REVIEW POTPOURRI: Music, TV and books!

George Raft

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

George Raft

Having for so long equated actor George Raft (1901-1980) with his role as the Saint Valentine’s Day killer/bootlegger Spats Columbo in the 1958 comedy Some Like It Hot, I found it interesting to see him in a good guy role in the 1952 film noir Loan Shark. He portrays a just-released ex-convict Joe Gargen who simply wants to live a quiet life and mind his own business.

Through his sister’s husband, he lands a job at a tire plant.

Unfortunately, he finds out there’s a gang of loan sharkers preying on workers there and at other plants. And after his brother-in-law is killed because he tries to rally workers to fight back, Joe decides to go undercover to find the individuals behind the operation.

The script was written by Martin Rackin, who also did a superb one for 1950s The Enforcer with Humphrey Bogart. And with a very good support cast, including Dorothy Hart, Paul Stewart and John Hoyt, the movie is highly entertaining.

Black List

I am watching the 10th and very unfortunately last season of NBC’s Black List starring James Spader as Raymond Reddington, a master criminal who knows everything there is to know about every other criminal and becomes a secret informant for a secret branch of the FBI.

In its 10 seasons, Spader constantly steals the show with his wit and insights.

Elevator Music

Lee deForest

A 1995 book entitled Elevator Music, by Joseph Lanza, is the first to provide a history of easy listening. Its practitioners in the U.S. include the orchestras of Lawrence Welk and Mantovani, the synthesizer musician Yanni, pianist Richard Clayder­man and Celtic New Age singer Enya, etc. With all due respect to individual talent, this brand of music making from them relaxes people, provides background noise and even works as a sleeping pill.

According to the author, easy listening came in with early radio and one of its inventors Lee De Forest believed “in the physical existence of a universal medium termed either, …’those silent etheric voices, which seem often less of nature than of the spirit realm.’…..Merging the language of science and fantasy, we can infer that from ether came ethereal music” – thus a jump from ethereal to elevator music that lifts the passive listener to the shining stars of the solar system and its dreamland. Enough said!

Hunter Thompson

Hunter Thompson

The late writer Hunter Thompson (1937-2005) created the term Gonzo Journalism which is a form of journalism having little to do with objectivity and more to do with the subjective participation of the reporter and whatever the point of view is being conveyed by him.

In his crazily witty 1988 book A Genera­tion of Swine, Thompson not only mentions the well-known fact of Benjamin Franklin flying his kite during a thunderstorm and getting a shock but also blubbering like a baby every time a thunderstorm occurred after that experience, which just might be a fabrication of Thompson’s imagination.

Rachmaninoff

Rachmaninoff

I wrote some months ago about composer Sergei Rachmaninoff’s desert island melodic masterpiece, the Second Symphony, and how it has generated several distinguished recordings during the last 80 years, including four different ones by his close friend Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

A recording from September 19 and 20, 1994, and released by the BBC Music Magazine featured the late Edward Downes (1924-2009) conducting the BBC Philharmonic in a performance that glows with a consummate combination of power, beauty, rhythmic pulse and a shining array of exquisite details . And copies are available from Internet vendors such as Ebay and Amazon.

During the last two years of his life, Downes had been going both blind and deaf, and suffering from other health problems after hip replacement, totally dependent on his younger wife Joan’s caregiving.

Meanwhile she had come down with pancreatic cancer and had just a few months to live. Both believing that life under these conditions was no longer viable, they jointly terminated their lives at an assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland, with their son and daughter in attendance, on July 10, 2009. Downes was 85, Joan 74.

An example of classy easy listening done with good taste is a budget-priced LP on the t$2 RCA Camden label which was a subsidiary of the parent label RCA Victor. Its producer Ethel Gabriel organized a group of skilled singers known as the Living Voices who recorded numerous albums with different arrangers such as Nashville’s Chet Atkins; the superb Anita Kerr who passed away last year at 95 and whose records with her singers are consistently lovely; and several others.

