Happy Birthday, Dad!

Lionel Stander (center) in "The Big Show-Off"

My father would have been 103 years old today (the simplest date of all: 1/11/11). My latest acquisition of Lionel Stander memorabilia is a publicity still from The Big Show-Off, released in January 1945. I haven't seen it, but per the synopsis it seems to be a typical Republic Pictures "B" movie. Its one claim to fame is that it stars Dale Evans just before she hitched up with Roy Rogers.

I visited my mom and stepfather in Maine two weeks ago. While I was doing my morning stretches, I suddenly noticed a book, which I'm sure had been on the same shelf for 20 years: BUILDING A CHARACTER.

"Huh," I thought. "This might be useful in writing fiction." (I've been working on The Great American Potboiler, in fits and starts, for several years.)

I pulled the book down, and saw that the author was Constantin Stanislavski, inventor of "The Method" espoused by Jacob & Stella Adler, and countless other of Dad's actor friends. I opened it and was surprised to see that it was from the New York Public Library's Bloomingdale Branch, on West 100th St.

Even more surprising, my father's temporary library card was in the pocket, with our old West End Avenue address and phone number--proof that he had indeed moved back in with Mom and me. The book was borrowed Dec 16, 1961, and due on Jan 26, 1962. The overdue fine is 5¢ "per calendar day." That's almost $900 by now, so this is a very valuable book.

I felt a mental connection with Dad when I started reading BUILDING A CHARACTER: this was a book that he went out of his way to read. The Dewey card is stuck between the first two pages of Chapter Four: "Making the Body Expressive." Did Dad get bored and stop there? That chapter is a bit of a slog. But he was such a voracious reader--often a book per day--and Stanislavski's work so important that I'd like to think he read all the way through.

As luck would have it, today I found a bit on YouTube from "The Danny Kaye Radio Show," in which Kaye hilariously explains the Stanislavski Method to my father, who was a regular on the show. What I miss most about Dad is his voice, which is like no other. (I've never heard a credible imitation. When I was little my mother took me to the doctor because my voice was hoarse. Turned out I was trying to speak like Daddy.) So it's wonderful to be able to hear him long after his death--and long before my birth. He gets a few lines to set up the bit, then it's all Danny Kaye. Listen:

Timeless Truths in Fiction

He offered the honest terms that a sound concern and an honest man had to offer. But that was not what people wanted nowadays. They wanted their hypothetical arrangements, their wild rumors, their manipulated booms with nothing behind it all but hot air....He could see them now at that very moment--all these many-colored and frivolous articles of fashion which captivated the world on the persons of equally frivolous young girls.

How fresh and contemporary, eh? This is from the 1931 edition of GRAND HOTEL by Vicki Baum, published in Germany in 1929 as MENSCHEN IM HOTEL ("People in a Hotel"). There's one thing that's dated, though: the casual use of n*gger in the narrative. Blech.

Oh, and Greta Garbo's famous line, "I want to be alone," was lifted right from the book.

At the Cinema with Dad & Me

UK film magazine The Big Picture has an article about my father, Lionel Stander (above in "The Loved One"):

The Horror of the Hollywood blacklist changed not only American film, but also American society forever.

Jez Connolly of The Big Picture also did an online interview with me: First Person

In Cheery Siberia (aka Denver, CO)

An arctic blast hit Denver over the weekend. It snowed yet again last night--snowfall #9 since October 8, for those keeping score. When I got up this morning it was 3°F outside. The thermometer outside my dining room window registered a sultry 20° a little after noon. When last I looked it was 10°.

Sunday night I watched Silk Stockings, with songs by Cole Porter, starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. (Fun fact: costar Janis Paige was married to my father's double-cousin Arthur, whose parents were Dad's paternal aunt and a Stander cousin.)

And what song could be more appropriate to the frigid weather than "Siberia," sung by Joseph Buloff, Jules Munshin & Peter Lorre:

When we’re sent to dear Siberia,
To Siberi-eri-a,
When it’s cocktail time ’twill be so nice
Just to know you’ll not have to phone for ice.

