Arthur Anderson (1922-2016)

Though I couldn’t call the late Arthur Anderson a friend, we certainly knew and liked one-another.  I had been meeting him on-and-off since the early 1980s, when I was on the board that organized a yearly seminar on vintage radio, The Friends of Old Time Radio convention (FOTR). 

FOTR, run from its inception till its end just a few years ago (in 2009) by Jay Hickerson, was unlike other conventions.  The three-day event would have multiple recreations of vintage radio shows starring the very people who starred in them during the 30s, 40s and 50s, and the event was small enough to create a feeling of family among regular attendees.  I was in college when I went to my first FOTR convention, and well into my 40s for my last.  If that doesn’t say something about Hickerson, vintage radio fans, and the event, then nothing does.

The most important names in radio drama attended FOTR at one time or another, and several were regulars every year.  Anderson was in that latter category, and I actually had the pleasure of appearing with him in several radio recreations.  (One of the great joys of FOTR was that fans and attendees were often part of the recreations; better still, there was a dinner event two nights of the three, and often you were seated next to the likes of Jackson Beck or Burgess Meredith.  How cool was that?)

Anderson was a fixture on Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater (1938 – where you can hear Anderson in Treasure Island and Life With Father), and a regular on the classic children’s program, Let’s Pretend (1928-1954).  His story – in a highly fictionalized form – is told in the film Me and Orson Welles (2009), where the handsome Zac Efron played young Anderson.  (Anderson was actually much younger than Efron in the film, which allowed filmmakers to incorporate romance into the story.)

Anderson can be seen in the Woody Allen film  Zelig (1983), and in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969) and on television in Car 54 Where Are You, as well as the more sober Law and Order.  And he worked till the end, doing voices for commercials (his is the voice of the Lucky Charms leprechaun from 1963 till 1992), cartoons and the like, and being the best spokesman vintage radio could ever have.  As Anderson said: I never got the girl, not in 19 seasons. I was never starred, I was never featured. But I always worked.

Anderson was unfailingly friendly and one of that rare vanishing breed: the jobbing New York actor.  He and his late wife, Alice, were always a pleasure to see and both always had terrific stories to tell.  He was really the last of the great voices from the classic era of radio drama, and we won’t see his like again.  He will be missed.

Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx by Stefan Kanfer

Few figures throw a mightier shadow over the 20^th Century cultural landscape than Groucho Marx (1890-1977), born Julius Henry Marx to assimilating German Jews in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  With three of his four brothers – Chico, Harpo and Zeppo – he created several of Hollywood’s greatest comedies, and, as a single act later on, became a celebrated wit, humorist and game show host.  His eyebrows, mustache and eyeglasses have become shorthand for comedy and his insouciant, insulting delivery is echoed to this day in comedians as diverse as Adam Sandler and Woody Allen.

Sadly, Groucho Marx was like many other great comedians before and since, a deeply sad, melancholy and difficult man.  Groucho is revealed, warts and all, in a stunning biography by Stefan Kanfer called Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx.  Kanfer details Groucho’s troubled relationship with his mother, Minnie, who pushed all of her sons into show business and drove them on until they were successful, no matter the cost.  It was Minnie who took the quiet, bookish Groucho out of school and insisted that he go on the road – a move that the would-be doctor Groucho never forgot nor ever forgave.

Kanfer also looks at Groucho’s relations with his brothers.  Chico, the oldest, was a compulsive gambler and womanizer who seemed, oddly enough, beloved by everyone who knew him.  Things came easy to Chico, and Groucho resented that, along with the fact that Minnie loved Chico best.  Harpo, who clearly had some kind of undiagnosed learning disability, was often the subject of Groucho’s most condescending japes.  However Harpo was a genuinely happy man – it could be said Harpo had a talent for happiness – and this was inexplicable to the suspicious, touchy and often abrasive Groucho.  The two younger brothers, Zeppo and Gummo (who never really embraced show business) were never a significant part of Groucho’s life, but he did feel a responsibility for them, and often made arrangements to further their careers and businesses.  (Groucho often behaved as if he were the oldest brother – and was indeed the only brother upon whom a level of maturity rested.  It did nothing to improve his happiness.)

Kanfer shows that Groucho was equally inept in his romantic life.  He married three times, twice to women young enough to be his daughters.  All three marriages ended with Groucho emotionally pushing these women away from him – all three of them finding solace in alcohol.  His relations with his children were also messy – neither of his two daughters nor his son had much to do with the old man in later life, citing countless putdowns, oppressions, disappointments and casual brutalities as the reason.  One frightful illustration of Groucho’s child-rearing capabilities is evident in a bedtime story he told his daughter:

Tommy was a poor little boy.  He got up one morning and his mother said, “There is no food in the house, so you better go out and get some money.”  Tommy went out and he was hungry.  As he was walking along he saw a little girl run across the street just as a car was coming along.  He dashed out on the street and saved the little girl’s life.  The little girl’s nurse said, “Oh, you have saved the little girl’s life.  Her father is rich and he will reward you.”  So they wet to the little girl’s house and the nurse told the father that Tommy had saved the little girl’s life.  And the father said to Tommy, “You have saved my little girl’s life and I will reward you.  Here is $4,000.”  And Tommy said, “Oh, good, now I can buy some food.  I have not eaten anything all day.”  And the father said, “Wait a minute.  Here are some cookies and a glass of milk.”  So Tommy drank the whole glass of milk and ate all the cookies.  He was really hungry.  When he finished, the father said, “You better go home now and here is your money: $3,500.”  He had reconsidered.

