Dr. Metablog

Debra Paget Then and Now -- Broken Arrow (1950)

In 1951, when Broken Arrow hit the Leader Theater on Coney Island Avenue, I was just an ungrown twelve-year-old. I wasn't an assiduous movie-goer because weekends were for basketball and softball, but when I did invest my 14 cents in a matinee, it was for a Western  -- not for a soppy musical or scary crime film. Last night, for the first time in 67 years, I watched Broken Arrow again. I imagined that I would remember it clearly.

Hold on, let me be scrupulously honest here. I didn't pretend that I would remember the entirety of the film, not even the plot. I knew only that Sanseearah, the Indian Maiden "Morningstar" as portrayed by Debra Paget, was incised into the deep fabric of my brain. She, Debra that is, might have been my greatest crush or first true love. And why shouldn't she have been? Just direct your admiring gaze to the still above. Miss Paget was young, lovely, exotic as all get out, and yielding. I admit with chagrin that I didn't fully understand what got me so het up about her in 1951, but het up I was.

But all is changed, now, almost three generations later. What was "hot" and romantic then seems more than a little creepy now. Debra Paget (or DebraLee Griffin, of Denver, Colorado) was only sixteen years old when the film was shot. Sixteen! Moreover, she plays younger. In fact, the film devotes several long scenes to Morningstar's  puberty rites -- so perhaps she's imagined to be thirteen. (The head dress that she wears in the picture below as well as the rest of the ceremony, was, I am sure, what is now called "fakelore.")

Look at her. The poor dear is barely out of childhood. Mr. Stewart (James Stewart, her graying white mountain-man suitor) was forty-two years old, and looks every bit of it. How can we, how did we, not notice the age difference? Why is he attracted by a child?  I tried hard to suspend disbelief, but my powers of suspension are not infinite. The film, I'm sorry to say, teeters into unsavory child-molesting territory.  

My pre-adolescent fascination with the film has now been altered, dampened and dispatched.

It's a shame, too, because Broken Arrow was a self-consciously progressive film in which the Apaches were figured not as brutal savages but as human beings. It deserves high praise for its groundbreaking stance. The film was written by the leftist Albert Maltz, of Brooklyn, New York, who was one of the Hollywood Ten, and who, on the day I saw Broken Arrow for the first time, was in jail serving a one-year sentence for refusing to cooperate with the runaway House Un-American Activities Committee. 

I therefore wish that the film hadn't been compromised by the March-October love affair. And that Albert Maltz hadn't side-stepped the real difficulties of an interracial marriage in the 1880s by allowing Dear Debra to be murdered.    

And while I'm wishing, I wish also that the authorities at Twentieth-Century Fox hadn't insisted that the two most important Apache roles be played not by Apaches but by whites. Debra Paget is the one lead, while Cochise, the Apache chief, was played in redface by Jeff Chandler, formerly Ira Grossel, a graduate of Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, New York. It's not as though more appropriate actors weren't available. In fact, the character of Geronimo, who has one brief speech, was played by an uncredited Jay Silverheels, an accomplished actor of Cayuga and Mohawk heritage.

But would we, in 1951, have been able to empathize with real Apaches, genuine Apaches, rather than with familiar faces in heavy makeup? Or would such Indians have been, even for liberals, too "other," too foreign?

Where I Lived (V)

 

Here's a picture of the house in which we lived from 1969 to 1973. It's 1521 9th Street in Boulder, Colorado. It's a small, old Craftsman, probably right out of the Sears, Roebuck catalog, which retained, in those years, many of its original dark-wood-and-stained-glass beauties. It was good to us but there weren't enough bedrooms for a young family of five. The rent was so low ($130 a month) that we were able to save a few dollars for a down payment on larger quarters. 

 

The photograph comes from a real estate advertisement. 1521 is up for sale for (gasp) $1.3 million, ten times what it sold for in the '80s.  

 

We had rented the place sight unseen and then in August drove the Dodge across the country. I remember how excited we were to arrive at such a handsome respectable home after four years of apartment living. I loved the house and would have bought it, but in the summer of 1972, when we returned to Boulder from Vermont, it was clear that we couldn't fit comfortably into such crowded quarters, however beautiful.

 

So we started the search.  The offspring were unanimously adamant that we must remain in the Flatirons Elementary School district. They were so wise.

 

Warm memories of 1521. It was this house that welcomed Eve in June of 1970.

