I’ve been watching some old All in the Family episodes this week. It’s one of those shows that you can go years without seeing and then when you start watching them again, you’re actually surprised at how funny it still is!
What’s been extra interesting and fun for me this week is my two oldest kids have been watching with me, ages 15 and 17. During the first episode, they were both shocked and disgusted by the things Archie said. By the second or third show, they were laughing as they realized that Archie is the butt of the jokes. It proves that intelligent people will understand intelligent programming if you give them the chance. Unfortunately, today’s TV executives don’t trust the audience and so we end up with moronic crap like Jersey Shore or Two and A Half Men. It’s too bad because this was programming that had social relevance and was funny.
I love James Garner. I think I mentioned it before but it bears repeating. In fact, I’m guessing it won’t be the last time I say it here. I’ve loved TV and movies since I was a very young child but there are a few special performers who somehow come to feel like they’re a part of your family or maybe you’re a part of their family. I’m sure we all feel that way about different performers but I also think there are certain performers who have that effect on a whole lot of people. James Garner is one of those people.
I just finished reading The Garner Files: A Memoir that Garner wrote with the help of Jon Winokur. I happy to say that the book or the man did not disappoint. One of the things I’ve always loved most about James Garner is the fact that he gives the impression that he wouldn’t give a damn whether I liked him or not. And, of course, he shouldn’t. But he’s honest enough to say it and always has been. As corny as it sounds, he’s a guy who always been true to himself. He is not a sellout. He’s not an ass kisser and he is not a phony.
I like people who are genuine. I don’t have many talents but I am a pretty good judge of people. I can spot a phony and/or a BS artist. I always felt that Garner was the real deal. After reading his memoir, I have no reason to believe otherwise. I also think it’s that kind of honesty that comes through on screen and makes someone as popular as he’s been with the public for over fifty years. It’s not foolproof. I’m sure there’s been a great many actors and actresses who were extremely talented performers who would have been a disappointment to meet in situations where the camera wasn’t rolling. Garner – I’d be happy to meet anytime, anywhere.
My kids and I have this running debates about commercials. They like them and think a lot of them are entertaining. I hate them. However, there was one series of commercials I always loved. This is how you know someone is really special – when he/she can make even commercials fun to watch!
There are quite a few important birthdays today. Let’s start with two who didn’t make it into our headline but who still hold an important place in our popular culture history.
Dorothy Provine needn’t have done anything besides playing Emeline Marcus-Finch in the 1963 film classic It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World if she wanted to show up on my radar. The classic comedy directed by Stanley Kramer is one of my all-time favorites. She also appears in some other solid swinging sixties comedies like The Great Race (1965) and Who’s Minding the Mint (1967). Sadly, Provine passed away in 2010 at the age of 75.
The very interesting Arte Johnson, Laugh In‘s resident “dirty old man,” turns 83 years old today which I find incredibly hard to believe. If he’s 83, how old does that make me? Here he is in the bushes with a friend.
The amazing Patricia Neal would have been 86 years old today. Neal was a fine actress who probably became better known for her controversial love affair with Gary Cooper (he was married at the time) and for her amazing recovery from a series of strokes in 1965 than she did for her acting. My mother always admired Patricia Neal, not only for her courageous handling of the debilitating strokes, but for her work after that to help victims of brain injuries.
Nevertheless, she was a really outstanding actress who gave memorable performances in such film classics as A Face in the Crowd, Hud (for which she she won the Oscar for Best Actress) and The Subject Was Roses. My first recollection of her was in the 1971 TV movie/pilot The Homecoming which gave birth to the series The Waltons.
And then there’s the great maestro, Federico Fellini. He was, without question, one of the most innovative and pioneering filmmakers in the history of the medium. I wrote a paper about him years ago for a graduate film class I took on the work of Fellini and Bergman with a wonderful writer and teacher named Ed Murray at SUNY Brockport. The conclusion I reached for that paper and one of the messages of Fellini’s films that I always remember is that the only reality is the reality we create within ourselves, within our own minds. He was truly one of the greatest of all cinema artists.
