tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59438637393281100972024-03-12T20:02:30.777-04:00American Film and CultureMary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.comBlogger33125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-89139344278631335462013-10-27T11:27:00.003-04:002017-02-26T16:27:26.512-05:00"Legends of Hollywood" blog<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></span><i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">See<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span style="line-height: 107%;"><a href="http://legends-of-hollywood.blogspot.com/">“Legends of Hollywood” blog</a> for more stories.</span><span style="line-height: 107%;"> </span></span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Thank you.</span></i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i> </i> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"> – Mary Claire Kendall</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 8.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Photo Credit: Associated Press <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 8.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Gold Medal Rose Garden at the International
Test Garden<br />
in Portland, Oregon in the "City of Roses"<br />
Monday, December 5, 2011<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-48695434367100620952012-11-23T09:27:00.002-05:002021-03-04T16:40:09.086-05:00Spielberg's "Lincoln"<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">By Mary
Claire Kendall</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"> </span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Mary Todd Lincoln</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">
The earliest known daguerreotype of her,<br />
taken c.1864 by Nicholas H. Shepherd.<br />
Source: <a href="http://rogerjnorton.com/photos/marytoddgallery.html">Roger
Norton Photo Gallery</a>. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">Steven
Spielberg’s film</span><a href="http://thelincolnmovie.com/" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"> <i>Lincoln</i></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"> is superb.</span></div>
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There is just one VERY MAJOR FLAW: Sally Field, age 66, played Mary Todd
Lincoln, age 46, and it didn't work—at all. Field looks every bit her 65 years
(age when filming), which is not a bad thing, except when you are playing a 46
year old: It’s simply not believable that she could be the mother of then ten
year old Tad or the wife/lover of the then 55/56 year old president—exactly <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Day-Lewis">Daniel Day-Lewis</a>’ age—when
the war was winding down and he was working to pass the Thirteenth Amendment in
the U.S. House of Representatives. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">Every
time Field was part of a scene I found myself going, eh gad. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">Why Spielberg made
this most unfortunate casting decision is a mystery. The only thing I can
figure out is he thought it would work because Lincoln had aged 10 years by
that time. But, having a wife who matched her real age would have had the
effect of making Lincoln look older, which is the whole point: the war had been
hell and his aged face showed it. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Still of Daniel Day-Lewis in <i>Lincoln</i>. Credit: DreamWorks.</span></td></tr>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">Mary Claire Kendall is a Washington-based
writer. She writes a regular column for Forbes.com, most recently <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/maryclairekendall/2012/11/11/doolittles-raiders-and-the-miracle-that-saved-them/">“Doolittle’s Raiders And The Miracle That Saved Them.”</a><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
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Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-56396377526094066932012-04-09T11:39:00.006-04:002012-04-09T11:43:38.792-04:00HBO Film Reveals the Power of Cloistered Life: In a Word—“Love”<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14.5pt;">By Mary Claire Kendall </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14.5pt;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14.5pt; line-height: 115%;">Originally published in <i>The Wanderer</i> <a href="http://www.wandererpress.com/">www.wandererpress.com</a></span></div><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaFMcipTw8sZ1SEfofSHCz2eniR_tyKRUM-UIFaNs2l5unOYOT0pjjl0ezSwchD6rgkCV-2E4CH2aZwE6Etl-z2zhXGYhxCzn3-jhXCYOnrqjmvBODvU0paotVBPNel8lwgroLthHDeC8M/s1600/Elvis+%2526+Dolores+Hart.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaFMcipTw8sZ1SEfofSHCz2eniR_tyKRUM-UIFaNs2l5unOYOT0pjjl0ezSwchD6rgkCV-2E4CH2aZwE6Etl-z2zhXGYhxCzn3-jhXCYOnrqjmvBODvU0paotVBPNel8lwgroLthHDeC8M/s1600/Elvis+%2526+Dolores+Hart.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dolores Hart and Elvis Presley in <i>Loving You </i>(1957). <br />
Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">“How do you explain love?” Mother Dolores Hart asks in HBO’s Oscar-nominated film,</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">God Is the Bigger Elvis</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">, premiering on Holy Thursday.* </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Directed by Rebecca Cammisa, this 40-minute documentary answers the question as it artfully describes, through the medium Hart mastered, cloistered life at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut—the only enclosed Benedictine monastery and working farm in the United States. As Mother Prioress, Hart leads the community of 38 that follows the strict Benedictine schedule of work and prayer.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Much of the story is told through the prism of Mother Dolores’ life, which she relates with grace, charm and wit.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">The film dramatically opens with Elvis singing “Young Dreams” to Dolores Hart in</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Loving You</span></i><i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">(1958). “I often wonder,” Mother Dolores reflects, “why the Lord gave me such an opportunity to audition with Elvis… And, I just can’t believe I got the part.” Two years later, while starring on Broadway, a friend introduced her to the Abbey. Her life was never the same.