the Nazis.

Adolf Hitler had nothing to do with Berlin getting the Olympics, but once they were gotten and he was in charge, he ran with it, regarding the Games as a kind of...

...geopolitical, ethnographic track and field event, a way of promoting Aryan supremacy. Winning medals was merely a prelude to winning wars. 

And Germany did win a lot of medals in that Olympics. 101 medals, the most of any country. The United States was a distant second at 57. But it was which Americans that won those medals that put the lie to Nazi boasts. Jesse Owens obviously was not Aryan. With the exception of Luz Long in the long jump, Owens toughest competitors weren't German athletes, but his fellow African Americans, such as Mack Robinson, Jackie's brother. None of it seemed to matter to Hitler, who instead showered his affections on the German athletes.

 

This led to the decades-long charge that Der Führer had snubbed the rest of the world's athletes, in particular the United States athletes, in particular the United States black athletes, in particular Jesse Owens. That's how much of the American press, particularly the black American press, portrayed it. But not everyone bought into that scenario. Surprisingly, one such dissenter was a black American member of the press himself, Robert Lee Vann, publisher and editor of the Pittsburgh Courier. "Wonder of wonders, I saw Herr Adolf Hitler salute this lad," Vann reported. "I saw Jesse Owens greeted by the Grand Chancellor of this country as a brilliant sun peeped out through the clouds" Owens himself acknowledged some sort of amiable exchange, stating, "Hitler had a certain time to come to the stadium and a certain time to leave...It happened that he had to leave before the victory celebration. But before he left I was on my way to a broadcast and passed his box. He waved at me and I waved back." This friendly exchange either wasn't caught on camera, or if it was then ended up on Leni Riefenstahl's cutting room floor. Since it's a story that Owens stuck to through the years, I have to believe it happened. Regardless of whether it was a salute or a wave or a nod or a smile or even a wink, does that make Hitler a nice guy after all? I think not. A friendly wave hardly mitigates genocide! So why did Vann and in particular Owens seem to be shilling for the racist of all racists? I don't think they were. They merely were trying to put the whole thing is perspective. And just what was that perspective?

In hindsight, an unfair comparison. But in 1936, Hitler's fiercest critics had no idea just how bad things were going to get. Prewar Germany may have been discriminatory, but it was not yet murderous. And so at the time one could make a reasonable argument that something similar to the Third Reich existed in America below the Mason-Dixon line. And traces could be found above the Mason-Dixon line as well. Upon returning to the United States after the Olympics, Jesse Owen was treated to a ticker-tape parade through Manhattan. Afterwards, there was a reception for him at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Except as a black, even a famous black, he wasn't allowed through the hotel's front doors. Instead, the guest of honor had to go around back and take a freight elevator to his own party! Depending on the jurisdiction, the gold medalist still had to ride in the back of the bus, still had to use a separate drinking fountain. It was those kinds of snubs on his native soil that he put up with for decades to come."Hitler didn't shake my hand, but then neither did President Roosevelt," Owens, a Republican, once said. (At the time the South was a significant source of votes for the Democratic Party. My, how things change!)

 

 

