Vital Viewing (Naked Light Bulbs, Rude Remarks, and Vulgar Actions Edition)

 

Playwright Tennessee Williams was born on this day in 1911 (he died in 1983.) Williams was about 63 when he sat down for an interview with talk show host Dick Cavett in a leafy courtyard of an antebellum era New Orleans hotel. As his plays were an unusual blend of tragedy, comedy, poetry, social commentary, sex, violence, and local color, you might expect the man himself to be somewhat unusual, and Williams certainly doesn't disappoint, but he's unusual in the most charming, wonderfully Southern twangy way possible. Though any careful, or even sloppy, reading of his work would indicate a rather dark nature, he seems to be in good humor here. Watch and listen:

It took me a bit of googling to find out who the hell this pirate was that Cavett was talking about. As Williams suggested, Jean Lafitte was an obvious choice, as he was the most famous pirate in New Orleans, having helped Andrew Jackson defend the city against the British during the War of 1812 in exchange for a pardon (what none of the local combatants on either side knew is that a peace treaty had been signed in Belgium a few weeks earlier. Life before the telegraph.) But he wasn't involved with any plot to bring Napoleon to America. 

Turns out it was a friend of Laffite's named Dominique You. A wealthy New Orleanian and former mayor by the name of Nicholas Girod sponsored a plan to have You rescue Napoleon Bonaparte from his second exile on St. Helena (Elba was the first), bring him to America, and set him up in a guest room in Girod's home, where the Little Corporal would presumably live rent-free. This was a popular scheme in New Orleans, which at the time had a heavily ethnic French presence, and, who knows, had Napoleon not died before You had even set sail, it might have gotten Girod another term as mayor. The house is still in existence, and is now a restaurant called The Napoleon House. So Cavett knew what he was talking about, even if it was a bit of a digression from anything having to do with Tennessee Williams. But look at me, I'm digressing myself! So lets get back to the playwright.

 

He was born Thomas Lanier Williams III, but thought Tom was a rather "dull name" for a writer, and so started calling himself "Tennessee" when he was about 27 years old and his playwriting career began in earnest. According to John Lahr's acclaimed 2014 biography, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, which right now is sitting to the left of the computer I'm writing this on, he lived in the actual state of Tennessee for just two separate years of his life, the first time when he was still a toddler, and the second time when he had been sent there to recover from a nervous breakdown after--I mean no disrespect but for personal reasons I can't help but smile--working in a shoe warehouse. However, Williams' father, though not particularly distinguished himself (an alcoholic who gambled away his middle-management earnings, he once got part of his ear bit off in a poker fight), came from a distinguished line of Tennesseans including that state's first senator, and so by giving himself that nickname, young Tom Williams figured he could claim a piece of that linage for himself. As for where he did live in his life, until he was eight he lived mostly in Mississippi in the house of his maternal grandfather, an Episcopal minister from Illinois, just enough time for him to acquire that Southern accent. After his father, who had been a traveling shoe salesman, was transferred to the shoe company's home office in St. Louis, Williams, his prim and proper mother Edwina, mentally troubled sister Rose (the model for Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie), and younger brother Dakin (often depicted in Williams biographies as the most normal one of the bunch, later in life he was seen as a bit of a character himself) were packed off to the hustle and the bustle and the Northern accents of a major Midwestern industrial city. The difference between the two environments would pop up again and again in his plays (as did just about every other facet of Williams life with the notable exception of his homosexuality, and even that was there, though thinly camouflaged.) Jumping ahead to the last thirty years of his life, Williams mostly divided his time between Manhattan, the home of Broadway where his plays were produced, and Key West, the bohemian island and city just off of Florida's southernmost tip. And there were extended trips abroad where he palled around with the likes of Gore Vidal and Truman Capote (at first the three of them together, and then, once Vidal and Capote had a falling-out, separately.) In-between and interspersed and intertwined with all of that were residencies in the aforementioned New Orleans, the setting of a number of his plays, including one of his most famous. If you were listening to that Cavett interview carefully, you would have heard a line read from one of those plays. If you weren't listening carefully (and shame on you for not doing so), I'll repeat it here:  

"They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!"

Obviously that line is packed with allegorical meaning, but that's not the only thing. It's also packed with...

 

 

 

...literal meaning.

(There's a River Styx Road that runs through Cleveland's southern exurbs. I wonder if I could turn that into a play.)

A Streetcar Named Desire wasn't Tennessee William's first Broadway hit. That would have been the St. Louis "memory play" The Glass Menagerie, which came out in 1945, two years earlier. But the success of Streetcar did prove Williams was no one-hit-wonder (in fact, he eventually became a seven-hit wonder, nine-hit wonder if you throw in off-Broadway, ten-hit wonder if you add an original screenplay, eleven-hit wonder if you count a best-selling memoir, a sixteen-hit-wonder if you throw in the movie adaptations, and I think that's it--Oh, wait, there were several highly-rated TV adaptations, and some of his Broadway flops did quite well when performed by regional companies, but I can't count them as hits because my pocket calculator just upped and died on me.) 

In 1951, A Streetcar Named Desire was turned into a movie, starring Vivien Leigh as Blanche, Marlon Brando as Stanley, Kim Hunter as Stella, and--I'm going to let you guess the last one..................That's right, Karl Malden as Mitch, not looking all that much different than he did when he played opposite Michael Douglas in The Streets of San Francisco some twenty years later. Brando, Hunter, and Malden all were in the original 1947 Broadway production (I've gone online and looked at pictures from that production, and Malden STILL looks like he did in The Streets of San Francisco!) 

