Delanceyplace.com 7/17/09 - Robin Williams

In today's excerpt - the comedian Robin Williams gets his start:

"Robin Williams was an acting student in the early 1970s at New York's prestigious Juilliard School, where his classmates were Christopher Reeve and William Hurt. As producer George Schlatter recalls, 'He didn't graduate because they asked him to leave after his junior year. They said, 'No, Robin, there's just nothing more we can teach you. So you should go out and work.' ' Williams himself remembers the conversation with the school's founder, the esteemed director and actor John Houseman, a bit differently: 'Mr. Williams, the theater needs you. I'm going off to sell Volvos.' ...

"Robin Williams was born in Chicago in 1952 and was raised in a well-to-do suburb outside of Detroit, Michigan, where his father was a busy senior executive with the Ford Motor Company. Neglected by his family, Williams grew up in a thirty-room mansion, where he had the entire third floor to himself. To entertain himself, he created an array of imaginary playmates. ...

"When Williams turned sixteen, his father took early retirement and moved the family to Marin County, just north of San Francisco. 'It was mellow times,' he recalled. 'That's where I found out about drugs and happiness. I saw the best brains of my time turned to mud.' Williams returned there after leaving Juilliard and soon ventured to Los Angeles, where he did the stand-up rounds. Budd Friedman recalls, 'I put him on every time he'd walk in and people would say, 'Why are you putting him on? He ain't got no act.' Trust me, he's got an act. And Robin became a favorite so quickly.' George Schlatter [observed], 'He came out in overalls, with a straw hat on, barefoot - it was Jonny Winters squared, you know? And he had a pole, and he put it out over the audience, and he says, 'I'm fishing for assholes.' The moment you saw him, you said, 'This is gonna be an important force. Not just a talent, but an important force in show business.' ' Williams made his featured debut [on the short-lived revival of Laugh-In] in late 1977; his first line was 'Ladies and gentlemen, tonight I'm here to talk to you about the very serious problem of schizophrenia - No, he isn't! - SHUT UP, LET HIM SPEAK!' ...

"Over at the soundstages at ABC, there was a hit number one sitcom called Happy Days. Producer Garry Marshall, on a whim suggested by his seven-year-old son, decided to drop an alien from space down on Fonzie and his friends. Finding the right actor would be crucial, and Marshall called on his sister, Ronnie, who was his casting director. Marshall recalled: 'Get me Jonathan Winters, get me John Byner, get me one of those crazy guys - Don Knotts, I'll take.' 'No, we got a guy, Robin Williams,' my sister Ronnie said. 'What he's done, Robin Williams?' 'He stands on a street corner and he does funny things and mimes and he passes the hat. That's his credit.' This is who I'm gonna see over the people I want to see? 'Yes, you gotta see him.' And I said, 'But why?' And I remember my sister said very clearly, 'You should see him - it's an awful full hat.'

"Williams's debut as Mork from Ork whipped the studio audience into pandemonium; in the days of sitcom spin-offs, a vehicle was not far behind. Mork and Mindy was hastily arranged for the following fall. ...

"On the first day of shooting, Marshall had to contend with the fact that his star was out of orbit: He was all set to go, I said, 'All right, Robin, we have three cameramen.' Three cameras for Mork and Mindy, and the average age of the cameramen is seventy-nine, eighty. And so I said, 'Okay, Robin, ready, action.' And he ran around, he did a very funny thing, he ad-libbed a little, he said the lines, he was all over the place, and I yell, 'Cut! Great!' And to Sam, my oldest cameraman, I said, 'Did you get that, Sam?' And Sam said, 'Never came by here.' I said, 'You gotta move the camera, Sam. The man's a genius.' And Sam said, 'If he's such a genius, he could hit that mark right over there and he'll be on camera.' So we hired a fourth camera, just to follow Robin."

