Raymond Burr

by Peter Cates

Perry Mason

Perry Mason ran for nine seasons on CBS from 1957 to 1966 and has rarely been out of syndication or inaccessible. I have been watching one or two episodes daily via Amazon prime and am now into the second season. And I plan to keep watching until all 271 episodes are finished.

The show was based on the character of a very intelligent and highly ethical defense lawyer created by Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) in 1933 when he published The Case of the Velvet Claws and would go on to write 79 more in the series. The author himself was a lawyer and represented many clients among the poor who had been wrongfully convicted. He would also appear in an uncredited role in the final episode as the presiding judge.

Raymond Burr (1917-1993) initially auditioned for the role of district attorney Hamilton Burger but producer Gail Patrick Jackson (1911-1980) felt he would be better as Mason, provided he shed 60 pounds, which he did. His previous TV and film appearances had frequently been as very convincing villains, including his appearance as the murderous husband in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window where he tries to kill Jimmy Stewart.

His characterization of the lawyer was quite subtle, especially in ferreting out the real killer by the end of the episode.

Barbara Hale

Barbara Hale (1922-2017) portrayed Della Street, Mason’s infinitely charming and discreet confidential secretary. She would reprise that role with Burr in a few made-for-TV films with Burr’s Mason. On the TV series, she and Mason’s relationship remains on a friendly professional level that extends to her boss treating her to meals in restaurants and comical visual and verbal interactions especially when other women show up at the office seeking advice.

William Hopper (1915-1970) was the private investigator Paul Drake whose office was next to Mason’s and who had his own private connecting door. His personality is multi-faceted; immensely resourceful, physically imposing against intimidating individuals, charming with the ladies, flirtatious with Della Street (always greeting her with “Hello, Beautiful !”), and at times comically bungling.

Hopper’s mother was the feared Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (1885-1966); rumor has it that the actor was estranged from his mother as an adult because he disliked her interference in his life, and her power to destroy careers and lives in the movie industry.

I will continue with more about this show in next week’s column.

George Meredith

by Peter Cates

George Meredith

The English poet/novelist George Meredith (1828-1909) composed the following tribute to Queen Victoria (1819-1901), At the Funeral; February 2, 1901 :

“Her sacred body bear – the tenement
Of that strong soul now ranked with God’s
Elect.
Her heart upon her people’s heart she spent;
Hence is she Royalty’s lodestar to direct.

The peace is hers, of whom all lands have praised
Majestic virtues ere her day unseen.
Aloft the name of Womanhood she raised,
And gave new readings to the Title, Queen.”

I have too little space to go into Victoria’s reign, of which libraries of materials exist elsewhere, but Meredith touched on a few of her qualities that sum up the simplicity of greatness.

‘Her sacred body bear –’; Victoria brought integrity to the throne in her world view and practice of a happy, righteous life in her marriage, parenting and compassion to others. Meredith’s use of a dash after the verb ‘bear’ had a dramatic effect in the rhythm of that first line; her physical body, ‘the tenement’, was the home of a morally strong woman who found inner peace in this world against the savage pressures of political intrigue at Buckingham Palace, the social problems on the home front, the Crimean War during the 1850s, the death at a young age of her husband Prince Albert, etcs.

Queen Victoria

Meredith eloquently articulated a sense that she was now with the angels in heavenly eternity – ‘that strong soul now ranked with God’s/Elect”; again the dramatic pause between ‘God’s’ and ‘Elect’ heightening a feeling that Victoria had achieved a mighty victory in passing from this world to the next.

Moving on, despite her faults, historians have generally agreed that she brought a quality of being to the British throne that has been rarely, if ever, seen before her ascent and since her death in 1901 (I do admire the present Queen Elizabeth but her own virtues are for another day); ‘Majestic virtues ere her day unseen./Aloft the name of Womanhood she raised,/And gave new readings to the Title, Queen.’

