Category: Old Smoke

How Things Seem

New York Press, November 6, 2001

Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things; Strindberg’s Dance of Death with Mirren and McKellen; Artistic disarray at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater

There’s some first-rate acting going on at the Promenade Theater, where Gretchen Mol is appearing with Paul Rudd, Frederick Weller, and Rachel Weisz in a new play by Neil LaBute called The Shape of Things. The play is part comedy of sexual manners and part drama of sexual intrigue, which is to say that it feels a little like Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago or Howard Korder’s Boys’ Life while you are watching it, and like Dangerous Liaisons afterward.

LaBute is a filmmaker with something of a reputation for “misogyny,” or so reviewers keep saying. Actually, his work appears no more anti-woman than Mamet’s. It may be anti-people, but there’s nothing wrong with that, to my mind. LaBute seems to be primarily interested in power and cruelty. The young people he writes about commit emotional atrocities for no reason other than that they can and the amusement the fact affords them.

LaBute’s first film, In the Company of Men, was about the calculated seduction of a young deaf woman by a pair of businessmen. The Shape of Things has a similar plot: Adam (Rudd), a nebbishy undergraduate, falls for a shrill and pusillanimous art student with advanced ideas who sets about trying to destroy him. What’s curious is her choice of weapon, which is positive influence. She brings him down by making him over into a more attractive and self-confident person than he was before. LaBute isn’t advocating superficiality; on the contrary, in the play’s own most superficial strain he makes this horror-show of a girlfriend spout pseudo-intellectual apercus about dishonest art and our surface preoccupation with “the shape of things.”

If this sounds muddled, it is. LaBute’s intellectualizing is almost indistinguishable from his anti-heroine’s. Moreover, nearly everything about the play is artificial: the plot, the two central characters, the denouement. That it’s also riveting—and it is—is largely due to the quality of the acting, not from Weisz, who is strident and pedantic, or Rudd, who has an impossible task (playing an intelligent man hoodwinked by a woman who is obviously up to no good), but from Weller and Mol, who play two friends of Adam’s, a former not-quite-girlfriend and the former roommate to whom she is ambivalently affianced. These are contemporary humor characters—the almost-insipid blonde, the testosterone-happy best friend—and Mol and Weller play them with great subtlety and humanity. A couple of scenes in which Adam fails to recognize his repressed feelings for them, or theirs for him, are electrifying.

Two good characters and two great scenes are nothing to sneeze at, and there’s an art to making us want to see a predetermined story play out. The Greeks did that a lot. So did Mamet in Oleanna, where our knowledge of what had to happen seemed to militate against what we saw in front of us. Watching The Shape of Things, I found myself admiring the way in which LaBute had taken into account one of the contemporary realities of theatergoing: the knowledge we come to the theater with about where a play is going. It’s knowledge derived mostly from hype and buzz, things without which theater can’t survive.

LaBute has The Smashing Pumpkins blaring out at deafening levels between scenes, reportedly to keep audience members from talking to each other. He runs the two-hour play without intermission, like a movie. And he keeps us asking ourselves, “How are these characters going to get where they have to go?”—which doesn’t make his play literature. It’s a potboiler, but it’s good commercial theater.

What exactly constitutes “commercial” theater is a question I found myself pondering during a recent performance of The Dance of Death at the Broadhurst. There I was in a big Broadway house, watching Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren, two of the greatest living actors of the English-speaking theater, acting their hearts out in one of Strindberg’s most unrelievedly grim and cerebral plays. There before me was one of those breathtaking Santo Loquasto sets that contrive to evoke squalor pleasingly and express a life of mind-crippling tedium while offering us no end of interesting things to look at.

Nothing very pleasant or uplifting was happening onstage: a husband and wife who loathed the sight of each other were battling it out, alternately abusing and tormenting each other, while a third character, played by David Strathairn, tried to make sense of it all, allowing himself to be used and manipulated by both. Not jolly stuff; yet all around me hundreds of people seemed, like myself, to be having a perfectly swell time. There was no restlessness, no checking one’s watch every five minutes. We were engrossed, entertained. And if, during the intermission, we found ourselves talking about other things, if the play stopped short of actually moving us, it wasn’t for anything lacking in the production or the performances. It just wasn’t King Lear, that was all—that was the worst you could say.