Written in 2009 and Republished Today, as Relevant Now as Then: As Time Goes By

Two nights ago [this would be October of 2009, of course], I watched the Phillies trounce the Dodgers, 11-0. What a colossal drubbing! HDTV let me appreciate Cliff Lee's southpaw masterpiece in exquisite detail. But for me the most memorable moment of the evening wasn't Lee's artistry or 270-pound Ryan Howard's mad-dash triple to right. Instead, it was the discovery that the Phillies'  lanky, awkward-but-effective scraggly-bearded right fielder Jayson Werth sports a noteworthy baseball pedigree. His grandfather was Ducky Schofield, a good-field no-hit infielder from the 1950s -- from the days, that is, of my golden youth. Holy jumping jiminy! I saw this young feller's grandpappy play! 

Youch!  More evidence, as if more were needed, of my long-in-the-toothedness.

Why should I be surprised?  I went to my first baseball game in 1946 (at Ebbets Field -- Cardinals 3, Dodgers 1).  Before there was TV. I've been attending to the game for 63 years. Close to three generations.  [Nine more years have passed since I first wrote this;  so 72 years now.]  

I've grown accustomed to father-son combos. Bobby and Barry; the Griffeys (who once played together in the same outfield); Felipe and Moises; huge Cecil Fielder and his even more enormous son, Prince; the Hundleys, the Stottlemyres, and many, many others. Sometimes while I'm watching a game I lose track of time. Eric Young, Jr. looks and runs so exactly like his father that it's easy to fall into flashback mode. I remember a game in which Pedro Borbon came in to relieve. Holy moly, I said to myself -- he's a right-handed pitcher. Why the heck is he throwing with his left hand?  Then after a few seconds of complete bafflement it came to me: Pedro Borbon, Jr. I had simply lost twenty-five years -- a phenomenon to which your "mature" brain is occasionally and increasingly prone.

Jayson Werth isn't even the sole grandson. Aaron Boone's father was the catcher (and manager) Bob Boone and his grandfather was the Cleveland infielder Ray Boone, whom I also saw play, but only on the TV. And then there's the Bell family: grandsons David and Mike, father Buddy, and grandfather Gus, a big hitter with Cincinnati during the Ducky Schofield years.  

So here's the question. Will I hang around long enough to watch the great-grandsons play? Is Jayson Werth fertile?  Does he have any kids?  Are there any budding Boones or baby Bells waiting in the wings?

Horrors of Hellenism

I've been reading about the death of Alexander at the beginning of the Hellenistic period. It's all new to me, and much of it is fascinating, especially about cultural matters, but there's also page after page of difficult-to-retain accounts of warfare and of particular battles. Here's an example of the kind of material that takes up three-quarters or perhaps even 80% of the book.  

"The two armies faced each other quite conventionally, with the phalanx composed mostly of Lysimachus' and Cassander's troops confronting Antigonus'  phalanx. On their right, Seleucus and Lysimachus stationed a vast mass of Seleucus'  light infantry; on the left was their heavy cavalry commanded by Seleucus' son Antiochus.  Confronting Antiochus was Demetrius in command of Antigonus'  heavy cavalry. As the battle commenced, Demetrius and his cavalry charged Antiochus and drove the enemy cavalry off. Demetrius proceeded to commit the worst blunder a cavalry leader can commit: he over-pursued, leaving the main battle well behind, instead of turning to attack the enemy infantry from behind. As soon as Demetrius had disappeared in the distance, Seleucus brought forward four hundred war elephants and placed them as a screen between Demetrius and his path back to the battle. Meanwhile Lysimachus' phalanx came to grips with that of Antigonus, and Seleucus led his light cavalry in an outflanking maneuver to attack Antigonus' infantry from behind...."  Etc. 

Exactly what is at stake in this war? The historian (Richard Billows, Before and After Alexander [New York, 2018]) leaves us rather in doubt. He puts no emphasis on the usual economic or ideological issues; the struggle seems to be entirely about personalities. Will the kingdom be ruled by Lysimachus or Demetrius, by Antiochus or Antigonus?  It doesn't seem to matter, either to me or to the historian.

But what of the soldiers?  Whether on one side or the other, they're likely to be impaled by the dreaded Macedonian larissa, trampled by horses, or squished by elephants. For what purpose?

