by Peter Cates

Clark Gable

Clark Gable (1901-1960) might not have achieved the same level of greatness as, for example, Sir Lawrence Olivier, Rod Steiger, George C. Scott and, among the living, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branaugh, when it came to getting inside the skin of a range of different characters; but he had an on-screen charisma in his portrayal of the same charming, arrogant character in every film I ever saw of his.

They include Call of the Wild with Loretta Young, Soldier of Fortune with Susan Hayward, Teacher’s Pet with Doris Day, Command Decision with Van Johnson and last, but far from least, Gone with the Wind with Sir Lawrence Olivier’s then-wife Vivian Leigh; I had my first viewing of it at the long gone Winslow Drive-In during the summer of 1961.

His first appearance in the now legendary role of Rhett Butler is at the foot of the long staircase at the Tara plantation. He’s staring up at Vivian’s Scarlet O’Hara and this first eye contact sows some very turbulent seeds of ballistic romance.

One critic referred to Gable’s presence as brutally masculine. He was a man among men and hunted and fished. Yet he was also a voracious reader, had a huge library of books and absolutely did not want his men friends knowing about this hobby.

Gable was married five times, including a much publicized second one to actress Carole Lombard, who perished in a 1942 plane crash in Nevada.

He died in November 1960, at the age of 59, after suffering two heart attacks over a ten-day period. His widow was pregnant with his only biological son John Clark Gable, born four months later. Gable also fathered a daughter in 1935 during a brief affair with actress Loretta Young while filming Call of the Wild.

William F. Buckley Jr.

A 1988 biography, William F. Buckley Jr. Patron Saint of the Conservatives, by John B. Judis, proved a fascinating book to browse in. Buckley (1925-2008) brought a wit and intellectual brilliance to conservative thinking via the weekly magazine he founded in 1955, National Review, and his television show Firing Line. His nice guy debating skills both thrilled and terrified those on the other side of a given issue.

In 1965, Buckley ran as an independent in a three-way race against Democrat contender Abe Beame and Republican winner John Lindsay. Buckley wrote the following sardonic quote about Lindsay:

“For some people, politics is the ultimate concern. Of them, it can be said that they are serious about politics, in the sense in which Mr. John Lindsay is serious about politics. He is as serious about politics as, for instance, a flagpole-sitter is serious about flagpoles. Politics sustains Mr. Lindsay, even as the flagpole sustains the flagpole-sitter. Others care less for politics than for the end of politics. We climb flagpoles, but only in order to look at the horizon.”

Alma Gluck

A 12-inch acoustic shellac disc (Victrola Red Seal 88434) from 1914 features soprano Alma Gluck (1884-1938) in a collaboration with her husband, violinist Efrem Zimbalist (1889-1985), and pianist Eugene Lutsky performing Braga’s Angel’s Serenade, a frequently recorded concert piece during the World War I years. Gluck had one of the most beautiful voices of that era and sang a wide range of music including opera, hymns and folk songs.

They were the parents of actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and the grandparents of actress Stephanie Zimbalist.

This very fine record can be heard via YouTube.

 

 

 

.

by Peter Cates

Charles Munch, Walter Bruno, Pierre Monteux

Continuing with my on-going fascination with the great conductors of the past, I encountered a group photo of Charles Munch (1891-1968), Bruno Walter (1876-1962), and Pierre Monteux (1875-1964), who established the still existing Domaine School in Hancock for conducting students just over 80 years ago. The occasion for this get together at Carnegie Hall’s green room was all three maestros conducting the NBC Symphony in a 1958 memorial concert for its former music director Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957), each of them featured in one piece.

Youtubes of each of the three conductors guesting with the NBC include a very good late ‘30s Mahler 1st Symphony, with Walter ; a 1953 Beethoven 7th with Monteux; and a Ravel Le Tombeau de Couperin with Munch also from 1953, along with several others.

The NBC Symphony was created as a radio orchestra in order to lure Toscanini back to the United States from his native Italy where he was living since resigning as music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1936 after seven brilliant years there. The NBC broadcasts have never been surpassed for long-term popularity.

However, by 1954, Toscanini, although still in good shape, was pressured to resign and his last three years would see a decline in health.

According to Monteux’s daughter, Toscanini and her father admired each other’s art; while Walter and Toscanini had been friends for decades, the older man once stated that “whenever Walter conducts a piece, he melts all over the place.” Munch appeared several times with NBC at Toscanini’s invitation.

I recently listened to a Columbia Masterworks cassette, MYT 38473, of Bruno Walter conducting the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in Mozart’s Linz and Prague Symphonies. This orchestra was a studio group assembled around 1959 to 1960 and consisting of Los Angeles Philharmonic musicians when Walter was living out his remaining years in Beverly Hills.

The Linz, #36 among the 41, is a sweetly melodic and graceful work suited nicely to Walter’s “melting” music making; the more perky Prague, #38, receives a decent performance but lacks the perky excitement of a 1960 London Symphony recording conducted by Peter Maag. Still, this is a very enjoyable pair of performances that have worn well.

