Stanley Kubrick : a biography (John Baxter)

John Baxter's Stanley Kubrick : a biography made for absorbing reading. The book covers his life, films and relationships with members of the filmmaking community -- stars, producers, other directors, technical crews and, with varying degrees of success, the authors and screenwriters whose work he transformed into images on the big screen. As a group these writers tend to be Mr. Baxter's most revealing sources.

There haven't been too many people to whom the dictum Less is More applies better than to Kubrick and not simply in terms of the number of films he made over the course of his career. By the end of his life as this biography tells it, S. K. comes across as a cross between Howard Hughes and Greta Garbo with a penchant for secrecy, obsession with security and the limited number of associates allowed through the gates. In shunning the celebrity culture of Hollywood for the relative isolation which he needed to remain creative, Kubrick may have created more fascination with his life and work than he would have if he'd chosen to reside in Malibu.

Needless to say, Kubrick wasn't an active participant in the making of this biography and the people who were interviewed by John Baxter were former associates, not people working with him during the researching and writing of this biography.

Published in 1997 by Carroll & Graf Publishers and distributed by Publishers Group West, this 399-page work includes some terrific illustrations and a section of notes for each chapter. Alas the specific reference aren't noted by page or phrase so any reader (or future Kubrick biographer) wishing to fact-check using this book will have a job to untangle the background information.

On a personal note I was amazed to learn that one of the addresses for the Kubrick family during Stanley's high school years and also the address of his future wife, Toba Metz, was 1414 Shakespeare Avenue in the Highbridge section of the Bronx. In the 1940's my maternal and paternal grandparents lived a few blocks south of the Kubricks. My parents were only 2 and 4 years older than Stanley but both attended Catholic high schools in Manhattan, not William Howard Taft H.S., the "neighborhood" public h.s. for this area where Stanley and Toba went to school.

Researchers interested in delving into the Stanley Kubrick story more deeply should visit http://www.arts.ac.uk/kubrick.htm, the website of the archive of the acclaimed film maker's personal papers. The Archive contains more than 1000 boxes of material, including scripts, props, costumes, photography, correspondence, equipment and research.

The Films of John Garfield

It's not fair to blame Thomas Pynchon and Inherent Vice but ever since discovering how Pynchon's P.I. Doc imagined himself as John Garfield, I've been on a bit of nostalgic Garfield trip that's led me into the fascinating world of theatre in New York in the years between the world wars. A Garfield biography led me to Howard Clurman's The Fervent Years. From there I found Cheryl Crawford's memoir, and onto A Life on the Stage by Jacob Adler, and a few other books about the fascinating world of theatre in New York from the late 19th century up to the early 1950's. Some of these I've written about on this blog, others I've just recommended to friends and family but maybe I'll make a few notes eventually.


Back to the subject at hand -- Howard Gelman's The Films of John Garfield (Seacaucus, NJ : Citadel Press, c.1975) is worth tracking down just for the superlative photos of Garfield that it contains. It starts off with a 3-page introduction by Abraham Polonsky in which Polonsky explains how he met Garfield and his partner, Bob Roberts, at their independent film company, Enterprise Productions, and convinces them to produce Body and Soul, scripted by Polonsky. The resultant film, directed by Robert Rossen is considered one of Garfield's finest.


Don't be misled by the title. Yes, each film receives 1 or more pages of still photographs and production details, background information on the film, a 1970's assessment of its effectiveness, a plot synopsis and excerpts from period review(s) of the film focusing on Garfield's performance). In addition, though, there's a 27-page chapter of biographical information, a chapter on Garfield's major theatrical performances, and one on the HUAC investigation with excerpts from John Garfield's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee.


Back to Pynchon and Doc -- why would a youngish man of Italian (?) ancestry born in California identify so closely with John Garfield? How often does a person get to don a raincoat in sunny, Southern California? Is there something about being outsiders? Pynchon doesn't describe Doc's appearance so as I read the book, it was his attitude and p.o.v. that called to mind several people but none of these friends looked remotely like John Garfied.