On the whole, it was like going to see a non-masterpiece performed by a world-class opera or ballet company. This in itself can be a rewarding and uplifting experience: exposing oneself to extraordinary human achievement—great dancing or singing or, in the case of Dance of Death, acting. For me, seeing Dance of Death was primarily about seeing Mirren in a stage vehicle that, unlike the Roundabout Theater’s dreadful A Month in the Country some years back, was worthy of her gifts. It’s always a treat to see McKellen doing what he does best, which is hamming adorably and what he does here.

But Mirren belongs to that rare breed of British actress who can be many different women at the same time, often within the same role. We’ve come to know her mostly through her role as the unsexualized heroine of the Prime Suspect series on television, but over the years, on film, she’s played a whole spectrum of differently tempered women in a man’s world—wives and mistresses, most of them, whose alliance with an obsessed or unbalanced man gives him a clarity or depth he might have lacked with a less interesting woman. Often, these roles have entailed little more than radiating a kind of sexualized intelligence that hinted, in silence or repose, at what Mirren hid below the surface. The Strindberg gives her a chance to be Hedda and Ophelia, Miss Julie, Lady Macbeth and Arkadina all at the same time.

There’s a long pause between acts, about three-quarters of the way through, where Mirren is offstage changing her costume and McKellen, left alone onstage, goes about in the dim light picking things up and putting them in order in a desultory way. It was during this lull that I found myself wondering what made this production any more “commercial” than any of the plays or productions New York’s institutional theaters send to Broadway. At a time when artistic directors all over the city are behaving like Broadway moguls and all the interesting, healthy, vibrant impulses in New York theater seem to be coming from outside the nonprofit sector—from institutional theaters abroad, like the Almeida in London, or from small independent producers—this seems like a valid question.

Certainly it’s worth asking in the context of the institutional meltdown that the New York Shakespeare Festival seems to be going through. Earlier this month, the theater announced the resignation of Fran Reiter from the top financial post. A former deputy mayor, Reiter was the latest in a succession of people who had tried to put the theater’s affairs in order. Then last week came the news that the two largest and most loyal donors on the theater’s board of directors had stepped down.

More than once, Times theater reporter Robin Pogrebin has characterized the situation at the Public as a dispute over money laced with personality conflicts. Her most recent article, from last week, made the current disarray sound like a function of George Wolfe’s unrealistic spending policies and an inability to play well with others. For people familiar with the history of the New York Shakespeare Festival under its founder, Joe Papp, and its subsequent fate under Wolfe, it’s hard not to suspect that there is more going on, and that at least some of it has to do with Wolfe’s lack of anything like an artistic policy and his apparent inability to behave like the artistic director of one of the country’s most influential nonprofit theaters.

Since taking over the Public, Wolfe has focused almost entirely on commercial productions, using the company chiefly as a tryout ground for productions he hopes will move to Broadway. The Times, equating “artistic” with commercial achievement (“The theater has also had its share of recent artistic successes. This season’s production featuring Elaine Stritch is already sold out…”), seems to have no problem with this but others may.

Mostly what the company has lacked under Wolfe is any serious or consistent vision, which may well be what its longtime supporters are finally responding to. Among the many basic things that Wolfe has failed to do, one was to keep up with what was happening in the nonprofit theater elsewhere in the world. Over the years, for instance, Papp had developed a longstanding alliance with London’s Royal Court Theater, a connection he mined as a source for new work. Wolfe let that relationship lapse—and just at a time when the Court and the Almeida Theater, in Islington, were becoming centers of a renaissance in writing for the stage. Under Stephan Daldry, the Court had opened its doors to unrepresented writers, while the Almeida, under Ian McDiarmid and Jonathan Kent, had opened its to movie folk, creating a synergy between the worlds of theater and independent film. The result was a general rekindling of interest in the stage.