A 1964 LP, Living Voices Sing Moonglow and Other Great Standards, has ten favorites from the ‘30s and ‘40s Great American Songbook – the title song, Solitude, I Get a Kick Out of You, My Funny Valentine, These Foolish Things, etc.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Calvin Coolidge

Calvin Coolidge

by Peter Cates

Calvin Coolidge

The 30th President Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) had the kind of wife in the former First Lady Grace Goodhue Coolidge (1879-1957) who was a rarity when it came to truly being on the same page as her husband. She catered to just about every whim in him possible, although Cal had such a calm balanced unflappable personality and may not have given into whims very often.
The seven pages devoted to Mrs. Coolidge in Christine Sadler’s book America’s First Ladies abound in choice anecdotes and quotes, especially in its first three paragraphs:

Grace Goodhue Coolidge

“After Grace Coolidge became First Lady in the middle of a hot August night in the Plymouth, Vermont, farmhouse of her father-in-law, she went back to bed and slept easily. Not many women could have accomplished this feat, but then nobody else was married to Calvin Coolidge; the little red-headed president who always looked as if he smelled something burning and who never spoke to anybody if he could avoid the experience.

“If Grace had not been an unusual woman she never would have married Coolidge in the first place, and her mother, for one, could never see why she did. But Grace and her merry father, Captain Andrew I. Goodhue, a steamboat inspector for vessels plying Lake Champlain, always understood the Coolidge appeal. She was the completely happy wife, and that was the secret of her phenomenal success as First Lady.

“Grace had found an extra kerosene lamp for the dramatic swearing-in rites so that anxious reporters, who rushed to Ply­mouth after news of the unexpected death of President Harding, could see what they were writing. She watched with interest while a telephone line was strung up by emergency crews. But at around two-thirty in the morning, after the hullabaloo connected with becoming president was over, it would never have occurred to her not to accompany her husband back to bed. Nor would he have permitted such deviation from the norm. And naturally she would go back to sleep if he ordered her to do so. “

So begins, on August 3, 1923, the almost six years Coolidge would serve in the White House and ones bombarded with challenges:

The scandals of Harding’s cabinet.

The rise of the Ku Klux Klan from very low numbers to 4 million members by 1924 and the increase in lynchings.

The rise of bootlegging gangsters, and not just in Chicago, due to the “Noble Experiment of Prohibition and the naïve belief of its supporters in the perfectibility of human beings.”

The sometimes violent reactions of big business, government and society itself to any form of non-conformity, not just with progressives, socialists, free-thinkers and any other individuals whose world views deviate from their norms.

The wild partying and increasingly “loose” morals to be found at social gatherings of what’s been termed the “Jazz Age.”

The frantic speculations on Wall Street.

And finally, in a strange cause and effect manner, a terrible disillusionment with the traditional values and hopes that had sustained the country since the American Revolution, especially among veterans returning from the bloodshed of World War I.

Coolidge responded much of the time to these challenges with a hands off leadership style, admittedly disastrous in certain respects, but he did keep a close eye on events.

He also may have had a problem with narcolepsy and reportedly slept 12 hours a night while still needing a four-hour nap; these figures might be slightly exaggerated, even as H.L. Mencken did not help with the real truth about Coolidge’s sleepiness by such comments as the following – “Coolidge’s chief feat was to sleep more than any other president…The itch to run things did not afflict him; he was content to let them run themselves.”

Mencken did concede some good points – “His failings are forgotten: the country remembers only…that he let it alone. Well, there are worse epitaph for a statesman.”

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Sarah Orne Jewett & others

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Sarah Orne Jewett

Sarah Orne Jewett

South Berwick native Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) advised younger writers to “Write about what you know!”

Aroostook County native Helen Hamlin (1917-2004) once commented on the fascination of one’s childhood for so many:

“It is only natural that a person’s childhood environment should always remain the most glamorous and most interesting phase of one’s life, and I am no exception. Growing up in a town like Fort Kent, with a generous dose of Grandpa’s rich woods lore of old Aroostook, and in a mixed French and English household, has done more than just build a collection of reminiscences. It has left a distinct love and admiration for a land, and no other place can ever seem as attractive.”

Have Gun Will Travel

Richard Boone

Many episodes of Richard Boone’s TV series Have Gun Will Travel, which ran for six seasons from 1957 to 1963, can be accessed via YouTube; a season 6 episode, The Fifth Bullet, has Boone’s character, a well-read gunfighter named Paladin giving a man just released from prison some safe passage back home to his wife and their young son (For reasons not totally clear, five outlaws have contracts to kill him.).

Guest star Ben Johnson conveyed a most vivid presence as the man eager to be reunited with his wife and son. He did memorable acting in the movies Mighty Joe Young with Terry Moore, Shane with Alan Ladd and Van Heflin, and the Last Picture Show with Cybill Shepherd and Ellen Burstyn.