I also couldn’t emphasize more the power of great literature on its own terms than in this poem itself. George Meredith was one of a large number of great English writers to emerge during Victoria’s 64-year reign from 1837 to 1901, along with Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, Christina Rossetti, A. Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson and others. The poet Richard Howard commented that English literature during the 1800s was one major explosion of talent, and I concur.

I have only read a few other works of Meredith – his exquisite poems A Lark Ascending and Modern Love, and his more than 500 page novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, which I joyfully plowed through in two days, 30 years ago, and remember fondly for its comedy, tragedy, realism, romanticism and other elements of the life experiences blended in a very memorable group of characters on a country estate. He had an individuality, and a style of writing that won renown during his lifetime, despite its sometimes thorny difficulty.

The novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) wrote her own tribute to Meredith and remembered vividly his loud hearty laughter.

Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontë, by their brother Branwell (c. 1834). He painted himself among his sisters, but later removed his image so as not to clutter the picture. (National Portrait Gallery, London.)

by Peter Cates

In 1846, a slim volume, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, was published in Great Britain, sold two copies and generated three unsigned, but very positive reviews. Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell were, due to the damn-with-faint-praise prejudice against women writers, pseudonyms for Charlotte (1816-1855), Emily (1818-1848), and Anne (1820-1849) Bronte. Since the sisters were little girls, they were writing poems, romances and stories as games of the imagination.

The Brontes were three of six children born to the Reverend Patrick (1777-1861) and Maria (1783-1821) Bronte. From all accounts, the parents were very kind, committed to education and provided material needs. But the family was cursed by tragedy and sorrow. The oldest daughters Maria and Elizabeth died in their teens, the mother perished from tuberculosis when Emily, the youngest, was only three and the remaining three girls and one son passed away within a seven-year period, with the father outliving all of them.

Emily is arguably considered the most gifted of the three sisters as a poet and contributed 21 poems to the volume; a book of her collected poems would number over 200.

The usual adjectives of powerful, eloquent, beautiful, sublime seem like very tired cliches when describing their effect. Her passionate, solitary nature lent the several ones I have read a complex range of emotions (the fascination with the wild, windy English moors and rocky cliffs in her novel Wuthering Heights strengthen her poetic imagery) and, even more importantly, universal wisdom of a spiritual nature.

One of the unsigned reviews praised her poems for a “fine, quaint spirit” and that they had “things to speak that men will be glad to hear, – AND an evident power of wing that may reach heights not here attempted.”

I offer The Old Stoic:

“Riches I hold in light esteem,
And Love I laugh to scorn;
And lust of fame was but a dream
That vanished with the morn;

And if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is, ‘Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty!’

Yes, as my swift days near their goal,
‘Tis all that I implore:
In life and death a chainless soul,
With courage to endure.”

This poem conveyed Emily’s scorn of materialism, ‘Riches in light esteem’; her disdain for ordinary notions of romance, ‘Love I laugh to scorn’ – she was the consummate introvert and allowed very few people to get close to her, except her sister Anne, but she was compassionate towards the less fortunate; and a fearless search for righteousness and spiritual victory – ‘In life and death a chainless soul, /with courage to endure.’

One of Emily’s teachers wrote the following:

“She should have been a man – a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty, never would have given way but with life. She had a head for logic, and a capability of argument unusual in a man and rarer indeed in a woman…. impairing this gift was her stubborn tenacity of will which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned.”

Her sense of right and of tender compassion are interestingly juxtaposed in the following anecdote. When she was six, her brother Branwell had been naughty and their father asked how he should deal with the little guy. She replied, “Reason with him, and when he won’t listen to reason, whip him!”

Emily Bronte came down with a cold while attending her brother’s funeral in September 1848, which developed into tuberculosis, but she refused all medical help until the very end when it was too late, being determined that no doctor would poison her. She died within three months on December 19, at 2 p.m., with older sister Charlotte tending her.

To conclude, one of Emily’s untitled poems:

“All hushed and still within the house;
Without – all winds and driving rain;
But something whispers to my mind,
Through rain and through the wailing wind,
Never again.
Never again? Why never again?
Memory has power as real as thine.”