If Wolfe had wanted to, he could have made us, his constituency, beneficiaries of that rebirth. If he’d done anything—anything at all—to foster a spirit of non-commercialism at the Public, New York’s other institutional theaters would have had to follow suit. A rivalry might have developed, like the rivalry between the National Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company, which sparked so much great theater in the 70s and 80s, or like the rivalry that exists between the Royal Court and the Almeida now. Instead, what has happened is a wholesale betrayal of the philosophies upon which art and arts patronage are based.

The Truth as You See It

In 1900, when newspapers were still the only mass media, over thirty daily papers of general and specialized circulation were published in Manhattan alone. But by the Twenties, a combination of massive capital investment and increasing difficulties in getting through traffic jams to deliver the newspapers to customers made launching

In 1900, when newspapers were still the only mass media, over thirty daily papers of general and specialized circulation were published in Manhattan alone. But by the Twenties, a combination of massive capital investment and increasing difficulties in getting through traffic jams to deliver the newspapers to customers made launching a new daily something only an established publisher might try.

For example, the Daily News, first published on June 26, 1919, was founded by Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, an heir to the family that published the Chicago Tribune. Within five years its large photographs, wild headlines, and popular columnists had given the Daily News a circulation of 750,000, making it the most widely read daily in the United States. In 1924, William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Journal and the New York American, declared war on Patterson by starting his own tabloid, the Daily Mirror.

But these papers, however sensational, still published something that could be recognized as news. Nothing had prepared journalism for Bernarr Macfadden’s New York Graphic.

Macfadden proved that material success can be won by the hard-working, ambitious, and utterly humorless. He was an ignoramus with the courage of his convictions, believing that whatever interested him would interest everybody else, and for an amazingly long time, he was largely right.

He was a graphomaniac health nut: during his long career, he published some 150 books on diet and fitness. He was also fixated on sex, although to call his focus on the human body an obsession is to lend glamor to a grimly Celtic fanaticism.

Bernard Adolphus McFadden was born near Mill Spring, Missouri on August 16, 1868. No one knows when or why he changed his name: one memoirist wrote, “…there was a legend around the Macfadden magazines…that the name was a misprint of Bernard, but that upon seeing it misspelled by a printer he had decided to keep it.”

He arrived in New York in 1894 after a brief stint as a professional wrestler with Sandow, the Strong Man. Four years later, already a vegetarian and non-drinker, Macfadden launched his first magazine, Physical Culture, from the Flatiron Building. At first he wrote most of the magazine himself, including its serialized novels. He also posed for the magazine in various stages of undress as an exemplar of Healthy American Manhood. He lectured, denounced alcohol and tobacco, and advocated fasting, natural healing, and exercise.

In 1912, his five-volume Encyclopedia of Physical Culture argued that all major illnesses, including polio, cancer, and Bright’s disease, could be cured by simple diets, water therapy, and modest exercises. One diet called for grapes—nothing but grapes—which Macfadden insisted would eradicate any cancer in the system.

His four marriages produced eight children, six of whom were daughters—Berwyn, Braunda, Beverly, Brynece, Byrne, and Beulah. They were a handsome family, and he loved publishing photographs of his children as representative of ideal American youth, often wearing costumes that Graphic reporter Lester Cohen later described as looking “like…a number of silk handkerchiefs, hanging here or there.”

Then he made his fortune. True Story began publication in 1918. It was the first modern true-confessions magazine. It warned young women against “random flirtations and promiscuous sex.”

One of his writers once asked an editor, “Can a heroine of True Story have sexual intercourse?”

“Yes,” the editor replied, “if she doesn’t enjoy it.”

Perhaps the greatest argument for Macfadden’s sanity is that, when the magazine’s sales dipped in 1920, he did a complete turnabout, publishing stories that placed a heavy emphasis on women who sought sexual gratification outside the bounds of marriage (although Macfadden still drew a conventional moral lesson from his characters’ unhappy lives).