Martha Scott

Martha Scott

One very heartfelt movie on a wonderful teacher is the 1941 Cheers for Miss Bishop, starring Martha Scott (1912-2003), with a superlative supporting cast that included Marsha Hunt (who passed away last year at the age of 104.), William Gargan, Sidney Blackmer, Edmund Gwenn, John Hamilton (perhaps best known as the Daily Planet editor Perry White on the 1950s Adventures of Superman), Pierre Watkin (who portrayed Perry White for the Superman late ‘40s movie serials starring Kirk Allyn) and Mary Anderson.

Gerry Mulligan

Gerry Mulligan

In 1955, baritone saxist Gerry Mulligan assembled a sextet that included Zoot Sims on tenor sax, drummer Dave Bailey, trumpeter Jon Eard­ley, trombonist Bob Brook­meyer and bassist Peck Morrison on the Mercury Emarcy jazz LP simply titled Presenting the Gerry Mulligan Sextet.

According to the liner notes, Mulligan’s greatest fear was “musical stagnation and boredom.” Thus, after completing a very successful concert tour with his acclaimed quartet, he disbanded it and chilled out for six months to figure out what was next.

This LP of eight selections has some very eloquent musicianship ; the six participants were reported as being very pleased with the results.

Of the then-very young musicians, only Dave Bailey is still living at the very young age of 97.

In 1968, Gerry Mulligan collaborated with pianist Dave Brubeck in the Columbia LP, Brubeck-Mulligan Compadres, also featuring eight selections and recorded live in Mexico.

Before the comments on the album, a personal memory – during the summer of 1965, I attended New England Music Camp, in Sidney, along the fabulous Messalonskee Lake and had as a fellow camper Chris Brubeck.

One afternoon, he comes into the bunkhouse with a sly grin and states, “Peter, my father’s here.”

I replied, “Bulls..t he is, Brubeck!”

Within less than half a second walks the great man. And a truly down to earth gentleman.

The above album came as a result of Brubeck assembling another quartet (the famous one from the 1950s into early ‘60s had been disbanded in 1967) for a concert tour of four cities in Mexico arranged by promoter George Wein. The new quartet had Brubeck, Mulligan, Alan Dawson on drums and bass player Jack Six.

One of the concerts was held in a bullring.

All in all, a good record.

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli

Arturo Michelangeli

Italian pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelan­geli (1920-1995), much like fellow virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz, not only had a superhuman technique with the keyboard but could also be quite eccentric and reclusive and was prone to depression.

Unlike Horowitz, Michelangeli could play the same composition twice over a period of months and both performances would have the same exact timing.

After winning first prize at a competition in Geneva, Switzerland, Benito Mussolini gave the pianist a full time Professorship at a Conservatory in Bologna.

Michelangeli made very few studio recordings but his live concerts have been released on numerous LPs and CDs. One such LP has him performing the Beethoven 12th Piano Sonata, better known as the Funeral March Sonata, and Schubert’s A minor Sonata, one of 22 magnificent ones that poured out of this composer along with over 600 songs, nine symphonies, numerous chamber music works and other pieces before he died at the young age of 31. The pianist performed both Sonatas with a cutting edge combination of dexterity and vibrant beauty.

Michelangeli had all 22 Sonatas of Schubert committed to memory.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Warren G. Harding

Warren G. Harding

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Warren G. Harding

The 29th former President Warren Gamaliel Harding (1865-1923) was born November 2, 1865, in Blooming Grove, Ohio, the son and oldest of 8 children of George Tryon Harding (1843-1928) and his wife, the former Phoebe Dickerson (1843-1910).

The father was basically a jack of all trades, including farmer, teacher, businessman, veterinarian and doctor who did receive a medical degree. He was also rather lazy and opportunistic but did provide help to his son from time to time while the two had a very close relationship.

A key experience in Harding’s childhood – when he was six years old, his father became part owner of a small town newspaper and little Warren worked as an errand boy for the printer and became quite fascinated with the sights, sounds and smells of the inner workings of a newspaper.

During later years, Harding would share fond memories of growing up on the farm and of rural life but he detested doing chores, much preferring socializing with his friends in town. And his ability to win friends and influence people manifested itself early.