Here's the trailer: 

If the above doesn't convince you that this movie might not be a bad way to kill 125 minutes, here's a couple of more reasons:

Stanley Kowalski, widely considered to be the villain of the piece (though some literary scholars would consider that an oversimplification.) Was Marlon Brando's hiring an oversimplification? As Williams described it after hearing him read for the part, Brando was "God-sent". Except God hadn't read the play's own instructions, which states Stanley is about 30 years old, the same age as Mitch. Brando was 23, 12 years younger than Malden, and a whopping 15 years younger than Jessica Tandy, who originated the role of Blanche, Stanley's sister-in-law. Even Kim Hunter, who played Blanche's sister and Stanley's wife Stella, was two years older. Director Elia Kazan (who also helmed the film version) privately thought Williams was turned on by Brando. Williams did admit that "he was just about the best-looking young man I've ever seen", but the wily wordsmith also offered this explanation and/or rationalization:  "It had not occurred to me before what an excellent value would come through casting a very young actor in this part. It humanizes the character of Stanley in that it becomes the brutality and callousness of youth rather than a vicious old man ... A new value came out of Brando's reading which was by far the best reading I have ever heard." Whether he said this before or after the cold shower, I can't say, but Brando got the part, got up on stage, and turned on theatergoers. Then he got the film role, went before the camera, and once the prints went out to the nation's movie palaces, turned on moviegoers. In fact, he became a movie star and kept on turning on moviegoers right through the 1950s, and into the 1960s, until his steady diet of Mallomars, cinnamon buns, and jars of peanut butter finally caught up to him (fortunately for him, he had genuine acting talent to fall back on, thus allowing him to make potentially no-longer-turned-on audiences an offer they could not refuse.) Here's Brando in, if not necessarily the best, then at least the most famous scene in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire:    

Lust means never having to say you're sorry.

Charlton Heston and (in make-up) Kim Hunter. No matter her appearance, Hunter seems to have no problem attracting shirtless males.

As I said earlier, Jessica Tandy (right) originated the role of Blanche DuBois on stage, and the theater critics of the day thought she did a superb job, something we have to partially take their word for as the performance was never captured on film (however, we do have the audio .) Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden, at the time all relatively unknown outside New York City, got to repeat their roles in front of a Hollywood camera. Elia Kazan, who got to repeat his role behind a Hollywood camera, also wanted Tandy for the film version, but the studio execs didn't. Although Tandy finally became a household name in her senior years (thanks to such 1980s movies as Cocoon and, especially, Driving Miss Daisy), she wasn't one in 1951. What the execs wanted was an actress with a national following, i.e., a movie star. Vivien Leigh (above) had some prior experience playing a Southern belle, and had also portrayed Blanche on the London stage (husband Larry was the director), so she got the gig. Nothing against Jessica Tandy--I have fond memories of her and Morgan Freeman's humorous exchanges as they motored about the Jim Crow South--but I don't see how Blanche DuBois can get much better than this:   

Tomorrow is another day. At least it is for that paperboy.

Like the character she played, Leigh eventually succumbed to mental illness. In fact, she even blamed that character, claiming Blanche had "tipped me over into madness." 

I still haven't convinced you to watch this movie? You find the whole Southern Gothic thing too off-putting? All that black-and-white drama with now-dead actors is something you just can't relate to? And what's with all the jazz music? Aren't they supposed to listen to the Grand Ole Opry in the South?

Perhaps this charming young woman can help make it more accessible for you:

I love how, after she tells of Stella returning to Stanley, she can't help but blurt out a hushed "stupid". And dig that shocked Mickey Mouse on her jacket. That says it all.

Tennessee Williams father was a southerner who spent spent so much time in the North that it's said he eventually lost his southern accent. Tennessee Williams mother was a northerner who spent so much time in the South that it's said she eventually gained a southern accent. Somehow in transit they hooked up with each other, opposites attracted while going in opposite directions. Cornelius Coffin "C.C." Williams and the former Edwina Dakin never divorced, but it's telling that I'm forced to use separate pictures because I couldn't find one online with both of them in it. Obviously, there were conflicts there. So be it. As any lit professor worth his tenure will tell you, conflict fuels the best fiction, and it fueled Tennessee's plays. There's the conflict between rural calm and urban restlessness, the conflict between cultural enrichment and industrial efficiency, the conflict between the religious and the secular, the conflict between tradition and originality, the conflict between uniformity and individuality, the conflict between homogeneity and multiculturalism, the conflict between nonconformity and economic survival, the conflict between self-actualization and a social life, the conflict between free will and chromosomes,  the conflict between the head and the heart, the conflict between the head and the loins, the conflict between the heart and the loins, the conflict between boy-meets-girl and (as Williams' generation viewed it)  the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name, and, as every bit as pronounced in his work as anything sexual, the conflict between upward mobility and downward mobility. Finally, there's the conflict between the Mason and the Dixon, a line Williams spent his entire life straddling. The Dixon part is what gets everybody's attention, but Williams also had things to say about the Mason. Y'all just have to get past the regional dialects and regional colloquialisms to know what they are. Ultimately, his writing was universal, as all art strives to be. And all artists, be they painters, writers, or actors. Take Vivien Leigh. When she wasn't playing Southern belles, she talked with an English accent!  

 

"Mom, Elvis. Elvis, Mom."

Actually, by the time rock 'n' roll arrived on the scene, Tennessee Williams was about 45 years old, not exactly its target audience, and so probably didn't listen to too much of it. However, he does seem to have been a fan of at least one of its musical antecedents:

 In that interview with Dick Cavett, Williams mentions that during one of his stays, perhaps his first stay, in New Orleans, he'd head to the bar after a full day of writing and listen on the jukebox to the proto-doo wop group The Ink Spots. Here's their biggest hit (which Williams and Cavett try but fail to sing), "If I Didn't Care".  Give it a listen. Who knows? Maybe it will inspire you to write your own Streetcar Named Desire.