He was so great that you need not recognize the language to recognize the visual genius of Fellini. Oh, and it didn’t hurt that his wife and frequent star, Giulietta Masina, was one of the most expressive and talented actresses of the time.
And finally the grand old man of American vaudeville, radio, television and films, Nathan Birnbaum. Known to you and me as George Burns the great comedian would have been 116 today.
Burns was a member of that rare group of entertainers who mastered just about every form of entertainment important to America in the 20th century. He began singing in the streets of New York as a kid and eventually found his way into vaudeville. He often said vaudeville was his favorite medium because you didn’t have to be good, you just needed an act. His self-deprecating humor belies the fact that he was not only a talented performer but a very successful producer as well. Burns also had a talent for recognizing talent as he helped promote the careers of stars like Bobby Darin and Ann Margret.
He enjoyed fifty years of show biz success before he was called on to replace his best friend Jack Benny in the 1975 film The Sunshine Boys after Benny’s untimely death from stomach cancer. He won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance and his career reached new heights in popularity and stardom. He became a film actor, a huge concert draw and a recording artist! He wrote best-selling books (one of my all-time favorite books is “All My Best Friends” by GB) promoting his secrets of how to live long and live well. He worked into his late nineties and told interviewers he couldn’t die because he was booked!
Happily, Burns did make it to 100 years old. Unhappily, he was unable to fulfill his engagement at the Palladium which he’d had booked for years. He died just about six weeks after his centennial celebration. He was a true American legend.
Here’s a wonderful clip with he and the two people he loved as much as he loved anyone in the world.
Reprinted below is an article I wrote last year for Fra Noi on actor Ben Gazzara. I watched a film last week called Crime in the Streets with Gazzara’s friend John Cassavettes and Sal Mineo because I’m currently working on a piece about Mineo. This weekend I watched an old Columbo episode with Mineo in it. All the exposure to Cassavettes and Peter Falk made me think of their friend Ben Gazzara so that’s why I decided to post this today. Hope you enjoy it.
He’s been called “an actor’s actor” which usually means you’re known and appreciated almost exclusively by your peers. In the case of Ben Gazzara, however, he’s known and respected the world over by actors, audiences and critics alike. He’s survived drink, depression and cancer and continues to work after nearly six decades in the theatrical arts. And for Gazzara, theater is just that – art. He has as much love and respect for great acting as any artist has for painting or any writer has for great literature.
Ben Gazzara was born in 1930 and grew up in a cold water flat on Twenty-Ninth Street in New York City. It was a tough neighborhood made up of primarily Italian and Irish immigrants. In his autobiography, “In the Moment – Ben Gazzara: My Life as an Actor,” he recalls the thrill he’d get when his father would let him start the fire in the pot-bellied stove that heated their little apartment. “When the fire started to make things warm and cozy, I was proud and happy,” Gazzara remembers. “My father would often peel tangerines and put the skins on top of the stove. The sweet citrus smell wafted into all the rooms. I loved it. We’d sit together on wooden chairs and talk while enjoying the heat. That is, my mother, father, and brother talked. I always just listened. I liked that more than talking.” The skill of listening to the conversations of those around him would no doubt help him in the years to come with his chosen profession.
Gazzara was one of only two children born to Antonio and Angela (Cusumano) Gazzara. His mother was forty-five when Gazzara was born and he had a brother Tony who was five years older than he was. His father had begun working in the sulphur mines of Sicily as a young boy.
He remembers his childhood as somewhat lonely. He loved his parents and his brother but he never felt at home among his peers. He looked forward to holidays and family events when his extended family would come together and share their love and their stories over his mother’s delicious food and his father’s coveted homemade wine.
According to Gazzara, his neighborhood was like a little village unto itself with a brewery, a butcher shop, two grocery stores, a candy store, a funeral parlor and a Boys Club where he and his friends would gather after school. It was the Madison Square Boys Club, in fact, which would set the course for his future.
