A Blog of My Own

Anyone who was alive at the time remembers the two defining “downfall” moments of Ted Kennedy’s career. One was the (supposed) inadequacy of his response to the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969, and the other was the (supposed) inadequacy of his response to Roger Mudd’s question, “Why do you want to be president?” in a 1979 CBS television interview.

Never having seen or heard his televised speech to the people of Massachusetts in 1969, or the full Mudd interview in 1979, I bought into the media’s take that both responses showed fatal flaws in Kennedy’s character. That certainly was the conventional wisdom, and has remained so.

I would still be buying into it if I hadn’t heard the actual sound clips on the radio the other morning.

POTUS radio (a Sirius/XM channel dedicated to political news), in an overview of Kennedy’s life the day after his death, played a lengthy segment, uninterrupted, of the famous Chappaquiddick speech, and a few minutes later played Kennedy’s answer to Roger Mudd’s question in its entirety.

I was astonished to discover, for the first time, that neither moment showed a flaw in Kennedy’s character.

Starting with the later one first, it was clear that the 3-second pause that began Kennedy’s response to Mudd’s question – a pause widely interpreted at the time to mean that Kennedy didn’t know why he wanted to be president – meant nothing of the kind. After the pause, his first words were, “Well I, were I to make the announcement to run…” In other words, he hadn’t announced yet. How do you answer a question like “Why do you want to be president?” when the time has not yet come for you to announce you are running? You can’t. Any direct answer Kennedy could have given that started with the thought, “I want to be president because…” would have tipped his hand that he planned to get into the race. The answer he did give once he began, phrased in the subjunctive case (“were I to run,” etc.), was complete, thorough, and fully satisfactory. He talked of the resources of the United States, and the major problems facing the country, and how the current leadership was not marshaling the former to help solve the latter.

If all you knew of it was the clip of the 3-second pause that was aired over and over, or what you read about it in the morning papers and weekly and monthly news journals, you would have thought Kennedy was not suited to be president. Because that’s what the press wanted you to think.

Regarding the Chappaquiddick speech of ten years earlier, the popular wisdom has always been that Kennedy failed to give a full account of the night he drove his car off a bridge, resulting in the drowning death of his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne. Hearing the speech on POTUS radio the other morning, I was taken aback to realize that the popular wisdom I had always believed had been wrong. Kennedy gave a fully credible account of the night’s events. As he described his own near-drowning, as water filled the car and his lungs, and the cerebral concussion he suffered in the event, and the repeated unsuccessful attempts he made to dive back down and save Kopechne, and the state of shock that followed, it was easy to identify with his confusion and flawed decision-making in the immediate aftermath. He didn’t make excuses or ask to be forgiven. He owned up to his actions. And he was fully, and believably, penitent for his role in the loss of Kopechne’s life.

Here is a page that gives you the complete text of that speech. It also has links to video and audio excerpts, but I don’t recommend you go to those. Because they are excerpts, they present yet another “mediated” (rather than direct) experience of his speech, and therefore an untrue one. Just read the text of his address, and see if you don’t agree with me.

Why did the press use both these moments to portray Kennedy as an unserious, irresponsible man? Why was the public so eager to buy into this story instead of the true one? Did it suit our need for a schadenfreudy “how the mighty have fallen” narrative? Did it (in some perversely satisfying way) suit a general hopelessness in the national mood? Traumatized by two Kennedy assassinations (one a president, the other running for president), did we somehow need to get Ted out of the line of fire, for his own and our sakes? I think it may have been all these things.

Today, we’re still dragging our leaders down. This may be because we lost “Daddy” on November 22, 1963, and all “new dads” are cast into the role of rank pretender for us. We can only like them so long before we turn on them. It may be that the country won’t be able to get moving again until every American who was alive on November 22, 1963 has died. Then, fully cleansed at last of the blood that spilled on that date, the nation can respect its leaders once again.

The subject of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is death. Not killing, although there’s plenty of that. Death. There’s not a moment in the film’s two-and-a-half-hour length that you aren’t confronting the difference between life and death, and the way one can turn into the other, for any of us, in the blink of an eye. This is probably true of all of Tarantino’s movies; offhand I can’t think of another filmmaker whose body of work is so able to make us confront the horror of this cosmic reality. That he’s able to do this while giving us an ecstatically good time at the movies makes his genius even more awe-inspiring.