Meanwhile Harding’s mother thought her son would make a good preacher, even though his grades were average, and got him admitted to Ohio Central College . He took to college life socially, did intermittent debating, played althorn in the school band and edited the yearbook but had no interest in preaching; he even admitted he didn’t know what he wanted to take up as an occupation.

After graduating from college in 1882 at the age of 17, Harding taught briefly, studied law and sold insurance ; nothing clicked there.

Meanwhile the family had moved from Blooming Grove to Marion where Dr. Harding was cultivating greater Ohioan opportunities for his medical practice. The son moved in with them, loved the social life of Marion as well and became a reputable manager of finances for the local baseball team and marching band.

Harding at age 18.

At 18 in 1884, Harding and two friends bought a struggling newspaper in Marion, the Star, for $300 and the mortgage on it. It floundered for a few years but managed to survive and Harding bought out the two friends.

The Star was at first politically neutral but eventually became a mouthpiece for Republican ideals, especially since the businessmen around Marion who bought ads were card carrying Republicans.

In 1891, Harding, at 26, married 31-year-old Florence Kling De Wolfe, a rich widow with a young son, and she helped him on the business end of the newspaper while he wrote the editorials and won even more friends and influence in town , particularly in calling Marion the finest small city in the state to raise a family.

In 1898, Harding won a seat in the Ohio State Senate and quickly became the most popular politician at the State House. Like all good politicians, he remembered everyone’s name, was a great poker player and could charm squabbling members of the Ohio Republican party into reconciliation with each other.

Due to a certain laziness, Harding was lacking in political expertise but soon made the acquaintance of Harry M. Daugherty, a shrewd lobbyist and political fixer who never won an election himself but could guide others to victory.

When Daugherty first saw Harding, he immediately sensed future presidential potential. Their immediately begun friendship got Harding elected as Lieutenant Governor in 1902.

But by 1904, the Ohio Republicans were engaged in unholy internal warfare and Harding refused to run again as he wished to distance himself from these divisions.

Another reason – the Democrats were dominating state politics, an occurrence usually as rare as hen’s teeth.

After losing campaigns for governor in 1910 and 1912 , Harding won election to Congress as Senator in 1914.

His Senate career in terms of achievement was not that good but he continued to exude phenomenal charm; Harding loved people and they loved him in return.

Warren G. Harding and vice-presidential candidate Calvin Coolidge won the White House by seven million votes over the Democrat ticket of fellow Ohioan James M. Cox, who had served two terms as governor, and his vice presidential running mate, former assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Harding and Coolidge campaigned on an isolationist back to normalcy platform while Cox and Roosevelt were supporting progressivism, social reforms and entry into the League of Nations, a forerunner of the United Nations. The voters were tired of anything international after World War I and wanted the normalcy and enjoyment of private life.

Volumes have been written about the scandals and corruption of Harding’s two-year presidency and his sudden death in a San Francisco hotel on August 2, 1923, at the age of 57, so, for reasons of space, I move on to a note of sympathy that his widow wrote to President and Mrs. Coolidge when their son Calvin Jr. died from blood poisoning at the age of 15, not long before she died at 64 from a kidney ailment: “No matter how many loving hands may be stretched out to help us, some paths we tread alone.”

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Maine Novelist Ruth Moore

Ruth Moore

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Maine Novelist Ruth Moore

Maine novelist Ruth Moore (1903-1989) was born on Gott’s Island, spent several years as an adult out of state, and published the very successful novel Spoonhandle in 1946, which was adapted for the 1948 movie Deep Waters; the money enabled her to move back to Maine for the rest of her life.

During the 1930s, Moore was active in the NAACP , having begun working as a researcher. In 1930, she traveled to the Deep South where her investigation led to the release of two African-American men who had been falsely accused of murder.

A very powerful opening in Moore’s 1943 novel The Weir which takes place on one of the outlying islands along the Maine coast resonates on a universal level with any of us who sat through long years of school in quiet desperation:

“Sayl Comey went to school every day, but it seemed to him that things got worse instead of better. He couldn’t get used to the routine, and he couldn’t see any sense in what went on. In class he presented a face of bleak and absolute boredom.”

A writer well worth checking out.

The Adventures of Superman

George Reeves

My favorite childhood TV show was The Adventures of Superman, starring George Reeves (1914-1959). One particular episode started the 1953 season, 5 Minutes to Doom, which guest starred Dabbs Greer (1917-2007) as an innocent man wrongly sentenced to the electric chair. The depiction of the chair itself has stayed in my memory for decades, it was so well filmed.