One of Gazzara’s friends was acting in a play at the Madison Square Boys Club when Gazzara attended the performance and became jealous of his friend’s talent. He thought he could act as well as his friend and so he inquired about the program. His friend encouraged him to join the group. Not long after that, he was asked to audition for a part in one of the plays by the group’s teacher, Mr. Sinclair. He got the part and was asked to join the rehearsals right away. He recalled, “[The] initial rehearsal was the most exciting time I’d ever had. When it was over and Mr. Sinclair said we’d meet the next day at three p.m., those heavy feelings of loneliness that seemed always to be hanging around, disappeared. Now I had something to look forward to.”
The first time Gazzara stood in front of an audience and heard their applause of appreciation for his talent, he was hooked for life. He knew that acting was what he wanted to do with his life. He thought of it as “a way to get off the street corner.”
Gazzara was such a bright student that he attended the famed Stuyvesant High School. He was put on the fast track to graduate in three years instead of four. He did fine for the first year but then grew bored. As his interest in acting increased, his interest in math and science decreased. He began skipping school on a regular basis to go to the movies and feed his dreams of stardom. Eventually, when he returned to school he was told he’d have to go to summer school to make up the lost time. Instead he transferred to a small school in the Bronx called St. Simon Stock, which was taught by the Sisters of Mercy.
At around this time, Mr. Sinclair, his acting teacher at the Madison Square Boys Club, took a group of students to see Laurette Taylor in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie on Broadway. Gazzara remembers it as a life-changing experience. “[Taylor’s] interpretation of the mother, Amanda Wingfield, was pathetic and touching, annoying and funny, and ultimately heartbreaking,” recalls Gazzara. “She didn’t push to make her point but behaved simply. Nor did she frame or underscore moments in order to make it easier for us to understand what was going on inside Amanda. She just was. Here for the first time ever I was witnessing an actress who had taken a character from the written page and given it the flesh, blood, heart and soul of a human being. My notions about acting were changed for good.”
Once he graduated high school he planned on attending college but needed to earn some money first. A friend was heading to Miami and Gazzara tagged along. They eventually landed jobs as bellboys at one of the ritzy hotels but Gazzara spent more time daydreaming about a career on Broadway then he did attending to the needs of the guests. He returned home and as the bus neared the New York skyline, he knew he had to at least try for an acting career or else he’d regret it for the rest of his life.
He’d heard about The Dramatic Workshop and auditioned for a scholarship position using a soliloquy from Seventh Heaven, one of the plays he’d performed at the Madison Square Boys Club. He did well and was admitted to the group. He spent two years in the program learning and honing his craft under the direction of Erwin Piscator, a German refugee who was a peer of Bertolt Brecht. He acted in the classics of Moliere and Shakespeare as well as newer material like Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story.
In 1951 he auditioned for the Actor’s Studio where Marlon Brando and Julie Harris attended sessions. He was enthusiastic about the prospect of working with Elia Kazan who worked with the group. Kazan had made a name for himself directing such landmark productions as Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman and Tennessee Williams’ AStreetcar Named Desire which featured the young Brando.
Gazzara enlisted the help of an actress named Loretta Leversee and an actor and playwright named Michael Gazzo to help him with his audition. In reality he had to go through a series of auditions before finally being accepted into the Actor’s Studio. Michael Gazzo would become a lifelong friend and Gazzara would star in Gazzo’s hit play A Hatful of Rain on Broadway just a few years later.
The Actor’s Studio allowed Gazzara to work on scenes from classic drama to new works in progress by up and coming playwrights. Gazzara was soon enlisted by a fellow student named Jack Garfein to act in an adaptation of a novel by a young writer named Calder Willingham. The novel, and the eventual play, was entitled End as a Man. When they performed the play at the Actor’s Studio in front of an audience that included Tennessee Williams they received rave reviews. They took the production to off-Broadway where the play was a success.
On the closing night of End as a Man Gazzara’s first acting coach from the Madison Square Boys Club, Mr. Sinclair, came backstage and with tears in his eyes told Gazzara how proud he was of him. In recalling those words of praise from his first mentor in the theater, Gazzara wrote, “No review I had ever meant as much to me as his words.”