Arguably, John Garfield was one of the first "ethnic" types to achieve leading man status in Hollywood motion pictures as well as a forerunner of those famous rebellious youthful heroes of the 1950's and 60's -- from James Dean through that trio of easy riders. He was an ambitious, self-driven young man who removed himself from the poverty of the Bronx, plunged headlong into the theatre (after dreams of a professional boxing career faded) and landed in The Group (the brainchild of Clurman, Crawford and Lee Strasberg). Eventually he got himself out to Hollywood, reportedly because Clurman gave the lead in Clifford Odets' Golden Boy to Luther Adler, rather than Jules Garfield, for whom Odet had written the part.



Becoming John Garfield and starring in a series of gritty Warner Brothers' films designed to appeal to the Everyman (and woman), JG had a meteoric career. Eventually, frustration with Warners typecasting, less-than-reasonable loans to other studios and a number of suspensions led Garfield to go the independent route. Sadly, the blacklisting badly hurt his studio as well as his opportunities to get important roles and JG returned to NY, the theatre, the HUAC appearances and a life that had spiraled out of control. His May 1952 funeral in NYC was reportedly the biggest celebrity-funeral since that of Rudolf Valentino's in 1926 (http://themave.com/Garfield/artc/nytimes.htm).

Being a bit literal-minded and because I'd seen Garfield wearing lots of trench coats in noir-ish settings over my movie-watching years, I read Inherent Vice thinking John Garfield had played at least one P.I. for Doc to want to channel. Mr. Gelman's book provided a good way to determine if John Garfield ever portrayed a private investigator. So, for the record, here are the occupations of the characters portrayed by John Garfield in each of his films (minus a few appearances as himself):

Footlight Parade (1933) - sailor, U.S. Navy
Four Daughters (1938) - pianist and drifter
Made Me a Criminal (1939) - boxer and ranch hand
Blackwell's Island (1939) - investigative journalist
Juarez (1939) - general fighting to overthrow Mexico's foreign rule
Daughters Courageous (1939) - con man and vagabond
Dust Be My Destiny (1939) - fugitive from the law
Saturday's Children (1940) - an inventor
Castle on the Hudson (1940) - gangster
Flowing Gold (1940) - oil-field worker on the run from the law
East of the River (1940) - small-time hoodlum
The Sea Wolf (1941) - seaman on a fishing vessel
Out of the Fog (1941) - gangster
Dangerously They Live (1941) - intern at a NY hospital who runs afoul of Nazi spies
Tortilla Flat (1942) - workingman in a small fishing village in Mexico
Air Force (1943) - Army Air Corps sergeant aboard a fighter bomber
Destination Tokyo (1943) - sailor aboard U.S. Navy submarine attacking Tokyo
The Fallen Sparrow (1943) - Spanish Civil War veteran
Between Two Worlds (1944) - Newspaper reporter
Pride of the Marines (1945) - WW2 U.S. Marine Corps machine gunner blinded in action
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) - drifter
Nobody Lives Forever (1946) -WW2 veteran and con man
Humoresque (1946) - violinist
Body and Soul (1947) - prizefighter
Gentleman's Agreement (1947) WW2 veteran experiencing anti-Semitism
Force of Evil (1948) - lawyer working for the mob
We Were Strangers (1949) - revolutionary and leader of a guerilla band in Cuba
Under My Skin (1950) -jockey barred from horse-racing
The Breaking Point (1950) -owner/captain of a sport-fishing boat
He Ran All the Way (1951) - small-time thief and murderer

Quite a range of occupations, quite a few films for such a short career, but nary a P.I. in the lot. But, thanks to The Films of John Garfield, I've a better handle on the film titles and characters so it's time to reread Inherent Vice.