Arvo Volmer

Arvo Volmer

Now 60, the quite gifted Estonian conductor Arvo Volmer recorded the 7 Symphonies, Finlandia, Valse Triste and Violin Concerto (with soloist Adele Anthony), of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius between 2007 and 2010 with the Adelaide Symphony of Australia for the ABC Classics label on 4 CDs; while these performances don’t have the craggy power of other conductors (Sibelius used the entire string/woodwind/brass/percussion apparatus of the modern orchestra to evoke the rocky ocean landscape, fields, woodlands and hills that are so similar to our own Maine), they do have a lot of poetry and are quite effective on their own terms.

For anyone new to classical music, I recommend sampling any of the many YouTubes of Sibelius’s music, especially the stirring patriotic Finlandia, the rhythmically gripping Violin Concerto, the powerful 1st and 2nd Symphonies with their rich outpourings of gorgeous, brilliantly sustained melody and the haunting mystery of Valse Triste and the otherworldly Swan of Tuonela.

Country Music Anthologies

During the early 1980s, Time Life Records marketed a series of LP anthologies devoted to country music artists and sold them by mail and through supermarkets.

They included Hank Williams, Chet Atkins, George Jones (of course), Johnny Cash, Elvis, Barbara Mandrell, Tammy Wynette, etc.

I recently listened to the one devoted to Waylon Jennings (1937-2002) which contains nine selections drawn from his albums for RCA Victor and include Brown Eyed Handsome Man, MacArthur Park, Ladies Love Outlaws and Love of the Common People.

The man knew how to communicate a song in an impressive manner.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Thomas Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Thomas Woodrow Wilson

The 28th president, Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), had been a professor of history and president of Princeton University before being lured into New Jersey Democratic party politics, and he soon found out that he enjoyed politics a lot . In the three-way race of 1912, Taft and Roosevelt split the vote among Republicans, thus assuring Wilson the White House.

A little more background: Wilson was the son of a Presbyterian minister, was born in Virginia but spent most of his childhood in Georgia where his father had taken another church position and moved the family.

He got degrees from Princeton and Johns Hopkins and studied enough law at the University of Virginia Law School and through home study to get admitted to the bar in Georgia where he practiced for a short period of time.

But he was drawn back to academic life and taught at both Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania, and Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, after which he was offered a professorship at Princeton in 1890 .

Wilson wrote at least nine books and numerous articles; I highly recommend his five volume The History of the American People, published between 1901-1902, which I own and read most of, finding his narrative gifts superb.

After teaching there for 12 years, Woodrow Wilson was appointed president of Princeton, in 1902, and brought about a reorganization of the curriculum with an emphasis on campus life being one of serious study and not socializing. But he absolutely would not allow any African-Americans admission.

In 1910 Wilson was elected governor of New Jersey and served for two years before he was elected president of the United States.

Wilson had a world view mixture of Deep South Confederacy racism as a believer in segregation, progressivism when it came to such issues as workman’s compensation, regulation of public utilities and cronyism in government and, later in his presidency, internationalism in his pro-active participation in the Paris peace talks and his fight to establish the League of Nations. There is a vast amount of material on the pros and cons of his eight years in the White House, in particular his last two years after suffering a series of strokes.

Wilson was married first to Ellen Axson (1860-1914) who was studying art in New York City but gave it up to be a wonderful helpmate to her husband and gave birth to three daughters, Margaret, Jessie, and Eleanor.

Jessie married a Harvard professor Francis Sayre, Eleanor her father’s Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo, while Margaret remained single indulging her love of culture and beauty (a photograph shows her listening to records which resonated with yours truly on a very personal level.).

In 1915, Wilson met a widow Edith Bolling Galt (1872-1961), and initiated an ardent courtship; by December, they were married.

After Wilson’s incapacitating strokes, the country was pretty much being secretly run by the First Lady, Wilson’s physician Dr. Cary Grayson and his private secretary Joe Tumulty while Vice-President Thomas Marshall was kept out of the loop.

After leaving the White House in 1921, the couple moved to a house on S Street which has since become a tourist attraction.

On Veterans Day in 1923, the former president summoned enough strength to give a brief speech to people gathered in front of his house in which he stated:

“I have seen fools resist Providence before and I have seen their destruction, and it will come upon these again, utter destruction and contempt; that we shall prevail is as sure as that God reigns.”