Now get back to your typewriters, er, keyboards.

Hey, I hope you enjoyed this trip into the heart of Tennessee (the man, not the state.) I guess that's a bit of hyperbole as I got nowhere near his heart, and, to mix a metaphor, barely scratched the surface of his career (though that's not much of a mixture given the trenchant nature of his work.) As long as this post was, I never got around to Big Daddy, or Carroll Baker in her short nightie in a crib, or Anna Magnani and her tattooed friends, or those hungry little kids that drove Liz Taylor to a shrink. Maybe next time. For now, so long, and remember... 

...be kind to strangers. They depend on it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By George, I Think She's Got It

 

 

 

 

On the left we have Audrey Hepburn, the right Julie Andrews. And if you look in the lower right-hand corner, you'll see a statuette. Recognize it? Somebody won something, but for what, exactly?

No, that's not God in the upper left-hand corner of the Al Hirschfeld-drawn Broadway

poster above, but instead a caricature of a deceased man who didn't even believe in God, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. In the early 1910s, Shaw had written a play titled Pygmalion, an Edwardian era updating of an ancient Greek myth about a statue that comes to life. Only in this update the statue is an already-alive-but-poverty-stricken Cockney flower girl named Eliza Doolittle, who learns to speak the de-Cockneyefied King's English from one Henry Higgins, a brilliant but irascible professor of phonetics. After a rough start, Higgins is able to pass Eliza off as a member of royalty, thus exposing the folly of the European class system as it existed on the eve of World

War I. Unfortunately, though Higgins sees himself as a reformer, he's too misanthropic to take anything other than monetary satisfaction (he wins a bet) from his exposé.  Higgins' idea of a classless society is one where he gets to treat everyone equally like shit, including Eliza, no matter what her syntax. This all may sound like heavy going, but Shaw's genius was making weighty philosophical, political, and economic concerns acceptable subject matter for drawing room comedies. Audiences laughed as they ruminated. In its West End premiere, Eliza was played by Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Higgins by Sir Herbert Tree, at the time two well-known figures of the London stage.  It did very well, running for 118 performances. However, audiences did sometimes express disappointment that Eliza and Higgins don't get together in the end, much to Shaw's irritation. It's not supposed to be a love story! But what it's supposed to be can change over time. In 1938, a very good British film version came out, with Wendy Hiller as Eliza and Leslie Howard as Higgins. It was here that the famous "rain in Spain" line made its debut. Shaw, now 82, was one of three screenwriters credited (out of reportedly six altogether) and probably not the one who pushed the ending closer to romantic reconciliation by having Eliza pay a visit to the lonely phonetics professor. Shaw died in 1950 at the age of 94, clearing the way for an unapologetically romantic reboot as a Broadway musical, My Fair Lady, the poster of which, of course, sits at the top of this very long paragraph (and it ain't over yet!) If you've read the poster, you'll have figured out that Higgins is now played by Rex Harrison, and Eliza is now brought to life by newcomer Julie Andrews. 

 The daughter of show biz parents, Julie Andrews made her Broadway debut at age 19 when a West End musical she was starring in, The Boy Friend, made its Broadway debut. She got a lot of good notices, won the Theatre World Award, and eventually came to the attention of librettist/lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe, who had taken it upon themselves (before they had even secured the rights) to turn Shaw's play into a musical, and figured a show that takes place in England might as well have for its female lead a woman who had grown up in England. That she could sing up a storm probably didn't hurt either. My Fair Lady was  the biggest Broadway hit of the 1950s. Also the 1940s, '30s,'20s, etc, as it went on to run a then-record 2,717 performances. When it came time to cast the film version, Andrews was considered a...

...shoo-in?

So what gives?

     

Jack L. Warner, that's what. By the early 1960s the only Warner brother still at Warner Bros, his studio at his direction shelled out $5.5 million, a record sum at the time, for the film rights to My Fair Lady. Since he ran the place, Warner also had final say on the casting. According to his autobiography, there was "nothing mysterious or complicated" about his decision to bypass Andrews in favor of Audrey Hepburn for the part of Eliza Dolittle. He simply wanted somebody famous. "In Clinton, Iowa and Anchorage, Alaska, and thousands of others cities and towns in our 50 states and abroad you can say Audrey Hepburn, and people instantly know you're talking about a beautiful and talented star." OK, fine, but was Julie Andrews, herself beautiful and talented, really that obscure a figure in 1962? She had followed her stage success in My Fair Lady with another Lerner and Loewe's Broadway smash, Camelot, playing Guinevere opposite Richard Burton's King Arthur. I'll grant you that Broadway stardom may mean something in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut but little anywhere else. However, in 1957, Andrews also played the title character in Rodgers and Hammerstein's live TV version of Cinderella, seen by 100 million people, presumably including those living in Clinton, Iowa. She was a guest star on TV shows hosted by Ed Sullivan, Jack Benny, Dinah Shore, and Garry Moore, all big names in their day. In 1962, Andrews and then-Gary Moore sidekick Carol Burnett got their own TV special, Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall, which won an Emmy. I think it can be said that Julie Andrews was a fairly well-known name by the time Jack Warner purchased the My Fair Lady film rights. True, she had not at that point attained the most exalted show biz title of all, "movie star", having appeared in no movies, but there's a first time for everything. A first time for Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall, all of whom rose to fame during Jack Warner's long reign as a movie mogul. Perhaps it's because Warner was turning 70, and even though he was his eponymous studio's president and majority stockholder, his position may have been less secure as it seems. In the past ten years he had seen fellow movie moguls Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, and David O. Selznick either get pushed out of their jobs or just quit because they couldn't adapt to changing times. Competition from television and an antitrust suit that had forced the studios to divest themselves of their theater chains (or the other way around) meant movies were no longer as profitable as they once were. So Warner just wanted a sure thing. "In my business I have to know who brings people and their money to a movie theater box office," he wrote. "I knew Audrey Hepburn has never made a financial flop." 