Jesse Owens post-Olympics years had their ups and down. Naturally, some of those downs had to with racism, but not all. Athletics is a time-sensitive occupation, and a pensionless retirement can come early. Owens tried to brace himself against such a future by taking money wherever and whenever he could almost immediately upon winning his medals, at first in the form of endorsements. The U.S. Olympic Committee saw that as crass and revoked his amateur status. That freed Owens up to compete professionally, but against who? Unlike soccer or basketball, there's really not much in the way of professional track and field. Owens ended up racing, and beating, a horse at the South Idaho State Fair. He also raced dogs, trucks, and motorcycles. As time passed and endorsements became fewer, Owens opened up his own drive-thu dry cleaner, which didn't last long. Various other failed business ventures eventually led him to declared bankruptcy. So much for the downs. As for the ups, President Eisenhower appointed him a goodwill ambassador, and he was sent to the developing countries of the world to promote both physical fitness and, as this was during the Cold War, the American cause of freedom. There were corporate speeches, and honors such as the Presidental Medal of Freedom, given to him by Jerry Ford. Not to be outdone, Ford's successor, Jimmy Carter, gave him a Living Legends Award. Owens was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame. He didn't live to see it erected, but here in Cleveland, where Owens went to high school, his statue crosses a finish line in a downtown park. Ohio State, where Owens went to college, has a stadium named after him. One thing Owens did live to see was a new generation of U.S. Olympic Committee members who refused to hold his earlier commercialism against him, and even appointed him to its Board of Directors. Owens went to the 1972 Munich Olympics as a guest of the West German government, where he met the ex-boxer Max Schmeling, who had battled Joe Louis in another African American-versus-the-Nazis sporting event (though Schmeling was anything but a Nazi and in fact harbored Jews during World War II.) A pack-a-day smoker, Jesse Owens died of lung cancer in 1980.

 

Whoopie Goldberg got herself embroiled in a bit of controversy not too long ago when she characterized the Holocaust as "white-on-white violence", refusing to regard Judaism as a race. Well, is it? That depends on who's doing the regarding. Some 20 years ago, biologists came to the conclusion that, genetically, there was no other race but a human race and the various groupings that we regard as separate races are not distinct species of hominoids but mere social constructs. Well, for Goldberg and plenty of others who are neither geneticists nor biologists, skin pigmentation has long been the tried-and-true way of constructing those social differences. Except under that definition, Adolf Hitler was oddly colorblind. Race was whatever the Powers That Be said it was, anti-Semitism a government-mandated dye job that became a social, as well as a damn near literal, deconstruction of a whole people.

Mel Brooks once defended the many Nazi jokes found in both the movie and stage versions of The Producers by saying that he hoped such mockery would loosen whatever grip those monsters still held on the public's imagination. That came to my mind as I watched the following interview Jesse Owens did for Canadian television in 1963. By that time it had become obvious that the Third Reich had outdone even the Jim Crow South when it came to man's inhumanity to man, and Owens had adjusted his views accordingly. Actually, most of this interview concerns Owens work with the Illinois Youth Commision. However, right toward the end, the inevitable question about the Nazi Olympics is asked, and Owens comes up with a corker of a response:

 

 

BA-DUM-CHING! And let's make it a world holiday.

In Memoriam: Carl Reiner 1922-2020

Unlike so many comedy icons who rose to prominence in the mid-20th century, particularly those born to Jewish immigrants and raised somewhere in New York City, Carl Reiner never played the Catskills. In fact, he was never really a stand-up comedian at all except when maybe after he already had become famous he was asked to emcee various show biz functions. The facts are murky, but Reiner seems to have started out as a straight actor. Somewhere along the way a now-forgotten Broadway casting director thought he might make a good straight actor in comedies--that is, a straight man, the guy who feeds the lines to some clownish character who then turns the whole thing into a joke. The more successful of these comedies were "revues", collections of skits and musical numbers, including Call Me Mister, which dealt with returning World War II vets (Reiner himself happened to be one in real life.) Television came along about this time, and the revue format made the transition to the new medium, where it soon became known as the "variety show". Texaco Star Theater, starring Milton Berle, was one early example. Another was Your Show of Shows.

Your Show of Shows had evolved out of the Admiral Broadway Revue (and later evolved into Caesar's Hour.) Ninety minutes long, it featured elaborate musical numbers, and, what it soon became best known for, comedy sketches. These sketches were enacted by host Sid Caesar, and costars Imogene Coca, Howard Morris, and Carl Reiner. Caesar, Coca, and Morris were three classic rubber-faced comedians who could changes their voices, talk with exaggerated foreign accents, and basically disappear into extreme comic characterizations. Mildly handsome back in the day, Reiner was anything but rubber-faced. Nevertheless, given half the chance, he could change his voice, exaggerate a foreign accent, and disappear into an extreme comic characterization with the best of them. But more often he maintained a normal, vaguely mock-dramatic presence that the other three could play of of. In particular as a reporter in an overcoat and fedora interviewing, and feeding lines to, Caesar's flaky German professor (Reiner: Professor, what keeps birds in the air? Caesar: Courage!) But if feeding lines was considered Reiner's chief asset onscreen, offscreen he soon proved to have a knack for inventing lines.