On February 3, 1924, Woodrow Wilson died at the age of 67; his successor Warren G. Harding had passed away the previous August and been succeeded by Calvin Coolidge, who was among the tiny group of mourners at Wilson’s funeral held at the S Street residence.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Ray Charles & 101 Strings

Ray Charles

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Ray Charles

My first experience of Ray Charles (1930-2004) was as a kid in the early ‘60s watching Dick Clark’s American Bandstand in which the singer made an appearance singing his megahit Georgia on My Mind. I remember being struck by his combination of calm stage presence with consummate timing and delivery.

An ABC/Paramount 45 record from 1963 contains two really good examples of his rhythm and blues artistry:

No Letter Today, in which the singer is dubbed in a duet with himself, and backed by “his orchestra” conducted by the exceptionally gifted jazz arranger Gerald Wilson.

Take These Chains From My Heart, in which the singer is joined by the Jack Halloran Singers and arranged and conducted by Marty Paich.

Both sides were produced by Sid Feller and released in 1963 as also part of the album, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, an album that broke the barrier between soul and country and western music. And both sides can be heard via YouTube.

A personal note: my grandmother Annabelle Cates (1888-1974) received a Christmas present of a two-LP set featuring the hits of Ray Charles and, despite her otherwise old-fashioned taste in music, enjoyed this album, in particular Hit the Road, Jack.

Jazz singer Anita O’Day (1919-2006) recorded two staples at a 1947 jam session- Sometimes I’m Happy and – that were released on a ten-inch 78 record on the Signature label. Among the vocalists who learned their craft with the big bands during the World War II 1940s that included Sinatra with Tommy Dorsey, Peggy Lee with Benny Goodman, etcs. Anita O’Day had a uniquely charming way with rhythm, melody, phrasing and timing and both sides can also be heard on YouTube.

101 Strings

101 Strings was the creation of businessman D.L. Miller, of Pennsylvania, who recruited this number of players from such orchestras as the Hamburg Philharmonic and arranged for recording sessions that started in the late 1950s and resulted in a sizable number of very inexpensively priced LPs on his Somerset/Stereo Fidelity label.

The albums included hit songs of the era, Gypsy tunes, opera arias, folk songs from countries around the world, Christmas carols, hymns and Broadway and film selections.

The arrangements were skillfully done, making for very pleasant listening. One such album was A Cruise to the Rivieras-Spain, France and Italy and consisted of the following titles: La Mer, Flamenco Fantasy, Estrellita, A Night on the Riviera, Monaco, Sunday in Genoa, and a medley of Santa Lucia, Funiculi Funicula and Sorento. This album is also available for listening on YouTube.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: William Howard Taft

William Howard Taft

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

William Howard Taft

The 27th former President William Howard Taft (1857-1930) had what might be considered the closest friendship possible with his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt. They more than frequently visited with each other, advised each other, encouraged each other, even rebuked each other.

Under Roosevelt, Taft served as Governor/General of the newly-annexed Philippines and, in a strange twist of fate, as Secretary of War at the same time; TR had so much faith in Taft that he used him as his personal roving ambassador at large (no pun intended with Taft’s well known obesity of over 300 pounds) and as a diplomatic mediator in setting up peace talks between the Russians and Japanese during their 1905 War.

When the 1908 Republican Convention occurred, Roosevelt, due to his own popularity with the voters, pretty much had control of its delegates, got his friend easily nominated as the front runner and a Republican president another four years in the White House, an achievement not to be achieved again until the Reagan/Bush years of 1980-1992.

An interesting anecdote in Christine Sadler’s 1963 book America’s First Ladies tells of a vicious blizzard of an ice storm that “tied up transportation all along the Atlantic coast, left thousands of inaugural visitors stranded on trains and roads leading into Washington, and temporarily halted the sending of telegrams. President Roosevelt said the storm was aimed at him and would abate when he got out of town, but Taft replied, ‘You’re wrong; it’s my storm. I always said it would be a cold day when I got to be president of the United States. ‘ ”

At the actual inauguration ceremony, Taft’s youngest son Charles brought along a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in case he was bored by his father’s speech; it proved to be a very interesting speech which 11-year-old Charles enjoyed immensely. The boy never even cracked his book and his father considered the boy’s attention a personal compliment.