Set in Nazi-occupied France in World War II, the film makes an interesting contrast to another war film of this summer, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, about an American bomb squad in Iraq. The Hurt Locker is an excellent film, but with a different subject: not death itself, but danger. Its characters face the possibility of dying every day, and we come to understand the traumatizing effect this has on them in a most powerful way; but the film doesn’t compel us to feel horror at the fragility of our own lives. It’s happening to them, not us.

Tarantino won’t let you off that easy. The only way we get through the day in our “real” lives is to live in constant denial of the truth that we’re going to die and be consigned to some other world, possibly hell, or to nothingness, which might even be worse. A Tarantino movie blends humor and violence (and by the way, while the violence that happens in this movie is gruesome, it occupies surprisingly little real estate, screentime-wise) to strip away that denial and make you know the truth you spend the rest of your life avoiding. It’s a funhouse ride that isn’t kidding around.

Whether the characters whose lives are at stake in Basterds are Nazis, Jews, collaborator French, resistance French, or innocent bystanders, there’s no distancing yourself from them. Some critics have understood how great this film is, but others have complained that it rambles or even grows tedious over its length. I don’t know what the hell (no pun intended) is wrong with them. From the first scene of this epic film (in which an SS officer interviews, in suave and sophisticated fashion, a French dairy farmer he suspects of hiding Jews) all the way to its Grand Guignol climax and quiet denouement, I was gripped by it. Proper attention has been paid elsewhere to the superior acting in this film, but the main source of the film’s power is Tarantino’s writing. The man knows structure, and the man knows how to write dialogue that won’t let you go. Best of all, he knows how to make a movie that has its way with you and leaves you limp as more movies used to, but very very few do now.

The movie Julie and Julia — in which a young writer feels connected to, and inspired by, an older one — brought back memories of the afternoon I spent with the movie critic Pauline Kael in her apartment.

There were some key differences. In the movie [spoiler alert], Julie is told by a reporter that her inspiration, master French chef Julia Child, hates Julie’s blog. (We never get confirmation that this is so, but Julie presumes it to be true, and is devastated.) And Julie never meets Julia. [End spoiler alert].

I, on the other hand, had the heady experience of learning from Pauline Kael that she liked my work (I was the main movie reviewer for my college newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, and had sent her some clippings) and was open to meeting with me. As the DP’s “Cinema Editor,” I had sent her a letter requesting an interview for an article to appear in the paper. How did I get her address? Simple. I went to the University of Pennsylvania library and looked her up in the Manhattan phone book! (She was actually listed.)

I thought that by enclosing some reviews I’d written, I might get Kael, the preeminent American film critic from the 1960s through the 1980s, to say yes in the event she liked them. That’s what happened. I sent her three or four of my reviews. The only one I remember now is the one I wrote about the Carrie Snodgress & Richard Benjamin movie Diary of a Mad Housewife, regarding which I held a jaundiced view. She must have liked my sensibility, or my ability to express my sensibility, or perhaps she simply agreed with my viewpoints in the pieces I sent her, but in any case I received within the week a letter from her proposing I come up to interview her in her apartment on a date in the near future. I called her and arranged to do so.

On that day, I took the train up to New York from Philadelphia. I brought a cassette recorder with me, and we sat down in the large living room of Pauline’s Central Park West apartment. (A manual typewriter on a desk by one wall testified that this room was also where she wrote her movie criticism.) Was I scared? You bet. The fact that at the time I had the moxie to have contacted her for the interview and gone through with it should not be mistaken for an excess of self-confidence.

To say I idolized her would be no exaggeration. Ever since as a high schooler I discovered her first two books, I Lost It at The Movies and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, my way of looking at movies, and my way of understanding the potency of passionate persuasion possible with the written word, were transformed.

I Lost It at the Movies First Edition Book Cover

I had written out a bunch of questions for Kael, then in her early fifties, and went through my list, trying my best to listen to her answers for possible questions that might occur to me impromptu. She spoke in a gentle voice, and even though I (inwardly) feared that she would reduce me to a puddle by regarding one of my questions as stupid, she didn’t. I had the feeling that she thought it was important to talk to me and give me all the time I needed. That time turned out to be three hours, and at no time did she show impatience.

