Category Archives: Memory Lane

Now, getting back to my personal Dorothy Parker….

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It should surprise no one familiar with her writings that as soon as decently possible after her so casual, offhand invitation to stop in for a drink the next time I found myself in her Manhattan neighborhood around that time of the afternoon, I did just happen to find myself around Madison Avenue and the upper ’40s.  When I gave my name to the deskman at the New Weston Hotel, for him to ask whether he should let me go up, it would not at all have surprised me for him to turn me away – but by golly he didn’t!  I can’t recall who else had already dropped in on Dorothy that afternoon, but I soon discovered that she had obviously extended that casual invitation to a  fairly wide circle, for I never appeared there without finding at least one visitor already on hand.

Informed Parker fans may have wondered why, in my dropping the resounding name of Dorothy Parker, I haven’t gone all the way and called her Dottie – as did virtually everyone else who knew her at all – so let’s get that cleared up right now.  At first it would have seemed to me something close to lèse-majesté for me to have presumed to call her that, and I hadn’t known her long before a chance occurrence one afternoon answered my unasked question.  A woman friend of Dorothy’s and I formed that afternoon’s group; I’ve forgotten that visitor’s identity but she also had a sort of nickname problem, and it transpired that I’d unknowingly ingratiated myself with her by not using it.  The conversational byplay prompted by that included Dorothy’s saying: “Paul calls us by our right names”, adding that she’d always hated the nickname she got stuck with during her periods of Hollywood servitude.  Naturally I never once, during the time we remained in contact (until a Hollywood gig she felt forced to accept took her back there around Christmastime 1948), called her anything except Dorothy.

If anyone asked me to name the saddest woman I ever knew, I wouldn’t even have to reflect before naming Dorothy.  Research shows that she even attempted suicide on three occasions.  She’d lost her Jewish mother a few months before her fifth birthday, and her Jewish father had then married a shiksa – about whom Dorothy told me a psychologically important tidbit I’ve never seen anywhere in print:

“She brought me up to look down on my father the same way she did, because I was only half-Jewish and he was all-Jewish.”  She immediately added: “Of course in later life that made me two hundred percent Jewish.” 

She grew up on Manhattan’s upper west side, and attended Roman Catholic elementary school at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament, no doubt at the decision of her stepmother – who, in turn, died before Dorothy turned ten.  She also attended Miss Dana’s School, a stylish finishing school in upper-class Morristown, New Jersey.  Her formal education ended completely not long after her thirteenth birthday.  When “The Paris Review” interviewed Dorothy many years later, she said she’d learned nothing during her school years except that a pencil eraser will erase ink “if you spit on it.”

In all those 1948 afternoons we drank together – and she always had plenty of drink of various kinds on hand, with endless reinforcements only a room-service telephone call away – I don’t recall having ever seen her actually drunk . . . but a moment’s reflection reminds me that I myself probably got too sozzled to have even noticed her own state. 

I’ve read somewhere that her closest friend Lillian Hellman’s long-time lover Dashiell Hammett couldn’t stand Dorothy, because of what he regarded as her duplicity, her two-faced behavior, but I myself caught only one brief glimpse of that.  At one point during those years three young Manhattan débutantes turned up fairly frequently in the gossip columns as stars of what someone during that period dubbed Café Society.  I recall one of their names as Brenda Frasier, but one of the other two, whose name I’ve forgotten, also dropped into the New Weston one afternoon and the deskman called up for Dorothy’s instructions.  She did tell him to send her up, but during the few minutes it took her to arrive at Dorothy’s apartment door, Dorothy absolutely demolished her, mercilessly ridiculing everything conceivable about her.  Then the doorbell rang, and Dorothy’s manner instantaneously underwent a total transformation; to revert to a Texas expression, you could have poured her on a waffle.  Two-faced?  Hypocritical?  To trot out another Texas locution, those terms hardly covered it.

(During that period I also rejoiced in occasional meetings with another well-known writer, Dawn Powell, a Greenwich Village neighbor of mine the literary pope Edmund Wilson highly esteemed and in a “New Yorker” essay praised to the skies.  One afternoon at Dawn’s – also, inevitably, over drinks – Dorothy’s name came up, and I told her how distasteful I’d found the episode with that débutante.  Dawn said she understood what I meant, but she had a personal theory about Dorothy that I can at least reliably paraphrase: “She fires those demolition jets of vitriol in swift little volleys, and that takes care of it, right then and there.  I think the rest of us do more or less the same thing, only we spread it out over a lot more time.”)

My most memorable single experience of Dorothy took place one night after whoever else had come that afternoon had left, leaving Dorothy and me alone.  I’d noticed earlier that evening that she seemed unusually depressed, and for that reason I’d not left, for I didn’t want to leave her all alone in that desolate mood.