Taft himself had always set his ambition on being Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court but his wife Helen (1861-1943) pushed him into politics and he lacked the will to resist her.

However, once in the White House, Taft, while still believing in Roosevelt’s policies, steered a more cautious middle ground between the traditional Republicans who detested Roosevelt’s aggressive “bull in a china shop” progressivism and the progressive Republicans who wished to continue where Roosevelt left off.

He also basically disliked the job, didn’t try very hard to achieve much and had an ultra-cautious Vice-President James Sherman (1855-1912) who made Taft seem like a radical progressive.

Meanwhile, the First Lady suffered a physical collapse and some paralysis of her facial muscles which left her an invalid most of the first year (She did eventually recover much of her health and lived to see oldest son Robert elected to the U.S. Senate in 1939.).

As mentioned in an earlier column, Taft lost in the three-way race of 1912 in which Roosevelt’s Bull Moose candidacy split the Republican vote and was quite happy to turn the White House over to Woodrow Wilson.

Finally in 1921, President Warren G. Harding (1865-1923) appointed Taft to his dream job as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court where he would do fine work, would swear in both Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover as president in 1925 and 1929, respectively, and would retire in February 1930, one month before his death from a heart ailment at the age of 72.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: A few vintage films

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Adam Had Four Sons

Ingrid Bergman

Amazon Prime has a large array of vintage films that I have been lately bingeing on and I recently viewed a few choice ones:

1941’s Adam Had Four Sons starred Ingrid Bergman (1915-1982), Warner Baxter (1888-1951), Fay Wray (1907-2004), Richard Denning (1914-1998), and Susan Hayward (1917-1975).

The story begins during the early 1900s and ends just after the end of World War I, depicting the lives of a wealthy stockbroker Adam Stoddard (portrayed with professionally honed suavity by Warner Baxter), his ailing and very nurturing wife (Fay Wray, best known as the young woman in a night dress being carried by King Kong in his hand as he clambers up the Empire State Building in the 1933 film classic), and their four sons from when they are young boys to full adulthood and military service in 1917-18 France.

Richard Denning, who was perhaps best known for the 1950s TV show Michael Shayne, portrayed the eldest son Jack with commendable skill; fans of Jack Lord’s Hawaii Five-O may remember his calming authoritative presence as the governor for the first few seasons.

A central presence was Ingrid Bergmann as the governess. She was captivating but I found her much more so with Humphrey Bogart in the following year’s Casablanca and in 1947’s Bells of Saint Mary’s with Bing Crosby.

The venomous character in the film was the gold digger Hester who charms one of the younger brothers into marrying her and then starts playing everyone else against each other.

A commendably entertaining love story/soap opera combination.

My Foolish Heart

Susan Hayward

1949’s My Foolish Heart has Susan Hayward portraying a much more sympathetic woman struggling with alcoholism and an unhappy marriage; we find out why with flashbacks to when she falls in love with a young officer before he goes off to World War II (and featuring the consistently reliable Dana Andrews, 1912-1992). I used to find Hayward’s characters much too abrasive but here she completely drew me into the story. Critics trashed it but the public loved it. Highly recommended.

Behind Green Lights

William Gargan

Two suspenseful film noirs – 1946’s Behind Green Lights is an engaging account of the chaotic activities inside a big city police station among the front desk cops, the detectives, the newspaper reporters, the morgue attendants and the ordinary citizens who drop in voluntarily or under involuntary duress.

The plot begins thickening when a driverless car jumps up on the sidewalk with a dead body inside.

William Gargan (1905-1979) portrays the police commissioner in charge of the investigation and the interrogation of a lady who was last seen in the victim’s apartment before he was thrown in the car (the lady was very convincingly and compassionately portrayed by Carole Landis (1919-1948) who very sadly committed suicide two years after the film’s release at the age of 29 by overdosing on barbiturates.)

Gargan had a successful career in movies and television until 1958 when, as a chain smoker, he contracted lung cancer and had his larynx removed; afterwards he had to speak into a voice box and became celebrated as a zealous campaigner against the perils of cigarettes for the remaining 20 years of his life.

Please Murder Me

Raymond Burr

1956’s Please Murder Me has Raymond Burr (1917-1993) as a defense attorney with a different name from the one he portrayed for nine years on CBS’s Perry Mason beginning in 1957 , only a year after this film’s release.