At one point she interrupted the interview in order to take her small dog around the block for a walk. Some other luminary might have used the occasion as a convenient moment to end an interview with a student reporter. Instead, she invited me to stay in her apartment, by myself, until her return! Why did she not ask me to accompany her on her walk? I don’t know, but it might be because she thought I would welcome the opportunity to get a feel for her place in her absence. It certainly showed a tremendous amount of trust. Why didn’t I volunteer to accompany her on her walk? Because I couldn’t refuse the chance to get a feel for Pauline Kael’s apartment in her absence!

In that twenty minute or so interval, I poked around with my eyes, not touching anything. I noticed that her record collection tilted predominantly (almost exclusively) to two genres, opera and R&B; she had many complete opera recordings, along with a pronounced appreciation for Aretha Franklin. And I noticed that her book collection contained first editions of all the Frank L. Baum Oz books. These books were a childhood passion that predated the film, since she was twenty when the movie of The Wizard of Oz came out.

She returned with her dog (come to think of it, a little dog very much like Toto!) and we resumed the interview. By the time it was through, I had three cassette tapes filled on both sides. As we parted at her door, we clasped hands, and she said, warmly, to be sure to send her the interview when it was written, and to be sure to keep in touch. I said I would do both.

I did neither.

I will never understand why, although I’ve spent many hours of therapy trying.

I would be graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in only two or three more weeks. While I had imagined there would be time for me to write up the interview and get it into the paper, now there didn’t seem to be time.

Only a couple of weeks elapsed between graduation and when I began a master’s program in journalism at Northwestern, outside of Chicago. I brought the Pauline tapes with me, thinking I would transcribe them and turn them into a piece I could get published somewhere. It certainly didn’t seem far-fetched to imagine a newspaper or magazine would want it. She didn’t give out many interviews of any length, let alone as extensive an interview as the one she granted me.

I did, in fact, transcribe the tapes, on the typewriter in my graduate student apartment, during that hot and humid summer of 1971. But I never went further with it.

Nevertheless, I still had those tapes, and I had the typewritten transcript. It always seemed possible to me that I would do something with them. But I never did; and then, one day years later, when looking for the tapes and the transcript, finally possessed of the resolve to write up the piece now, I could not find them. They were lost.

Why did I not keep my promise to Pauline Kael, the one I made to her at her apartment doorway as we parted company that afternoon?

There are many answers to that, all of them true.

1. I was at the time, and remain to this day, a person with a rock-bottom sense of self-doubt. While sometimes I am able to propel myself into action and assertiveness in defiance of this self-doubt, at other times I cannot. Concerning my Pauline Kael interview, decades elapsed in a paralysis of self-doubt. At the same time a part of my brain knew that the material would be of interest to a publisher, another part of me kept saying, “Oh, who’s going to want your interview with Pauline Kael anyway?” The energy required to turn the transcripts into a publishable piece was just never there, because hope is the fuel that turns dreams into energy, and when it comes to that fuel, I have always run on empty.
2. While Blanche Dubois said, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” my watchword has always been, “I have always feared the retribution of everyone.” I go around thinking that people think ill of me, and wish harm to come to me, for ways in which I imagine I have failed them. A part of me was afraid to publish the piece, because I was afraid Pauline wouldn’t like it. (The feeling was similar to my fear that she’d pounce on me for a dumb question during the interview, and even though she didn’t do that, the possibility that she would be displeased with my article effectively paralyzed me.) There was no reason, in truth, to suppose that she would have been anything but delighted. That’s easy for me to see now, now that writing the piece is impossible.
3. This one is the most difficult to admit. Entirely for reasons having to do with my own sexual inexperience and hangups at the time, and having nothing to do with Pauline Kael, I started to entertain the fantasy that she had “designs” on me—designs that I would have no idea how to deal with. In today’s slang, I started to think of her as a cougar. I had in my makeup a fear — easily triggered regardless that circumstances might not warrant it — of sexual predation. I am so ashamed of having felt this that the words are difficult to type. But I thought, “Why is she having me up to her apartment? Why is she spending so much time with me here? Why is she letting me feel so at home, even to the point of leaving me alone in her apartment? Why, upon our parting, is she shaking my hand so warmly, and holding out the implicit promise of a keen interest in my future if only I will keep in touch? It can only be because she wants to turn me into her personal plaything! In return for what she can do for me, what will be the price to be paid?” I didn’t examine these delusions at the time (a blend of narcissism and terror), but I did entertain them — and the result was to make me keep my distance from her  (including not writing the piece and never contacting her again), when my professional goals and hopes and dreams would have been better served by the opposite course. Was it possible that she just plain liked me and had affection for my ideas and my talent? I was able to entertain that thought, too — but not for very long.
4. My self-loathing made me feel unworthy of her attention, even if she disagreed with that assessment. It seemed to me a fairy tale had come true the afternoon I spent with her, but it was just a fairy tale. She’d return to her exalted life, and I’d return to the rock I crawled out from under. I didn’t belong in the same world as her.
5. The more time passed without my keeping my promises to her to send her the finished piece and to keep in touch, the worse I felt about the betrayal. And the worse I felt, the more paralyzed I became. At some point it seemed ridiculous even to think about the matter much anymore, because surely it was now “too late” to do anything about it.