With her sitting in one corner of her not terribly spacious hotel living room and me diametrically across the room from her, we exchanged respective miseries, undoubtedly doing the exact opposite of bucking each other up.  Some time prior to that I had gone into psychoanalysis – beginning one of the most traumatic experiences of my life, not because of psychoanalysis per se, but because the coincidence of outrageous fortune had landed me on the couch of an analyst my worst enemy might have selected for me – so that evening I had an abundant reservoir of raw material to hold up my own end of our ever more and more lugubrious colloquy.  Three epithets at the end of one of Dorothy’s sentences branded themselves forever into my memory; speaking of herself at that time of her life, after her divorce from Alan Campbell, she summed up her autobiographical summary at 55 with these whip-lash words: “elderly, ugly, and alone.”

To my dying day I’ll regret not yielding to my spontaneous impulse to rush across the room and enfold her in my arms . . . but I didn’t.  Why not?  Well, for one thing her identity as the Dorothy Parker still overawed me.  Another factor also inhibited me: Dorothy had a reputation for losing her heart to sensitive young men a great deal younger than she, a category in which I definitely belonged, and I did not want to get involved in that kind of predicament.  (Talk about unlucky in love: Dorothy married homosexual Alan Campbell not once but twice; they divorced in 1947, remarried three years later, and remained together on and off until his death in 1963 in West Hollywood – the largely gay section of Los Angeles.  I recall reading somewhere that in her cups her fundamental hostility towards him did not stop short of homophobic twitting, even in the company of others.)

That evening she and I did somehow manage to yank our spirits up at least a bit higher than rock-bottom, but before I finally left she pointedly quizzed me about my own personal situation at that stage of my life.  Not long before that I’d lost the script-writing job at RKO-Pathé (which an unorthodox, graphology-influenced, possibly almost clairvoyant employment agent had sent me into, thus officially enabling me finally to call myself a writer), and I faced a bleakly uncertain future with virtually no money in the bank.  When Dorothy demanded details, I gave them to her.  Without another word she went to another area of that two-room apartment and came back with one of those big out-sized check ledgers you see mostly in places of business.  She sat down and wrote out one check, then folded it to conceal the amount and handed it to me with this envoi: “I’ve had some unexpected royalties recently, so here’s a month.  Have a month on me.”

The fact that she’d even done such a thing struck me almost totally dumb, but as soon as I even began trying to put into words the grateful fullness I felt in my heart, she wanted none of that.  I couldn’t see the amount she’d written, but I did catch a glimpse of the top-level private bank where she had her account: Brown Brothers Harriman - as I recall, Averell Harriman, one of the richest Democrats in the country, had at least a hand in running it.  (Reflection subsequently led to my conclusion that Dorothy had not exactly thrown away the bounteous reimbursement she’d received from those Hollywood chores for which she had such contempt.  She and Alan Campbell co-wrote more than fifteen films, at salaries as high as $5,200 a week, an all the more enormous sum during those post-1929 depression years.)

Before I even got into the elevator, naturally I unfolded the check and damned near fainted when I saw the amount: $500.  At RKO-Pathé they’d paid me $50 a week; for my dark little warren down on West Tenth Street I paid exactly $31 a month.  For me at that time, $500 would go a long, long, long way farther than the month she’d mentioned.  In context, I believe that topped, for sheer generosity, any other benefaction that’s come my way ever since.

A standard reference work summarizes Dorothy Parker as “best known for her caustic wit, wisecracks, and sharp eye for 20th-century urban foibles.”  Well, yes, I suppose so . . . but also someone much, very much more than that.  She took a passionate interest in social issues; any kind of social injustice outraged her.  Her outrage never drove her quite into actually joining the Communist Party, but she made no secret, especially in Hollywood, of her left-wing sympathies.  The infamous vigilante outfit called “Red Channels” came right out and called her a Communist.  With Mussolini’s fascist Italy and Hitler’s Nazi Germany destroying Spain’s elected Republican government while the leading democratic world powers merely looked on, she actually went to Spain herself, and wrote about what she experienced there for the not officially Communist but definitely Party-lining intellectual weekly “New Masses”, which also published two little-known poems of hers, “Not Enough” and “Sophisticated Poetry – and the Hell With It”.

In 1967, at the comparatively early age of 73, Dorothy died of a heart attack in her suite at the high-class Volney residential hotel in New York City, in a reasonable facsimile of which she set one of her last literary efforts, a collaboration entitled “The Ladies of the Corridor”.  Her will bequeathed her entire estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Foundation; following King’s death, it passed on to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.  For whatever reason, her best friend and executrix, the equally left-wing playwright Lillian Hellman, bitterly but unsuccessfully contested that disposition.  Dorothy’s ashes remained unclaimed, in various places including the filing cabinet of her attorney Paul O’Dwyer, for about seventeen years.  The N.A.A.C.P. eventually claimed them and designed a memorial garden for them outside its Baltimore headquarters.  The plaque there reads:

“Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893 – 1967), humorist, writer, critic.  Defender of human and civil rights.  For her epitaph she suggested, ‘Excuse My Dust’.  This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people. Dedicated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.  October 28, 1988.”  Dorothy’s image appeared on a 29¢ commemorative postage stamp in the Literary Arts series, issued on August 22, 1992, Dorothy’s 99th birthday.