I think that at one point in my life I might have been intrigued by these dynastic struggles, but now, what I feel most strongly is sympathy for the ordinary soldier and sorrow for the stupidity of my species.

Where I Lived (IV)

378 Broadway in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1960 to early in 1962. It was a two-family frame house in which the second floor had been turned into two apartments. We were in one of them, a bedroom, a living room with a kitchen and a detached bathroom down the hall. Perfectly fine for a newlywed graduate student. The newlywed neighbors, Adi and Rutty, are still friends; their daughter, Zerlina, born in April of 1961, was the first child I held in my arms (as an adult). But there was a conflict with the puritanical small-town Irish Catholic landlady because we had allowed a friend to stay in the apartment while we were away "and he brought a woman in." So we moved to a university-owned apartment house on Irving Street, between Cambridge and Kirkland, despite the fact that it raised our rent from $90 a month to $105. We bought a second or third or fourth hand bed for $25 and a rug for $10. It was a serviceable apartment that seemed like luxury after the decrepit Ithaca digs. We stayed until the summer of 1965 when we lit out for Manhattan.  

Where I Lived (III)

Some childhood summer residences.  

1944: my mother had surgery (I was never informed what sort -- such things were kept secret in those days -- but I suspect a hysterectomy) and I was sent to live with my grandmother Sonia, who rented or owned a house near Monticello, New York. It was a plain wood-shingled house and I believe that Sonia used it as an informal hotel or b&b. I don't remember much at all except that she tied a long string to a light bulb over my bed and instructed me to pull it if I needed help during the night. Help? Though only 5, I considered myself quite self-sufficient.

1945: my parents rented a summer home on Glen Lake in the Catskills. It was a house without indoor plumbing. I have a vivid memory of the outhouse, which frightened me because you could look into the hole and see your and your parents' deposits. I remember with more pleasure the pump in the kitchen through which we drew our water. Sometimes I was allowed to prime the pump by pouring a glass of water down its mouth. In August, the war ended and people who owned motor boats were zooming around the lake, shouting. I asked my father what was going on and he said, "the war is over."

1947, 1948, 1949: the best part of my childhood. Three long idyllic summers on Makamah Beach near Northport, N.Y. I have written about this elsewhere.

Where I Lived (II)

Between 1956 and 1961, I lived in five different places in Ithaca, New York: four bad, one good.

The first was a cinder-block dormitory room, less a home than a cell, which I shared with a young guy from Virginia who was a not only a smoker but a classic Southern bigot of a type that's pretty much extinct nowadays. No doubt he's changed and matured, but our paths have not crossed these last sixty years. We were both very young, but I was much too young. Childish, when I'm honest with myself. The following year -- 1957-58 -- I lived in a basement apartment in a building that was known locally as the "Indian Embassy" because the upper three floors were all inhabited by men (no women, not a trace of them) from the subcontinent. The odor of garam masala and turmeric, much more exotic then than now, regularly drifted into my apartment. I remember that my kitchen, which I rarely used, was unheated and that it was not unusual to find in midwinter a pot or pan of water, left in the sink, frozen into a block of ice. If the city of Ithaca had any zoning laws, and enforced them, the owner of my apartment, Miss Emily, would have been exiled to Siberia. In my third year in Ithaca I lived in still another beaten-down house on College Avenue. It was also unfit for adult habitation but had a functioning kitchen -- it's there that I learned to cook my own food. In my senior year, I lived in a real apartment -- four bedrooms, three roommates, including one who has remained a lifelong friend. I should have noticed, but I didn't, that the fourth floor of an ancient building made entirely of wood, with no fire escape, was dangerous. It was a firetrap and although I survived, the building didn't, and was demolished a few years after I graduated -- and left the southern tier for good.   

My favorite residence during the Ithaca years came during the summer of 1961, when, fleeing graduate school in Cambridge and still attached to Ithaca, we (my bride and I) sublet a small (very small house -- essentially a single room that served as both living room and bedroom) -- at 148 Snyder Hill Road. It was my first experience of living in "the country." There was a cow next door! When I returned to Ithaca in 1992 for my daughter's graduation from Cornell, my house had disappeared and the fields were filled with acres of rich suburban homes -- large lots, big lawns, clean, neat and prosperous.

Our 1961 house, though not more than a tumbledown cabin, gave us a good summer and a good memory. 

Where I Lived (I)

From my birth in 1939 until I left for college in 1956, I lived at 539 East 9 Street in the Flatbush (now gentrified to "Kensington") section of Brooklyn. 539 was a three-story, three-family wood-frame Victorian, which my parents had acquired in 1937 for $4500 -- a depression-era fire-sale price financed by my generous "maiden aunt" Mollie. The house was larger and more splendid, I believe, than my father's modest income would otherwise have justified. At first we lived on the first floor and rented floors two and three. Much later, substantially more prosperous, we rented the first floor apartment and lived on the second and third floors in nine spacious rooms, only a couple of which mattered to me.

Most mysterious was my parents'  bedroom, which was entirely off limits to me and to my brothers Eugene and Jonathan. A forbidden zone. Absolutely taboo. I remember that one time I played some sort of racing or hiding game with one of my brothers and ventured into the room and -- horror of horrors  -- rumpled my parents' neat bedspread (the bed was always carefully made). It was as if I had robbed a bank or bitten Miss Bildersee, our formidable PS 217 principal. I was severely rebuked and made to swear that I would never commit such an outrageous transgression again. An overreaction by my parents, I knew even then.  

Nevertheless, I used to sneak into the room when the parents were absent. In one corner hung a picture of my deceased infant sister Susan. Placed on the floor under the picture, was a child-size chair of wood and rush which was venerated even more than the connubial bed. A shrine. I'm sure that the taboo against entering the room was linked to the shrine. Yet to me, the parents' bedroom was not so much holy as it was weird and strange.  

After my mother died in 1978 my father moved downstairs, abandoning shrine, bed and bedroom. When I visited as an adult, my wife and I would sometimes sleep in what had formerly been the parents' bed. That was mighty creepy and inhibiting.    

Equally important to me but much more pleasant was my father's small but intensely cultivated backyard garden. He grew roses -- hybrid teas, mostly but also a floriferous "Blaze" climber. An apple tree, not very prolific, a Bartlett pear, and a peach tree that was damaged by the hurricane of 1946 and finished off by borers. There was also a patch of perennial sweet peas, a weigela with picotee  leaves, and a fragrant mock orange. But the garden was dominated by Dad's  perfectly tended roses. 

In 1948 I was allotted a square foot of space in which I planted a single pumpkin seed. The plant transgressed its assigned borders --  which amused me no end -- and the single pumpkin that it produced was prizeworthy huge. In subsequent years, I was allowed room to plant and study the habits of old-fashioned annuals: snapdragons, marigolds, zinnias. I saved their seeds over the winter. I now grow those same plants in their modern, much-improved versions. But I don't dare to try roses; that will always be Dad's domain.    

I think my life would have been very different without the garden. 

On the whole, 539 was very good to us. After my father died, it was torn down and replaced with an undistinguished apartment house rented by families of Hasids. My very secular father would have been appalled.

Here's a picture of 539 as it appeared in 1940.  The kid's toy in front of the house probably belonged to my older brother.

Billy Graham and Me, 1957

In 1957 (I was 18 and in my second year in college), the reverend doctor Billy Graham led the largest revival meeting in history -- an average attendance, in the old-old Madison Square Garden, of eighteen thousand people a night for three months. What was his message?  It was half jingo, half Christian fundamentalism. "Let us tell the world that Americans believe in God, that we are morally and spiritually strong as well as militarily and economically. Let us tell the world that we are united and ready to march under the banner of Almighty God" -- not a sentiment that would have been dear to my heart. No Almighty God in my upbringing or anywhere in my brain. 

Graham was a fervent anti-Communist, but of a sort that left me baffled: "My own theory about Communism," he proclaimed, "is that it is master-minded by Satan. I think there is no other explanation for the tremendous gains of Communism in which they seem to outwit us at every turn, unless they have supernatural power and wisdom and intelligence given to them."  Let me try two non-Satanic explanations for apparent Communist success: 1) "They" didn't outwit us;  in fact, they were dumber than us, overplayed their hand, and collapsed. 2) European and American imperialism had left a mess in the "underdeveloped countries" that was ripe for exploitation.  

How was a secular partially-educated young fellow supposed to understand such a paranoid, irrational  analysis of world politics?