When we meet in sweet Siberia,
Far from Bolshevik hysteria,
We’ll go on a tear,
For our buddies all are there
In cheery Siberi-a.

When we’re sent to dear Siberia,
To Siberi-eri-a,
There’s a most delicious bill of fare,
You must try our filet of polar bear.

When we meet in sweet Siberia
To protect us from diphtheria,
We can toast our toes
On the lady Eskimos
In cheery Siberi-a.

When we’re sent to dear Siberia,
To Siberi-eri-a,
Where the fresh salt air makes us feel so fine,
It is fresh salt air from our own salt mine.

When we meet in sweet Siberia,
Where the snow is so superia
You can bet, all right
That your Christmas will be white
In cheery Siberi-a.

Here's the number (stop at 2:31):

Julian Fellowes Talks About PAST IMPERFECT

Photo © Giles Keyte

PAST IMPERFECT opens with its anonymous narrator, a member of the minor aristocracy, being contacted by Damian Baxter, an ex-friend from Cambridge whom he hasn’t seen in decades. Thus begins a journey that contrasts the naïve debutantes and would-be debonair beaux of the London Season of 1968 with their surprisingly altered (or not) selves 40 years later.

Reached by phone in Chicago on Halloween morning, Julian Fellowes observed to freelance writer Bella Stander that “Lake Michigan is like an enchanted sea around a fairy castle.” Later that day, From Time to Time, which he produced, directed and wrote, was screened at the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival. Starring Maggie Smith, the picture went on to win the Best of Fest Award and two other prizes.... more at BookReporter.com

IN MY FATHER'S SHADOW: Orson Welles's Daughter Speaks

"Ignore your children and they will be obsessed with you for life."—Alain de Botton

From the moment I saw In My Father’s Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles in the Algonquin Books fall catalog, I knew that I must read the book and speak to author Chris Welles Feder. As the daughter of actor Lionel Stander (a contemporary of Welles), I wanted to learn how Feder managed to survive with—and more often, without—a famous, larger-than-life father.

A few days before she took off for California to start her book tour, I reached Feder by phone in her New York City home. The voice that greeted me was so youthful, I found it hard to believe it was coming from a 71-year-old. I started off by asking why she wrote In My Father’s Shadow....

Read more at Wild River Review

Photo of Chris Welles Feder © Gregory Downer

Amazing Resemblance

As research for a piece I'm writing, yesterday I watched "Citizen Kane" and "The Battle Over Citizen Kane." The second film had a photograph of Orson Welles just after his arrival in Hollywood in 1939, sporting a Van Dyck beard and smoking a pipe.

Wow, I thought, that "beatnik" guy on "Mad Men" (above right) looks just like Welles. I wonder if it's by accident or on purpose?

I stopped wondering after a Google search for "Michael Gladis" + "Orson Welles" got 225 results, the 2nd of which is an AMC blog, which begins:

He looks like Orson Welles, smokes like Albert Einstein and wants to be Ernest Hemingway. Michael Gladis was born to play bohemian ad man, Paul Kinsey.

Q: Your character is compared to Orson Welles. You've played Orson on stage. Is this an ongoing theme?

A: I remember at like six-years-old my grandmother saying you look like a young Orson Welles and I had no idea who that was. I had to turn to my mother and be like is that a good thing or a bad thing? She said no sweetie it's a very good thing. My whole life there has been comparisons drawn. I was cast to play Orson in a film that didn't get made and I was heartbroken.

Q: Did that have anything to do with casting you as Paul?

A: That came up in the audition. Matt Weiner, at the beginning of the season (I think referencing our conversation in the audition room) said some time this season someone is going to make note of your resemblance to Orson Welles. Mark my words. And I never heard anything else about it. I'd see every script and there was nothing there. Finally, Joan makes the reference in Episode 12 and Matt says see you thought I forgot didn't you? He stuck it in.

Until I read the above, I'd forgotten about that line. I wonder how Gladis feels about Christian McKay, who played Welles in the play "Rosebud," getting to portray him again in "Me and Orson Welles," which opens on Nov 25. McKay sure as hell doesn't look like Welles in the movie's poster, below. However, he does in the shot with Zac Efron, probably due to padded cheeks and bulky clothing.