One might say Dorothy summed up her fundamental Weltanschauung in the eight lines of the little poem she laconically entitled “Résumé“:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

I could, and easily, write a lot more about my indelible personal experiences involving Dorothy, but I hope this unfairly brief mini-memoir will at least suffice to present another aspect of her intricate personality, at such variance with the predominant reputation that’s survived her.

My own personal Dorothy Parker

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On this day 114 years ago, a New York couple named Rothschild, who had a summer cottage in the little New Jersey beach town of Long Branch, became parents of a baby they named Dorothy.  (A brief momentary aside: on this same date, 79 years ago, a German couple named Stockhausen living near Cologne became parents of a baby boy they named Karlheinz – but let’s stick with Dorothy; I may or may not eventually come back to Stockhausen [anyone interested?], whose path and mine have crossed on fairly numerous occasions starting during his teeth-cutting electronic days at Cologne’s Westdeutscher Rundfunk about half a century or so ago, when Time had me fly there from Berlin to provide its first story about him.)

But as long as I seem in a veering mood, let’s veer back for just a moment to that name Rothschild.  Virtually all the world connects it with the unique European banking family (some of my fellow codgers may recall George Arliss decades ago in a Hollywood epic called “The House of Rothschild”), which by clever distribution of progeny established a unique international web of banks, and Anglophone eyes tend to divide that surname wrong - approximately Roth’s Child – whereas the original (meanwhile archaic) German spelling, pronounced Roat-Shild, means simply Red Schield – get it?  (I’ll exert myself not to veer yet once more and pause to tell you about finding myself on the same BEA plane from Salzburg to London with a latter-day descendent who’d become Lord Rothschild - with me at that point accompanying the great (Soviet) Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter on a dream assignment the German magazine stern laid on me to spend two or three weeks travelling with Richter and Nina Dorliac, the Russian soprano everyone at that point took for his wife, to three of Europe’s most important annual music festivals: Salzburg, Edinburgh, and Lucerne.  [I'll really have to exert myself to keep from veering off yet again about Richter's introductory meeting with Marlene Dietrich in Edinburgh's George Hotel, with me on hand . . . but that'll have to wait until I finally get around to taking that Memory Lane stroll here through the Marlene Dietrich neighborhood I recently discovered has long since become my home here in Berlin.])

Now then – getting back to that newborn New Jersey child Dorothy Rothschild.  When she grew up, she married a gentleman named Parker, and since American anti-Semitism made his surname professionally preferable for a budding writer, she became, forevermore, Dorothy Parker.  I first heard her name at a very early age during my El Paso childhood, from the brother of my Texan sister’s New Mexico rancher fiancé, whose literarily inclined younger brother Jim described her work as “caustic”, a word also new to me, which he kindly defined for me.  I thus had a pre-conceived notion that jibed, I believe, with the vast majority of people’s opinion of the slim volume of literary treasures Dorothy Parker left us when she died.

One night in New York during the mid-1940s my telephone rang and I heard the voice of Hallie Faulk, whose approaching second marriage had recently brought her up from Texas, where for part of the summer of 1942 I’d roomed with her and her brilliant first husband John Henry Faulk (about whom I could also write a short book – but more of him later, too) in their house out on the bank of the Colorado River as an 18-year-old senior at the University of Texas in Austin.  (During her later years Hallie enjoyed a modest folk-singer success as Hallie Wood, recording at least one LP.)  Halfway through the evening in question she telephoned me in my dark, tiny apartment down in the unfashionable part of Greenwich Village from a party up on lower Park Avenue, where they had a piano that needed someone to play it, so how about my coming up? 

I reacted to news that with an equanimity bordering on coma until she started going down the list of people present.  During those pre-McCarthy days, when the dividing line between anti-fascist and pro-Communist frequently became blurred, almost everyone I knew in that era’s New York classified as left-wing, and Hallie had telephoned me from a fund-raising party for an organization I’d never before even heard of: U.N.A.V.A, which stood for United Negro-American Veterans’ Association or something similar.  The choreographer Jerome Robbins (later pilloried by the McCarthy mob as a one-time member of the Communist Party of the United States of America) had made available for it the furnished apartment down in the un-chic lower part of Park Avenue he’d temporarily sublet from the photographer George Platt Lynes.  I knew Jerry slightly, through mutual friends including Leonard Bernstein (with whom he’d made a simultaneous introductory splash with their ballet “Fancy Free”) but not until Hallie mentioned Dorothy Parker as one of the guests did I really snap to attention.  Needless to say, I hightailed it up to that party as fast as Manhattan’s subway system (which in those days cost a nickel) could get me there.  (Taxis?  Me, at that stage in my life?  Don’t make me laugh – not even the sooner to get to meet my adored Dorothy Parker.)

I found her the way S. J. Perelman had also found her at their introductory encounter: visibly gassed.  Literary gossip about her already legendary self had it that she’d tried Alcoholic Anonymous – but without lasting success.  Lynes had one of those modest waist-high pianos I believe the manufacturers (inaccurately) called spinets, and almost as soon as I sat down I had Dorothy’s face directly in front of me, elbows on top of the little piano, chin cradled in her hands, gazing directly into my utterly enchanted eyes from only a few feet away, with a dreamy smile on her face I could without exaggeration call almost adoring - catapulting me of course directly into seventh heaven.  She quite clearly took an immediate shine to me – I hardly need go into my own reaction to that totally unanticipated development – and primarily for her I proceeded to trot out virtually my entire repertoire, and to hell with the fact that only a small circle close around us really listened to the musical pearls I so lavishly cast before them.

I guess I could fairly say that I moved from seventh up to eighth heaven when the party broke up, during the no longer very wee hours of that morning, and with genuine cordiality she casually extended to me one of the most appreciated invitations of my entire life.  At that time, between her two marriages to her considerably younger writing collaborator Alan Campbell, she had moved into a two-room suite at the largely residential semi-bohemian New Weston Hotel, on Madison Avenue in the upper forties.  Almost off-handedly, unaware of the accolade her invitation automatically amounted to, she said that any time I happened to find myself in the New Weston’s neighborhood around cocktail time, I should feel free to drop in for a drink.

. . . Now I hate to frustrate those of you I know I have drooling to read absolutely everything I can tell you about my fairly numerous visits to her in that apartment, but it grows late here in Berlin and I did want to write this little tribute on her birthday.  Tomorrow looms uniquely large in my life – 4 a.m. E.D.T. will find me at one of Berlin’s regional City Halls collecting the certificate that will proclaim me a brand-new citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany (after living here for almost all the past 56 years), and tomorrow afternoon will find me making my debut – albeit merely as a modest Anglophone voice - at Berlin’s pinnacle Deutsches Theater, where Max Reinhardt worked his theatrical wonders until the brownshirt goons who took over in 1933 threw him out for his suddenly criminal Jewish origin.  Please don’t go away mad, though – I assure you that I myself want to wrap up my memories of Dorothy Parker every bit as eagerly as you do, okay?

The Dorothy Parker S. J. Perelman first met

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By way of preparation for what I myself hope to write about Dorothy day after tomorrow, this afternoon I pulled out a book I’d bought when it first appeared in 1981: “The Last Laugh” (Simon & Schuster), a collection of odds and ends left by that master humorist S. J. Perelman when he died.  I whole-heartedly commend that entire treasure to your attention (for one thing, the microscopic accuracy of Perelman’s vocabulary makes that alone a special pleasure for anyone who even tries to write), but here I’ll quote only an excerpt from his own six-page reminiscence about Dorothy that begins with what he calls his “scarifying” first encounter with her – characteristic of the kind of verbal stiletto-work on her part that dominates most people’s impression of her, an impression I hope my own memories may do a bit to counteract.

Perelman underwent this baptism by Parkerian fire at a cocktail party thrown by the Broadway producer Poultney Kerr, who’d invited “forty or fifty” New York sophisticates for the self-serving purpose of picking their collective brains for the perfect title he sought for a revue to which Perelman had contributed “some sketches” – but let Perelman tell his own story:

“Halfway through the proceedings Mrs. Parker arrived, visibly gassed but dressed to kill in a black confection by Lanvin, a feathered toque, and opera-length gloves.  Thirty-nine years old and a very toothsome dish, she immediately made every other woman in the assemblage feel dowdy, and for a moment the sound of their teeth gnashing drowned out the buzz of chitchat.  When Kerr introduced us, she straightaway fired off a barrage of compliments likening me to Congreve, Oscar Wilde, and Noël Coward.  Inasmuch as my total Broadway output was confined to one sketch in the Third Little Show, I thought the praise a mite excessive, but I blushingly accepted the tribute.” 

Kerr called for silence in order to get the title-seeking ball rolling, and all heads present automatically turned towards Dorothy.  She first came up with “Pousse-Café” and soon she in turn zeroed in on Perelman, who continues: ”I suddenly became aware of Mrs. Parker’s eyes fixed on me with cat-like intentness.  ‘What do you think of Pousse-Café, Mr. Perelman?’” 

The poor devil couldn’t, in spite of trying, make his mendacious response sound sufficiently convincing, and Dorothy went in for the kill when Perelman lamely finished with “I mean, poose-café – it’s too soft, somehow.”

“‘Oh really?’ she asked with a slow and deadly inflection” and she immediately aimed a second suggestion directly at him.  To that one he said: “I just wonder, though, if we can’t find something a tiny bit sharper, less static. . . .”

