by Peter Cates

What It Takes

A 1992 book, What It Takes, by the late Richard Ben Cramer (1950-2013) examined the lives of six candidates in the 1988 race for the White House: Republicans Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush (1924-2018) and Democrats Joe Biden, Michael Dukakis, Dick Gephart and Gary Hart. It weighs in at over 1,000 pages and is written in an incisively fascinating narrative style that lends itself to dipping into because, life being much too short, one may not have enough time to slog through the entire volume.

In my continuing series on past presidents, I couldn’t have come across, among the piles of unread books in my house, this one at a better time as when I needed something interesting on George Herbert Walker Bush, #41, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Since birth, Bush had lived a life of wealth and privilege inside a bubble and Cramer zeroed in on a key moment before the 1981 inauguration when the newly-elected vice-president represented Ronald Reagan at the Massachusetts funeral of former Democrat House Speaker John McCormack:

“It was as George Bush left the church, and all the other mourners were held at the door, as he was guided through a gauntlet of men to the limousine waiting in a ten-car train, as the agents closed him in behind bulletproof steel and glass, and stood round the car, scanning the sidewalks and the empty street ahead, as the motorcycles roared to life and George Bush could no longer hear the men and women with whom he had prayed only minutes before, and he could see only the backs of the agents and the streak of two-wheelers past his shaded window, as even the church was rendered invisible by the men and machines walling him away, then George Bush drew one deep breath, as he turned from the window, and he said to friends in the car:

” ‘God!…Isn’t it great? D’ya ever see so many cops?’ ”

For what it’s worth, I voted for HW in both 1988 and 1992, he had some truly good qualities that, in scanning this book, Cramer seems to have ignored, and I have never regretted these votes.

A hilariously true quote about the vice-president job description was provided by FDR’s #2 man, John Nance Garner (until Franklin dropped him from the 1940 ticket in favor of Henry Wallace): “A bucket of warm spit!”

Coincidentally, both Bush and Cramer shared the same birthday of June 12, along with my nephew Philip Cates, in Florida.

California Split

A 1974 film, California Split, directed by Robert Altman (1925-2006), dealt with the sleazy world of gambling casinos in Los Angeles and Reno, Nevada. One saw the full range of humanity, warts and all, at the card games, slot machines and horse races, from the out of state grandmothers to the starry eyed youth.

The wide spanning cinematography had a certain poetic lyricism in its capturing of detail. The landscape of a highway bus ride from Los Angeles to Reno, along with the glimpses into the 1970s street life of both cities, gave me goosebumps.

I remember enjoying it a lot when it first came out 50 years ago, I recently rewatched it on Amazon Prime and I enjoyed it even more.

Elliott Gould, still living at 85, and the late George Segal (1934-2021) portray two addicted gamblers, Charlie and Bill, who bet heavily at poker games, blackjack, boxing matches, basketball games etc., winning a little, losing a lot and getting into difficulties with their banks, bookies and more ominous characters.

One situation has them winning a lot of cash at poker in LA but encountering a dangerous sore loser who, later that evening, robs them at gunpoint and kicks their ribs several times in the process.. Later in Reno, Charlie sees the robber, follows him into the men’s room, kicks him in the ribs, busts his nose and takes back his cash.

While in Reno, the two, having staked each other, experience a miraculous winning streak of over $82,000, and divide the cash evenly; Charlie wants to continue with the heavy betting everywhere and anywhere but Bill decides to turn over a new leaf and the two men go their separate ways.

Actresses Ann Prentiss (1939-2010) and Gwen Welles (1951-1993) portray two prostitutes Babara and Susan who share an apartment with Charlie and both women brought a wonderful sensitivity to their roles.

Actress Barbara Ruick (1930-1974) brought a beautifully vivid presence as the bartender in the private room hosting a high stakes poker game. Before the movie was released, she complained of headaches and nausea, went to bed early and was found dead in her hotel room the next morning. The cause of death was an aneurysm . The closing credits mentioned her in memory.

Her husband was composer John Williams, still living at 91, who dedicated his Violin Concerto also to her memory.

In the 1956 musical Carousel, Miss Ruick portrayed Carrie Snow, the close friend of Julie Jordan portrayed by Shirley Jones, and sang beautifully in that role. The musical was also filmed in Maine’s own Boothbay Harbor.

The Sound of Tomorrow

In 1963, RCA Victor released a one dollar LP sampler of its new pop and classical releases, The Sound of Tomorrow, and sold it through Buick automobile dealerships around the country. I bought my copy at the then-Silver Street dealership, in Waterville, that was owned by a friend of the family, the late Nick Saporita and played it to death.