Michael Kantor and Laurence Maslon , Make 'Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America, Twelve, Hachette Book Group, Copyright 2008 by Michael Kantor and Laurence Maslon, Kindle Loc. 5003-44

Delanceyplace.com 7/16/09 - Bananas and Foreign Policy

In today's encore excerpt - in the early 20th century, with American industry just beginning to expand overseas, and with Latin America still just emerging from its colonial shackles, bananas became one of America's first powerhouse industries:

"Bananas are the world's largest fruit crop and the fourth-largest product grown overall, after wheat, rice and corn. ... In Central America, [American banana companies] built and toppled nations: a struggle to control the banana crop led to the overthrow of Guatemala's first democratically elected government in the 1950s, which in turn gave birth to the Mayan genocide of the 1980s. In the 1960s, banana companies - trying to regain plantations nationalized by Fidel Castro - allowed the CIA to use their freighters as part of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. ... Eli Black, the chairman of Chiquita, threw himself out of the window of a Manhattan skyscraper in 1974 after his company's political machinations were exposed. ...

"On August 12, 1898, Spain surrendered [Cuba as a result of their loss to America in the Spanish-American War], and the United States gained control over the island, opening a naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Over the next thirty-five years; the U.S. military intervened in Latin America twenty-eight times: in Mexico, in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba in the Caribbean; and in Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and El Salvador in Central America. The biggest consequence of those incursions was to make the region safe for bananas. One of the first businesses to enter Cuba was United Fruit. The banana and sugar plantations it established would eventually encompass 300,000 acres. An 1899 article in the Los Angeles Times described Latin America as 'Uncle Sam's New Fruit Garden,' offering readers insight into 'How bananas, pineapples, and cocoanuts can be turned into fortunes.' ...

"[But the U.S.] public knew little about events like the 1912 U.S. invasion of Honduras, which granted United Fruit broad rights to build railroads and grow bananas in the country. They weren't aware that in 1918 alone, U.S. military forces put down banana workers' strikes in Panama, Columbia, and Guatemala. For every direct intervention, there were two or three softer ones, accomplished by proxy through local armies and police forces controlled by friendly governments. One of the few observers to take note of the situation was Count Vay de Vaya of Hungary, who ... upon returning from a visit to Latin America, described the banana as 'a weapon of conquest.' "

Dan Koeppel, Banana, Hudson Street, Copyright 2008 by Dan Koeppel, pp. xiii-xiv, 63-64.

Delanceyplace.com 7/15/09 - Operation Praying Mantis

In today's excerpt - 1988's little-known Operation Praying Mantis, one of the more influential naval engagements in U.S. history:

"Early on the morning of April 18, 1988, Bosun's Mate Third Class Anthony Rodriguez got up and began to go about his business on the deck of the USS Wainwright, which was sitting in the Persian Gulf, preparing to shoot an Iranian oil platform. ...

"Officially neutral [in the then on-going Iran-Iraq War], the United States 'tilted' toward Iraq, and was escorting Kuwaiti oil tankers (which had been reflagged as American ships) through the Gulf to protect them from attacks. ...

"Four days earlier, an Iranian mine had torn a massive hole in the U.S. frigate Samuel B. Roberts. This morning's attack, named Operation Praying Mantis, would be retribution against the Iranians for that mine. ...

"At 7:55 A.M, Operation Praying Mantis began. The Wainwright and two smaller ships took positions around an oil platform and announced in Farsi and English that the crew had five minutes to get off. The crew asked for extra time to exit. The U.S. captain gave them about a half hour. At 8:30 the three ships began firing a thousand five-inch bullets at the platform. ...

"[At 9:00] Rodriguez heard someone scream 'video separation,' which meant a missile had been fired [from an Iranian warship] at the Wainwright. The missile heading toward the ship was a U.S.-made Harpoon, which had been sold to Iran when the Shah was in power. ...