Ben Gazzara must have made quite an impression in End as a Man because soon after that production ended, he was cast as Brick in Tennessee Williams’ Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. Not only would he be acting on Broadway in a Tennessee Williams’ play but he would be directed by Elia Kazan – the same man who had directed the original productions of Death of A Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was a big success as was Gazzara’s next Broadway play, A Hatful of Rain written by his friend Michael Gazzo. Gazzara was tackling powerful subjects like latent homosexuality and drug addiction in his roles and receiving rave notices.
He began to be offered more film roles and to his everlasting dismay, he turned many of them down. By his own admission, he waited too long for the perfect film roles to come along and, in the process, turned down some once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. He turned down films like The Gunfight at the OK Corral, War and Peace, and Somebody Up There Likes Me.
The role of Rocky in Somebody Up There Likes Me went to Paul Newman. Ironically, two years later, Newman would be cast as Brick in the film adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof instead of Gazzara. The film, according to Gazzara, was originally supposed to be directed by George Cukor. Gazzara had met with Cukor and seemed to be on the fast track to do the film. However, Cukor had a falling out with the management at MGM because they wanted to purge the script of all references to homosexuality. In the end, Richard Brooks directed the film and the part went to Newman. It was a devastating blow to Gazzara.
The following year he was offered a part in director Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder. It was not as juicy a role as Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof but it did offer Gazzara the opportunity to work with one of his childhood film idols, James Stewart. Gazzara remembered the experience of working with Stewart very fondly. “In his role as my [character’s] lawyer, James Stewart handled himself with effortless elegance and ease. Watching him was an eye-opening experience,” wrote Gazzara. “His easy way with dialogue, even the legal jargon was delightful, and the humor he found in his part was an important reason for the eventual success of the picture.”
In the 1960s, Gazzara would star in two different television series, Arrest and Trial, a precursor to Law and Order, and Run For Your Life. While it was steady work, it was exhausting and not as creatively challenging as Gazzara desired. The very day Run For Your Life finished shooting in 1968, Gazzara ran into John Cassavetes on the Universal lot. Cassavetes told him that they were going to work on a film together. Gazzara remembered, “I forgot about John’s remark because actors hear that kind of thing all the time, and almost nothing ever comes of it.” Little did Gazzara know that one of the most creative and emotionally enriching chapters of his life was about to begin.
Gazzara went to Europe to work on the film The Bridge at Remagen. Cassavetes and Peter Falk went to work on a film in Italy. While Gazzara was shooting his film in Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968, the Russian tanks came rolling into the country. He received a call from Cassavetes who’d been watching the events on TV. Cassavetes told Gazzara, “Ben, don’t get killed, I got the money.”
Soon afterward, Gazzara met Cassavetes and Peter Falk at a villa in Rome to read over the script or the remnants of what passed for a script. By the time they actually got together a few months later in New York City to begin filming, Cassavetes had completely rewritten the project. According to Gazzara, “Once we began to read the new script I saw, right away, that my part was richer and funnier than it had been in Rome. So was John’s, and so was Peter’s, too.”
Gazzara had never been involved with a project before that had allowed him so much artistic freedom in creating his own character. Gazzara remains convinced that “John’s willingness to share the creative process with Peter and me was in no small part responsible for what made Husbands a really good movie.”
Husbands (1970), in fact, has become a cult classic among independent film buffs. It was not only an experimentally exciting film for its time but it was the beginning of Gazzara’s involvement with John Cassavetes as a director and as a friend. Ben Gazzara would go on to make two more films with director John Cassavetes, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) and Opening Night (1977). They also appeared together in two other films, If it’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969) and Capone (1975).