I came into a second copy of the LP recently as part of a free crate of records otherwise headed for a dumpster. The Sound of Tomorrow referred to the Dynagroove recording process which proved, in the long run, because of its dryness of sound to be a deterioration in quality of sound rather than an advance.

Anyway, the pop and classical selections were quite good, ranging from the jazz influenced percussion of Dick Schory’s Stompin’ at the Savoy and Sid Ramin’s brassy arrangement of Spring is Here to soprano Leontyne Price’s Un Bel Di or One Fine Day from Puccini’s opera Madam Butterfly and Erich Leinsdorf conducting the Boston Symphony in the Mahler First Symphony Scherzo movement.

by Peter Cates

Fred Bonnie

Bridgton native Fred Bonnie (1945-2000) attended a two-room schoolhouse, in North Bridgton, until his father’s death in 1954 and the family’s move to Portland. He graduated in 1964 from Cheverus High School and in 1971 with honors from the University of Vermont.

Mr. Bonnie moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where he became gardening editor for Southern Living Magazine for a number of years and taught writing courses at the Uni­versity of Alabama.

He wrote novels, collections of short stories and books on gardening and best expressed his beginnings as a writer and his thematic concerns in two paragraphs found in the author biographies section of the 1989 anthology Maine Speaks:

“Growing up in Maine had a lot to do with my becoming a writer. As a child, I was indoctrinated with the Natives-versus-Outsiders frame of mind. Complaining about the outsiders has become the state sport. In Portland, I was exposed to a broad range of human types. Portland is small, but has some people most of us would call weird. A port city tends to have street people, some interesting, some just pitiful. But decades before the street people gained national news attention, they were common in downtown Portland.

“As a part-time dishwasher in a downtown restaurant when I was in high school, I observed at close range the types of people John Steinbeck and Erskine Caldwell were writing about in the 1930s and ‘40s. I write about people trying to deal with life. I’ve always sympathized with underdogs. I hope I always do.”

In a short story, The State Meet, and in keeping with Fred Bonnie’s interest in, and compassion for, the underdogs of society and the ever-present undercurrents of indescribable anxieties intruding into the inner emotional lives of these underdogs, Fred Bonnie’s gift for connecting Maine’s at times not so beautiful landscape with the terrors of a teenage boy on a very long bus ride from Portland to a state cross country race at an unnamed University near Bangor is conveyed in the following passage-

“By the time the bus reached Bangor, the sky was grayer and colder. Rain seemed certain. Daniel hated running in the rain, with the paths muddy and the grassy fields like swamps. The drive from Bangor to the University field house was short. They arrived long before Daniel could accept being there. He was the last one to leave the bus.”

On May 13, 2000, Fred Bonnie died from injuries sustained in an automobile accident three days earlier. He was 54.

Lionel Barrymore

An MGM/Longines Symphonette LP features the great actor Lionel Barrymore (1878-1954) portraying Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens justly immortal A Christmas Carol. Barrymore conveyed a presence in that role that, for me, was only surpassed by Alastair Sims in the 1951 black and white English film version, although others such as Reginald Owens in the 1937 MGM American version; Mister Magoo in the early ‘60s cartoon; and George C. Scott in one made for TV during the 1980s, each scored points as the miser turned kind man in the space of a few hours.
Side 2 has David Rose and his orchestra doing 12 Xmas carols in nicely old-fashioned arrangements with lots of strings and quite the change from Rose’s brassy 1960s megahit, The Stripper.

Ronald Reagan

In the on-going survey of former presidents, I shall deal with Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) quickly and concisely.

A. His last film as a mobster in the 1964 made for TV, The Killers, with co-stars John Cassavetes, Claude Akins, Lee Marvin, Clu Gulagher and Angie Dickinson was riveting.

B. His brokering of a treaty with Mikhail Gorbachev remains a fine example of diplomacy, good will and friendship with a former Premier of the former Soviet Union and an ideological adversary.

C. His courage in writing a farewell letter to the American people when he was beginning his downslide with dementia and Alzheimer’s.

by Peter Cates

Christmas music

Reader’s Digest released a number of record sets devoted to Christmas music, one being a 1985, two LP set Joy to the World. It contains two sides of 15 famous carols performed with decent professionalism by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Peter Knight (1917-1985); Knight’s name might be familiar to fans of the Moody Blues as he scored the strings for the group’s album Days of Future Passed.