Cheryl Crawford, "One naked individual"

In her 1977 autobiography, producer Cheryl Crawford (1902-1986) recounts her love of the theatre and overwhelming desire to become and stay part of this of world. Theatre represented an environment where she could express herself in ways that the Akron, Ohio of her childhood prohibited and the restrictive code of behavior imposed upon Smith College students. One Naked Individual : My Fifty Years in the Theatre traces Miss Crawford's triumphs, flops and failures (she defines the latter two conditions differently) as she assailed the barriers that existed against women as theatrical producers. Over the course of her career she moved back and forth between relative security of group work (but with limits imposed by others and frequent personality conflicts) and and the freedom enjoyed by the independent producer (along with sky-high financial risk.)



As Crawford explains, this autobiography is an exploration of her life by way of a mix of chronological and thematic strands. For readers who prefer a more chronological approach, the appendix comes in handy. Most readers, if they are familiar with Crawford's work, will recognize her from the musicals she produced. These are largely described in 2 chapters: "One Touch of Venus" and "Musical Adventures." The story of how of One Touch of Venus came to be such a smash hit is one of the most delightful in the book as she traces the production from its initial inception to its London premiere. A near siege aimed at getting Marlene Dietrich to play the goddess having failed, the stage is set for Crawford's initial meeting with Mary Martin, and an important lifelong friendship. From a disastrous opening in Boston Venus went on to win accolades, awards and audiences galore.



Since 1936 Crawford and Kurt Weill had nourished a hope of collaborating on a second work. Their first resulted in Johnny Johnson, a production that had been beset by difficulties raising money (a near constant strand in the book) and personality conflicts galore. Amidst these problems and distractions Crawford and Weill found themselves in agreement about the role and prospects for musical theatre, an interest that was secondary to her fellow Group Theatre directors. Crawford along with was a member of the triumvirate that ran the Group Theater. Impressed by the work of Stanislavsky and Mayerhoff and the theater scene in the Soviet Union, Crawford, Howard Clurman and Lee Strasberg led a strong company of actors wishing to expand their acting skills by presenting plays by young and little-known American dramatists. Thematically, the Group Theater wanted to put on plays that were relevant to to situation of American audiences during the Great Depression, a striking contrast to most of the Broadway productions, not to mention Hollywood films, of this period.


Miss Crawford writes that she had the "good fortune to be identified with many of the major theatrical enterprises of my time." In addition to the The Maplewood Theater, a stock company she ran for 3 seasons until WW2 gas restrictions impeded attendance, the list is a veritable What's What of New York Theatre: the Theatre Guild, the Group Theatre (aka The Group), the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), the American Repertory Theatre (ART), and the Actors Studio


Famous individuals fly across these pages with actresses figuring larger than actors. (In Body and Soul: The Story of John Garfield biographer Larry Swindell describes J.G.'s prolonged siege of Cheryl Crawford; here the effort gets a sentence.) Besides Mary Martin, Judith Anderson and Marilyn Monroe stand out from the crowd of names. But it's the playwrights who get the most attention with three dominating the later chapters of the book: "Gadg" as Elia Kazan was known (his college nickname of Gadget being shortened), Clifford Odets (whom Crawford first hired as an actor and sent out with road companies) and most movingly, Tennessee Williams or "Tenn" (whose photographic portrait suggests he was far and away the handsomest of the group.)



Speaking of photographs, there are 34 black-and-white ones reproduced with varying degrees of success on 16 glossy pages. Alas there were not more but these were carefully chosen and cover the time-frame of the autobiography from beginning to end. There's also a poem by Walt Whitman that begins "I know I am solid and sound...' quoted; Crawford describes this as her bulwark against uncertainty and attacks of the "blues."



Wistfully she explains "I had no private life to speak of, just occasional evenings with colleagues. A social life, not to mention a love life, takes time, and I had none to spare. It was a high price to pay." (p.112). Published in 1977 by Bobbs-Merrill, this 275-page autobiography is a fascinating page-turner. Chances are you'll have to look for copies at the library or o.p. dealers. I gather from a tag on a library book annotation site, Crawford is known in the lgbt community but there's no hint of serious personal attachments to anybody in One Naked Individual : My Fifty Years in the Theatre.

For researchers interested in looking at Cheryl Crawford's papers, the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has the following inventory online: http://www.nypl.org/research/manuscripts/the/thecrawford.xml

Acting with Adler by Joanna Rotté

Joanna Rotté, a writer, actor and director, studied with Stella Adler for three years in the 1970's. A member of Actors Equity, she has a doctorate in theatre from the CUNY Graduate Center and is a professor of graduate-level theatre at Villanova University in addition to teaching at the Stella Adler Conservatory in New York City.

Ellen Adler, Stella's daughter from her first marriage to Horace Eliascheff, has contributed an unusual foreward that eschews tracing her mother's life or career. Ms. Adler devotes a few sentences to her mother and her three husband and devotes the bulk of the foreward to describing the Adler family burial plot in Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens, N.Y. This is the final resting place of two major stars of the late 19th/early 20th century Yiddish theatre, Jacob and Sara Adler (Ellen's grandparents), their sons Jay, Abe, and Luther (he of the piercing stare) and daughters Frances (with her daughters, Pearl and Lulla) and Stella (along with her second husband, Harold Clurman. )


Acting with Adler is of interest to the casual reader for its insight into one method of teaching acting (sometimes referred to as "The Method"). Readers with an interest in the life and career of Stella Adler can glean some nuggets of information but this distillation of Miss Adler's ideas only makes me wish someone would write a proper biography. In the meantime Harold Clurman's The Fervent Years is the best substitute that I've found.

Paul Robeson by Martin Bauml Duberman

Paul Robeson by Martin Bauml Duberman. New York : Knopf, 1988. 1st ed. xiii, 804 p., [48] p. of plates .

Good thing I double-checked as I wrote a new FB that I'd blogged about this book when, in fact, this entry has been in draft form since September 2009.

This may be first book where I spent as much time reading the "Notes" as the text. 198 pages of notes printed in a small typeface and arranged in a double column make for a considerable amount of reading. Many of these notes provide highly detailed clarifications or contradictory evidence; readers ignore the notes at their own peril.

As Professor Duberman explains in the "Note on Sources", this level of information was necessary because so much of his research was based on the Robeson Family Archives (RA), a 50,000-item collection made by Paul Robeson's wife, Eslanda (Essie), and later organized by their son, Paul Robeson, Jr. Writing in 1988 Duberman hopes that the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University will open the RA to general use shortly. He has attempted to assist future scholars by citing gaps or contradictions in the record and also pointing to valuable seconday sources. In addition to the documentary material in the RA, Duberman consulted the holdings of an additional 29 repositories and 30 privately-held collections of manuscript materials. He interviewed over 100 acquaintances and colleagues of Robeson, going back to high school and college classmates.

Paul Robeson was not a diarist nor was he a prolific correspondent; the years before he met and married Essie Goode are sparsely documented. For the later chapters of Paul Robeson's life, much of the documentation is provided by files from the FBI which Paul Robeson, Jr. was able to obtain under the Freedom of Information Act. Feeling there was additional FBI material that Mr. Robeson had not received and recognizing that access under FOIA had become more restricted, Duberman eventually filed a lawsuit against the FBI for materials relating to Robeson's physical and mental collapse. Sadly, the files received were inconclusive, leaving another avenue for future scholars to probe. Since this work was researched and published prior to the end of the Soviet Union, one can only hope that the opening of Soviet-era archives in Russia and Eastern Europe will provide access to additional unpublished material from these counties.

112 black-and-white photographs from family, friends and a wide range of other sources

Martin Bauml Duberman is Distinguished Preofessor of History at Leman College, The City University of New York and the author of ten previous books and a play.

The Blue Flower: A Novel

In The Blue Flower: A Novel Penelope Fitzgerald, winner of the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore, presents a richly detailed imagining of a brief period in the life of Friedrich (Fritz) von Hardenberg (1772-1801) better known by his pen name, Novalis. Drawing on literary and historical writings - correspondence, diaries and other documents - Fitzgerald depicts Hardenberg's family life and friendships during his university years and the start of his planned career, The position of mining inspector in the Harz Mountains has been chosen for him by his family as it will allow him to continue in his father's footsteps and keep the family landholdings together.


