Mark Steyn: Ex-Husband of Love Goddesses

Artie Shaw was the last of the big bandleaders of the Swing Era. We think of them as musicians now, and a few of them — very few, according to Shaw — were great artists. But for anyone under a certain age it’s hard to comprehend the scale of their celebrity — instrumentalists in tuxes fronting orchestras, and yet they were as big as the biggest movie stars. Imagine Britney if she could play a clarinet. Brilliantly.

On the eve of World War Two, Time reported that to Germans America meant “skyscrapers, Clark Gable and Artie Shaw”. And Shaw lived more like a movie star than Gable did. In the ranks of legendary heterosexuals, he’s rivaled only by Sinatra when it comes to the number of A-list Hollywood babes he got to see in non-Hays Code situations. He was engaged to Betty Grable when he ran off with Lana Turner. He married Ava Gardner and had an affair with Rita Hayworth. Among his eight wives were Evelyn Keyes, who played Mrs Jolson in The Jolson Story, and Kathleen Winsor, bestselling naughty novelist of Forever Amber, and Betty Kern, daughter of Jerome.

Most fans of P G Wodehouse regard his literary landscape as a timeless playground sealed off from reality. “Mr Wodehouse’s world can never stale,” wrote Evelyn Waugh. “He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.” But Artie Shaw loomed so large at the height of his fame that he has the distinction of being one of the few real, live, flesh-and-blood contemporaries to invade the Wodehouse canon. In The Mating Season, a Hollywood starlet recounts to Bertie Wooster her encounter with an elderly English spinster, who turns out to be something of a movie fan:

EX-HUSBAND OF LOVE GODDESSES
Artie Shaw, 1910-2004

Artie Shaw was the last of the big bandleaders of the Swing Era. We think of them as musicians now, and a few of them – very few, according to Shaw – were great artists. But for anyone under a certain age it’s hard to comprehend the scale of their celebrity - instrumentalists in tuxes fronting orchestras, and yet they were as big as the biggest movie stars. Imagine Britney if she could play a clarinet. Brilliantly.

On the eve of World War Two, Time reported that to Germans America meant “skyscrapers, Clark Gable and Artie Shaw”. And Shaw lived more like a movie star than Gable did. In the ranks of legendary heterosexuals, he’s rivaled only by Sinatra when it comes to the number of A-list Hollywood babes he got to see in non-Hays Code situations. He was engaged to Betty Grable when he ran off with Lana Turner. He married Ava Gardner and had an affair with Rita Hayworth. Among his eight wives were Evelyn Keyes, who played Mrs Jolson in The Jolson Story, and Kathleen Winsor, bestselling naughty novelist of Forever Amber, and Betty Kern, daughter of Jerome.

Most fans of P G Wodehouse regard his literary landscape as a timeless playground sealed off from reality. “Mr Wodehouse’s world can never stale,” wrote Evelyn Waugh. “He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.” But Artie Shaw loomed so large at the height of his fame that he has the distinction of being one of the few real, live, flesh-and-blood contemporaries to invade the Wodehouse canon. In The Mating Season, a Hollywood starlet recounts to Bertie Wooster her encounter with an elderly English spinster, who turns out to be something of a movie fan:

“She knows exactly how many times everybody’s been divorced and why, how much every picture for the last twenty years has grossed, and how many Warner brothers there are. She even knows how many times Artie Shaw has been married, which I’ll bet he couldn’t tell you himself. She asked if I had ever married Artie Shaw, and when I said no, seemed to think I was pulling her leg or must have done it without noticing. I tried to explain that when a girl goes to Hollywood she doesn’t have to marry Artie Shaw, it’s optional, but I don’t think I convinced her.”

When he stopped marrying, he started lecturing on it at colleges – “Consecutive Monogamy & Ideal Divorce” by an “ex-husband of love goddesses”. “These love goddesses are not what they seem, especially if you’re married to one,” he explained. “They all think they want a traditional marriage, but they aren’t made for that sort of thing. Somebody’s got to get the coffee in the morning, and an Ava Gardner is not going to do that. So you get up and get it, and then you find you’re doing everything. And why? Because she’s the love goddess and that’s all she has to be.” He had children with a couple of ‘em, but didn’t care much for them either. “I didn’t get along with the mothers,” he said. “So why should I get along with the kids?”

Still, celebrity broads were a rare compensation in a world where everything else was a pain in the neck. He was a swing bandleader, but he hated the word “swing”, and he was a jazz musician, but he hated the word “jazz”. He resented singers, and despised dancers, and loathed fans; the audience were “morons”, and the musicians were “prima donnas”, and the ones who weren’t were hacks who did that cheesy synchronized swaying with the saxes and the trombones that the morons were dumb enough to go crazy for. Glenn Miller? “It would have been better if he’d lived and his music had died.” Well, okay, lots of jazz guys have a problem with Miller; how about Benny Goodman? “Musically, he had a limited vocabulary,” sniffed Shaw.

Gene Lees has described the big bands of the late Thirties and early Forties as “the sound that will not go away”. For Shaw – restless and obsessive – that was the problem. So he went away instead. He started quitting the music business “permanently” a few months after his first hit, and kept on quitting it. But every time he came back the fans were still there, demanding “Star Dust” and “Frenesi”. He found out it was one thing to “Begin The Beguine”, quite another to try and stop it. “Every time someone comes up to me and says, ‘Oh, Mr Shaw, I love ‘Begin The Beguine’,” he told me, “I want to vomit.”

“Sorry,” I said, “but I do love ‘Begin The Beguine’.”