Gazzara had often experienced the close friendships that sprung up on a movie set. Everyone involved in the picture vowed to keep in touch and rarely did. That was just the nature of the business. But it was different with the relationships that were forged in the making of Husbands. Gazzara, Falk and Cassavetes did indeed stay in touch. The friendships that were formed on that film stood the test of time. Fans of the movie recognized it as something special and so did the actors. Gazzara said that people assumed the three men had been friends before the making of the film but that was not the case. It was the film that made them friends and mutual respect that kept them all together for nearly twenty years until Cassavetes’ untimely death in 1989.
Ben Gazzara has been married three times. He met his third and current wife Elke in 1979. They have been happily married since 1981. He credits her with saving his life both spiritually and physically. He was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1999 but his strength and tenacity helped him to survive the disease so that he could return to the work he loves. He has continued to be active in theater and film for the last twelve years since the cancer and shows no signs of slowing down.
He began working extensively in Italy in the 1980s and he and his wife eventually bought a home there. He felt a connection to the land that he, in part, attributes to loving memories of his parents who were proud Italian immigrants.
His autobiography, “In the Moment,” was published in 2004 and he has appeared as an honored guest and speaker at film festivals all around the globe wherever and whenever his work, or the work of his friend John Cassavetes, is celebrated.
Ben Gazzara is a cultured man of the arts who has traveled the globe and lived the good life. With all his success and acclaim he continues to look to the future while cherishing his past and the memory of his father’s coveted homemade wine.
I feel that Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the handful of most important men and women in all of American history. In fact, in the case of Dr. King, he was probably one of the most important human beings anywhere on the planet over the last 100 years or more. We still haven’t learned all his lessons. Hatred and bigotry continue to exist in the world. However like Mother Teresa, like Gandhi, like Jesus and like all people of peace before or since his brief moment on the world stage, Dr. King left us an example of how to live and how to treat our fellow inhabitants of the planet. Hopefully, someday, as a civilization we will choose to live a path predicated on peace and tolerance instead of hatred and violence.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
The House I Live In is a song I’ve always associated with Frank Sinatra. The song was written for a short ten minute film made in 1945 in which Sinatra takes a break from a recording session and comes upon some kids who are harassing another kid because of his different religion. Sinatra then precedes to lecture the kids about how we’re all Americans and no one person is better than the next, especially not because of his religion or the color of his skin. Frank then precedes to sing a song entitled The House I Live In.
The song was written by Lewis Allen and Earl Robinson. Allen was a guy who apparently adopted the two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after they were executed. Robinson was later blacklisted as a Communist. Albert Maltz, who wrote the film, was also later blacklisted. And, of course, the star of the film who also recorded the song, Frank Sinatra, was a tremendous Roosevelt Liberal Democrat who thirty years later had turned into a Reagan Conservative Republican and that’s how we got to thinking about this song today.
My friend Dr. Tim sent me an anti-war song yesterday by Rod McKuen that I’d never heard of called Soldiers Who Want To Be Heroes. That got us e-mailing back and forth about various Hollywood stars and their stance on war and politics in general. I mentioned Sinatra and today I received this from Dr. Tim:
I was fascinated because not only had I never heard Robeson’s recording of this number but I never heard these particular lyrics. Then, once I listened to Robeson, I noticed this recording of the same song by Sam Cooke of all people!
I love Sam Cooke so I was thrilled to find that recording.
After finding those recordings, I felt compelled to post the Sinatra version as well. Imagine how thrilled I was to find the entire 1945 film available on line!
And on top of everything else, you get a little of If You Are But A Dream – one of Sinatra’s best from his Columbia recording period.
I believe I’ve said this before but it bears repeating. No movie – not even The Godfather – has more classic lines per square feet of film than Casablanca (1943). That may be one of the reasons Bogart’s persona has held up so long.
Here’s just a sampling:
“I like to think you killed a man. It’s the romantic in me.” Hah! I love it!
I posted both of these a while back but I just watched them again and couldn’t stop laughing. Remember, while the clips themselves are funny, the routines are only half as funny as Dean and Rickles’ reactions. I love it!
Remember that scene in Manhattan where Woody Allen is speaking into the tape recorder and coming up with things that make life worth living? I thought it would be fun to do a video version of that today (really tomorrow) to keep my spirits up.