At that, she pounced.  “‘Well, goodness me.’  Mrs. Parker’s words dripped sweet poison.  ‘What ever shall we do?  Our wrist has just been slapped by the house genius there, who feels that we’re a bit dull-witted.  Of course, he’s in a position to know, isn’t he, leaning down from Parnassus – ‘

“‘Look, folks!’  Kerr broke in nervously.  ‘Have another drink.  Don’t go, it’s still early – ‘

“‘How privileged we are to have the benefit of Mr. P.’s wide experience!’ she overrode him.  ‘How gracious of him to analyze our shortcomings!  I wonder, though, if Mr. P. realizes that he’s a great big etcetera.  Because he is, you know.  In fact, of all the etceteras I’ve ever known – ‘

“Well, fortunately for me, the bystanders who had witnessed the carnage recovered their tongues at this juncture, and the rest of Mrs. Parker’s diatribe was lost in the babble.  I made my escape, and when Kerr phoned me the next day to apologize for her conduct, I swore that if I ever met the woman again, I’d skewer her with one of her own hatpins.  That evening I received a dozen magnificent roses from her, accompanied by a note steeped in remorse.  It was the beginning of a friendship that survived the next thirty-five years, with intermittent lapses. . . .”

Don’t expect my own intended contribution here to measure up to that, but I hope this little appetiser will have at least sharpened your curiosity about whatever comparatively modest contribution I myself may make.

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Starting down Memory Lane with Dorothy Parker

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On August 22d 114 years ago, the Rothschild couple who lived in New York but had a summer cottage at 732 Ocean Avenue in the New Jersey village of Long Branch became parents there of a baby girl they named Dorothy.  In due time she married a gentleman named Parker, and in the years after that she created a unique niche in literary history for the brilliant and versatile writer Dorothy Parker.  A chance reminder of this 114th birthday has galvanized me into reserving Wednesday to write about the Dorothy Parker I had the rare luck to know in New York the end of the 1940s, thus finally getting around to at least starting a mini-memoir of the woman I myself came to know, for abundant evidence has long convinced me that in addition to the rare privilege of having had her as a friend at all, I had the even rarer privilege of knowing a human being at quite considerable variance from the stereotype caustic, saber-tongued Dorothy Parker almost everyone else except me seems to have known.  I believe I could write even an entire short book about my Dorothy, for memories of precious time spent in her unique company have remained permanently indelible – but at least whatever I do manage to write here will serve as a start, a foundation.  I just hope nothing between now and Wednesday will deter me yet once again.

Political humor at its most trenchant

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A used item discarded onto a sidewalk in my Berlin neighborhood took me back down Memory Lane this morning to a splendid example of political humor that came my way back during the Eisenhower administration.  (Can you remember?  Five-Star U.S. Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower, victorious as Supreme Commander of the British, French, and American Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War II - born 1890 in Denison, TEXAS - served as thirty-fourth President of the United States of America from 1953 to 1961.)

One day in the White House, bucked all the way up via the Secretaries of Commerce and State, came an order from the Soviet Ministry of Health in Moscow that demanded decision at the very highest level.  It stipulated 12,000,000 condoms with only one additional detail: they should all uniformly measure 30 centimeters in length.  A uniformed aide consulted the Library of Congress and informed the President that in real measurements that amounted to 11.82 inches precisely.

Ike summoned his entire Cabinet on the double, where from the perspective of Realpolitik this order posed a real problem, what with the Cold War right at its coldest and all and all.  Brows furrowed in a silence broken solely by the tense sound of drumming fingers.  Ike’s more hard-nosed fellow Republicans on hand favored advising the Reds exactly where they could shove their order, but their kinder, gentler, more realistic and intelligent crypto-ComSymp colleagues said no, the nation’s economy at that point could definitely do with such an unexpected international trade bonanza – and who could tell what else it might lead to? 

With the Cabinet split 50-50, Ike said he’d like to sleep on this overnight, and would let them know his decision the following morning.

That night his unremitting tossing and turning made things hell for Mamie, and finally she said, “Ike, honey, what’s got you so upset?” – so he told her.  Within minutes the President had finally lapsed into a profound sleep, and he woke up a few hours later ready and eager to greet the new day.  He found his office already full of high-level aides with uniformly expectant faces, so he wasted no time before enlightening them.

After highest-level consultation (for tactical reasons he left Mamie out of this), he had decided that the country which had become the bastion of western democracy could indeed accept the Soviet order – under two preconditions.

First, each item would bear a stamp reading “Made in USA”.

And underneath that: “Medium size”.

(A quick historical footnote: State Secretary John Foster Dulles around that time coined a two-word phrase immediately adopted into American politics, referring to what the Reds could expect if they got funny with God’s Country, and an American diplomat in Munich spontaneously quoted that when I told him this joke: “Massive retaliation!”)

Keith Olbermann: today’s Edward R. Murrow?