"As the day wore on, fights broke out all over the Gulf. As planned, three other U.S. ships attacked another oil platform named Salman. Then small Iranian speedboats shot at a U.S. helicopter, attacked a U.S. supply boat, and peppered an oil platform off the coast of Abu Dhabi with grenades and machine gunfire for four hours. An Iranian frigate fired on three navy jets, which shot it with laser-guided bombs before a U.S. warship sank it with a Harpoon missile. The Wainwright, though, wasn't done. Two Iranian F-4 Phantom jets (also purchased from the United States when the Shah was in power) came in to attack, and the Wainwright shot at them. Then U.S. bombers attacked one of Iran's largest warships. By the end of the day this accidental battle had become, according to naval historian Craig Symonds, one of the most influential naval engagements in U.S. history, right up there with the Battle of Midway. And it was the beginning of a complex, often contradictory U.S. military involvement in the Gulf. ...

"The nine-hour fight ended with two oil platforms burned, wiping out 150,000 barrels of oil production a day, six Iranian ships sunk or damaged, one Iranian plane down, and at least fifteen Iranians dead and twenty-nine wounded. Half of Iran's navy had been destroyed. A helicopter accident killed two Americans. ... Operation Praying Mantis was the beginning of it all, but it remains, in Rodriguez's words, 'one of those mini-epic battles not many people know about.'

"In the years since 1988, the U.S. military presence in the Gulf has grown from nothing, to $50 billion a year for the 1990s, to a full-scale occupation costing more than $132 billion a year in 2005. By one estimate, the hidden costs of defense and import spending are the equivalent of an extra $5 for every gallon of imported gasoline, a cost that doesn't show up at American gas pumps.

"I came across Operation Praying Mantis in a 2003 ruling by the International Court of Justice. The ruling, which didn't get much press in the United States, determined that the U.S.'s destruction of the Iranian platforms was not justifiable as self-defense."

Lisa Margonelli, Oil on the Brain, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, Copyright 2007 by Lisa Margonelli, pp. 200-203

Delanceyplace.com 7/14/09 - The Risk of Being Loved

In today's excerpt - the risk inherent in positive emotions: observations from the psychiatrist George Vaillant, who has long been the chief curator of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running - and probably the most exhaustive - longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history. Begun in 1937 as a study of healthy, well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), it has followed its subjects for more than 70 years:

"As Freud was displaced by biological psychiatry and cognitive psychology - and the massive data sets and double-blind trials that became the industry standard - Vaillant's work risked obsolescence. But in the late 1990s, a tide called 'positive psychology' came in, and lifted his boat. Driven by a savvy, brilliant psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania named Martin Seligman, the movement to create a scientific study of the good life has spread wildly through academia and popular culture (dozens of books, a cover story in Time, attention from Oprah, etc.).

"Vaillant became a kind of godfather to the field, and a champion of its message that psychology can improve ordinary lives, not just treat disease. But in many ways, his role in the movement is as provocateur. Last October, I watched him give a lecture to Seligman's graduate students on the power of positive emotions - awe, love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, hope, and trust (or faith). 'The happiness books say, 'Try happiness. You'll like it a lot more than misery' - which is perfectly true,' he told them. But why, he asked, do people tell psychologists they'd cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day?

"In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they're future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs - protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections - but in the short term actually put us at risk. That's because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

"To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his 'prize' [Harvard] Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. 'On his 70th birthday,' Vaillant said, 'when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, 'Would you write a letter of appreciation?' And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters - often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.' Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. 'George, I don't know what you're going to make of this,' the man said, as he began to cry, 'but I've never read it.' 'It's very hard,' Vaillant said, 'for most of us to tolerate being loved.' "

Joshua Wolf Shenk, "What Makes Us Happy?" The Atlantic, June 2009, pp. 47-48.

Delanceyplace.com 7/13/09 - George Lippard

In today's excerpt - George Lippard (1822-1854) was the best-selling author in America in the 1840s. His popularity came from his belief that the common man was the true hero of America - not the generals or the politicians:

"Born of obscure parents in 1822 near Philadelphia, George Lippard in his early twenties flashed across the literary sky like a meteor. A callow, crusading journalist, he took up labor's cause during the latter stages of the severe depression of 1837-1844. Sharpening his skills as a writer for the penny newspaper Spirit of the Times, whose motto was 'Democratic and Fearless,' Lippard turned into a 'literary volcano constantly erupting with hot rage against America's ruling class.' His Quaker City, or, the Monks of Monk Hall became a best seller in 1844. A muckraker before the term was coined, Lippard described Philadelphia as a stomach-turning subversion of American democracy and an insult to the old ideal of the City of Brotherly Love. Philadelphia's venerated leaders, charged Lippard, displayed a 'callow indifference to the poor' that was 'equaled only by their private venality and licentiousness.' The book made him the most widely read author in the nation. His sales far exceeded those of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Washington Irving; in fact, Lippard's books sold more than those of all the authors of the transcendentalist school put together.

"In 1846, Lippard began churning out legends of the American Revolution. ... Mixing hair-raising descriptions of the terrors of war with florid portraits of American battlefield heroism, Lippard presented the Revolution as a poor man's war, one that he hoped would provide inspiration for mid-nineteenth century labor reformers whom he admired and promoted. His stories in Washington and His Generals (1847) and Washington and His Men (1849) gave Washington his due, but it was the common man on the battlefield who was the true hero. ... 'The General who receives all the glory of the battles said to have been fought under his eye, who is worshiped in poetry and history, received in every city which he may enter by hundreds of thousands, who makes the heavens ring with his name; this General then is not the hero. No; the hero is the private soldier, who stands upon the battle field; ... the poor soldier ... whose skull bleaches in the sands, while the general whose glory the volunteer helped to win is warm and comfortable upon his mimic throne.' Lippard cautioned his audience to 'worship the hero ... [andl reverence the heroic; but have a care that you are not swindled by a bastard heroism; be very careful of the sham hero.'

"Lippard gave polite history a bad name; but the public loved him. He became their cultural arbiter and provided their understanding of the American Revolution. ...

"Lippard's stories ... extended his lesson about heroes and heroism. 'You may depend upon it,' he wrote, 'John Smith, the rent payer, is a greater man, a truer hero than Bloodhound the general, or Pumfrog the politician. True,' Lippard continued, 'when John is dead there is only another grave added to the graves of the forgotten poor, while your general and your politician have piles of white marble over their fleshen skulls. But judging a hero by the rule that he who suffers most, endures most, works most, is the true hero ... When you read the praises of Great Statesmen, in the papers, don't be fooled from the truth by these sugar-tits of panegyric. These statesmen are not heroes.' "

Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution, Viking, Copyright 2005 by Gary B. Nash, pp. xxiii-xxvi

Delanceyplace.com 7/10/09 - Tennessee Williams

In today's excerpt - the personal notebooks of Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), the American playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. In addition, The Glass Menagerie (1945) and The Night of the Iguana (1961) received New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards. His 1952 play The Rose Tattoo received the Tony Award for best play:

"The notebooks of Tennessee Williams span the years 1936 to 1981, the period from a few weeks before Williams' twenty-fifth birthday to almost two years before his death at age seventy-one in February 1983. The thirty known journals are a collection of unremarkable-looking notebooks, in which Williams recorded his daily thoughts and emotions. Much of his writing is casual, spontaneous, and at times confessional. ... Unlike his letters, where he modulated his tone and style to suit the recipient, the journals reveal Williams' authentic voice - genuine and unadorned.

"Williams: Keeping a journal is a lonely man's habit, it betrays the vices of introspection and social withdrawal, even a kind of Narcissism, ... It has certain things to recommend it, it keeps a recorded continuity between his past and present selves, it gives him the comforting reassurance that shocks, defeats, disappointments are all snowed under by the pages and pages of new experience that still keep flaking down over him as be continues through time, and promises that this comforting snowfall of obliteration will go right on as long as be himself keeps going. ...