This period encompasses Fritz's "love at first sight" meeting with Sophie von Kuhn, the 12-year old step-daughter of a business associate of Hardenberg's mentor and teacher, Coelestin Just. Fitzgerald throws her readers into an unsettled historical period and an unsettling period for Fritz, given his tumultuous relationship with his father Sophie's age is less of an issue than modern readers are apt to expect, particularly once Friedrich agrees to wait until Sophie reaches an age specified by her family to formally announce their engagement. The bigger issue for the von Hardenberg family is Sophie's lower social status. Her father was a minor noble but following his death, her mother remarried ; her new husband is a one-time military officer who retired to the provinces with no particular distinction other than an outsize, booming personality.


Reading The Blue Flower, I was puzzled by Fitzgerald's use of "the" preceding certain names. Both Fritz's younger brother August Wilhem Bernhard ("the Bernhard") and Sophie's married older sister "the Mandelsloh" (the wife of an army lieutenant of that name and Sophie's companion and nurse) get this treatment. These two individuals were very important to Fritz and Sophie, respectively, so perhaps that's the reason for the emphasis.



According to the Afterword, Fritz informed his friends he would write under the name Novalis in Feb. 1798. Novalis was an old family name which translated as "clearer of new land." Three years later he was dead of the same disease which claimed his beloved and several of his brothers and sisters, pulmonary tuberculosis.

The Blue Flower is a delight to read, at turns tragic and comic, filled with unforgettable characters, set in a region torn by war, in 227 pages (including an illustration of the engagement ring), this novel also delineates the state of medicine in the late 18th century when it is beginning to emerge as a profession based on experimental science from its earlier wellsprings of observation, analogy and speculation.

Throughout Fitzgerald contrasts the protagonist's artistic aspirations with the practical demands of career and preparation for eventual inheritance and elevated social position in such a way that the plot is propelled forward at a gallop.

Published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, c1995.

Swept away with T. C. Boyle

Water Music by T. Coraghessan Boyle ; introduction by James R. Kincaid. New York : Penguin Books, [2006]. Originally published by Little, Brown and Company, 1981. 25th Anniversary Edition with a new introduction. (Kincaid is Aerol Professor of English at the University of Southern California.) "Map to illustrate Mungo Park's missions into West Africa (on 2 facing pages preceding the t.p.)

The citation for this novelized version of the life of Mungo Park in Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder (more on this later) reminded me of my resolution to read more of T. Coraghessan Boyle's work. Several years ago I read Riven Rock and Road to Wellville but wandered off to read other authors. From his wikipedia entry I realize he's written a dozen novels so I've more than a few books to I have to read in order to catch up. OK, one of these days.

Back to Mungo Park and his fascinating life (the unusual first name stuck in my memory but prior to reading Mr. Holmes' book I lacked a context in which to place the famed English explorer.) Here in a most unconventional fictionalized biography, Boyle reimagines Park's life in parallel with the experiences with those of an orphan who grows up in the slums of 18th century. This fictional alter ego, Ned Rise, is a young man in a hurry to succeed who pretty much turns everything he touches into a mess (not all that dissimilar from Boyle's view of Park.) Along with real characters like Ailie Anderson Park, Mungo's wife who gives new meaning to the term long-suffering, and Joseph Bank, one-time explorer but now stay-at home president of the Royal Society, Boyle creates a batch of fictional characters including Johnson (Mungo's guide to the mysteries of the River Niger), Gleg (a Scottish physician who stays home and tries to stand by Ailie) and various friends and enemies of Ned Rise.

If you're a fan of T.C. Boyle's but missed this uproarious first novel, please read it; if his reputation as a modern great or the ponderous pace of the film version of Road to Wellville has turned you off , give Water Music a try. I think you'll be in for a treat.