Archives for January 2005

That’s where I’ll be on this day next week (possibly wearing my large-lettered “OGIC” hoodie,

Reason #127 to appreciate Gilmore Girls?

The Stars Hollow Elementary School production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

The event is not, unfortunately, actually witnessed by the Girls nor by the viewing audience. A minor disappointment that, but some things are best left to the imagination.

Terry and a couple other helpful souls have written to answer my earlier question.

In 1978 Kenneth Tynan received $15,000 for his New Yorker profile of Johnny Carson. Today the equivalent would be a cool $43,501.85. Curiosity quenched.

Over at Tingle Alley, Carrie was provoked by the news of Johnny Carson’s death to do a little research. She went to Kenneth Tynan’s diaries and looked up entries relating to the writer’s 1978 New Yorker profile of Carson. In these she found a portrait in miniature of the writing life–or of one kind of writing life, anyway.

There’s enough in Tynan’s diary to make one shudder at such a life. He has cause to damn the New Yorker staff as “the inquisitorial logicians on 43rd Street.” But the redeeming moments are in there, too. After he turned in the piece and waited an agonizing week, the cash-strapped Tynan got good news from William Shawn:

He thinks the piece “stunning” and “marvellous”…

And better news from William Shawn:

…$15,000.

I believe Terry has in his possession a secret decoder ring that will tell us what that is in 2005 dollars. I, for one, would be interested [read: pruriently curious] to know.

Johnny Carson, who died this morning at the age of 79, devoted most of his adult life to that most ephemeral of endeavors, hosting a late-night talk show. I must have seen several hundred episodes of The Tonight Show in my lifetime, and I even went out of my way to watch the last one, yet I doubt I’ve thought of Carson more than once or twice in the thirteen years since he retired, just as I doubt that anyone now alive can quote from memory anything he said on any subject whatsoever.

By an odd coincidence, I happened to see a clip from The Tonight Show last night, on stage at the Acorn Theatre, where the New Group is reviving David Rabe’s Hurlyburly, a play set in Hollywood in the early Eighties. In the last scene, Ethan Hawke watches TV as he snorts all the cocaine he can cram up his nose, and it’s Carson that he watches, ranting wildly all the while. It startled me to hear again the once-familiar theme song and Ed McMahon’s stentorian Heeeeeere’s…Johnny!, yet a moment later I asked myself, How many people in this theater recognize the man on the screen? Not many, I fear.

Strange, then, to think that Carson was once one of the most powerful people in show business, that he could make (or break) careers, that his quips were quoted constantly, at least in the first years of his tenure. He gradually lost interest in The Tonight Show, appearing less and less frequently and to steadily diminishing effect, and in his last few seasons he bordered on self-caricature. Not that there’d ever been much to parody: his comedy routines were dullish, his charmingly casual manner too slender a reed to support vivid impersonation. My parents’ generation recalls Steve Allen and Jack Paar, his predecessors, in a way they don’t and won’t recall Carson, partly because TV was still something of a novelty back then but mostly because they were so much more idiosyncratic as personalities, Paar in particular. What’s more, they took chances, something Carson never did. He always played it safe.

The obits are being written now, the TV retrospectives being readied for tonight’s newscasts, and I’m sure they’ll be properly sentimental and respectful. I might even tune in NBC, his old network, to see what they have to offer. But probably not: I’m increasingly disinclined to wallow in nostalgia about nothing, which is what will be on tap for the next couple of days. And after that? A fast fade to black, I expect. American popular culture is cruel and brutal when it comes to the immediate past: it respects only extreme youth, and has no time for the day before yesterday.

All of which somehow makes me feel sorry for Johnny Carson. I wonder what he thought of his life’s work? Or how he felt about having lived long enough to disappear into the memory hole? At least he had the dignity to vanish completely, retreating into private life instead of trying to hang on to celebrity by his fingernails. Perhaps he knew how little it means to have once been famous.

The very long, very ambivalent entry for Johnny Carson in David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film contains too many truly bon bon mots to cite them all here. You may as well throw a dart. I don’t have a dart, but I choose an excerpt that captures the man’s characteristic contradiction by invoking another popular icon of his heyday:

He was all antennae, sweeping an audience for sullenness or the sweet mercy that liked him. “I don’t know why, but I’m in a silly mood tonight,” he’d claim, a thousand times, trying to believe it. Whereas Johnny Carson was about as silly as Jack Nicklaus putting for money.

For what it’s worth, I’m a little too young to know what I think about Carson. My parents watched him, but by the time I was staying up that late there was Letterman, whose first NBC show I’d watch after my parents had gone to bed. So I have a certain nostalgia-once-removed for Carson’s Tonight Show. It was the show I mildly looked forward to being old enough to watch, but whose appeal had dwindled and been displaced by the time I was.

It’s Friday, and I’m in The Wall Street Journal with a review of Harold and Maude: The Musical, plus a report on Harvey Fierstein’s debut as Tevye in the Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof.

The former was, eh, not so hot:

For years now, Tom Jones, whose list of credits includes the book and lyrics for “The Fantasticks,” has had his eye on “Harold and Maude,” the 1971 cult movie about a 20-year-old suicidal misfit who falls hard for a fey 80-year-old widow. When Harvey Schmidt, his longtime collaborator, declined the challenge of writing music for so quirky a project, the undaunted Mr. Jones teamed up with a younger composer, Joseph Thalken. They brought the finished product to New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse, where “Harold and Maude: The Musical” is running through Feb. 6, with Estelle Parsons playing the part created in the film by Ruth Gordon.

Would that the fruits of Mr. Jones’ protracted labors were more satisfying. Alas, “Harold and Maude” doesn’t fly, in part because the redeeming peculiarities of the film, an all-you-need-is-love-love-love period piece, have been carefully watered down by Mr. Jones to accommodate easily ruffled suburban sensibilities. What’s left is a decorously brief fling between Harold and Maude that still fails to pass the eeuuww test, portrayed with a starry-eyed tweeness that made my teeth itch….

The latter was, somewhat to my surprise, really fine, if a bit odd in spots:

Mr. Fierstein, last seen on Broadway in “Hairspray,” isn’t an obvious candidate for the part of Tevye. Aside from not getting to wear a dress, he has to sing several demanding songs, and his voice, which sounds like a bullfrog stuck in a double bass, makes a decidedly odd impression in “Sunrise, Sunset” and “Sabbath Prayer.” (Believe it or not, he croaks some of his numbers in keys so low that the orchestra has to transpose them up to meet him in the middle.) Still, he more than makes up in comic prowess for what he lacks in vocal luster, and though he hasn’t combed all the “Hairspray” out of his intermittently flouncy mugging, Mr. Fierstein rises effortlessly–as well as believably–to “Fiddler”‘s not-infrequent moments of high drama….

No link, and there’s much, much more, including a review of a third show, Washington’s Arena Stage revival of Hallelujah, Baby! To see what you’re missing, buy a copy of today’s Journal (duh), or click here and get with the program.

“Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian’s life can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx–my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me–we’re sinning! We’re succeeding! We’re human after all!).”

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer