by Peter Cates

Roger Boyle

For some years, I have found that the only criticism worth reading, whether books, music, etc., is that which has a passion for the subject, and a sense that the writing is a means of putting one’s thoughts in order while bringing the reader along in this journey.

In his endlessly rereadable Collected Essays, Graham Greene achieved this consistently. Among his interests were the English playwrights from after Shakespeare to the 18th century. One essay, An Unheroic Dramatist, is a 1937 book review of The Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, edited by William Smith Clark.

Looking up Boyle (1621-1679) on Wiki, I find out he was an Irish Protestant landowner, soldier, historian and poet. He was ferociously anti-Catholic and sided with the English against the Irish Catholics and other independents. And he blew the way the wind blew. He supported the rule of King Charles the First (1600-1649) before that monarch was overthrown and beheaded in the Tower of London, then aligned himself with the King’s adversary Oliver Cromwell after the latter took power and, after Cromwell’s death in 1659, made the leap to safety in supporting King Charles the Second who came back to the throne after being in exile.

I offer the opening paragraph of Greene’s book review for an assessment of Boyle’s merits as a writer and playwright:

“Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, is one of the great bores of literature, and it can hardly have been a labour of love for Mr. Clark to edit for the first time eight ponderous heroic plays, hardly lightened by two attempts at comedy. Yet all admirers of the period will be grateful: there is a peculiar satisfaction in seeing one more gap in Restoration scholarship filled with such immense efficiency: no crack between the bricks. …They will read with gorged satisfaction that one of these plays, The Tragedy of Zoroastes, has never before been printed that Orrery’s first play, The Generall, had been previously printed only in a private edition of eighty copies. Another great booming bogus piece, The Tragedy of King Saul, is added to the Orrery Canon for the first time. All this, with the really magnificent notes on Restoration [term for the 1660s monarchy of Charles the Second] stage-craft, is a not unworthy harvest of eight years labour.”

This is a very good example of Greene’s razor sharp clarity with words, his passion for this period of literature, his occasional willingness to be bored and his finely tuned ability at separating the wheat from the chaff.

Forgettable songs

A 1910 acoustically recorded 10 inch shellac record, Columbia A897, contains two glaringly awful old-fashioned deservedly forgettable songs:

Side A – Any Little Girl, That’s A Nice Little Girl, Is The Right Little Girl For Me, as sung by then 18-year-old Walter Van Brunt (1892-1971).

Side B – I’ve Got The Time; I’ve Got The Place, But It’s Hard To Find The Girl, as vocalized by Henry Burr, the frequently used recording name for Harry McClaskey (1882-1941).

Deservedly forgettable but a historically fascinating record of sheer idiocy in Tin Pan Alley songwriting before World War I erupted.

How to Get Away With Murder

Last night I watched the first episode of an ABC series, How To Get Away With Murder, which ran for six seasons beginning in 2014. The opening episode was sporadic in its interest but actress Viola Davis as the main character, a law professor at a prestigious university somewhere in Philadelphia, was well worth watching.

 

 

 

 

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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.