Dame Cleo Laine

by Peter Cates

Dame Cleo Laine

Still living at 93, singer Dame Cleo Laine recorded a CD consisting of 12 songs on the BMG Classics label, simply entitled Jazz; they include Duke Ellington’s Just a Sittin’ and a Rock­in’, Mel Torme’s Walking Shoes, Johnny Mercer’s Midnight Sun, the Gershwin brothers’ Lady Be Good, W.C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues, and Cy Coleman’s You Can Always Count On Me, etc.

She had a who’s who of some of the finest jazz musicians – Gerry Mulligan (1927-1996) on baritone sax, trumpet player Clark Terry (1920-2015), and harmonica virtuoso Toots Thielemans (1922-2016) – along with guitarist Mark Whitfield and the soprano saxophone player Jane Ira Bloom, both of whom are still living and active. Laine’s husband, the late Sir John Dankworth (1927-2010) scored the arrangements and conducted a small ensemble of additional lesser-known session players. Ettore Stratta (1933-2015), who produced hit recordings for Tony Bennett, Barbra Streisand and others, trouble-shooted the album to completion.

Laine brought her unique savory intelligence to each song, easily joining the ranks of Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Jo Stafford, Ella Fitzgerald, June Christy, Suzanne McCorkle, Norah Jones, Michael Feinstein, Nancy Wilson, Dick Haymes and Sarah Vaughan, to name some favorites.

Nat King Cole

Nat King Cole

Singer Nat King Cole (1919-1965) recorded Home (When Shadows Fall) and Tunnel of Love on a 1950 Capitol ten-inch 78 with the arrangements and conducting of Pete Rugolo (1915-2011) who was noted for the charts he scored for Stan Kenton’s band. It is the kind of record akin to an exquisite flower, whose petals of beauty continue to unfold, every time I hear it in its details of instrumentation from the woodwinds and muted brass or the blending of Cole’s voice with the harmonies of the small sized chorus.

Nat King Cole sold more records for Capitol than any other artist, including Sinatra and the Beatles. He was also very good-natured but an incident occurred just before he died of lung cancer at the age of 45, in 1965. He called the label and, when the switchboard operator replied, “Capitol records, home of the Beatles!”, he slammed the phone down.

Isaac McLellan

by Peter Cates

Poet
Isaac McLellan

Portland native Isaac McLellan (1806-1899), whom I have written about previously, celebrated our Pine Tree beauty, with wondrously enunciated place names in a minor masterpiece, The Shores of Maine; amidst the frigid long nights of January, one can hope that spring-pleasant temperatures arrive quickly and on time March 21:

“Far in the sunset’s mellow glory,
Far in the daybreak’s pearly bloom-
Fring’d by ocean’s foamy surges,
Belted in by woods of gloom,
Stretch thy soft luxuriant borders,
Smile thy shores, in hill and plain,
Flower-enamelled, ocean-girdled,
Green bright shores of Maine,

“Rivers of surpassing beauty
From thy hemlock woodlands flow,-
Androscoggin and Penobscot,
Saco, chill’d by northern snow,
These from many a lowly ravine
Thick by pine-trees shadow’d o’er,
Sparkling from their ice-cold tributes
To the surges of thy shore.

“Bays resplendent as the heaven,
Starr’d and gemm’d by thousand isles,
Gird thee, Casco, with its islets,
Quoddy with its dimpled smiles:
O’er them the fisher’s shallop,
And tall ships their wings expand,
While the smoke-flag of the steamer,
Flaunteth out its cloudy streamer,
Bound to foreign strand.

“Bright from many a rocky headland
Fring’d by sands that shine like gold,
Gleams the light-house white and lonely,
Grim as some barronial hold.
Bright by many an ocean valley
Shaded hut and village shine;
Roof and steeple, weather-beaten,
Stain’d by ocean’s breath of brine.”

After years residing in Massachusetts, Europe, New York City, Virginia and North Carolina, McLellan, a bachelor, lived out his last years at Greenport on Long Island.