He defends a woman who has been charged with murdering her husband and, convinced of her innocence, gets her acquitted, only to find out she’s guilty. The client’s manipulative malevolence was very persuasively conveyed by the brilliant young Angela Lansbury (1927-2022).

 

 

 

 

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Theodore Roosevelt

As the 25th former President William McKinley was slowly dying in a bed chamber, in Buffalo, New York, of a gangrenous infection from Leon Czolgosz’s bullet, Vice-President Teddy Roosevelt (1858-1919) was still vacationing with his family high up in the Adirondacks 400 miles due northeast in the Empire State, but felt the increasing urgency necessitated that he hurry to Buffalo.

The first seven hours of descent down the steep, slippery, curving trails to the trains were via horse and buggy, the driver instructed by his lone passenger to proceed at full speed.

This incident conveys the frequently much too brash boldness with which the first President Roosevelt proceeded through life. He was a total believer in the active strenuous life, both physically and intellectually.

Roosevelt could box, wrestle, hunt wild game and rope steers with expertise. He also mastered languages, speedred two or three books a day and wrote several highly acclaimed volumes of history.

I wrote in an earlier column of how McKinley and Roosevelt had a very wary relationship. Basically, it boiled down to McKinley having serious misgivings about Roosevelt’s much too brash boldness versus his own circumspect caution and consummate diplomacy in his career as a public servant; to the credit of both men, each believed in doing what was right.

There is a fascinating photo of President McKinley and Vice-President Roosevelt sitting together on the White House porch but neither one is smiling. Supposedly, McKinley, who had seen a lot of bloodshed as a Major in Civil War battles, was turned off by Roosevelt’s Rough Rider enthusiasm in seeing duty in the Spanish-American War while Roosevelt considered McKinley, according to biographer Edmund Morris, “a cold-blooded politician.”

President McKinley and Vice-President Roosevelt

I admit to a bias towards McKinley as a more decent human being the more I read about him, whereas Roosevelt has increasingly struck me as a combination of the bull in a china shop, personally enjoying upper class luxury and hobnobbing with his rich and famous friends while maybe pretending to have sympathy for the common man and being one himself.

But Roosevelt’s presidency did achieve much in the government trust busting and other such crusades. Health and safety standards in industry were enforced . Roosevelt fought for preservation of wilderness park lands, spearheaded the building of the Panama Canal, and mediated peace talks to end the 1905 war between Russia and Japan.

There have been hundreds of books written about Roosevelt. Years ago, I read Hermann Hagedorn’s 1954 The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill, the author having been a close friend of TR and the family, and having access to droves of letters, journals and other archived materials. The book recounted much first hand knowledge about Roosevelt’s personality with his family and friends at home – Sagamore Hill being the mansion in Oyster Bay on the northernmost end of Long Island, New York, where he resided most of his adult years.

Alice Roosevelt

Roosevelt’s first wife Alice Lee (1861-1884) died two days after giving birth to a baby girl named Alice. She also died the same night as Roose­velt’s mother, a double tragedy that traumatized Roosevelt so much that he left his daughter in the care of his sister Anna and moved out west to the Dakota badlands to be a rancher for two years.

Edith Roosevelt

In 1886, he returned East and married Edith Carow (1861-1948) who gave birth to five children. She epitomized classy poise and dignity, displayed phenomenal gifts at managing five very rambunctious children and yet would join her husband and kids on horseback rides through the woods surrounding the Sagamore Hill estate.

She and stepdaughter Alice had a contentious relationship; she had known Alice’s mother and made a hurtful comment that, if her mother had lived, she would have eventually bored her father with her insipid personality.

However, daughter Alice could hold her own with the sharp tongue; she once summed up her father’s ego-driven need to be the center of attention everywhere: “He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral and the baby at every christening.”

After leaving the White House in 1909, Roosevelt remained active in both public and private life. He hoped that his like-minded friend Howard Taft, whom he helped win the Republican nomination and presidency, would continue his policies but Taft became his own man.

In 1912, Roosevelt ran as an independent Bull Moose candidate against Taft, splitting the vote and giving the White House to Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson.

All four Roosevelt sons served in World War I, inspiring much pride in their father but tragedy struck in mid-1918 when youngest son Quentin was killed in France at the age of 21.

After that Roosevelt basically lost his own will to live and died on January 6, 1919, of a heart ailment, at the age of 60.