“Well, then, you make me want to vomit,” he replied. ““I did ‘Beguine’. It’s over. If you want it, get the record. People say, ‘Why did you give up music?’ I say, ‘Have you got every record I ever made?’ They say, ‘Well, no.’ Well, get ‘em all and then come back and complain.”

He made “Beguine” a hit, all 108 bars of it - the longest standard in the standard repertoire, thanks to Shaw. Cole Porter wrote it as a piece of faux exotica – “Down by the shore an orchestra’s playing/And even the palms seem to be swaying…” – but Shaw threw out the lyric and made the tune jump. It may have made him vomit, but people love that record because, two-thirds of a century on, the double thwack of those opening bars is as wild and exciting and unmistakeable as anything in American music. It’s nothing to do with Porter, just a little figure Shaw and his arranger Jerry Gray cooked up, and then his clarinet comes in riding the rhythm section. You don’t have to do it like that, you can play it a thousand different ways, but Shaw’s recording opened the way for all the others. Cole Porter understood. On being introduced to the bandleader, he said, “Happy to meet my collaborator.”

Three of the best bandleaders of the period were clarinetists – Shaw, Benny Goodman, Woody Herman – and it seems to me that’s the core sound of the era, so seductive, so insinuating. Artie, naturally, had no time for that kind of talk. According to him, the executives liked the clarinet because, in those days of primitive recording, its higher pitch made it cut through the band more clearly than the sax. Whatever. Digitally remastered and cleaned up, the arrangements still sound good. On his smash 1940 recording of “Star Dust”, Shaw’s solo manages, in just 16 marvelous bars, to sum up both the broad legato sweep of Hoagy Carmichael’s tune and yet get giddily away from it in those lovely triplets. There’s so much going on in those early hits – joyous explosive vamps that, for many listeners, became part of the song. You can find later recordings of “’SWonderful” and “My Blue Heaven” that aren’t performances of the numbers so much as of the Shaw band’s arrangements of them.

As much as he reviled the music biz, he had little time for the pomposity of post-big band jazz. “It doesn’t have to sound like broken crockery to be jazz,” he sighed. “It’s solemn rather than serious. I told Clint Eastwood that Dirty Harry was the closest to art he ever got. That picture’s America as it really is. Whereas a picture like Bird, which was meant to be a serious thing, was solemn and boring. If you’re going to pick an artist who’s at odds with his time you don’t pick Charlie Parker. He was worshipped in his lifetime. He just screwed up.”

He went into music just to make enough money to finish his education. He sold 100 million records and found out it wasn’t about the money. For most of its practitioners, the point of jazz is that it’s not fixed, it’s never the same, it’s improvisational. For Shaw, that’s what made music frustrating. “The trouble with composing is that, when it’s done, it doesn’t exist. It’s just notes on a piece of paper. Until it’s performed. And each performer will stick his own thumb print on it and change it. Whereas in a book there it is, you can’t change it. If you read Thomas Mann, you’re reading Thomas Mann. Nobody improvises around his sentences. The two most honest and pure media are painting and literature. Van Gogh’s Starry Night remains the same wherever you hang it. You can achieve your perfection. In music, you can only approximate it.”

So he gave up the clarinet, and became a novelist, and a dairy farmer, and a film producer, and the fourth-ranked precision rifleman in America. A decade back, he made his only visit to Britain for a one-night stand, conducting Prokofiev, Mozart and some of his old hits at the Royal Festival Hall. He’d been a hero to a colleague of mine for decades and was supposed to be interviewed by him for the BBC. But my friend fell ill, and I got the call to come in at the last minute. Listening from his sick bed, my pal scribbled me a note saying he’d been “horrified” by Shaw, but I loved that interview. Cole Porter said of the Duchess of Windsor’s conversational style that “she always returned the ball”. Shaw couldn’t wait that long. He leaned over your side of the net and whacked it down your throat while you were still serving. I mentioned his version of “These Foolish Things” because it was co-written by a BBC producer, Eric Maschwitz. “So what?” snapped Shaw. ““The song doesn’t mean anything. What I did had nothing to do with the tune. The last 11, 12 bars I did that cadenza – that’s as close to perfection as I’ll ever get.” It was one of his last records. In 1954, he put his clarinet away, never got it out again and never wanted to. “I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more would have been less.”

As for Artie’s fellow bandleaders, the sound may not have “gone away” but a lot of the business did, and Dorsey and Goodman found themselves like most celebrities, clinging to a moment, as it recedes into the past. When Shaw decided to pack it in, Duke Ellington told him, “Man, you got more guts than any of us.”

“I can say truthfully what very few people can say - that I did something better than anyone else in the world.” And he did: he was the best clarinetist, the one with the fullest tone and the slyest shadings. And then he stopped, and did other things, and outlived every other bandleader. “My life turned out the best, too.”

To his “dimwit” wives, he was a deranged obsessive. To his estranged sons, he was a miserable lonely man. But he was chasing different priorities. “The Mozart Clarinet Concerto, we know that’s a good piece of work. Here it is couple hundred years later. Here’s some of my work 50 years later. I would say if a piece of popular music lasts 50 years it’s got a good shot at what we laughingly call immortality. We’re aiming to transcend this short lifetime. You hope to put a footprint where it will last a little while.”

He certainly left his mark on Evelyn Keyes. If he went into a bathroom and saw the toilet roll hung up to unwind from the back rather than the front, it drove him nuts. Years after their divorce, she said, “Every time I change a toilet roll, I think of Artie Shaw.”
-The Atlantic Monthly, March 2005

~ Read Mark's "Post Mortem" column every month in the print edition of The Atlantic Monthly . In the April issue Mark writes about "the fifth Nixon", Rose Mary Woods - on sale now.