And then of course, one day it was too late. The tape and transcripts were gone. And Pauline died in 2001, with impeccable timing eight days before the horror of 9/11.

Was I really this crazy, dysfunctional way with everyone? No. I’ve always been blessed with friends and loved ones whose affection and love I am able to take at face value, and return. But these undercurrents ran through me then, and they surface again from time to time.

I remember leaving her apartment that day with a feeling of excitement and belief in myself and my future. Pauline Kael liked me! Pauline Kael wanted me to keep in touch! Pauline Kael is going to be my mentor, recommending me for the movie critic job at a prestigious newspaper or journal! (There were other writers, who would become known as “Paulettes,” whom she championed and helped.) But I couldn’t hold on to that feeling. Soon it was sunk underneath the depression that had been my more or less constant companion since childhood. The feeling was as lost to me, metaphorically, as the tapes and transcripts later became in reality.

Ever since, I’ve had self-recriminations about my stupidity and the road not taken.

And also, about my not having kept my end of the bargain with Pauline. She spent a lot of time with me that day. She didn’t do it for her health. She did it because she expected to see a piece come out of it that would reach a young audience. She had every right to expect that. And she did it, perhaps, out of wanting to make contact with someone who might, possibly, continue her level of thoughtful movie criticism into the next generation. She was generous with her time and got nothing for it in return. I’m ashamed of that.

What would have happened if I had written the piece, sent it to her, kept in contact? Perhaps not a whole lot. But I can’t know that.

I do remember one thing vividly from the interview, and since it is the one moment from our exchange I can give you verbatim without the benefit of the transcripts, I will. Since so much of her early reputation had been gained by publicly bashing the views of less astute (but more famous) critics, I asked her if there were any critics now that she followed with any regularity. She replied, “No, not really. I mean, in any generation, there’s only one film critic worth reading, isn’t there? In the thirties it was Otis Ferguson, in the forties it was James Agee, and now, it’s me.” I loved that answer, because it contained no braggadocio whatever. It was the truth.

The director John Hughes, who just died at 59, was a copywriter at the same international ad agency as I during my first decade there. I knew him a little — not well. He was a quiet, funny guy who could always be counted on to amuse in a storyboard presentation. His low-key manner of presentation was funny, and his work was funny.

Unless my recollection is wrong, he didn’t sell a whole lot of work. I don’t recall any campaigns he was known for at the time. Rather, he was a beneficiary of those fat times in advertising when you could afford to keep talented writers on the payroll just for their ability to amuse you in meetings. And that wasn’t a negligible or valueless skill. Even if the agency’s recommendation to the client was someone else’s campaign, it helped to soften the client up with some yucks from John and his campaign as an amuse-bouche before the main course. Of course, no agency could thrive without coming up with the goods for clients, but it seemed back then that clients were paying agencies to make them laugh in meetings as much as they were paying them to reach consumers; and that agencies were paying some writers primarily to be court jesters in their own internal meetings, which could be difficult to get through without a substantial leavening of humor. Also, you never knew — some crazy, hilarious idea John came up with just might work.

I remember one that didn’t, but which did crack us all up at the time. Several creative teams were working on a freeze-dried instant coffee (freeze-drying was new technology in the seventies), the claim of which was that it was indistinguishable from ground roast. John’s campaign depicted people who inexplicably didn’t know this about our coffee, and who therefore, naturally, went around wearing dunce caps. Schoolboy dunce caps in 1979 were already so antiquated that there was a wonderfully absurd and somehow sick quality to the humor of the idea. In my memory, I actually see people doing spit takes around the room as he unveiled it, and guffawing. There wasn’t a chance in hell the idea would make it to the client; that didn’t matter.