A highly recommended performance from Pierre Monteux is a Brahms Second Symphony, the first of four different recordings, in which he led the San Francisco Symphony in a 1945 Victor Red Seal recording. This symphony has a sunny outdoorsy quality and Monteux drew out its beauties with a very exquisitely phrased spontaneity.

A favorite Munch recording from the mid-’60s is a Nonesuch LP featuring two different Iberias, the first by French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and the second by a native of Spain’s Catalonia, Isaac Albeniz (1860-1909). Munch conducted the Debussy Iberia with a special flair for its pulsating rhythms and colorful instrumental effects and achieved a similar magic with Albeniz . As far as I know, Albeniz and Ernesto Halffter are the only two Spanish composers Munch ever conducted.

The album jacket mentions that Albeniz composed his Iberia in Paris whereas Debussy only spent a few hours in Spain to witness a bullfight, but the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla adored Debussy’s Iberia because its music evoked the Spain he knew so well.

I own many Toscanini recordings of outstanding merit and one I have returned to often during the last 40 years is a 1947 broadcast of French composer Hector Berlioz’s complete Romeo and Juliet Symphony which RCA Victor Red Seal first issued in 1967 and, as far as I know, still available on CD and accessible on YouTube.

by Peter Cates

Roberta Chester

Still living in her 80s, poet Roberta Chester has written articles for different newspapers in Maine and taught English at UMO, College of the Atlantic and in Israel.

With respect to the Pine Tree State, she wrote the following in the 1989 Maine Speaks anthology:

“Now that I live in Maine, the intense beauty of the Maine landscape has been a constant inspiration. I can’t think of a better place to be a poet than Maine, where each of the seasons arrives with so much passion that all of our senses are awakened. If we’re poets we have to respond.”

One poem of Ms. Chester that is included in the above-mentioned anthology, Succoth (Bangor 1982), alludes to an episode of antisemitism, although where and when remains unclear.

But first a little context.

Succoth is a harvest holiday celebration directly following Rosh Hashanah and the Yom Kippur day of fasting in an outdoor hut in which people are feasting and living. The shofar or ram’s horn is blown to announce beginning of the fast on Yom Kippur in which sins are atoned and resolutions made with hope that each individual remains in the Book of Life for the coming year.

The shul is another name for synagogue.

Now the poem:

“After the last blast of the shofar
and the hard fast, the promises
and prayers for a good year,
it takes us by surprise
when we are in the season
of apples and honey cakes
and wine, when we eat in huts
open as birds to the stars,

it takes us by surprise
to see a swastika
drawn on the wall of the shul,
painted red and razor sharp
the women whisper,
there can be no mistake.
They know the sign.

It makes me think
we have been found out
although we’ve been here
for years, our candles shining
at the windows, the smell of challah,
the bittersweet sounds of Shabbas songs
escaping from out the windows and doors
and into the streets between the bridge
and the old brick church.

It takes us by surprise
and yet the trouble is so old
it echoes in my blood
with the sound of my grandfather
climbing the stairs of a building
on the lower east side
and pressed against the wall
by someone with a knife
who held the blade
against his neck and said,
‘Swear, swear you are not a Jew,
and I will let you free!’

And from my grandfather who refused
just as they were both surprised
by an angel in disguise who opened a door
in that long, dark hall,
I learned never to be too much in love
with a roof over my head,
that houses are made of sticks and glass,
that they break like the works of our hands,
and that we should be ready to fly
up into the night with parcels and children
and scrolls under our arms
on the back of the wind.”

Disney anthology

In 1976, Ronco released an LP anthology, The Greatest Hits of Walt Disney, featuring 24 original soundtrack recordings and also including song lyrics and eight cutouts of Disney characters (Ronco R-2100). Like other anthologies from the label, it was heavily promoted on television. The selections include Bare Necessities, Whistle While You Work, A Spoonful of Sugar, Ballad of Davy Crockett, Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo, etc.

Humphrey Bogart

I recently rewatched for the 50th time the classic Humphrey Bogart 1946 film classic The Big Sleep via a nicely mastered DVD. Bogart as detective Philip Marlowe, his fourth and last wife Lauren Bacall as the “spoiled, exacting, ruthless Vivian Sternwood who falls in love with Marlowe and, among the distinguished cast, cowboy star Bob Steele and character actor Trevor Bardette, as two cold-blooded killers contributed vividly to its infinitely rewatchable qualities, with Henry Hawks directing and Mississippi novelist William Faulkner providing the script.

 

 

 

.

by Peter Cates

Richard Himber

A two LP set, Richard Himber and his Ritz-Carlton Hotel Orchestra Featuring Joey Nash (RCA Bluebird, AXM-5520, released 1975) contains 32 recordings from the 1934-35 years of 78s that were originally released on the ten-inch discs of that decade by RCA Victor’s subsidiary 35 cent Bluebird label.

Prior to the establishment of this Orchestra, Richard Himber (1899-1966) had been a violinist for Sophie Tucker’s hotel jazz band and then in charge of bookings for Rudy Vallee (whose own megahit of the 1920s, Stein Song, helped put his alma mater, the University of Maine/Orono, on the nationwide map).