 

Even if she wasn't on the Warner's lot singing in a Cockney accent, Julie Andrews spent at least five months of 1963 in front of a motion picture camera in Southern California. Seems there were a few people who DID think she could be a movie star. One was Robert Wise, who wanted to bring a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical to the screen. And there was producer Martin Ransohoff and director Arthur Hiller, who wanted her opposite James Garner in a film shot from a Paddy Chayefsky screenplay titled The Americanization of Emily. Andrews eventually became involved with both of those projects. But not before a man known more for animated cartoons than live-action features got to her first. Actually, Walt Disney had been producing live-action features for a little over a decade, with a few hits here and there, when he showed up backstage at Camelot to talk about her starring in a children's musical for which he had high hopes. Not knowing anything about pre-production and the length of time between an actor agreeing to do a movie and actually doing the movie, which for an elaborate production may take up to a year, she regretfully told him she was three months pregnant. Disney assured her he could wait.

The wait was worth it.

Take it away, Bob...

Julie Andrews also won a Golden Globe that year. Perhaps because those awards aren't as prestigious as the Oscars (though the open bar brings out the stars anyway), she felt she could be a little mischievous in her acceptance speech:

I'm not sure if Warner was laughing or crying. Maybe both.

None of this is meant to reflect poorly on Audrey Hepburn. She did nothing wrong but accept a role she would have been crazy to turn down. And as you saw at the very top of this post, she let herself be photographed with Julie after the latter won her Oscar. The two women eventually became good friends (meanwhile, Hepburn had her own reasons to be miffed at the studio after she found out that, unlike Funny Face or even Breakfast at Tiffany's, it wouldn't be her voice audiences heard during the musical numbers but dubber extraordinaire Marni Nixon.) The competition from television must not have been all that intense in 1964 for there were enough moviegoers to make box office hits of both Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady (which won the Best Picture Oscar.) And the success of the two films marked the beginning of a whole new round of big budget movie musicals, including this monster hit from 20th Century Fox:

 

In her own way, Julie Andrews exposed the folly of the Hollywood class system as it existed on the eve of the Vietnam War. Once a statue comes to life, not even Jack L. Warner can turn it back to stone.

 

 

Intelligent Lives in the Universe

Around 1989 or so I was at the library flipping through a book the title of which I can no longer recall but it was something like Famous Gay People Throughout History. All the usual--and long dead--suspects were there: Sappho, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, etc. The book was breezily written, the author realizing that while the historical gayness of Sappho was a no-brainer, when it comes to someone like King James (best known these days for his Bible), it may be more a matter of conjecture. The fun was in the speculation. And the speculation got revved up quite a bit on the book's final page, which dealt with still-living celebrities who had not yet publicly announced their homosexuality. To avoid any lawsuits, the author had simply provided a page of initials, and it was up to the reader to figure out to whom these initials belonged. One set of initials read L.T. It didn't take much guessing on my part to figure out who that was. Not because of any rumors I'd heard but due to the fact that someone had penciled Lily Tomlin right next to it! Whatever anger I might have felt over the defacement of a library book soon gave way to a sense of intrigue. As a kid I had watched Tomlin on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, and then, as I got older, watched her TV specials, the times she guest-hosted Saturday Night Live, the network showings of her feature films, and her talk show appearances. I found Tomlin funny, and considered myself a fan. Now to find out she was gay! Far from disappointed, I wanted to know more about this aspect of her life. Unfortunately, there was no Internet back then to do further research--remember, I was in the library flipping through a book--and the mainstream media of the day stayed out of Tomlin's personal life, as well they should. And really, it was none of my business. But if that mysterious pencil-carrying library vandal knew this about her, why shouldn't I? It was maybe another ten years before I pieced together not just the puzzle of her life but, as it turned out, her career, too, which has since become public knowledge. So, as this parade-less Pride Month quietly plays itself out, perhaps Tomlin's story can provide a bit of inspiration. It's not a float, but you won't have to go through the trouble of looking for a spot on a crowded sidewalk.

The daughter of Southern Baptists from Kentucky who relocated to Detroit during the Great Depression, Lily Tomlin attended Wayne State University originally intending to study biology, but soon switched her major to drama. However, keep in mind that drama is not always the same as dramatic. After college and in-between auditions and whatever roles she would have gotten from such auditions, Tomlin did stand-up comedy, first in Detroit, and then in New York City. In the latter location, she continued to study acting at the highly-regarded HB Studio. She appeared on TV for the first time in 1965 on The Merv Griffin Show. That and other television appearances brought her to the attention of the producers of the aforementioned Laugh-In. Original cast member Judy Carne was leaving, and Tomlin was brought in as a replacement. Tomlin ended up becoming the last great breakout star to emerge from the sketch comedy show. Among the characters she became famous for were Ernestine, the 1940s-in-the-1960s telephone operator, and Edith Ann, the philosophical, lisping little girl on the big chair. Declining ratings eventually forced the once-popular Laugh-In off the air in 1973, but that had no notable effect on Tomlin's career, at least not in the negative sense. Her first comedy album, This Is a Recording, peaked at #15 on Billboard, the highest ever for a solo comedienne, and won a Grammy. Naturally, there was a demand for an encore. It was how to meet this demand that now proved vexing. Out of economic necessity, Tomlin had written all or most of her stand-up material up to that point, but had never truly considered herself a writer. Her performances were limited  by what words she could come up with to put in her characters mouths. To her fans, that didn't seem like much of a limitation at all, but Tomlin wanted the act to have more depth than she felt she herself was capable. Now that she could afford one, Tomlin set about finding herself a writer.