Sid Caesar wasn't just content to act in these sketches but also wanted some say in how they came to be written. And he thought, or hoped, his costars might want some say also. To that end the entire cast had an open invitation to the writer's room. Reiner took this invitation very seriously, so much so that, long before this week's obits appeared, he was regularly described as having been a member of the Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour's writing staffs, alongside such future comedy legends as Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and Larry Gelbart. Yet he never received any onscreen credit. His contribution would have been hard to pin down anyway. Caesar's sketches were room written. A single person may have come up with a central concept (often Caesar himself), but then a dozen or so writers added jokes. That is, if they could be heard above the din as this highly competitive bunch weren't known to politely take turns (a young, introverted Woody Allen, who worked on specials Caesar did toward the end of the 1950s, hated the atmosphere, preferring to write a ton of jokes at home and then see if he could fit them in somewhere.) Watching the old kinescopes on YouTube, it's fun to speculate that "This joke could only have come from Brooks" or "That gag has Simon written all over it" but they were just as likely to have been written by Head Writer Mel Tolkin, well-respected in his field though never a household name. And even once the sketch was put down on paper, Caesar wasn't above ad libbing. Getting back to Reiner, since he wasn't listed in the credits, and there were enough writers already, could his be contribution have been exaggerated? I would say yes if it weren't for the fact that onscreen proof of his writing talents in a non-Caesar project was right around the corner.

Ironically, Reiner the non-writer writer was the first of Caesar's crew to write a book, an autobiographical novel titled Enter Laughing, which fellow Your Show of Shows writer (and future Fiddler on the Roof librettist) Joseph Stein turned into a hit Broadway play that Reiner himself adapted for the big screen. But Reiner hadn't yet given up playing straight man. In fact, he was primed to play straight man in one of the most celebrated, if intermittent, comedy teams of the postwar era.

One of the many friends the likable Reiner had made in Caesar's writing room was the aforementioned Mel Brooks. The two had cooked up a parody of TV news shows that had some eyewitness to history as an interview subject, which in the 1950s could have been a far back as the Spanish-American War. Reiner and Brooks wanted to go back further, all the way to ancient Mesopotamia if necessary. For whatever reason, such a sketch never made it onto Your Show of Shows or Caesar's Hour. But Reiner and Brooks kept the idea alive as a comedy routine they performed in front of friends at social gatherings (it certainly beats watching someone dance with a lampshade on their head.) Another TV comedy star of the day, Steve Allen, thought they should put the act down on record and even provided them the studio to do so, resulting in the comedy album 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. The 2000 year old man was just one character among many Brooks played, which included a Yiddish-accented astronaut and a Yiddish-accented rock and roll teen idol (!), but the twenty-centuries old Yiddish-accented geezer is what caught on, getting the two of them on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Hollywood Palace, and other variety shows. The success of the album raised Brooks profile considerably, as he was until then unknown outside of comedy writing circles. Reiner was again the straight man but as the act seems to have been a combination of previously-agreed upon exchanges and improvisation, he would often challenge Brooks one-liners, forcing the latter to come up with even funnier one-liners. While both men would soon (very soon, in the case of Reiner) move on to separate projects, they would revive the bit whenever asked to do so, even doing an animated version in the 1970s.