Groucho Marx did not love people and always expected the worse.  To him people in general, and women in particular, were parasitic, scheming and untrustworthy.  This makes the tragedy that was the final act of Groucho’s life even more heartbreaking.  In his dotage, after driving his family and many of his friends away, Groucho became entangled with a deranged adventuress named Erin Fleming (1941-2003), who spent the last few years of Groucho’s life alternately abusing him and siphoning off his cash.  The family descended and a series of legal battles began, ending only 11 years after Groucho’s death.  Fleming spent the next two decades in and out of mental hospitals before committing suicide.  This final relationship seemed curiously fated for Groucho … he expected the worst in people, and found it only by seeking out the worst people.

Kanfer’s book is wonderfully written and he has a clean, clear prose style.  Despite this, his book is alternately delightful and depressing – Groucho’s early salad days, when the Marx Brothers were crystalizing and taking Broadway by storm are exhilarating, but the tales of his middle-and-old age were ghastly laundry lists of bad behavior, paranoia, jealousy and emotional self destruction.

However interesting the personal life of Groucho Marx – and serious Marxists are encouraged to seek out Kanfer’s book – what really matters is the body of work he left behind.  Horse Feathers (1932), Duck Soup (1933) and A Night at the Opera (1935) are among the finest movie comedies ever made, and if we must remember what an unhappy man Groucho Marx was in real life, we must temper that sad realization with the generations of happiness he has created.

Paris Isn’t Burning

Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen’s latest film, has received some of the best reviews this talented comedian and filmmaker has received in years.  It is indeed funny, but I believe its great critical reception simply results from its … not being all that bad.

Allen has made some wonderful, affecting films, among them Manhattan (1979), Annie Hall (1977), Stardust Memories (1980) and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989.  But in recent years, Allen has been guilty of some truly wretched films, including Celebrity (1998), Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) and Small Time Crooks (2000).

My personal favorites, though, has always been Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and Radio Days (1987).  These, along with Bullets Over Broadway (1994) explore Allen’s love for mid-20^th Century Americana, an era where pop and fine art overlapped in a strange and wonderful alchemy.  Allen’s love-affair with the American Century was not uncomplicated; his valentines often suffered a little arrhythmia.  But the affection was undeniable. 

Allen returns to this era with Midnight in Paris, though this time focusing on a European locale.  Midnight chronicles the plight of screenwriter Owen Wilson, engaged to a shrill, upper-class vulgarian and dreaming during their Paris trip of the palmy 1920s of Hemmingway, Stein, Dali and the Fitzgeralds.

One night, after his fiancée heads out with friends, Wilson is picked up in a vintage cab ant taken to a party hosted by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, with Cole Porter playing piano in the background.  Later in the evening he meets Hemmingway and has the opportunity to have Gertrude Stein review his novel.

This is a delicious premise, and eventually Wilson meets everyone who was anyone in The Movable Feast, including Dali, Josephine Baker, T. S. Eliot, and Picasso.  So why is the resulting film so … lifeless?

Part of the problem must rest with Wilson.  An engaging and appealing performer, Wilson is the quintessential second banana and cannot carry a picture on his own.  (He also stumbled through the film looking in desperate need of a shower, shave and fresh clothes.)  The film is not helped by the fact that all of the guest-starring luminaries simply cross the stage, perform as expected, and then vanish.  Zelda is beautiful and unbalanced, check; Hemmingway a tedious jerk, check; Dali self-obsessed and rather ridiculous, check; Stein an earth mother, check, check, check…

But the key fault with the film is that the tone is curiously wistful for a comedy.  Wilson ultimately learns that there is no such thing as a Golden Age, or, rather, every age is a Golden Age.  He says it, at least, and shambles sleepily into a happy ending, but one wonders... is there no such thing as a Golden Age?  Is there no such thing as cultural loss?

I’m not sure that Allen, as screenwriter or director, really wants us to examine that question too closely.  Wasn’t Paris in the 20s something of a Golden Age?  Certainly it was compared to Paris under Vichy.  (Or Moscow under Stalin, for that matter.)  And hasn’t New York lost something of its glamour, for example, the silver-plated age of jazz clubs, speakeasies and a vital, interesting arts scene?

Of course, it would be professional suicide for a filmmaker say that the age in which his audience lives is rather drab and uninteresting, vulgar and silly compared to earlier eras.  But one cannot help thinking that Allen feels exactly that way, and the happy ending Wilson finds in Paris 2011 is a compromise at best.

Midnight in Paris is not an objectionable film.  Like most of Allen’s work, it is personal, idiosyncratic and intimate.  We would be diminished as a culture without him, though not all o f his films can be terrific.  You won’t dislike Midnight, but you will leave thinking about where to go for dinner.