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Egbert Roscoe Murrow, later known as plain Ed Murrow, born April 25, 1908 near Polecat Creek, near Greensboro, in Guilford County, North Carolina, half a century ago set the standard for responsible American television journalism.  His finest hour came on March 9, 1954, when a half-hour documentary quoting the documented utterances of Wisconsin’s hysterically red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy brought the turning point in that vile demagogue’s career and led directly to his self-disgrace and downfall.  I vividly recalled that telecast when I watched, fascinated, Keith Olbermann’s latest commentary in his “Countdown” program on MSNBC.

He has laced into Dubya and his gang before, but this blast goes far above and beyond any of those excoriations yet to come to my expatriated attention.  For me, like Murrow in the 1950s, Olbermann – especially in the degenerate age of Fox News and such repulsive journalistic excrescences as Ann C**lt*r – has firmly restored journalism to the status of an honorable profession.

I both marvel and rejoice that MSNBC keeps Olbermann on the air; they assuredly cannot find it easy to find sponsors for him.  During that bygone Murrow era, his own network, CBS, ranked head and shoulders for quality over its rivals NBC and ABC, but when Murrow and his equally courageous producer Fred Friendly launched their Person to Person series, CBS chickened out and left it to Murrow and Friendly to pay for their own newspaper advertising of their new series. 

From that distant time, Murrow’s telecasts – especially the one that so skillfully maneuvered McCarthy into self-destruction by means of incontestably documented fact – remained so memorable that the Koch Vision label reissued them.

Letters, telegrams, and phone-calls at the time deluged CBS by the thousands, running 15 to 1 in support of Murrow.  In a later A&E network tribute to Murrow, Fred Friendly recounted how, for instance, truck-drivers would pull up to the curb when they spotted Murrow on the street and call to him: “Good show, Ed!”

On this July 4th Independence Day I personally find precious little for Americans to celebrate, but I make a salient exception for Keith Olbermann in general and for this installment in particular, and I whole-heartedly commend it to you on this particular day as reassurance that the American principles laid down in 1776 - the present White House mob notwithstanding - have definitely not died.

Brooklyn’s Belle Silverman, a.k.a. Beverly Sills

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Due to my having left the USA for Europe as early as I did, I never even heard her live, let alone meet her, but her death so comparatively young saddens me every bit as much as if I had.  Out of the recesses of my memory comes an apparently characteristic story I read long ago in some reliable place.

The congenital profound deafness of her little daughter, nicknamed Muffie, undoubtedly provided the dominant tragedy of her doting mother’s life.  Even though she couldn’t actually hear her mother do her operatic thing, she could at least see her onstage, impersonating all those stylish ladies in their fancy costumes, so she got taken fairly frequently to opera performances where her mother royally queened it as only she could.

On one occasion, singing opposite the Italian tenor Gianni Raimondi, the character she portrayed died a few minutes before the final curtain came down and she dropped to the stage floor, now free to scan the front rows for Muffie.  At that point she emitted a fierce stage whisper from floor level: “Gianni!  Move your ass!  I can’t see Muffie!” – from everything I ever heard about her from people who knew her well, Beverly Sills to the life.

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The Quality of Dubya’s Mercy, Then and Now

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The facts, folks – just the facts, as summarized by The New York Times:

    I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted March 6, 2007, of lying to F.B.I. agents and grand jurors investigating the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative amid a burning dispute over the war in Iraq.

    The jury rejected Mr. Libby’s claims of memory lapses as it convicted him of obstruction of justice, giving false statements to the F.B.I. and perjuring himself, charges embodied in four counts of the indictment.

    The panel acquitted him on a single count of making false statements.

    On July 2, 2007, President Bush commuted the prison sentence.

In 1998, while still Governor of Texas, the same born-again Christian had ignored pleas for mercy for Karla Faye Tucker, 38, that came from Pope John Paul and the European Parliament, among others.  The nominally Christian fundamentalist televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell – normally staunch supporters of killing some prisoners - also called for the Governor’s commutation of her sentence.  Additional appeals to the Governor came from Sister Helen Prejean and Bianca Jagger, who led a clemency rally in opposition to the death sentence.  Sister Helen’s book Dead Man Walking and the movie adapted from it chronicled her work with a death-row inmate in Louisiana. 

Tucker’s legalized killing did not go unnoticed abroad.  Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, Italy’s President at the time, noted in a public speech that spectators outside Huntsville Prison in Texas had cheered the announcement of Tucker’s death by lethal injection.  “And we are on the threshold of two thousand years of Christ!” he exclaimed.  In England, Richard Harries of the Diocese of Oxford reported that a Gospel singer’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” got shouted down by cries of “Kill the bitch!” from the crowd gathered outside the prison.