Side 3 is devoted to a lushly overdone Christmas Suite for Orchestra consisting of the tried and true seasonal pop songs – Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, Winter Wonderland, Leroy Anderson’s Sleigh Ride, etc., with Waldtaufel’s classical Skater’s Waltz tacked on the end.

Side 4 has organ and bells instrumentals of The First Noel, Schubert’s Ave Maria, Good King Wenceslas and a couple of others. Nice arrangements in very small doses.

Caribbean Calypsos

A 1956 Capitol album (T 10071) Caribbean Calypsos features three vocalists – Tony Johnson and a singer simply known as the Torpedo, both men natives of Jamaica; and the older Lord Beginner (1904-1981) who came from Port of Spain, Trinidad.

The selections have such titles as I Will Die a Bachelor, Wheel and Turn Me, Don’t Fence Her In, Lazy Janie and Queen Elizabeth Calypso. And the lyrics evoked the peaceful contentment of life then in both islands while downplaying its difficulties.

The birth names of Lord Beginner and the Torpedo, respectively, were the good old-fashioned English names of Egbert Moore and Nevil Cameron and were zealously kept a secret from their fans in the island. Lord Beginner sold more records than any other Calypso singer, save for Harry Belafonte who surpassed him by a narrow margin.

Interestingly, as of the mid-50s, all three singers were residing in England.

Wienerwalzer Paprika

Wienerwalzer Paprika (Mercury MG50190) is an LP recorded during the summer of 1958 at the Vienna Konzerthaus Grosse Saal, one of the grand buildings erected during the reign of Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph to function as a concert hall and still in use, most famously as the location of the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Eve concerts broadcast worldwide.

The album doesn’t contain a single waltz by Vienna’s immortal Waltz King Johann Strauss Junior (1825-1899), instead focusing on six waltzes by as many composers:

1. Josef Lanner (1801-1835) – Die Schonbrunner Waltz; btw, Lanner, who was a self-taught violinist, formed a quartet to earn money performing at social gatherings and his second violinist was Johann Strauss Senior (1800-1849).

2. Josef Strauss (1827-1870) – Village Swallows Waltz; Josef was the younger brother of the Waltz King.

3. Emil Waldtaufel (1837-1915) – The Skater’s Waltz. This classic was conducted with more musicality than the above-mentioned rendition in the Reader’s Digest set.

4. Franz Lehar (1870-1948) – Merry Widow Waltz. I own numerous recordings of Lehar’s perpetually charming music for his Viennese operettas, the Merry Widow being quite rightfully his most famous.

5. Erno Dohnanyi (1877-1960) – Wedding Waltz. Dohnanyi was also a noted pianist, conductor and teacher in Budapest and, during his last ten years, at the University of Florida in Tallahassee.

During the Nazi occupation of Hungary, Dohnanyi’s personal intervention saved the lives of several dozen Jewish musicians. His son Hans was an admiral in the German navy but took an active role in the anti-Nazi resistance, as did his daughter’s husband, the renowned theologian Dietrich Bonhoffer; both men were arrested by the Gestapo and later executed.

Hans’s son Christoph Dohnanyi became Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra from 1984 to 2002 and is still active at the age of 94.

6. Emmerich Kalman (1882-1953) – The Gypsy Princess Waltz. Kalman was completing the Gypsy Princess in Budapest in 1915, while World War I was raging around him and, since its premiere in Vienna, the Operetta has been produced over 8,000 times worldwide.

Antal Dorati (1906-1988) conducted performances of vivid distinction while Mercury’s then-revolutionary technique of using one microphone placed strategically in the hall captured a full range of sound with tremendous clarity.

by Peter Cates

Samuel French Morse

Poet Samuel French Morse (1916-1985) taught English at Northeastern University and summered in Hancock.

His A Poem About the Red Paint People is a rumination on a long lost Native-American tribe and can be read in its entirety in the anthology Maine Speaks.

Several lines evoke the sense of sorrow and wonder at a burial site excavation:

“Perhaps he gave the place a name,
Or left a mark the weather wore
As smooth as water long before
The Abenaki settled here.
But who they were and where they went
No Indian or white man knows,
Whose own untoward and bitter wars
Are shellheaps now and broken adze,
Not someone’s half-remembered lies.”

According to his bio details, Morse kept a garden in which he grew plants not usually found and regaled visitors with inexhaustible details on each one.

Moriz Rosenthal

Polish pianist Moriz Rosenthal (1862-1946) achieved such progress as a youth that, after a tour of Romania, he was appointed the Romanian court pianist at the age of 14.