MAN OF TASTE
William A Mitchell, 1911-2004

William A Mitchell never became a household name, but most households you can name have something of his in it – Cool Whip, quick-set Jell-O, egg whites for cake mix… He gave American astronauts the first space-age beverage (Tang) and impressionable adolescents one of the great urban legends (Pop Rocks). Bill Mitchell’s inventions are not to everyone’s taste. Once, for a BBC show about Thanksgiving, I served Martha Stewart a pumpkin pie with Cool Whip, and she wasn’t happy about it. As it happens, Martha and Bill Mitchell both have Nutley, New Jersey in common. In the year of Martha’s birth, 1941, Bill Mitchell started work as a chemist at General Foods and briefly lived in Nutley. As he was developing Cool Whip, Martha’s parents were developing the anti-Cool Whip.

Business-wise, the former beats the latter. Originally developed as time-saving substitutes for various elementary kitchen needs, the Kraft/General Foods repertory has multiplied and mutated, and the products which Mitchell and his colleagues developed live happily within a self-contained universe. To make Kraft’s Classic Angel Flake Coconut Cake you need a 7 oz bag of Baker’s Angel Flake Coconut, a package of yellow cake mix, a package of Jell-O White Chocolate Instant Pudding, and a tub of Cool Whip. It’s like modular furniture: sometimes you put Cool Whip in the Jell-O, sometimes you put Jell-O in the Cool Whip. But it’s an all-or-nothing world. It would be unsettling and intrusive to replace the Cool Whip with Martha’s recipe for crème anglaise.

And yet, if you’re at a county fair or a church bazaar and you buy the local fundraising cookbook, you notice how in a relatively short period (Cool Whip, the world’s first non-dairy whipped topping, dates back only to 1966) Bill Mitchell’s products have become the great staples of “down-home cooking” and traditional “family recipes”. In the Tunbridge Volunteer Fire Department Cookbook from Tunbridge, Vermont, for example, Mary Vermette’s excellent “Pudding Dessert” requires for the first layer 2 sticks of oleo, 2 cups of flour, 1 cup of chopped nuts (mix and bake); for the second layer, 1 cup of confectioner’s sugar, 8 oz of cream cheese, 1 cup of Cool Whip (combine and spread on the first layer); for the third layer, 2 small packages of instant pudding and 2 ½ cups of milk (mix and spread on the second layer); and for the fourth layer more Cool Whip sprinkled with chopped nuts. I made it and ate it in the interests of research, and had such a good time I clean forgot what it was I was meant to be researching.

Still, you don’t have to eschew Mitchell’s products as ostentatiously as Martha Stewart does to feel that they might not be the best for one’s health. They were certainly good for Mitchell’s: he was 92 when he died, and long after his retirement from General Foods continued to chip in ideas for his daughter Cheryl’s company, California Natural Products. To a chemist, the line between “natural products” and “processed foods” is somewhat fuzzy. Starch technology, which is indispensable to the convenience food industry, goes back to ancient times. Bill Mitchell’s contributions to the science stand at an innocent mid-point between the separation of starch from grain first noted by Cato in 170 BC and the brave new world of genetically modified food that so terrifies the Europeans and the anti-globalists. Some of Mitchell’s inventions were specifically for children (Increda Bubble carbonated gum), but even the grown-up ones are child-like: they’re designed not just to shorten cooking time but to extend the sweet tooth of grade-school birthday-partygoers through adult life. Cool Whip is a little too sweet, a little too sugary ever to be mistaken for “natural”. By “sugary”, of course, I don’t mean sugar: Looking through the ingredients, one finds nothing labeled as such but plenty of palm kernel oils and sorbitan monostearate and “less than two percent of sodium caseinate”. In the European Union, they give all these additives “E numbers” – E912 (ontanic acid esters), E1202 (polyvinylpolypyrrolidone), E1442 (hydroxy propyl distarch phosphate), to name some of my all-time favorite numbers - which make it sound like the random draw of a megabucks lottery. Who, other than Bill Mitchell and a few other specialists, understands the precise combination which makes it just slightly too sweet enough? If you put in 2.4% of sodium caseinate, would it all go to hell?

He was born in 1911 in Raymond, Minnesota, spent his early years on a farm, and then, after the death of his father, moved into the town of Rocky Ford. By eight, he was picking peas and beans for local farmers; by 13, he was subbing for the older melon-packing boys; by 18, he’d rented land from the American Beet Sugar Company and was growing corn and tomatoes. That autumn, he went to junior high during the day, helped with the harvest for American Beet Sugar all night, and slept from 4.30 to 6.30 am. After working his way through college, Bill got a research job at an Agricultural Experiment Station in Lincoln, Nebraska, whose lab promptly blew up leaving him with second and third degree burns over most of his body.

His first big success came with a tapioca substitute developed during World War Two when “tapioca supplies were running low,” as the Associated Press put it. War is hell. In fact, tapioca, a starchy substance in hard grains from cassava, came mainly from the far east, and, with supply lines disrupted, that presented problems for packaged food. You can be sniffy about preservatives in peacetime, but in war an army marches on its stomach and food is a national security issue. Mitchell, in developing an alternative to tapioca, helped facilitate the huge expansion of the processed food business in the Forties and Fifties.

Some innovations were happy accidents. Pop Rocks began in the Fifties, as an attempt to create an instant carbonated drink that went awry. Though they took 20 years to reach the market, they were a huge hit with kids: when you put the fruit-flavored candy in your mouth, it triggered the carbonation, creating a mini-explosion complete with sound-effect. Almost immediately, rumors started about their potentially lethal effects. It was said that, if you ate Pop Rocks while sipping a Coke, the candy would react with the beverage and the carbonation combination would cause a massive gas explosion blasting apart your stomach. That was what had happened to Little Mikey, the cute boy in the Life cereal commercials. He’d popped a couple of Pop Rocks while chugging a Pepsi and he’d exploded in a horrible death. That’s how come you didn’t see him on TV anymore.