On January 26 that year, the almost notoriously right-wing journalist William F. Buckley devoted his column in The National Review to the Tucker case, which included this:

“The Court said No to the lady’s final appeal against the death sentence.  The lady in question is youngish (38) and beautiful.  She is a born-again Christian.  In the course of her conversations with the prison chaplain, all of them conducted with bulletproof glass separating minister and postulant, a courtship developed, and lo! they have been married, though they have never shaken hands.  The prosecutors who got her sentenced have asked for clemency.  [Emphasis added.  - P.M.]  So also a pro-death-penalty former U.S. attorney.  So also the sister of one of the murder victims.  Pat Robertson, the Pope of the Christian Coalition, has publicly requested clemency, while reiterating his support for capital punishment….”

Before Tucker was killed by a lethal injection, pleas for clemency also came to Gov. Bush from Waly Bacre Ndiaye, the United Nations commissioner on summary and arbitrary executions, the World Council of Churches, and Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, among other world figures.  Unusual pleas came from additional conservative American political figures including Newt Gingrich.

Only the possibility of a last-minute stay by the United States Supreme Court – which had an appeal pending - or intervention by Texas Governor George Bush stood between Tucker and the distinction of becoming the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War, in 1863.

Not often does the august New York Times display the angered outrage exuded by this morning’s editorial, pointedly entitled “Soft on Crime”: 

“When he was running for president, George W. Bush loved to contrast his law-abiding morality with that of President Clinton, who was charged with perjury and acquitted.  For Mr. Bush, the candidate, ‘politics, after a time of tarnished ideals, can be higher and better.’

“Not so for Mr. Bush, the president.  Judging from his decision yesterday to commute the 30-month sentence of I. Lewis Libby Jr. — who was charged with perjury and convicted — untarnished ideals are less of a priority than protecting the secrets of his inner circle and mollifying the tiny slice of right-wing Americans left in his political base…. “

So what might have motivated Libby’s legally determined actionable offence?  As noted, he had lied to federal agents investigating the leak of the name of a covert C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson.  By a funny coincidence, Mrs. Wilson’s husband Joseph Wilson had received the assignment to investigate a central claim in Bush’s drive to war with Iraq — to wit, whether Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Africa.  Mr. Wilson concluded that Iraq had not done that; furthermore, he had the temerity to share those conclusions with the American public. In essence: the casus belli the Dubya gang claimed to justify launching a war against Iraq – which had had nothing whatever to do with 9/11 – existed exclusively in that gang’s wishful thinking. Even more concisely: they had started a bilaterally murderous war without justification, legal or otherwise.

To quote The New York Times:

“It seems clear from the record that Vice President Dick Cheney organized a campaign to discredit Mr. Wilson.  And Mr. Libby, who was Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, was willing to lie to protect his boss….”

Dubya’s cheering section immediately demanded a presidential pardon.   “Those same Republicans”, The New York Times points out, ”have been rebelling against Mr. Bush, most recently on immigration reform, while Democrats in Congress have pursued an investigation into whether Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney lied about Iraq’s weapons programs.”  Funny coincidence after funny coincidence…. 

In that newspaper’s official editorial opinion, none of the “immense pressure on the president to do something before Mr. Libby went to jail [justified] the baldly political act of commuting his sentence….”

The New York Times has also gone back down Memory Lane:

“As governor of Texas, he was infamous for joking about the impending execution of Karla Faye Tucker, a killer who became a born-again Christian on Death Row.  As president, he has repeatedly put himself and those on his team, especially Mr. Cheney, above the law….”

Karla Faye Tucker did not ask for a pardon, only commutation of her death sentence to life in prison.  Huntsville Prison’s warden testified that she was a model prisoner and that, after fourteen years on Death Row, she likely had been reformed.  Despite those pleas, the Governor signed her death warrant.  In 1999, during the 2000 Republican Presidential primary race, the conservative -  repeat: conservative - commentator Tucker Carlson interviewed Bush for Talk Magazine (for September 1999, page 106).  An excerpt from that interview:

” . . . In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, a number of protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Karla Faye Tucker.  ‘Did you meet with any of them?’ I ask.  Bush whips around and stares at me.  “No, I didn’t meet with any of them”, he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed.  ‘I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it.  I watched his interview with Tucker, though.  He asked her real difficult questions like, ‘What would you say to Governor Bush?’” “What was her answer?” I wonder.  “‘Please,’ Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, ‘don’t kill me.’”  I must look shocked — ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel — because he immediately stops smirking.  Bush denied that he had intended to make light of the issue….”

That extraordinarily angry New York Times editorial this morning concludes:

“Presidents have the power to grant clemency and pardons.  But in this case, Mr. Bush did not sound like a leader making tough decisions about justice.  He sounded like a man worried about what a former loyalist might say when actually staring into a prison cell.”

Gen. Sherman’s "War is Hell" hardly covers it

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Missouri-born Lucien Agniel, the first American I had the rare good fortune to meet when I arrived in Germany in 1951, worked for the United States Foreign Service in the Munich Press Office of the U.S. Land Commissioner’s office; six years after the end of World War II, Munich still had no Consulate proper in Munich.  Lu and his wonderfully warm-hearted wife Libba (the only person I’ve ever known who spoke fluent German with the unmistakable accent of her native Georgia) soon made me virtually a member of their family, which included four  children, the youngest of them born in the U.S. Army Hospital in Munich’s Schwabing neighborhood. 