Wednesday, 3 December 1941

"Wednesday Night. Very blue. Very down hearted. Thoughts of despair in my feverish head. Very sick last night. Raging fever and pounding heart. The grippe I suppose. Tormented till daybreak. Then felt asleep and woke much improved, fever gone, but weak. Spent the day walking idly about Tampa - wound up at a movie, the usual anesthesia. Visited a bar with plump child-like B-girls & soldiers - called 'The Broken Mirror'. Home & read a detective story account of the bestial treatment of prisoners in Alcatraz - which made me feel even worse. I feel helpless, unprotected. This little moratorium seems to have stretched its limit and I have written no long play nor do I have a reliable idea for one - and my eye looks worse and I am unbearably shy and had no luck at sex for several weeks. I feel wretched & frightened. more than usual. Tomorrow I will pack off to St. Pete and the beach - God be merciful. Truly - En Avant. ...

Spring 1979

"Did I die by my own hand or was I destroyed slowly and brutally by a conspiratorial group? There is probably no clear cut answer. When was there ever such an answer to any question related to the individual human fate? Perhaps I was never meant to exist at all, but if I hadn't, a number of my created beings would have been denied their passionate existence. This season I purchased a home on a lovely residential street in Key West and removed my sister Rose from Stony Lodge and placed her there: perhaps mistakenly, it remains to be seen. But will I remain to see it? Today I must leave for New Orleans for medical examination and possibly for surgery: the chronic disease of my gastro-intestinal system has, for several weeks now, flared up alarmingly and there is no true relief. I suffer no pain. But I am observing my life and the approaching conclusion of my life and I see a long, long stretch of desolation about me, now at the end. Or will I yet survive? In what condition, under what circumstance? ... The best I can say for myself is that I worked like hell."

Margaret Bradham Thornton, Tennessee Williams Notebooks, Yale University Press, Copyright 2006 by the University of the South, pp. v, ix, 267, 739

Delanceyplace.com 7/9/09 - Albert "Lazy Dog" Einstein

In today's encore excerpt - young Albert Einstein:

"In the early 1900s, Einstein was a brilliant young scientist (26 in 1905) working independently of the usual academic community, who was obsessed with the idea of proving that atoms are real. [The existence of atoms was widely conjectured but not yet proven at this time.] ... This search was being carried out in the context of Einstein trying to obtain a Ph.D., which, by the beginning of the twentieth century was already being seen as the scientist's meal ticket, an essential requirement for anyone hoping to pursue a career in university research. Einstein had graduated from the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH - the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich in 1900, but although he had done well in his final examinations, his attitude had not endeared him to the professors at the ETH (one of his tutors, Hermann Minkowski, described young Albert as a 'lazy dog' who 'never bothered about mathematics at all'), and he was unable to get a job as one of their assistants, and equally unable to get a decent reference from them for a junior academic post.

"So he had a variety of short-term and part-time jobs before becoming a patent officer in Bern in 1902. He spent a lot of time working on scientific problems (not just in his spare time, but also at his desk when he should have been working on patent applications) and published several papers between 1900 and 1905. But his most important project was to obtain that Ph.D. and reopen the doors to academia. The ETH did not award doctorates itself, but there was an arrangement whereby graduates from the ETH could submit a doctoral thesis to the University of Zurich for approval, and this is the path Einstein took. After an abortive attempt on a piece of work which he decided in the end not to submit, he was ready in 1905 with a paper that would prove entirely satisfactory to the examiners in Zurich, and was the first of two papers in which he established the reality of atoms and molecules beyond reasonable doubt."

John Gribbin, The Scientists, Random House, Copyright 2002 by John and Mary Gribbin, pp. 392-393