Enter Jane Wagner. Compared to Lily Tomlin, biographical details are a bit harder to come by, even on her own website. She was born in Tennessee during the 1930s, wrote for the school newspaper, but was also interested in acting and eventually became a leading player at the Barter Theatre in Virginia. Then, like Tomlin, off to New York City to really make it as an actress. Instead, she made it as a designer, creating the  “Teach Me, Read Me” children’s bed sheets for Fieldcrest. Finally, writing. In 1969, when I was in the second grade, Wagner made her first professional sale as a writer, an hour-long children's special (almost immediately adapted into a book) titled J.T. Here's where that gap in her biography becomes, for me, particularly frustrating. Did Wagner send an unsolicited teleplay to CBS, or was this done through an agent? Either way, it was smart of the network to greenlight the project. Kevin Hooks, in an exceptional performance (of which there was another forthcoming in the feature film Sounder, and he was pretty good as Morris Thorpe in TV's The White Shadow, too), is the title character, a young boy living in Harlem who adopts a one-eyed alley cat. I was watching this on the computer a short while ago when I suddenly realized I had seen it the first time around! I remember liking it back then though my second-grade self was much disturbed by the feline's ultimate fate (honestly, my fifty-something self wasn't too pleased about it either.) J.T. went on to win the prestigious Peabody Award. Though ostensibly for children, it certainly can be appreciated by adults. One adult who appreciated it was Lily Tomlin, who then got in contact with Wagner, asking for help on her Edith Ann album. This I find a bit puzzling. J.T. may have been high-caliber television, but it wasn't a comedy. Tomlin never tells you where Edith Ann lives, but I very much doubt that it's Harlem. Nevertheless, Tomlin wanted Edith Ann to be less a caricature of a little girl and more like a real youngster, and Wagner wanted to show everyone that she, too, could be funny. According to Tomlin, when the two finally met in person, they immediately "clicked". 

The result was 1972's And That's the Truth. Unlike on Laugh-In, where Tomlin was dressed up as Edith Ann and addresses the viewer directly, here she relies totally on her voice to achieve the same effect since,  after all, there's no viewer, just a listener (well, there would have been viewers in the night club where this album was recorded, but even there I think she was out of costume.) But instead of being addressed directly, the listener gets to listen in as Edith Ann pesters a neighborhood lady (also voiced by Tomlin) walking to her home and then again at that home itself. The album did well, peaking at # 41 on Billboard's Hot 200 chart. Jane Wagner was also on the writing staff on all four of Tomlin's Emmy Awards-laden specials made between 1973 and 1981. The first three were produced by former Laugh-In writer and future Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels. The fourth, Lily Sold Out, which ends with out heroine in a Las Vegas pool amidst a floating pair of push-up bra inserts, was produced by Wagner. The duo also collaborated on a couple of feature films, Moment by Moment and The Incredible Shrinking Woman, neither one of which garnered much in the way of critical acclaim or box office receipts, but that hardly slowed them down. Their real forte was the stage, where Tomlin got her start, except this time that stage wouldn't be in...

...some cellar nightclub.

In 1977, Tomlin became the first woman to appear solo in a Broadway play, Appearing Nitely, written and directed by Wagner. There were all the old standbys, such as Ernestine the operator, and suburban housewife Mrs. Judith Beesley, and some new characters such as Trudy the bag lady, elderly blues revivalist Sister Boogie Woman, and Rick, a macho habitué of  single bars (among other things, Tomlin pioneered male drag.) The show toured the country, and was made into an album, Lily Tomlin on Stage, that earned a Grammy nomination. But it was Tomlin's and Wagner's next Broadway show, eight years later, that remains their career-defining achievement as a team, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. It's still a one-woman show, but this time, there's actually a narrative running through the whole thing. Trudy the bag lady is receiving alien signals through her tattered umbrella. It seems the otherworldly beings are curious about what we Earthlings are like, and Tomlin provides them with a cross-section of (American) humanity, both male and female. The play won a Tony for Tomlin as Best Actress, and was turned into both a book and a movie. And it's a tribute to Wagner's talents as a writer that the play is now occasionally performed without Tomlin (one Los Angeles production transformed it from a one-person to a twelve-person play, each actor playing a different character.)

 
As you may have guessed by now, or maybe even have known for decades (I'm talking to you, library book-defacer), Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner didn't just click professionally but romantically as well.  By the time And That's the Truth went on sale in record shops, they had become lovers, and have remained lovers ever since. And in 2013 they became more than that when they picked up their licenses and were married in a private ceremony. Prior to them tying the knot, they were somewhat discreet about their relationship. In 1975, Time magazine offered Tomlin the cover if she came out, but she said no (two years later, all the TV specials and first Broadway show got her the cover anyway.) Like a lot of celebrities in recent years, Tomlin and Wagner relied on a kind of osmosis to get the word out as the LGBTQ movement picked up steam. You can pass judgement on them for their lengthy discretion if you wish, but few couples, gay or straight, have so successfully merged their professional and personal lives, and for that they should take a great deal of Pride.

The above clip is from the feature film version of The Search for Signs of Intelligence Life in the Universe. In the original stage show you wouldn't have seen the inside of a car with rain pelting the windows, nor Lily Tomlin in three different outfits and three different hairstyles, the editing to pull something like that off downright impossible in a live performance. No, it would have been Tomlin wearing black pants and a white blouse throughout the whole thing, changing only her voice and facial expression as she switched from one character to another. Pure acting.