In fact, Carl Reiner had a much more ambitious project in mind. He would write, produce (along with former tough guy actor Sheldon Leonard) and star in a situation comedy called Head of the Family. Reiner played a New York-based TV comedy writer named Rob Petrie, who had young, pretty wife named Laura, a young son named Richie, and two co-workers named Buddy and Sally. If you recognized all those just named, then you know that no such TV series with Carl Reiner in the lead ever aired with any regularity. Ah, but the pilot does exist today on YouTube, where comparisons can be made with a later, more famous version. Head of the Family is funny enough, and Reiner is funny enough in it,  so why didn't CBS purchase the pilot? Reiner's Rob Petrie had a certain brashness about him, as well as a slight New York accent, which could be interpreted as "Jewish". At least, that is the prevailing theory. Now, it's not like a brash New York City Jew couldn't star in his own sitcom--Phil Silvers is a famous example--but as a suburban father? Not in that WASPish era. Reiner believed in the possibilities of his proposed sitcom more than he did in the possibilities of his own stardom, and so swallowed some pride and set about finding himself a new Rob Petrie.

He found one in the Midwestern born-and-raised, John Alden-descended, Tony Award-winning star of the hit Broadway show Bye, Bye, Birdie: Dick Van Dyke. The Dick Van Dyke Show premiered on October 3, 1961, and ran for five years, only leaving the airways when Reiner decided it should go out on top. It very nearly went out on bottom, as CBS decided to cancel it after the first season. The network only changed its mind after sponsor Proctor & Gamble, which obviously believed in the show, threatened to pull all its afternoon soap operas, unless the sitcom was allowed to find an audience. Ironically, it found its audience when it was rescheduled right after the highly-rated The Beverly Hillbillies. I say ironically because TDVDS is often held up as the most sophisticated television that the 1960s has to offer, whereas the country bumpkins-turned-oil barons sitcom is seen (perhaps unfairly) as among the least sophisticated. To that end I wonder if there was some strategic decision behind Van Dyke tripping over the ottoman at the beginning of the second season (the first season's opening credits just showed photographs of the stars), a way of assuring the yahoos watching Hillbillies that nothing too hifalutin was about to follow. Actually, compared to later sitcoms such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, All in the Family, MASH, Cheers, and Seinfeld, The Dick Van Dyke Show may not seem as sophisticated as it once did. But it remains quite funny, a mélange of workplace comedy, domestic comedy, physical comedy, and musical comedy, along with being a show biz satire (but then satire is merely a hifalutin form of comedy, isn't it?) In this revamped version of Reiner's original concept, Van Dyke's Rob Petrie is a smart, decent, but accident-prone family man whom, it's suggested, derives comic inspiration from his own klutziness. In fact, I sometimes think the slapstick may have been the most truly sophisticated aspect of the series, a reminder that no matter how good a joke a Rob Petrie can come up with on a typewriter, God, Fate, or Chance will come up with an even better one, that you can sidestep the ottoman, but stumble on the carpet anyway (as happens in later seasons.) Van Dyke was assisted by a terrific acting ensemble (none of whom were in the Head of the Family pilot.) The aforementioned Mary Tyler Moore as the pretty, now downright sexy capris pants-clad wife, Borsht Belt comic Morey Amsterdam as Borsht Belt comedy writer Buddy Sorrell (reportedly based on Mel Brooks), gravel-voiced Rose-Marie as the wise-cracking comedy writer Sally Rogers (reportedly based on Selma Diamond, who wrote for Caesar), Richard Deacon as the stuffy, sycophantic producer Mel Cooley (reportedly based on Mitch McConnell--no, just joking, that would be impossible), Ann Guilbert as the excitable next-door-neighbor Millie Helper, Jerry Paris as Jerry Helper, Millie's more laid-back husband (he has to be, he's a dentist), and Larry Mathews as Rob and Laura's son, who showed up every now and then to remind everyone that Rob was indeed a family man. Carl Reiner wrote over 50 episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, including such classics as "Never Bathe on Saturday" (in which Laura gets stuck in a bathtub--you had to be there), and "It May Look Like a Walnut" (an Invasion of the Body Snatchers parody in which a zombified Buddy Sorrell asks "Did you hear the one about the nearsighted turtle who fell in live with an army helmet?") Eventually, Reiner handed over the writing to others, including writing teams Garry Marshall and Jerry Belson (who later co-created the 1970s TV version of The Odd Couple, and, separately, the former created Happy Days and the latter wrote the screenplay for the 1970s feature film Smile, a beauty pageant satire), and Bill Persky and Sam Denoff (who later co-created That Girl.) Reiner stayed on as a producer. And made one other, in my opinion, huge contribution to the series.