It occurs to me now that the theme of “school” which was present in that idea informed most of his great movie work that came later. Perhaps it was also present in the National Lampoon magazine pieces he was writing at the time he was at the agency. I remember all of us being jealous that he was getting those pieces published while holding down the same job we did, but also holding him in awe for the energy and industry required by his double life.

Okay, stay with me now.

The other night I saw a silent movie on TCM, a terrific comedy called The Patsy from 1928 starring the talented (and unfairly maligned*) Marion Davies. What struck me was not how different everything is 81 years later, but how much is not different. The world portrayed in the movie is recognizably a modern one. People get around in cars. They talk on the phone. The attitudes and motivations of the characters are clear to a 2009 audience. The jokes are funny. Quite a lot of the freshness of the film is due to the performance of Davies; her gestures and gesticulations and body language seem to break through time altogether. No translation, no “making allowances,” is necessary.

One was left feeling that despite all that was different on the surface — the fashions, the decor, the absence of computers, etc. — the world of 1928 was the same, in any way that mattered, as the world of 2009. This surprised me.

Now for something completely different. Let’s take my birth year of 1950, and go back 81 years from that. The year? 1869. The Civil War is barely over. People traverse long distances by stage coach, or train if they’re lucky (the first transcontinental rail line is completed in that year). The Wild West is at its wildest. Nothing is the same as in 1950. It is a completely different world.

The difference between 1869 and 1950 is Mt. Everest compared to the molehill of difference between 1928 and 2009. Yet what separates each pair of years is exactly the same time span — 81 years.

This leads me to think the tremendous changes that occurred in the first decades of the 20th century — widespread automobile use, the birth of air travel, the coming of mass communications like movies and radio — made a much bigger impact on life than anything we’ve seen since, even in this computer age. We complain about change; we don’t know the meaning of the word change. 1890-1920: That’s when everything changed, in a way we’re still living with today. Even though the pace of life is faster today, when it comes to change, we’re pikers.

Everything we have now is a version of something that existed in 1928. Nothing, really, is qualitatively different. Take music downloads. Sure, it’s a whole new delivery system. We might think it’s revolutionary. But essentially, it’s recorded music, just coming at us a new way; it’s today’s version of the 78. Compare that to before Edison, when there was no recorded music. If you wanted to hear music, you had to go hear somebody play music — or make it yourself. The invention of the phonograph around the turn of 20th century — that’s when change happened. We’re still living in that world.

We think time is passing faster and faster. But in reality, time has slowed down. To an absolute crawl.

*Marion Davies was the mistress of William Randolph Hearst, and when Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane came out (a movie loosely based on the life of Hearst), people assumed the Susan Alexander character — an untalented singer who becomes Kane’s mistress, and whom Kane uses his millions to push into the limelight — was based on Davies. But although in real life Hearst used his influence and money to promote Davies’ career, a key difference is that Davies was marvelously talented. Welles himself recognized this difference, admired Davies, and later regretted that his movie had damaged her reputation.

When you say “there’s something funny about that guy,” you usually don’t mean he makes you laugh. You mean there’s something wrong with him. The word “funny” means two very different things in our language — or so it seems. The brilliance of Judd Apatow’s new film Funny People is that it raises the possibility that the meanings aren’t different, after all. He makes the link between comedy and pathology.

It’s not that no one ever noticed that comedians tend to be screwed up. But not until Funny People has there been a movie that connected the dots. To be a good comedian, to produce over a career’s time a steady stream of life observations that have the fresh surprise we call humor, means continuously to be observing life rather than living it. That takes a toll. You can see that this is what has led the fabulously successful main character, played by Adam Sandler, to the miserable state he’s in, and you can see the struggling young comedian characters in the film, played by Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Aubrey Plaza and Jason Schwartzman, well on their way to that hell. What the film doesn’t resolve is what’s the chicken and what’s the egg. Do people who are so disconnected from themselves and others that they are borderline-autistic find their way into standup comedy because it’s the one way they can turn their mental illness into a living? Or does choosing a life of comedy, with the commitment it entails always to be an observer, always to be at a remove from life and other people, make one over time into an alienated, depressed and anxiety-stricken creature? Or is it simply that getting up in front of people and trying to make them laugh will turn anyone into a nervous wreck?

Whichever it is, Apatow has found a way to make you guffaw and feel miserable at the same time. The film is a 130-minute anxiety attack, and it doesn’t send you out of the theater feeling good, but it makes a journey into hell as much laughs as a journey into hell can possibly be. Funny, that.