Little Mikey didn’t explode. Nor did his career, which is why, like many child stars of TV commercials, you never saw him on anything once the ad stopped running. But a quarter-century after becoming the confectioner’s equivalent of the Abbey Road cover Little Mikey was working as an account manager at a New York radio station. Bill Mitchell and General Foods took out advertisements in 45 newspapers, and the FDA set up a special hotline, but the stories persisted. It’s apparently true that a shipment of Pop Rocks managed to blow the doors off an overheated delivery truck. But turning your stomach into Bikini Atoll was strictly an urban myth. If there was anything to it, Islamic Jihad would be bulk ordering.

There’s something rather appealing about dangerous food. Instantly dangerous, that is, not cumulatively. America has the most regulated food in the developed world yet it also has the fattest people in the world, with the exception of the hearty trenchermen of Nauru and a few other dots in the Pacific. There surely is a cautionary tale in the limitations of big government, at least in respect of its ability to constrain big citizens. Not all of this is due to Bill Mitchell’s contributions to the American diet, but in his last years, serving as eminence grise to his daughter’s company, he seemed more health-conscious than at General Foods.

When Cheryl Mitchell persuaded her then husband to grow some dahlias on their land, it was her dad who suggested roasting their inulin-rich tubers. It produced a brown substance with a coffee-like taste which the Mitchells began marketing as Dacopa, a coffee substitute with health benefits. It never caught on in a big way. Mitchell didn’t foresee that, in an age of convenience foods, coffee would head in the other direction and become the ultimate inconvenience food. In the old days, you’d say, “Gimme a cup o’ java” and the waitress would slide it over the counter. Now you stand around for 20 minutes as the guy juices up the espresso, lovingly spoons on the froth, gives it a shot of hazelnut flavoring, sprinkles it with cinnamon, adds a slice of pepperoni and a couple of zebra mussels, and instead of a quarter it’s $5.95. In its sheer simplicity, Dacopa seems to belong to a lost world. A decaf Pop Rocks latte would have had a better shot.

But in his heyday, Mitchell always understood that a successful “convenience food” is a blend of convenience and delight. He never made the mistake of Princess Ozma’s scientific advisor, H. M. Wogglebug T.E., in L Frank Baum’s Oz books:

He took a bottle from his pocket and shook from it a tablet about the size of one of Ojo’s finger-nails.

‘That,’ announced the Shaggy Man, ‘is a square meal, in condensed form. Invention of the great Professor Wogglebug of the Royal College of Athletics. It contains soup, fish, roast meat, salad, apple-dumplings, ice cream and chocolate-drops, all boiled down to this small size, so it can be conveniently carried and swallowed when you are hungry and need a square meal.’

‘I’m square,’ said the Woozy. ‘Give me one, please…’

‘You have now had a six course dinner,” declared the Shaggy Man.

‘Pshaw!’ said the Woozy, ungratefully. “I want to taste something. There’s no fun in that sort of eating.’”

Even devising crystal mixes for space-shot beverages, Bill Mitchell subscribed to the fun of eating. Unlike Professor Wogglebug, in creating food in the rhythm of modern life, he wasn’t defeated by it. He’s part of the taste of America, the stuff that gets under your skin – from the not entirely “home-made” pies rotating at the diner to the red, white and blue Jell-O salad at the Fourth of July fireworks. That’s how he deserves to be celebrated: take 1 pkg of Jell-O, throw in 1 pkg of Cool Whip, add Tang, mix, lob in a couple of Pop Rocks, and stand well back.
The Atlantic Monthly, November 2004

~ Read Mark's "Post Mortem" column every month in the print edition of The Atlantic Monthly . This month Mark writes about celebrity divorce lawyer Marvin Mitchelson - on sale now.

EVOLUTIONARY FIGURE
Francis Crick, 1916-2004

Francis Crick is dead and gone. He has certainly not “passed on” - and, if he has, he’ll be extremely annoyed about it. As a 12-year old English schoolboy, he decided he was an atheist, and for much of the rest of his life worked hard to disprove the existence of the soul.

In between, he “discovered the secret of life”, as he crowed to the barmaids and regulars at The Eagle, his Cambridge pub, on a triumphant night in 1953. The opening sentence of his paper, written with his colleague Jim Watson, for Nature on April 25th that year put it more modestly:

We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid.

That’s DNA to you and me. And it’s thanks to Crick and Watson that we know the acronym and that it’s passed into the language as the contemporary shorthand for our core identity. Your career choice? “She says being a part of academia seemed to be hard-wired into her DNA because her father was a professor at the University of Virginia.” (The Chicago Tribune) Socio-economic inequality? “Income distribution appears to be hard-wired into the DNA of a nation.” (The Washington Post) New trends in rock video? “Staying cool is hard-wired into the DNA of MTV.” (The Los Angeles Times)

Francis Crick was the most important biologist of the 20th century. Like Darwin, he changed the way we think of ourselves. First, with Watson, he came up with one of the few scientific blueprints known to the general public – the double-helix structure of DNA (though he left it to Mrs Crick, usually a painter of nudes, to create the model). Later, with Sydney Brenner, he unraveled the universal genetic code. Today, Crick’s legacy includes all the thorniest questions of our time - genetic fingerprinting, stem-cell research, pre-screening for hereditary diseases, the “gay gene” and all the other “genes of the week”. In Britain, they’re arguing about a national DNA database; on the Continent, anti-globalists are protesting genetically modified crops; in America, it was traces of, um, DNA on Monica’s blue dress that obliged Bill Clinton to change his story. If you’re really determined, you can still just about ignore DNA – the OJ jury did – but, increasingly, it’s the currency of the age. Crick called his home in Cambridge the Golden Helix, and it truly was golden – not so much for him personally but for the biotechnology industry, something of a contradiction in terms half-a-century ago but now a 30-billion-a-year bonanza.