Joey Nash (?-2000) was Himber’s lead singer from 1933 to 1935. Himber also hired such musicians as Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Bunny Berrigan for the Ritz engagements.

The records feature some very beautifully arranged performances in which sophisticated rhythms are blended with sweet melodic textures and solo instrumental details from the harp, strings, woodwinds, etc. Joey Nash had a consistently appealing tenor voice and knew how to put a song across. Himber’s Orchestra was basically hired by hotel management to play music for its patrons to dance to but many of them preferred to simply listen.

Some very fascinating liner notes were provided for the 1975 re-issue by Joey Nash on the trials and tribulations that he observed and personally experienced before the Orchestra hit paydirt.

A few details:

– Himber was a bit of a con man promoting pipe dreams of stardom, classy hotel bookings and nightly radio broadcasts nationwide , meanwhile paying nothing.
– Its first broadcasts from the Essex House had the players housed in a rancid basement storage room for old hotel furnishings and assorted trash.
– A saxophone player busted Himber’s nose in a moment of arrogance.
– Other musicians received summons for alimony.
– One violinist brought his German shepherd to work where it chewed up a songbook and howled on a nationwide duet with the clarinettist.
– A musician was attacked by the angry father of his pregnant girlfriend.
– When the Ritz broadcasts became a success, the orchestra was earning $4,000 weekly.

Among the Great American Songbook classics on the album are Stars Fell on Alabama, Tea for Two, What a Difference a Day Made, Avalon and Winter Wonderland.

In later years, Himber had a traveling band giving free outdoor concerts on a flatbed truck and got sponsorship from Pepsi Cola. During one of these concerts in 1966, he collapsed from a heart attack and died a few hours later at the age of 67.

Himber once stated, “Remember that vanity rules the world.”

The above recordings can be heard via YouTube.

by Peter Cates

Adolph Hitler

In the interest of getting a few columns ready a few weeks ahead of time, I am writing this one on April 20, the 135th birthday anniversary of one of the two most evil dictators of the 20th century (the other being Joseph Stalin), namely former German chancellor Adolf Hitler (1889-1945).

My earliest exposure to Hitler’s life came via a short paperback, The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler, by William L. Shirer (1904-1993) which I bought for 25 cents through the TAB Book Club when I was in sixth grade during the 1962-63 school year. John Kennedy was still president and his father, who was appointed Ambassador to Great Britain in the late 1930s, for some mysterious reasons by FDR, was one of Hitler’s biggest fans, much to the disgust of FDR who eventually fired him, and of son Jack who would quietly leave the room whenever his father was spouting politics.

Shirer’s book was based on the much longer 1961 Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which has sold millions of copies and was a Book of the Month Club selection. Much of the material was based on the author’s years as a journalist in Berlin from 1934 to 1940. More than any other correspondent during those six years, Shirer personally witnessed the triumph of evil in its various manifestations and brought to his writing an immediacy most others lacked.

He authored several other books on these experiences – Berlin Diary, End of a Berlin Diary, The Nightmare Years, Twentieth Century Journey, etc.

In 1934, once Hitler was establishing himself after being “democratically voted in by the people,” Shirer wrote in the Nightmare Years what he was witnessing in Berlin:

“Platoons or companies of brown-shirted storm troopers of the S.A. and black-coated guards of the more elite S.S. were constantly marching through the streets, their jackboots echoing on the pavement. I was warned that anyone on the sidewalk who did not pause to salute their standards and flags was liable to be beaten up on the spot. I soon learned to duck into a shop when they passed.”

In 1940, Shirer received word that the Gestapo was planning to arrest him on trumped up charges of espionage and execute him, and got out in the nick of time.

Most highly recommended is a viewing of 1961’s Judgment at Nuremberg dealing with the trial of four Nazi judges by an American military tribunal and starring Spencer Tracy as the presiding chief justice, Burt Lancester as one of the Nazis and an all star cast that includes Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, William Shatner, etc. Spencer Tracy stole the show.

A particularly disturbing aspect of the film was the several Germans who denied knowing about the death camps. And other pertinent historical issues were referenced – the beginnings of the Cold War, the temporary closing of Berlin by the Russians and the Berlin Airlift of 1948 in which food and other necessary supplies were parachuted by American planes.

And finally a haunting scene of Tracy as the Judge walking by himself through the outdoor amphitheater where Hitler had his rallies communicated powerfully.

Otto Klemperer

I have been listening to an eight CD set of the great Otto Klem­perer’s 1960s studio recordings of Bach’s B minor Mass and Saint Matthew’s Passion, Handel’s Messiah and the Beeth­oven Missa Solemnis, each of which is a masterpiece. Klemperer (1885-1973) was already in his 80s and still conducting at a peak level. Warner Classics 9 93540 2.

Klem­perer’s son Werner portrayed Colonel Klink on Hogan’s Heroes.

These recordings can be heard via YouTube.

 

 

 

.