At a time when most magazines still used illustrators, Macfadden used posed photographs of actors or models to illustrate his stories. He always admitted the photographs were posed, usually in microscopic type on the contents page. The mere use of photographs blurred the line between fiction and fact: many of his readers believed the stories were true.

True Story became enormously popular. It spawned legions of imitators. Then he started True Detective Stories and other gritty pulp magazines. He made $30 million within five years. This was not enough: he had to publish a New York City daily. Thus, on April 15, 1924, the New York Graphic hit the streets for the first time.

Of course, Macfadden’s paper would publish Nothing but the Truth: it said so on the masthead. He knew what the public wanted: after all, he’d succeeded with True Story and his other magazines. And it would be a crusading newspaper, fighting for health and physical fitness and against medical ignorance, fighting against the use of pharmaceuticals and against what he called “Prurient Prudery,” to advance “a new human race, free of inhibitions and free of the contamination of smallpox vaccine.” Within days, the joke was that the Graphic was for fornication, against vaccination.

Macfadden, then in his late fifties, was slender, beaky, and about five feet, six inches tall. He looked vaguely exotic: many thought he had Native American blood. He spoke with a bizarre accent: one listener compared it to a combination of Old Scotch and Choctaw.

Macfadden had assembled some interesting professional talent. Money can do that. His managing editor, Emile Gauvreau, had been editor of the Hartford Courant at twenty-six; his memoirs, My Last Million Readers, is a fine, racy impression of Twenties tabloid journalism. Macfadden’s greatest catch was an unknown, Walter Winchell. It was Winchell’s first job on a daily newspaper. He was the nightclub editor, sports columnist, and dramatic critic. Within months, his gossip column made him famous; within two years, it landed him a job with Hearst. Better than Macfadden, perhaps, he knew what “they” wanted.

Between his own genius, the keyhole journalism of Walter Winchell, and contests (the Graphic appears to have been the first American daily to offer cash prizes in crossword puzzle competitions), Gauvreau built circulation from 30,000 to 300,000 within two years. Headlines like “Nude Models and Students in Mad Revel at Paris Ball” and “Boys Spill Beans on Nude Coeds in Reservoir Swim” helped a lot.

So did the Composograph, “a depiction, posed in the Art Department, of a sensational real-life scene that…could not be photographed.” To Macfadden, it was simply the logical extension of the sort of thing that his magazines  had done for years. His competitors found it fraudulent and unethical.

The tabloid photographers would do almost anything for a great shot. Thus, on January 12, 1928, Tom Howard, a Chicago Tribune photographer on assignment to the Daily News, concealed a miniature camera in his pants to illegally smuggle it into Sing Sing so that he could snap murderess Ruth Snyder, bound and hooded in Old Sparky, just as the executioner flipped the switch.

They were nearly two years behind the Graphic, which had used a Composograph to cover the execution of cop-killing post office bandit Gerald Chapman, whose polished manner had won him the tabloid nicknames “Gentleman Gerald” and “The Count of Gramercy Park.”  Gus Schoenbaechler, a Graphic staff, posed as Chapman; his editor hung him from a steam pipe for the shot; Schoenbaechler nearly strangled himself when he accidentally kicked away the chair; and the picture made the Graphic’s front page on Tuesday, April 6, 1926.

More importantly for the Graphic’s prurient readership, as long as the darkroom held out, the Graphic could simply fake front page photographs showing celebrities in intimate situations, as in the misadventures of Daddy Browning and his child-bride, Peaches.

Edward West Browning (1875-1934) rose from office boy to real estate multimillionaire by the age of forty. He first appeared in the tabloids when his wife left him for the family dentist in 1924. He complained, “How can any sensible woman fall in love with a dentist, particularly with the dentist who has done her own work?” Mrs. Browning’s response was to allege Browning’s weakness for little girls.

The divorce settlement left Browning with custody of his adopted daughter Dorothy. Within a year of the divorce, Browning, claiming she needed a sister, advertised in the Herald Tribune for a “pretty, refined girl, about fourteen years old…” He allegedly interviewed 12,000 applicants over two weeks, bouncing the girls on his knee as he caressed and pinched them. Unfortunately, the successful candidate was soon exposed as a twenty-one-year-old impostor.