“We were lucky with DNA,” he said. “Like America, it was just waiting to be discovered.” But Crick was an unlikely Columbus. The son of a boot factory owner, he grew up in the English Midlands, dabbling in the usual scientific experiments of small boys – blowing up bottles, etc – but never really progressing beyond. Indeed, as a scientist, he wasn’t one for conducting experiments. What he did was think, and even then it took him a while to think out what he ought to be thinking about. His studies were interrupted by the war, which he spent developing mines at the British Admiralty’s research laboratory. Afterwards, already 30 and at a loose end, he mulled over what he wanted to do and decided his main interests were the “big picture” questions, the ones arising from his rejection of God, the ones that seemed beyond the power of science. Crick reckoned that the “mystery of life” could be easily understood if you just cleared away all the mysticism we’ve chosen to surround it with.

That’s the difference between Darwin and Crick. Evolution, whatever offence it gives, by definition emphasizes how far man has come from his tree-swinging forebears. DNA, by contrast, seems reductive. Man and chimp share 98.5% of their genetic code, which would be no surprise to Darwin. But we also share 75% of our genetic make-up with the pumpkin. The pumpkin is just a big ridged orange lump lying on the ground all day, like a fat retiree on the beach in Florida. But other than that he has no discernible human characteristics until your kid carves them into him.

Yet the point of DNA is not just to prove that the pumpkin is our kin but to pump him for useful information. According to Monise Durrani, a BBC science correspondent, the genetic blueprint of the humble earthworm is proving useful in the study of Alzheimer’s. Do worms get Alzheimer’s? And, if they do, what difference does it make? As Ms Durrani says, “Although we like to think we are special, our genes bring us down to Earth... We all evolved from the same soup of chemicals.” It turns out there is a fly in my soup, and a chimp and a worm and a pumpkin.

Having found “the secret of life”, what do you do for an encore? Crick disliked celebrity, and had a standard reply card printed to fend off his fellow man: “Dr. Crick thanks you for your letter but regrets that he is unable to accept your kind invitation to…” There then followed a checklist of options with a tick by the relevant item: send an autograph, provide a photograph, appear on your radio or TV show, cure your disease, etc. This is a view of man as 75% pumpkin but capable of crude, predictable, repetitive patterns of imposition on more advanced forms of life. Dr Crick also turned down automatically honorary degrees and disdained the feudal honours offered by the British state. Presumably the hyper-rationalist in him consigned monarchical mumbo-jumbo to the same trash can of history as religion, though he eventually relented and accepted an invitation by the Queen to join her most elite Order of Merit. Religion he never let up on. The university at which he practiced his science is filled with ancient college chapels, whose presence so irked Crick that, when the new Churchill College invited him to become a Fellow, he agreed to do so only on condition that no chapel was built on the grounds. In 1963, when a benefactor offered to fund a chapel and Crick’s fellow Fellows voted to accept the money, he refused to accept the argument that many at the college would appreciate a place of worship and that those who didn’t were not obliged to enter it. He offered to fund a brothel on the same basis, and, when that was rejected, he resigned.

His militant atheism was good-humoured but fierce, and it drove him away from molecular biology. As the key to the mystery of life, DNA seems a small answer to the big picture, so Crick pushed on, advancing the theory of “Directed Panspermia”, which is not a Clinton DNA joke but his and his colleague Leslie Orgel’s explanation for how life began. Concerned by the narrow time frame – to those of a non-creationist bent - between the cooling of the earth and the rapid emergence of the planet’s first life forms, Crick determined to provide another explanation for the origin of life. As he put it, bouncing along a tenuous chain of probabilities:

The first self-replicating system is believed to have arisen spontaneously in the ‘soup,’ the weak solution of organic chemicals formed in the oceans, seas, and lakes by the action of sunlight and electric storms. Exactly how it started we do not know…

The universe began much earlier. Its exact age is uncertain but a figure of 10 to 15 billion years is not too far out…

Although we do not know for certain, we suspect that there are in the galaxy many stars with planets suitable for life…

Could life have first started much earlier on the planet of some distant star, perhaps eight to 10 billion years ago? If so, a higher civilization, similar to ours, might have developed from it at about the time that the Earth was formed… Would they have had the urge and the technology to spread life through the wastes of space and seed these sterile planets, including our own?..

For such a job, bacteria are ideal. Since they are small, many of them can be sent. They can be stored almost indefinitely at very low temperatures, and the chances are they would multiply easily in the ‘soup’ of the primitive ocean…

“We do not know… uncertain… not too far out… we do not know for certain… we suspect… chances are…” And thus the Nobel prize winner embraces the theory that space aliens sent rocketships to seed the earth. The man of science who confidently dismissed God at Mill Hill School half a century earlier appears not to have noticed that he’d merely substituted for his culturally inherited monotheism a weary variant on Graeco-Roman-Norse pantheism – the gods in the skies who fertilise the earth and then retreat to the heavens beyond our reach. To be sure, he leaves them as anonymous aliens showering seed rather than Zeus adopting the form of a swan, but nevertheless Dr Crick’s hyper-rationalism took 50 years to lead him round to embracing a belief in a celestial creator of human life, indeed a deus ex machina.