Inauguration Theme Song

I've been watching a lot of old movies lately, as I've found escapism great for the soul. Therefore a phrase in Barack Obama's inaugural speech sounded especially familiar: "pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again." Perhaps not coincidentally, it echoes a song that was popular during the Depression, sung by Ginger Rogers & Fred Astaire in the 1936 movie "Swing Time." Nearly three-quarters of a century later, the lyrics are still fresh and timely.

From "Pick Yourself Up," words by Dorothy Field, music by Jerome Kern:

Nothing's impossible I have found,
For when my chin is on the ground,
I pick myself up,
Dust myself off,
Start all over again.

Don't lose your confidence if you slip,
Be grateful for a pleasant trip,
And pick yourself up,
Dust yourself off,
Start all over again.

Work like a soul inspired,
Till the battle of the day is won.
You may be sick and tired,
But you'll be a man, my son!

Will you remember the famous men,
Who had to fall to rise again?
So take a deep breath,
Pick yourself up,
Dust yourself off,
Start all over again.

Coming in Late in the Game...A Century Late

Thanks to a link at Booksquare, I came across Cinema stole my favourite books on the UK Guardian book blog. The subtitle to David Barnett's screed is:

I expended time and imagination to absorb these stories. Why should people be entitled to think they know them without putting in any effort?

He writes:

Can there be anything worse than lovingly engaging with a couple of hundred thousand words of prose over perhaps two or three weeks, drinking in the author's dialogue and descriptions, creating your own vision of the work in the privacy of your head, only to have every man and his dog (special offer on Tuesdays at your local Odeon) blast your intellectual ownership of the book out of the water after spending 90 minutes slobbing out in front of a cinema screen?

First of all, for someone who (apparently) makes his living by writing about books, Barnett is an awfully slow reader. Two to three weeks to read just one book?

Second, he's weighing in late, by about 100 years. The first film version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was made in 1912, and viewers only had to slob out for 12 minutes. L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and sequels, adapted the series to film in 1908 and 1914. Greta Garbo starred in Anna Karenina in 1935; the film is #42 in the American Film Institute's 100 Years...100 Passions list of top love stories in American cinema.

Third, if Barnett thinks movie adaptations of books are so dumb (he cites "The Watchmen" as a major offender), why doesn't he just, you know, stay home and read?

Happy Bastille Day!

Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix

All together now:
"Allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé!"
(Read all about "La Marseillaise" here.)

July 14 will always be a jour de gloire for me. Twelve years ago today, Darling Husband and I were married in Portland, Maine. Our wedding cake was inscribed Liberté, Fraternité, Félicité. (I didn't think Fraternité was quite the thing.)

Too bad THE BLACK TOWER by Louis Bayard won't be out till August 26, because it would be the perfect book to read today. Set in 1818 Paris, it's a mystery about the not-so-pretty aftermath of the French Revolution. Bayard has a marvelous gift for bringing other times and places to pulsing life. You'd swear he'd lived in Dickens's London (Mr. Timothy, which I reviewed for People), trained at West Point in 1830 (The Pale Blue Eye) and consorted with legendary French detective Vidocq. As in The Pale Blue Eye (featuring a young Edgar Allen Poe), THE BLACK TOWER has a terrific triple-whammy at the end. No way you'll see it coming.

French movies to watch tonight (or anytime):

• Paris Je t'Aime -- made me laugh, made me cry; with Gérard Depardieu
• La Vie en Rose (La Môme) -- with Academy Award-winnier Marion Clotillard and Gérard Depardieu
• Cyrano de Bergerac -- with Gérard Depardieu; rhyming subtitles by Anthony Burgess (!)
• Jean de Florette -- with (quelle surprise!) Gérard Depardieu*
• Manon of the Spring (Manon des Sources) -- sequel to "Jean de Florette" (Depardieu isn't in it, but it's a spoiler to explain why)
• Les Enfants du Paradis -- still heartbreaking after 63 years

*Darling Husband: "Is there any recent French movie without Gérard Depardieu?"
Moi: "I like Gérard Depardieu!"