 

In Memoriam: Buck Henry 1930-2020

 I guess because it doesn't quite gibe with his irreverent comedy style or, as Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield put it, his status as a "1970s New Hollywood renegade", I was surprised to learn Buck Henry had come from a show biz background. At least one half of a show biz background. His mother was silent film actress Ruth Taylor, who married a stockbroker when talkies became popular and moved to New York City. Still, she must have retained some ties to her old profession, as her son got to meet Humphrey Bogart on the set of The Maltese Falcon when he was about ten years old. Henry's own show biz debut was right after World War II in a New York City-area touring production of Life With Father, playing one of the sons (don't know which one, as there were four) when he was 15. After high school, Henry went to Dartmouth College. Though he wrote for the campus humor magazine Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, upon graduation he went back into acting, but not for long, as he was drafted. An Army aptitude test decided he could best serve his country as a helicopter mechanic in West Germany, but after a year of that, he managed to get a transfer to Special Services, the entertainment arm of the military branch. There he wrote, directed, and starred in a musical titled Beyond the Moon, about a couple of servicemen who are accidentally rocketed to a planet full of beautiful women (the movies Cat-Women of the Moon, Abbot and Costello Go to Mars, The Queen of Outer Space, and Fire Maidens of Outer Space all have similar plots. Obviously there was a whole generation of horny heterosexual young men who saw the rocket ship as a phallic symbol.)

Despite having written his own musical, upon release from the Army Henry went back to acting, taking whatever small part he could get in stage productions and early television dramas. This all changed when he joined the The Premise, one of the many improvisational comedy groups that popped up in the wake of Second City, performing in a small theater in Greenwich Village, his castmates included George Segal and Theodore J. Flicker (best known as the writer and director of  the 1967 movie The President's Analyst, a satire of the national security state, and co-creator of the 1970's police sitcom Barney Miller.) Now to understand just how important this was to Henry's career, know that one of the defining feature's of improv theater is a segment of the show where the performers take suggestions from the audience, and then act upon those suggestions then and there. In In essence, they're writing, and many a improv actor, including the aforementioned Flicker, Elaine May, and, a decade later, Harold Ramis, did go on to become the more traditional type of writer, the once hunched over a typewriter or computer. And so to did Buck Henry once talent scouts for Steve Allen showed up in the audience. Henry was invited to join Allen's new variety show (or simply an ongoing variety show that had simply been shunted from one network to another) as a writer-performer. Among his castmates were Tim Conway, Jim Nabors, and the Smother Brothers, as well as Allen mainstays Louis Nye, Tom Poston, Pat Harrington, Gabriel Dell, and wife Jayme Meadows. Unfortunately, the show only lasted 13 weeks, but Henry now known as both a writer and an actor and would bounce back and forth between the two, sometimes on the same project, for the rest of his life.

While all this was going on, Henry became involved in a bit of tomfoolery dreamed up by his friend Alan Abel, a humor writer best known for staging elaborate hoaxes that were taken quite seriously by a gullible media. One of his earliest pranks had Henry--this was before he became a recognizable show biz personality--pose as G. Clifford Prout, Jr, president of The Society for the Indecency of Naked Animals, which advocated putting clothes on animals as way to avoid accidentally being exposed to dogs, cats, and elephant's genitals. Always eager for the odd story, the print and electronic media of the day lapped the story up with without doing the necessary fact-checking. Henry-as-Prout appeared on The Today Show where then-co-host Barbara Walters tried to talk reason into him by pointing out that fur and feathers were natural clothing. Amazingly, the hoax lasted from 1959 until 1962. Abel and Henry actually had to give back money donated to the cause, as they were only interested in playing mind games and not cheating people out of their earnings (plus, they didn't want to be charged with mail fraud.) It all fell apart when the staff of the CBS Evening News recognized Henry, but only AFTER he had been interviewed on the air by Walter Cronkite, who was furious when he found out that's the way it isn't.

Back to Henry's career in show biz. After Steve Allen's show ended, he got a job as a writer on Garry Moore's variety show (on which a young Carol Burnett was a regular). After that he was again an writer-performer on That Was the Week That Was. Based on a British show of the same name, it was hosted by David Frost (who also emceed the original UK version), and featured radio comedian Henry Morgan, a young Alan Alda, and on occasion song satirist Tom Lehrer and the comedy team of Nichols and May. I've never seen this show, but it's been described as a combination of topical comedy sketches, the songs of Tom Lehrer (performed byNancy Ames) and interviews, it's seen by some as a precursor to The Daily Show. According to Buck Henry, the Left-skewing show went off the air after two years because the Republican Party, in the interest of equal time, kept looking for ways to preempt it.

This all brings us to the mid-1960s. The success of the first few James Bond movies had led to a secret agent craze in popular entertainment. Dean Martin's Matt Helm and James Coburn's Derek Flint were mildly successful knockoffs of the Bond formula, and on TV you had The Man from U.N.C.L.E, I Spy, and even a secret agent western The Wild, Wild, West. it was all ripe for parody (though by Goldfinger, the third in the series, the Bond films were pretty much parodying themselves.) There's different stories on how it began--Henry tells one of those stories in the video section at bottom--but it seems a producer asked Borscht Belt comic-turned-TV writer Mel Brooks to write a pilot film for a spy comedy. But Brooks didn't of being hunched over a typewriter--he was used to the crowded writers rooms of Your Show of Show's and Caesar's Hour, where people just threw out ideas. Well, nobody was going to give Brooks a crowded room, but Henry was enlisted to help with the pilot, and the result was Get Smart, starring Don Adams and Barbara Feldon with Edward Platt as the head of an intelligence agency called CONTROL, which did battle with the mischievous organization KAOS. After the pilot was sold, Brooks left to do other things (such as the write and direct the first film version of The Producers.) Henry, however, stayed on for two more years as story editor. This meant that final teleplay draft, or what's sometimes called the shooting script, went through Henry's typewriter, no matter who got the on-screen credit (it's a Writers Guild thing.) A master of the comic non-sequitur, Henry was able to establish the TV series overall tone, which other story editors had to hew to once he left. Even though Mel Brooks is asked about Get Smart to this very day, it was really Buck Henry's comic sensibility that prevailed (but, hey, you don't have to believe me, just see what Barbara Feldon has to say in the video section.)