He didn’t see it that way, of course. His last major work, The Astonishing Hypothesis, was a full-scale assault on human feeling. “The Astonishing Hypothesis," trumpeted Crick, “is that ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’”

It’s not a new idea. Round about the time Dr Crick was working on his double-helix, Cole Porter wrote a song for a surly Soviet lass fending off the attentions of an amorous American:

When the electromagnetic of the he-male
Meets the electromagnetic of the female
If right away she should say this is the male
It’s A Chemical Reaction, That’s All.

Of course, in the film of Silk Stockings, Cyd Charisse eventually succumbs to Fred Astaire and comes to understand her thesis is not the final word. Even if the Astonishing Hypothesis – that there’s no “You”, no thoughts, no feelings, no falling in love, no free will - is true, it’s so all-encompassing as to be useless except to the most sinister eugenicists. And in the end Francis Crick’s own life seems to disprove it: He was never a dry or pompous scientist, he liked jokes and costume parties, he was an undistinguished man pushing 40 with one great obsession. Perhaps the combination of human quirks and sparks that drove him to chase his double-helix are merely a chemical formula no different in principle from that which determines variations in the pumpkin patch. But, even if Francis Crick is 75% the same as a pumpkin, the degree of difference between him and even the savviest Hubbard squash suggests that as a unit of measurement it doesn’t quite capture the scale of difference.

It is too late to retreat now. Francis Crick set us on the path to a biotechnological era that may yet be only an intermediate stage to a post-human future. But, just as a joke that’s explained is no longer funny, so in his final astonishing hypothesis Dr Crick eventually arrived at the logical end: you can only unmask the mystery of humanity by denying our humanity.
The Atlantic Monthly, October 2004

~ Read Mark's "Post Mortem" column every month in the print edition of The Atlantic Monthly. This month Mark writes about William Mitchell, the collossus of Cool-Whip - on sale now.

BUST TRUSTER
Russ Meyer, 1922-2004

In his book Adventures In The Screen Trade, William Goldman pours scorn on the "auteur theory", at least as it applies to Hollywood: Spielberg isn't an "auteur", nor is Hitchcock, nor is John Ford. Goldman continues:

Is there then no American auteur director? Perhaps there is one. One man who thinks up his own stories and produces his pictures and directs them too. And also serves as his own cinematographer. Not to mention he also does his own editing. All of this connected with an intensely personal and unique vision of the world. That man is Russ Meyer.

Meyer, whose "intensely personal and unique vision" gave us Wild Gals Of The Naked West, Eroticom, Eve And The Handyman, Common Law Cabin, Mud Honey, Vixen, The Supervixens and Beneath The Valley Of The Ultra-Vixens, died last week. If Ziegfeld dedicated his life to "glorifying the American girl", Meyer preferred to specialize: he dedicated his to glorifying the American breast. He liked them big and he liked them round, but he had no time for implants. "They miss the whole point," he said - which is a good way of putting it. He liked those magnificently cantilevered 1950s women in the pointy bras and tight sweaters - but he liked them better without the sweaters and bras.

His first hit, The Immoral Mr Teas (1959), was filmed in four days in Meyer's home town of Oakland, California and now has an honoured place in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The protagonist is a man who delivers false teeth - mainly because Meyer had a friend who was a dentist - but more importantly he also had X-ray eyes which enabled him to see through ladies' clothing to the lush nubile form underneath. Hitherto, if you wanted to see naked women in American movies you were pretty much stuck with the naturist genre - earnest types wandering around nudist camps with an annoyingly laboured wholesomeness about them. Meyer really was an auteur: he was the first to recognize the advantages of plot to nudity. No doubt others would have stumbled on it eventually, but it was Meyer who pioneered the genre: Mr Teas spawned 150 cheap knock-offs within a year and is the granddaddy of all those soft-porn Euro-movies of the Seventies where the bisexual countess discovers the new stable-girl sleeping naked in the hayloft and takes her shopping to the accompaniment of elevator music. "That pipphole bra rilly suits you, ja?"

Meyer was better than that. Cherry, Harry And Raquel (1969) was the first film with an underwater lesbian scene, which the director shot himself in between coming up for gulps of air. "You don't see Otto Preminger doing that," he pointed out. He eschewed the anonymous interiors of most soft-porn, opting for the lyrical vistas of his native state, the deserts and the mountains. If you can overlook the naked women in the foreground, which admittedly is rather difficult when they're a double-F, his landscapes are beautiful, very clean and crisp. Of course, the topography inevitably comes second to the top-offgraphy: His second film Eve And The Handyman starred his wife Eve, whom he'd photographed for one of Playboy's earliest centrefolds, as a hitchhiker on the highway, gradually disrobing in an effort to get a ride.

Roger Ebert, Meyer's screenwriter for Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls (1970), says the director was never very interested in any of the lower bits and pieces. For one thing, he wanted to play regular movie theatres and clean up at the box office, rather than get shunted into porno houses and have to split it with the mob. But there were artistic considerations, too. "Frankly," Meyer told Ebert, "what goes on below the waist is visually not that entertaining." Very true. It would be interesting to commission a study on whether directors' efforts to make it more entertaining have changed the nature of sex. I was once told that in the waning days of Communism the beleagured citizens of the Warsaw Pact suddenly got a flood of western porn videos and were amazed by the athleticism of the sex scenes. Nobody ever did it just lying on top of one another. Instead, there were all these remarkable contortions and angles - designed for the benefit of the camera. But to Communist audiences it was the final insult: not only did the decadent capitalists have bigger homes and more money but they got better sex, too. It's said there was an enormous strain placed on Soviet chiropractors and similar facilities by locals who made the mistake of trying it at home.