A year later, Browning met Frances Heenan at a sorority dance. The fifty-one-year-old was entranced by the fifteen year-old blonde. He said, “You look like peaches and cream to me! I’m going to call you Peaches.” The tabloids had already named him “Daddy.”

At five feet, seven inches and 145 pounds, Peaches was a healthy girl. Damon Runyon wrote, “She is…one of those large, patient blondes…her legs are what the boys call piano legs. They say she is fifteen, but she is developed enough to pass anywhere for twenty.”

They were married on April 11, 1926; on October 2, 1926, less than six months later, she marched out of their hotel lugging $30,000 worth of jewels, furs, gowns, and gifts while screaming, “Money isn’t everything!”

Daddy and Peaches each held numerous press conferences, at which they washed, as one writer commented, not only their dirty linen but their scanties and socks as well. Before their five-day divorce trial, Peaches confusingly claimed that: that he had forced her to perform unnatural acts, that she had had nightly relations with him “except when ill,” and that she had never slept with Browning at all.

At trial, Peaches testified that Browning had forced her to look at pornography and eat breakfast with him in the nude. He loved to hide behind doors and screens and then jump out naked to surprise her, shouting “Woof! Woof!”

Macfadden found this material irresistible.  A flood of Composographs followed, such as one showing Daddy (discreetly in his pajamas) advancing on a cowering, towel-draped Peaches, saying “Woof! Woof! Don’t be a goof!” in an overhead comic-strip balloon while Daddy’s pet African honking gander, “perched on the marital bed,” comments “Honk! Honk! It’s the bonk!”

Peaches was awarded $350 a week in temporary alimony, cut off when the divorce was finalized.

The death of film star Rudolph Valentino, the Great Lover of the silent screen, made the Composograph almost  infamous. Near the height of his fame, Valentino was only 31 when he died suddenly of peritonitis on August 23, 1926. There was an orgy of frenzied mourning, encouraged by the studios and the tabloids, with hysterical mobs shattering windows to get into Frank E. Campbell’s funeral home on Madison Avenue where Valentino’s body lay in state.

Macfadden sent two photographers to Campbell’s before the body’s arrival. Presumably after a distribution of appropriate gratuities, one photographer posed in Valentino’s empty casket. The other snapped away. While developing the photograph, the darkroom boys superimposed the actor’s head on the photographer’s body. Thus the Graphic had a picture of Valentino in the box before Campbell’s had finished embalming him. The boys also created a picture of Valentino on the operating table (Graphic staffer Lester Cohen later wrote that he recognized two fellow reporters among the “surgeons” and “nurses” in the photograph) and yet another, based on a medium’s vision, showing Valentino standing with Enrico Caruso in heaven as scores of dead souls ascend the stairway to the Pearly Gates.

Macfadden responded to one critic of this sort of thing by snapping, “What’s the harm in telling the public the truth as you see it? I ask you, sir!”

Macfadden never tired of pushing his nuttier ideas into the paper against Gauvreau’s better instincts. In 1928, Gauvreau, worn out by fighting with his boss, left the Graphic for peace and tranquillity as managing editor of Hearst’s Daily Mirror, and the paper lost momentum with his departure. Macfadden, now convinced he should be President of the United States, further dissipated his energies by building a chain of newspapers and magazines to further his ambitions. Nearly all lost money.

On July 7, 1932, Macfadden folded the Graphic. In eight years, he had reportedly lost between seven and eleven million dollars. He never actually ran for President: in 1940, he ran for U.S. Senator from Florida in the Democratic primary, one of those old-fashioned races with sixteen candidates, and managed to poll a little over ten percent of the vote. A year later, the bankers took over Macfadden Publications and he was out.

In 1955, Macfadden was diagnosed with jaundice. Refusing all medical help, he trusted to fasting. He died on October 12, 1955—probably of his own prescription.

New York Press, January 11, 2000