There's a character I haven't told you about yet, the guy Rob, Buddy, and Sally works for. Technically, I suppose that would be producer Mel Cooley, except Cooley has no real power over that bunch and is in fact regularly insulted by Buddy--who shows no fear of getting fired--whenever he enters the room. Besides, Mel himself takes his orders from the star of the fictional variety/sketch comedy show, Alan Brady. I'm going by memory as the Internet is no help whatsoever here, but I don't believe we see Alan at all during the first season of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Even in an episode ("The Sick Boy and the Sitter") that takes place in Alan's home, we don't see him. And he never visits the writers room. This, of course, isn't the way Sid Caesar did things (but it may be the way another 1950s TV comedy legend, Jackie Gleason, did things. According to Mel Brooks, Gleason had his writers slip his scripts under his dressing room door.) I'm not absolutely certain of this, but I think Alan Brady makes his first appearance in a second-season episode titled "When a Bowling Pin Talks, Listen", but only the back of head. Now, it's easy to imagine what the front of his head looks like, because Alan Brady was played by none other than Carl Reiner. So why the modesty? Knowing that he had been only a "second banana" on Sid Caesar's various shows, and that CBS didn't think he should star in a sitcom based on his own life, Reiner felt nobody would accept him as a longtime TV comedy star (according to one 1961 episode, The Alan Brady Show already had been on the air about ten years.) And so for the next two seasons, when we saw Alan Brady at all, it was just the back of his bald or toupee'd head. Then, in season 4, in an episode titled "Three Letters from One Wife" Reiner was finally prevailed upon to show his face, and from that point on, he never looked back. Vain, egotistical, self-involved, insensitive, and motor-mouthed, Alan Brady is a bull in a china shop, with Rob, Laura, Buddy, Sally, Mel, and, in one story ("A Day in the Life of Alan Brady"), even Millie and Jerry, as the plates, cups, and saucers. Brady is the focal point of several episodes in the last two seasons, and in these episodes, The Dick Van Dyke Show becomes a wickedly funny satire of television and show biz, which it hadn't quite been up to then. And if the situation comedy itself had proven Reiner's skill as a writer, then the Alan Brady-centered episodes showed just what a great comedian he could be, his talents as a comic performer most likely wasted in his years as a second banana or straight man. In fact, in the scenes they appear in together, it's Van Dyke who comes off as the straight man!

After The Dick Van Dyke Show went off the air in 1966, there were a few more stabs at producing and writing for TV, most notably The New Dick Van Dyke Show, which ran for three years in the early 1970s. As far as acting goes, Reiner got to star in what turned out to be a box office hit, the Cold War satire, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966). But mostly, Reiner settled into a long, relatively successful career as a feature film director. In 1977, he had a huge hit with Oh, God! starring George Burns and John Denver, with a screenplay by old Caesar's Hour cohort Larry Gelbart. He then gave Steve Martin a big boost by directing him in three films in which they both worked on the screenplays, The Jerk (1979), the film nor parody Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982), and my personal favorite, the mad scientist spoof The Man with Two Brains (1983). There was a fourth film that Reiner directed and Martin starred but which neither one wrote the screenplay, All of Me (1984), that has the latter possessed by a prim and proper Lily Tomlin. Reiner's final film was 1997's That Old Feeling with Bette Midler. I have a vague memory of once seeing an ad for it, and that's all. After the filmmaking career ended, he did many, many, many guest appearances on TV shows, and maintained his comic timing right up to the end.

   

Quips and Quotations

You're always a little disappointing in person because you can't be the edited essence of yourself.

--Mel Brooks