With mockery, I'm afraid. Sometime in the middle of the summer of 1957, along with a bunch of wise-ass PS 217 cronies, I took a break from my Sears, Roebuck warehouse job and took the subway to 49th Street to take a gander and a listen to the Crusade for Christ (it was free). What do I remember?  A chorus (probably led by George Beverly Shea but I can't swear to it), bright lights, a cheering, milling crowd. I remember that Billy spoke, but I have no recollection of what he said, though the bronze gong of a voice resounded through the hall. Did he tell us of the five ways that Americans could most effectively combat Communism? By "old-fashioned Americanism" -- whatever that was, by "conservative and evangelical Christianity," by prayer, by "spiritual revival," and by "personal Christian experience." All five of which sound pretty much the same to me. And remote from my experience or desires.

Needless to say, I wasn't his most sympathetic or susceptible auditor.  

I wonder if he touched on another of his favorite topics that night: that "a woman commits sin when she deliberately dresses in such a way as to entice a man"; "that a wife "should keep herself attractive and give her husband a big kiss when he comes home from the office instead of yelling at him from the kitchen."

Except for the spectacle, it's all vague in my mind. I do remember, though, that when leaving that Garden I accidentally and momentarily found myself on the line of people who had made a "decision for Christ" and were heading to the podium. That was scary. I beat a quick retreat.  

I wonder how many other members of the audience were rubberneckers like me. 

I'm reminded now of the great old gospel song by the Carter Family, "Something Got a Hold of Me."  It's a parable that tells the story of a man who goes to a revival meeting to scoff. "I says I'll go down, take a look at the crowd/  It's just the weak-minded I feel."  But then there's a revelation: "They sing and shout and they all clasp their hands/ And they all got down on their knees./ When the fire fell from heaven it fell upon me,/ And then I fell to the floor." Because

Something's got a hold of me.

Yes, something's got a hold of me.

I have a spirit I'll never forget

That something's got a hold of me.

Well, nothing got a hold of me. No fire from heaven, no road to Damascus revelation. If anything, I was confirmed in my scoffery and atheism.

What did I learn? Not much. At the most, only that if the people who inhabit this country, my fellow Americans, are incomprehensible to me, then it is equally likely that I am incomprehensible to them.

And frankly, the mysteries that I encountered in Madison Square Garden in 1957 are, sixty years later, still mysterious to this day. Perhaps even more so.

Amnesia on Film: Crack-up (1946)

Ho-hum. Another day, another amnesia movie. 

Crack-up offers still another variant on this most malleable of diseases: amnesia that is chemically-induced.  

George Steele (played by too-old-for-the-part Pat O'Brien) presents a danger to a doctor-thief played by reliable Ray Collins. To discredit  him, Steele is kidnapped and injected with "narcosynthesis" which causes him lose his memory and act erratically. Too many silly plot complications and a couple of murders follow, but eventually a second injection brings Steele round.

I'm not aware of another case of chemically-induced amnesia in film, but I know that there is such a thing in medicine. Propofol and scopolamine are frequently mentioned and I believe that even the common sleeping pill, Ambien, may have amnesiac properties. So there's some limited scientific underpinning for Crack-up's apparently fantastic premise.

In noir, amnesia is as common as the common cold. In the 40s and 50s, a guy couldn't walk down a louche shadowy city street or take a dame out dancing to  a night spot without encountering half a dozen cases. It was a regular plague. 

My Mitt

My most valuable possession, lifetime, was my baseball mitt. A fielder's glove, not a catcher's or first baseman's. It was, I think, a Rawlings model, and it was inscribed with the name "Monte Pearson." (Pearson had been a pitcher for the Cleveland Indians.)  I remember many hours spent oiling it. I guarantee that it was well cared for.

In the P. S. 217 neighborhood, to possess one's own baseball glove was a marker of class. When we played, there were never enough gloves to go around, so when our team came in to bat, those who had gloves would leave theirs on the field for someone from the other team to use. Although I never articulated it at the time, it felt downright prosperous to be a lender, not a borrower. I think a good glove cost about $15.00 in those days, so it was no trivial expense.

When my brother Jonathan, who was three years younger than I, was presented with his glove, he slept with it every night.  I recently asked him if he continued to do so after he was married.  He says no, but....

I don't think that anyone who didn't grow up in the 40s and 50s in Brooklyn, in the Jackie Robinson era, can appreciate the importance of baseball to us.  

I've tried to think of another possession that ever meant as much to me -- a particular book or an automobile, for instance -- but nothing compares. Not even slightly.