Lucien, one of the gentlest, kindest human beings ever to bless my life, didn’t talk much about his own WW2 experiences only a few years earlier, but I did know he’d participated in the insanely murderous “Battle of the Bulge” that resulted from Nazi Germany’s desperate last gasp before capitulating to the Allies.  On one of the rare occasions he did talk about that with me, he indirectly labeled himself a war criminal when he happened to mention the ever more numerous hordes of young Germans his own U.S. Army unit had taken prisoner during those tumultuous days. 

“Whenever the German prisoners surrendering by the hundreds outnumbered the members of our own unit – and that happened fairly often, over and over and over – sheer self-preservation automatically took priority, and our commanding officer would quietly assign a small commando to take them over and lag with them behind the rest of our marching column until a suitable distance separated them from us, and then, with machine-guns, simply mow them down.  That situation boiled down to ‘Either them or us.’”

That memory has haunted me for more than half a century, and it emerged into my conscious mind most recently this weekend when I came upon a story in the Anglophone online edition that Germany’s top-notch newsmagazine Der Spiegel makes available free of charge.  Sixty-two years ago World War II may have finished Adolf Hitler’s “1000-Year Reich” (which in fact fell short of his prediction by 988 years), but only relatively recently has the postwar German democracy got around to legally “rehabilitating” some thirty thousand Germans the Nazis’ courts martial sentenced to death for desertion from the military.  However, that posthumous rehabilitation has not applied to others found guilty of what during that hideous era classified as anti-Nazi treason.  Legally – and in punctilious Germany such details have serious importance for various reasons – those doubly hapless wretches remain every bit as guilty today as at the time of their execution.  Only now has Germany’s Bundestag (Parliament) got around to showing signs that it may – finally, finally – get around to making recompense for that.

Consider these specific incidents of such “treason”:

One German soldier, his name meanwhile lost to history, in May 1944 tried to smuggle thirteen automatically doomed Jews out of Hungary (where the Jewish population almost unanimously disappeared up Nazi extermination camps’ smokestacks) into Romania to save them from the gas chambers at Auschwitz and the SS’s five other specifically extermination camps on Polish soil.  A border check disclosed his illegal cargo hiding in the back of his army truck – and a Nazi German military court sentenced him to death on the charge  of treason.

At least Adolf Hermann Pogede’s name remains on record.  In July 1944, he also got turned over to the hangman after a military trial found him also guilty of treason, charged with having told Soviet prisoners of war that Hitler had led Germany into an abyss, “thereby awakening the prisoners’ resistance instincts”.

Or Josef Salz, who in February 1944 wrote in his diary that (in the words of a certain General Hoernlein recorded there) “he was a friend of Jews and Bolsheviks and … reviled the German Volk [people], its leadership and army.”

Fifty-six years ago, when for involuted reasons I decided to stick around for a while in Munich, where I’d originally anticipated a sojourn of two months at most (and whence, after five not months but years, I moved my residence to Berlin, where I’ve since spent a total of thirty-seven years – a bit more than 44% of my entire life), I fervently, passionately, implacably hated every German man, woman, and child - the direct result of my last job in New York, where my employer, RKO-Pathé, during World War II received, uncut, every scrap of news footage filmed at such European locations as Dachau, Buchenwald – and of course Auschwitz….

During the decades since then I’ve met – and in some cases become close friends with – Germans who as young men, more or less contemporaneous with Lucien Agniel – and no doubt every bit as gentle and kind - found themselves in precisely equivalent situations as my dear friend Lu during the Battle of the Bulge.

For anyone seriously interested in the horrific nuances of man’s fate during wartime, no matter where, I commend to your attention that entire Spiegel article, available by clicking here.

A FINAL final note on that Stockhausen flap

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Let me refer you to this official statement dated September 18th, 2001 – in German, but I assume you can read that – issued by the city-state Hamburg the day after the press conference there that ignited that brouhaha.   The night before, only hours after that outrageous utterance, Dr. Christina Weiss, Hamburg’s Senator for Kultur, and her co-worker Benedikt Stampa had an “ausführliches Gespräch” – a detailed discussion – with Stockhausen, which resulted in his own lamely belated apologetic statement that he had “never felt or thought what has been read into my words” – was in meine Worte hineingelegt worden ist. 

Read into them?!  More attempted smoke-screening and spin-doctoring camouflage.  Nobody needed to “read anything into” the words the Norddeutscher Rundfunk’s documentary tape-recording incontestably proved, as if graven in stone – and which Sen. Weiss denounced as “cynical and immoral” – that he had indeed said.

It all boils down to one simple question: did he or did he not say those words?

Damned right he did.