Meyer found sex too funny to go in for any of that slo-mo grinding. He preferred to cut away to a rocket blasting off or two cars colliding. It was, he believed, the perfect formula: big bazongas plus slapstick gags - Keystone Kups. If he hadn't been so hung up on massive racks, what might he have accomplished? Well, he was an army photographer during World War II and filmed the original "Dirty Dozen" - 12 GIs convicted of capital offences but promised pardons if they went into France on a dangerous mission. Unlike the Hollywood version, they skipped out once they'd landed on French soil and were never heard of again. But Meyer had a hell of a story and got a credit in E M Nathanson's novel of the incident. He loathed Robert Aldrich's 1967 movie.

William Goldman's own "auteur theory" holds that once you're hailed as an auteur your work goes to hell. Look at Hitchcock. Things were going great till they told him he was a genius, and then came Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy. Russ Meyer nearly went the same way. His basic plot - rapacious amazonian women, submissive men - caught the eye of feminist scholars who hailed him as "the first feminist director". The homicidal go-go dancers of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! were hailed as "empowering". Meyer let himself be talked into doing a "serious" film, The Seven Minutes (1971), which is about as long as it lasted in theatres. "I made the mistake of reading my reviews," he reflected. "What the public wants are big laughs and big tits and lots of 'em. Lucky for me that's what I like, too." He understood his limitations but within them - about 42D to 48FF - he was the master.
The Spectator, October 2nd 2004

THE LORD'S MUSIC AND THE DEVIL'S WORDS
Ray Charles, 1930-2004

Somewhere along the way in his vast autobiography, in among all the namechecking, wonkery and self-exculpation, Bill Clinton remarks: “I had loved Ray Charles since I heard his great line from ‘What’d I Say’: “Tell your mama, tell your pa, I’m gonna send you back to Arkansas.’”

It is a great line. Like Hoagy Carmichael, composer of “Georgia On My Mind”, Ray Charles had a natural affinity for the lie of the land: his voice could embrace the purple-mountained uplift of “America The Beautiful” and ramble slyly through the backroads and shanty towns, too. At 16, he was singing with an all-white hillbilly band called the Florida Playboys. At 18, he’d decided he’d gone as far as he could in the Sunshine State, unrolled a map of the country, pinpointed the town that was kitty-corner to Tampa, and then got on a bus to Seattle, where he formed his own Nat Cole-style trio.

Likewise, wherever you are on the musical map, he’s there, too. He was, said Frank Sinatra, “the only genius in our business”, and Ray wasn’t minded to disagree, putting it right up there in the LP title: The Genius Of Ray Charles. At the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, he explains in the introductory video to the official tour that soul is what happens when church, blues and country are “all intertwined some kind of way”. On the album covers, he spelt out the relevant formulae more mathematically: Genius + Soul = Jazz. Plus he was a little bit country, he was a little bit rock’n’roll. He was a rare literal rocker, rocking back and forth at the piano as he sang Lennon & McCartney. But he rocked to Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, too. From Stephen Foster to Stevie Wonder, he claimed a century of American commercial song as his personal archive, and then added hymns and spirituals. He did “Hee Haw” and Porgy And Bess, and acquitted himself well on both. And, in the ultimate act of boundary-breaking, he did jingles for both Coke and Pepsi.

There are many category enforcers in the complicated apartheid of popular music who don’t care for the above: like the stock clerk at Coconuts, a lot of critics want to know which bin to file you in. And, when it’s not that simple, they doubt your motives: Genius + Orchestra = Sell-out. But the doubters have a point. There’s a name for this kind of behavior and Ray Charles used it when he started his own record label in the Seventies: Crossover. “Crossover” used to mean a fellow in a specialist genre (“race records”) crossing over to the main Top 40, and then somehow got stood on its head to mean a great artist condescending to a vernacular genre: Jose Carreras strangulating the vowels and mangling the consonants of “As Time Goes By” – “de worl’ weel ohlwez welcomm loafers”, rendered with all the passion of a sales exec addressing a footwear convention.

But, even when it’s not that bad, it’s not that good. In the Fifties, on “If I Were A Bell” (from Guys And Dolls) and a hundred others, Dinah Washington manages to signal through all the orchestral bounce that she’d still rather be singing the blues. A decade later, when Columbia leaned on him to do an album called Tony Bennett Sings The Great Songs Of Today, the singer was so disgusted with himself at having to do a lot of lame soft-rock covers he was physically sick before the session: Tony Bennett pukes the great songs of today. Even if the stuff doesn’t make you vomit, a guy who does everything comes over like an opportunist (Ray Charles’ old buddy Quincy Jones) or a poseur (Elvis Costello, who, after avant-garde string quartets and Burt Bacharach, now seems to be doing to his wife Diana Krall’s career what he did to his own).

In considering Ray Charles, Sinatra’s advice to Tony Bennett seems more germane: “You can only be yourself. But you’re good at that.” Ray was 16 when he cut his first songs, on a friend’s wire recorder, and he’s already good at being himself. The trio’s in conventional style for the late Forties, but the 16-year old voice is moaning the blues like a 60-year old.

By then, young Ray had gone through more in his brief life than most of us would want to bear in our three-score-and-ten. He was born in Albany, Georgia in 1930, the same year “Georgia On My Mind” was published. His father was gone, and his mother eventually moved her children across the state line to Florida. One day five-year old Ray was playing outside in the wash tub with his little brother, when the younger boy’s clothes got waterlogged and he drowned. Instead of running inside immediately and getting his mom, Ray struggled to pull his brother out, and, by the time he realized he couldn’t and went for help, it was too late. At seven, he went blind. At 14, his mother, barely 30 herself, died suddenly in her sleep. She had raised her children in poverty so extreme that, as Charles once told me, “even the blacks looked down on us. Going down the ladder, you had rich whites, poor blacks, then us. And there weren’t nothing between us and the bottom.”