After he left Get Smart, Buck Henry created the superhero parody Captain Nice, but it fared poorly as as it was scheduled against another superhero parody Mr. Terrific, the potential audience for each show canceling each other out (plus, people were starting to get tired of Batman, which had inspired these parodies.) But it didn't hurt Henry any as he was about to get the biggest break of his career. A comedian-turned-stage director-turned-filmmaker named Mike Nichols, whom had been a childhood friend, enlisted Henry to write a film adaptation of a novella by Charles Webb  about a recent college graduate who has an affair with the wife of his father's law partner. Since Webb's novel was almost entirely dialogue, Henry's screenplay followed it pretty closely, though he did add the famous "one word: plastics", a suggestion to young Benjamen Braddock as to how he should spend the rest of his life. The Graduate (also the name of Webb's novel) was a huge hit at the box office, ushered in a whole new style of Hollywood filmmaking (though not a whole new style of filmmaking, period. All of Nichol's cinematic tricks--long takes, fragmented editing, point-of-view visuals, use of zoom lenses, hand-held camera work--had earlier been used by the Italians and the French.) But Henry's screenplay, especially the first half, was funny enough that it could have been filmed in a more conventional manner and still been a box office hit. However, that doesn't necessarily make Henry the unsung hero of The Graduate. As I said, there was the original source material, as well as a first draft of the script by Calder Willingham. Henry claimed never to have read Willingham's version, and Nichols backed him up on that, but Willingham nevertheless brought a complaint before the Writers Guild of America-West Arbitration Committee. That committee did indeed see similarities between the two scripts, which Henry argued was simply because each was based on the same novel. Unswayed, one of the arbitrators told Henry he should have changed the names of the characters. Here's to you, Mrs. Peterson. And the onscreen credit ended up reading "Screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry" (Henry once mused that it may have been a good thing that the screenplay lost out at the Oscars as it saved him the awkwardness of having to go onstage and accept the award alongside Willingham.) I read Charles Webb's original novel years ago but can no longer remember what was what. The know the general consensus is that if there's something in the film that's not in the book, then either Buck Henry or Mike Nichols put it there. Shared credit notwithstanding, The Graduate became the cornerstone of Henry's writing career. From 1968 until the end of the century, he would be a highly sought-after, and highly-paid screenwriter. Along with two more films for Nichols, Catch-22 (1970) and The Day of the Dolphin (1972), Henry also wrote Candy (1968), The Owl and the Pussycat (1970), Heaven Can Wait (1978; he also co-directed with Warren Beatty), First Family (1980, also directed), To Die For (1995), and Town & Country (2001; one of many writers on a troubled production that took two years to film, but, according to some accounts, Henry walked away with a cool $3 million.)

For all his success as a screenwriter, Buck Henry still acted. In fact, his acting credits outnumber his writing credits. They were usually small roles, sometimes in films in which he worked on the script, such as The Graduate, where he played the hotel desk clerk trying to make sense of Benjamin Braddock's nervous request for a room. Among his notable roles in films he did not write, there was outer space alien David Bowie's bifocaled business partner in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), a doomed mob accountant in Gloria (1980), a sex-crazed bank manager in Eating Raoul (1982), one of three fisherman who just as soon not have their vacation interrupted in Short Cuts (1993), and a heavily layered IRS agent in Grumpy Old Men (1993) He even played himself in The Player (1992), pitching a Graduate sequel to studio executive Tim Robbins. Yet some of Henry's most memorable roles weren't in the movies but on the medium he thought he'd left behind: television.