In 1878, Rosenthal began studying with legendary composer/pianist Franz Liszt (1811-1886) at Weimar and remained there as an assistant until Liszt’s death.

The pianist made his U.S. debut in Boston in 1888, taught piano at Phila­delphia’s Curtis Institute of Music from 1926-28 and set up his own private studio in 1939 in New York City where he lived the last seven years of his life.

I have two of the four 12-inch 78 records that comprise a Victor Red Seal album of Chopin pieces he recorded in 1935 (Victor M/DM-338) which can be heard via Internet Archive. It is well worth hearing for its combination of astounding technical virtuosity, an astonishing range of loud and soft dynamics and a heartfelt poetry and knack for conveying the beauty of Chopin’s notes, especially the selected two Nocturnes.

Rosenthal also had a scathing sarcasm. When the pianist heard Vladimir Horowitz thunder brilliantly through the opening of the Tchaikovsky 1st Piano Concerto, he remarked, “He is an Octavian, but not Caesar.”

Upon attending a recital of another legendary pianist Paderewski, Rosenthal commented, “Yes, he plays well, I suppose, but he’s no Paderewski.”

by Peter Cates

Lee Grant

On the basis of three different roles, I currently find Lee Grant, still alive and very sharp in her late 90s, my favorite character actress.

The emotional nuance, strength, vulnerability, anger, calm before the storm, joy, love, maturity, chaos, decorum-every ounce of one’s humanity – is channeled from her very inner self with phenomenal discipline and authenticity into the trio of characters mentioned below:

The 1964 Fugitive episode Taps for a Dead War presented Miss Grant as Millie Hallop, a widow who owns a diner, and lives with her teenage son and brother-in-law, the latter with serious PTSD issues of his own as a Korean War veteran who was grossly disfigured by an explosion from a hand grenade tossed at him by an enemy soldier.

Meanwhile Millie is stressed out by everything that could stress out a widow raising a son, running a diner, dealing with an emotionally fractured brother-in-law and experiencing her own issues of harrowing loneliness with minimal help from the people around her.

Lee Grant has spoken of how she would draw on her own life experiences of loneliness, anxiety and anger to pour into her character roles. This statement verifies her rightfully celebrated ability to convey being on the brink of some unpredictable explosion resulting from the loneliness, anxiety and anger. When her brother-in-law, portrayed by the also very gifted Tim O’Connor, brings home the Fugitive title character Richard Kimble, whom he recognizes as a war-time buddy, Millie very quietly tells Kimble to leave immediately and never ever show his face at the diner again. The look of sulphuric rage in her eyes was honed to a precisely outstanding degree.

The 1967 Oscar winning In the Heat of the Night featured her as a grief-stricken widow Leslie Colbert who spasmodically flings her hands in the air when she is informed by Sidney Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs of her husband’s murder. At that moment, one is not sure if Mrs. Colbert is going to slap Tibbs or sob uncontrollably.

In a 1970 Columbo episode, Ransom for a Dead Man, she portrayed a murderess Leslie Williams who shoots her husband cold-bloodedly yet elicits a bizarre sympathy as she charmingly interacts with Peter Falk’s socially inept but phenomenally shrewd detective with his “Just one more thing” and “Thank you very much!”; and guardedly with a very suspicious stepdaughter. If I didn’t know any better, I would have rooted for her to get away with the murder.

One very memorable scene is when Leslie, being a licensed pilot of small aircraft, takes Columbo for a daredevil ride in her own plane and she is beautifully dressed and wearing designer sunglasses.

Born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal, in New York City, to parents who were Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia, Lee Grant caught the stage bug very early in childhood and her Wikipedia biography gives an interesting account of her career with its setbacks and successes.

She was nominated for the Oscar best supporting actress award in 1951’s Detective Story in which she played a shoplifter; was named best actress at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival; but then blacklisted as a communist from 1952 to 1964 because, even though she was never a communist herself nor was ever interested in its ideology, her first husband and scriptwriter Arnold Manoff was a communist and she wouldn’t testify against him. During the 12 years, she was ekeing out a living through a few stage and TV roles and teaching to support herself and her daughter, actress Dinah Manoff.

In her 2014 autobiography, I Said Yes to Everything, she writes :

“Dinah was my grail, my constant; nothing and no one could get between us. Dinah, and my need to support her financially, morally, viscerally, and my rage at those who had taken twelve working, acting years from my life were what motivated me.”

More about Lee Grant can also be accessed via YouTube, etc.