On the other hand, even singing hillbilly with the Florida Players, the teenage Ray Charles already seemed liked a man who transcended the facts of his life. When he’d lost his sight, his mom sent him to the state school for the blind in St Augustine. It had a white section and a colored section, and even at the time Ray thought it “kinda weird” that white kids and colored kids who couldn’t see which was which nevertheless had to be segregated on that basis. “Ain’t that a bitch,” he said.

You wonder what other segregations make less sense to those who can’t see it. Almost as soon as he hit the big time, critics complained he’d sold out – when he left Atlantic Records, when he got a string section, sang country, went Hollywood, did showtunes. But isn’t a lot of that prejudice to do with the externals – the orchestra’s tuxedos, the Nashville cowboy get-ups, a suburban concert hall filled with middle-class white folks? If you can’t see any of that, all you can hear, as Ray Charles heard growing up, is the music. “Take Artie Shaw,” he said. “I didn’t even know he was white.”

In those early days with the trio in Seattle, he’s trying to sound like Nat Cole, and it doesn’t work. But, other than that, whatever he does sounds like Ray Charles. On “Makin’ Whoopee”, Dinah Washington’s blues inflections and harmonic variations seem unconnected to the material; Charles drops it several socio-economic notches below Eddie Cantor, does it low-down and confessional, and wrings every last drop of rueful comic juice from it. On “Eleanor Rigby”, the queasy Tony Bennett was so intimidated by the mournful formality of the Beatles original he declaims it like a poem he’s been forced to learn for school; Charles’ version is tough and personal, up closer to the characters than the Fab Four got. He understood how to find his sound in the most familiar song. The obvious example is “Georgia”, which he’d sung for ages in the back of his car to and from gigs until his driver prevailed upon him to record it. Hoagy Carmichael and his college roommate, Stu Gorrell, had written it 30 years earlier, and Mildred Bailey did a lovely warm sweet record of it. But Charles changed the song. All that soul and all that ache – “The road leads back to yooooooo….” at the end of the bridge, and then that falsetto back into the final eight: after Ray Charles, you couldn’t glide through it the way Thirties crooners used to.

He was cool in all genres, and funny in most of them, too. He appropriated the music of faith and deployed it in the service of romance: “Talkin’ ‘Bout Jesus” became “Talkin’ ‘Bout You”; “This Little Light Of Mine” became “This Little Girl Of Mine”. “He took the Lord’s music and the devil’s words and make this amalgam they call soul music,” said Jerry Wexler, his producer at Atlantic Records. He added strings to soul, and then did a country album in it.

Was he a nice fellow? Well, you hear the usual stories about stars, and the only difference was Ray told some of them himself. For his girl group, he ran a well-worn casting couch. “You can’t be a Raelette unless you let Ray,” he’d say with a chuckle. For the first two decades of his career, he was a heroin addict, and, because he was blind, he required others to shoot him up, a small operational detail which somehow magnifies the self-degradation. For the last two decades, the genius coasted on way too many celebrity duets and synth-pop boilerplate. “I don’t mind the women,” a colleague of his said to me. “But he’s cheating on the music.”

He made two great jazz albums, one instrumental – Charles on Hammond organ with Basie sidemen – and one vocal – with Betty Carter. The last was an instant classic, and promptly went out of print. I had a Japanese LP of it I used to play all the time in my disc-jockey days. The engineer saw “Alone Together” on the running order late one night, and groaned, “God, I hate that song.” I played Ray and Betty’s version, two idiosyncratic voices matched perfectly, close-miked, slow and conversational, intense and intimate, the opposite of that raw abandon he has on most of his big hits. It’s as if they’re sprawled on the rug in the dark at the end of a long evening. “Wow,” said the engineer at the end. “Now I get it.”

Most of us get Ray Charles at some point in our lives. “‘What’d I Say’ didn’t feel like a big deal at the time,” said Tom Dowd, his engineer at Atlantic. “Ray, the gals and the band live in the small studio, no overdubs. Next!” In pop, there’s always something next. You move on, and yesterday’s hot groove is stone cold. But 40 years on the party-crowd call-and-response can still “make you feel so good right now”. My favorite Ray Charles album cover is his obligatory Christmas record. It’s a big snowbound field in the middle of the woods, with one horse and an open sleigh, and, standing on the sleigh holding the reins, a grinning blind man in a slick striped tux, blue shirt and big bow tie, ready to go dashing through the snow on the wildest ride of all. That’s the man in a single image: stick him in the middle of anything and he still comes up Ray Charles.
The Atlantic Monthly, September 2004

~ Read Mark's "Post Mortem" column every month in the print edition of The Atlantic Monthly. This month Mark writes about Francis Crick, 20th century Darwin - on sale now.

GLORIA IN EXCELSIS
Laura Branigan, 1957-2004

I was surprised how sad I was to hear that Laura Branigan had died of a brain aneurysm at the age of 47. I interviewed her back in my disc-jockey days. It wasn't a very good interview, because I fell a little bit in love with her when she walked through the door and said "Hi" and shook her hair, and I never quite got back on track. Unlike a lot of rock women, whose voices are thin and tinny away once they're away from the mixing board, she had a huge voice, stronger than almost any gal singer of the time. And, even if she rarely gave it the material it deserved, she had her moment, and anyone of a certain age remembers it. Back in the Eighties, there was nothing like that intro to "Gloria" to get a radio show off to a full-throttle start. "How Am I Supposed To Live Without You?" isn't bad either - one of those faintly cheesy ballads but she gave it more guts than Michael Bolton. Requiescat in pace. Gloria in excelsis.

STEYN ONLINE August 29th 2004

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.