After Johnny Carson had demanded that Tonight Show reruns that aired at 11:30 on Saturday nights get yanked from the schedule, a  former Laugh-In writer and a producer of an Emmy award-winning Lily Tomlin special named Lorne Michaels was given the opportunity by NBC to create a new program in that time slot. What he came up with was a 90-minute live variety show that was heavy on sketch comedy aptly called Saturday Night (Live was added to the title a year later.) The show was geared to an under-30 audience, and Michaels wanted guest host that would appeal to that age group. You wouldn't think that would be Buck Henry, who was 45 by then, but there was a certain hip cachet to having been the writer of The Graduate, and that was good enough for Michaels. NBC might have found it curious when trying to promote the show. Though very well-known in the entertainment industry, Henry was hardly a household name in 1975. In fact, during his first few time hosting the show, the comedy revolved around him being a nobody. Once, during the opening monologue, as Henry talked, the names of big stars who had turned down requests to host were scrolled upward on the screen. But Henry didn't remain a nobody for long. Despite the age difference between him and what at the time was called The Not Ready For Prime Time Players, Henry fit right in with the 20-somthing actors. After all, like most of them, he had got his start in improv comedy, albeit about a decade-and-a-half earlier. Henry hosted SNL ten times between 1976 and 1980, and by the time of his final appearance he had indeed become a household name, providing the household had members in their teens or twenties. One of the reasons for his popularity among the cast and crew was his willingness to appear in sketches that other guest hosts had turned. Sometimes with good reason. During its first five years SNL was known for its shock comedy, and Henry appeared in of its most shocking bits, the notorious Uncle Roy sketch (written by two women, Rosie Shuster and Ann Beats), in which a pedophile babysitter persuades his two prepubescent nieces (played by Gilda Radner and Laraine Newman, both in real-life well past the age of puberty) to pose for him in sexually suggestive positions. The innocuous little girls didn't know these were sexual positions and found the whole thing fun (years later in an interview for the Television Academy, Henry apologized to anybody who may have had a real-life Uncle Roy as a child.) Surprisingly, this wasn't the Henry sketch that generated the most angry mail. That instead was skit where played a stunt coordinator involved in a movie about child, in fact infant, abuse. Right before the moment of violence is to be filmed, the "star" baby is taken away and replaced by a stunt double, who is then thrown against the walls and furniture. No real infant was actually harmed while performing the sketch. Both the star baby and the stunt baby were obviously dolls, but it was still a bit too much for some people watching at home. A sketch that wasn't controversial but may have caused Henry a bit of grief anyway involved John Belushi's Samurai character. These were a series of skits where combined Japanese martial techniques with mundane jobs such as being a motel desk clerk or operating a delicatessen. In a sketch titled "Samurai Stockbroker", Henry, as Mr. Dantley, leans a bit too closely to hear some stock tips and gets hit by a sword. This wasn't in the script. I'd like to think Belushi's sword was nothing more than a prop, but can't actually confirm this. Real or not, Henry did get a cut on the head, and had to spend the rest of show wearing a bandage. Though it wasn't meant to happen and this was live TV, Chevy Chase made it one of his news items on Weekend Update. Furthermore, for the rest of the night, various cast members began popping up in sketches wearing bandages. As Henry said goodbye at the end, all the Not Ready for Prime Time Players stood behind him swathed up in a show of first aid solidarity. How's that for improv theater?

If you judge show biz success solely in terms of name recognition (and you really shouldn't) then those 10 Saturday Night Live appearances (11 if you count a Mardi Gras special that aired on a Sunday night) would have marked a high point in Buck Henry's career. His association with that show ended once the original cast left (some sooner than others.) And not just the actors. Lorne Michaels left for a few years, too. One of Michael's projects during his absence from SNL was another prime-time sketch comedy show titled The New Show that perhaps should have been called Friday Night Videotaped. With an ensemble cast of just four people, one of whom was Henry and another of whom was Dave Thomas of SCTV fame. Since the main cast was so puny, there were several guest stars rather than just one, including Steve Martin, John Candy, Catherine O'Hara, Gilda Radner, and Laraine Newman. The show is best remembered for Martin's Michael Jackson "Billie Jean" video parody, in which he had to stomp on the sidewalk in order to get it to light up. I recall The New Show as being funny enough, though there was certain listlessness to the way the whole thing was paced, as if after all those years of producing a live show, Michaels forgot that one of the advantages of tape is that it can be edited. The show never found an audience, and was canceled after just nine weeks. Michaels went back to SNL, but for some reason, Henry didn't follow. But their association didn't end completley as Henry guest-starred a few times as Liz Lemon's goofy father on the Micheals-produced 30 Rock. Aside from all things Lorne Micheal, what used to be a high point in an American actor's career before movies and TV came along, and still has a certain amount of prestige attached to it, Henry, along with George Segal and Wayne Knight (Newman on Seinfeld) appeared in a hit Broadway play. OK, the play I'm talking about, Art, was already a Tony-award-winning hit before these three actors signed on to play roles originally created (in the Broadway version of the Yasmina Reza's French comedy) by Alan Alda, Victor Garber, and Alfred Molina, but audiences still turned out to see Henry, Segal and Knight anyway. Henry, by this time in his 70s, again appeared on Broadway as part of a large ensemble in the Paul Osborne drama Morning's at Seven, which ran for about four months. About ten years ago he appeared in Lisa Ebersole's Off-Broadway comedy Mother, opposite Holland Taylor (of Two and a Half Men fame.) The play itself got mixed reviews, but the critics all agreed Henry and Taylor were very good in it.

In preparing this post, I read and watched four or five different interviews with Buck Henry. In about three of those interviews, he referred to himself as "lazy". Given all he accomplished, my jaw almost hit the keyboard when I first came across that self-description. What, so he was just in the right place at the right time over and over and over again? It could have been false modesty, I suppose, but I watched and listened, rather than read, one of these interviews, and he said it so matter-of-factly I have to think he meant it. But why? I wonder if by lazy he means some of higher aspirations of a life in the arts. Henry was by and large a hired gun, writing and acting in projects initiated by others. That's just the way it goes in popular entertainment, popular culture. Certainly not everybody, but most involved in mass media write, direct, draw, paint, sing, dance, and otherwise perform whatever someone pays them to write, direct, draw, paint, sing, dance, and otherwise perform. That doesn't leave much opportunity for a personal statement, or a artistic vision. But one reason I spend so much time writing about pop culture on this blog is I want to see if I find that statement or vision anyway, no matter what the odds. And Henry was really too smart not to have at least a little bit of his psyche sneak into his work-for-hire. But what was his artistic vision, his personal statement? To answer that question to my favorite part of his career, the time he spent on Get Smart. Asked once if the secret agent sitcom was realistic, Henry said no, that instead, reality was "extrapolated" into the television make-believe. What did he mean by that?

Here's my guess. In one episode that Henry is credited with writing, a grizzled, one-legged sea captain reminisces about the time he did battle with the Great White Whale.

Pointing to the wooden leg, Maxwell Smart asks, "Did the Great White Whale do that?"

"No," the sea captain replies. "That was done by a Small Blue Convertible."

Reality bites. Maybe that was Buck Henry's personal statement