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">“I never felt that I was leaving Hollywood,” she says. “The Abbey was like a grace of God that entered my life… totally unexpected… God was… the bigger Elvis.”</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Tackling a batch of letters with her loyal parakeet Toby by her side, she reads one from an “adorable” fan, who enthuses she and Elvis were his favorites. “What are you doing now?” he ends, eliciting a hearty laugh, a pause and, another hearty laugh. </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">“I was 19 and just on the threshold of the biggest career that you could ever have,” she comments. “Hal Wallis offered me a seven year contract.”</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">When a visitor tells of his distress over a missing loved one, Mother Dolores promises she will pray. She comments afterwards, “My role is to help a person discover you can always find hope and if you can find hope you might find faith.”</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">“My early life,” she reflects, was “most unstable”—her grandmother counseled her teen parents to get an abortion. But, this very instability nurtured her vocation as she realized, “The stability factor had to come within myself.”</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">In Hollywood, she rose every morning at 6 a.m. whether or not she was working, to go to mass. </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">“Every role I got I prayed for.”</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">While Hart was pursuing her career, the reverend mother clarified for her that “chastity doesn’t mean that you don’t appreciate what God created. Chastity says use it well,” which gave her “a sense of peace” --</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">and</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">a desire to return to the abbey.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Besides Elvis, she was starring opposite heartthrobs like Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Warren Beatty, who wanted to open her contract to MGM, raising her value to $1 million.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">“But… in the back of my mind,” she says, “I was thinking about going back to Regina Laudis… (to have) true communion with God. And, eternal love is the mystery that I found here.”</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Poignant testimony from the others, including Sr. John Mary—once a powerful executive in politics then advertising who coped by using alcohol and drugs—helps complete the picture and explain the mystery of eternal love.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">“Someone described a monastery as a powerhouse of prayer,” she says. “We’re carrying a lot for people and you make a decision here to surrender your life to God…This is the only place I could see myself being because this is where it’s at.” Said like the advertising pro she is.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">It’s also a bed of roses—complete with thorns. </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">After entering the Abbey in June 1963, wearing a wedding gown, Mother Dolores thought it would be nirvana. Instead, “The first night I felt like I had jumped off a 20-story building and landed flat on my butt. I had no idea it was going to mean singing seven times a day, working in the garden, 10 people in one bathroom, the sternness.”</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">It didn’t help that the other nuns didn’t give “the actress” a month. But, the actress fought back, apparently with salty words. As her former fiancé notes, “She wanted to be married to God.”</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">“In monastic life,” notes Sister John Mary, “there is no way out... Mother Prioress describes it as being skinned alive.”</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">But, as the film portrays, she deploys plenty of wisdom and inventiveness to ease the way, as two touching vignettes—one involving a Llama, another, a heart-to-heart talk—reveal. She has also artfully involved the community, as more clips show, helping each discover their own unique calling. </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">And, now, through this well-done HBO documentary, she’s involving Hollywood, to which she returned this year for the Oscars. If she helped lead the late great Patricia Neal, in her darkest days, to God (a story the film omits), it’s a good bet more miracles will follow. After 49 years of</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">loving God</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">, she’s certainly stored up the requisite spiritual wealth for</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">that production</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">__________</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">*All HBO playdates and times: April 5 (8-8:40 p.m.) 8 (4 p.m.) 10 (11:15 a.m.), 13 (4:30 p.m.), 14 (9:45 a.m.) and 19 (2:45 p.m.)</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Note: The Abbey of Regina Laudis is currently conducting a capital fundraising campaign. If you wish to contribute, </span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">see <a href="http://www.abbeyofreginalaudis.com/" style="color: #9fc5e8;">http://www.abbeyofreginalaudis.com</a>.</span></b><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-87611811061576481222012-03-31T23:08:00.020-04:002021-03-04T16:43:22.901-05:00What Whitney Houston's Death Tells Us About Female Stars of Yesteryear<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">By Mary Claire Kendall</span><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br /><div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpUE0N-erKrRqtWm6RLU04INexkITn_y0L26YDfcWMeMznCCctYFpvs072UeXKP52wHlEVq80vmVHcUXBr7XB7P40PXkLysnJg7O4jmXq84KkVBQ0W9LCGaQ7Fg7_kjbUzIyftHP63Faxq/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="405" data-original-width="612" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpUE0N-erKrRqtWm6RLU04INexkITn_y0L26YDfcWMeMznCCctYFpvs072UeXKP52wHlEVq80vmVHcUXBr7XB7P40PXkLysnJg7O4jmXq84KkVBQ0W9LCGaQ7Fg7_kjbUzIyftHP63Faxq/w362-h240/image.png" width="362" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 9pt; line-height: 13.8px;">Whitney Houston performs at the O2 Arena on April 25, 2010 in London, England. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 9pt; line-height: 13.8px;">(Photo by Samir Hussein/Getty Images) </span></div><div><br /></div></div></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Whitney Houston seemingly had it all—beauty, poise, charm and most of all that voice penetrating the depths of one’s soul—America’s soul.<o:p></o:p></span></div><u1:p></u1:p> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Why is it, then, that this alpha female with epic talent lost it all at such a young age?<o:p></o:p></span></div><u1:p></u1:p> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">It will take months, even years, to wrap our minds around this tragedy. But, by putting her life and death into the historical context of stars going back to Hollywood’s inception, the picture becomes a little clearer.<o:p></o:p></span></div><u1:p></u1:p> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Women of the “Golden Age of Film” (1912-1962) maintained an inner strength that stars like Houston in the late 20th/early 21st century lost because our culture is ailing. While claiming to uphold and reaffirm women, it ends up destroying that very something that’s the source of a woman’s strength. Losing that essence, Houston was seemingly reaching for a chemical substitute.<o:p></o:p></span></div><u1:p></u1:p> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Of course, substance abuse has always plagued Hollywood. Often, the greater the artistry the more susceptible the artist to the chemical siren call. Whitney had high anxiety—never thought she was good enough—and alcohol and drugs helped alleviate this stress.<o:p></o:p></span></div><u1:p></u1:p> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">The habit intensified after she filmed The Bodyguard, conspiring, along with cigarettes, to destroy her voice. Similarly, Judy Garland, dead at age 47, suffered anxiety—didn’t think her voice was that good either—and sought refuge in alcohol and drugs. (Admittedly, MGM shares some credit, feeding her drugs to stay thin, sleep, wake up, stay energized.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><u1:p></u1:p> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Marilyn Monroe and Margaret Sullavan, too, both died too young—at ages 36 and 50, respectively—of drug overdoses. And, Mabel Normand—who made films with Mack Sennett (famous for The Keystone Cops), directing a young Charlie Chaplin—became addicted to Roaring 20s all-night partying drenched with alcohol and cocaine. Her world came crashing down along with the stock market; she was dead at age 34.<o:p></o:p></span></div><u1:p></u1:p> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Still, there’s a palpable difference in the lives of Hollywood women, now and then.<o:p></o:p></span></div><u1:p></u1:p> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Mary Pickford, who dominated the silent film era, for whom the term “star” was coined, had her own studio at Paramount Pictures, co-founded Universal Pictures and practically invented the business framework under which Hollywood still operates.<o:p></o:p></span></div><u1:p></u1:p> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Pickford started working at age 6 after her father’s untimely death plunged the family into poverty. She never thought of herself as a woman or a man, just as a competent individual, trying to survive, working to be her best—in a cultural milieu that from today’s perspective almost seems like a Garden of Eden.<o:p></o:p></span></div><u1:p></u1:p> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">But, even in the Garden of Eden, there was the battle of the sexes. In Hollywood it’s as fierce as ever. Though women were foundational to Hollywood’s establishment, when the business became so glamorous and financially rewarding, the men simply took over.<o:p></o:p></span></div><u1:p></u1:p> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Pickford suffered a double blow given the difficult transition from silent film, a heart-rending reality brilliantly captured in this year’s critical favorite The Artist. “… (J)ust as she was the first great star to be created by film, she was the first great ‘has been’ to be created by film. And everyone watched it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><u1:p></u1:p> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">There was no privacy there,” Eileen Whitfield, author of Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood, told American Experience. More than the loss of her career, she was publicly humiliated when her beloved husband DouglasFairbanks, Jr. fled, landing in the arms of a woman twelve years her junior. “When a man finds himself sliding downhill,” Fairbanks said, “he should do everything to reach bottom in a hurry and pass out of the picture.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><u1:p></u1:p> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Like her Hennessy ancestors, Mary initially sought solace in intoxicating spirits.<o:p></o:p></span></div><u1:p></u1:p> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">But, she survived—personally, marrying Buddy Rogers, and dying at age 87.<u1:p></u1:p> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">So too did Betty Hutton, the fifth anniversary of whose death at age 86 falls on March 11—one month after Houston’s death.<o:p></o:p></span></div><u1:p></u1:p> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Hutton’s descent from the pinnacle of her career—epitomized by her starring role in Annie Get Your Gun (1950)—was as dramatic as Houston’s. As she toldAP, twenty years after foolishly tearing up her Paramount contract, “Uppers, downers, inners, outers, I took everything I could get my hands on.” Then one night she collapsed on stage at a dinner theater outside Boston where she was reprising her Annie Oakley role.<u1:p></u1:p> Not exactly Broadway. She was down to 85 pounds.<o:p></o:p></span></div><u1:p></u1:p> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Miraculously, she met this saintly priest, Fr. Peter Maguire, who just happened to be checking in his cook at the same rehab center where Hutton was recuperating. Fr. Maguire understood all her pain—and helped her cherish just “being Betty” and discover, as she told Turner Classic Movie’s Robert Osbourne, “Christ is my heart.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Perhaps Whitney, who also knew Christ was her heart, never found that someone who understood her pain.<o:p></o:p></span></div><u1:p></u1:p> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">But, isn’t about time, that as a culture, we try and understand that, as Hemingway told his friend A.E. Hotchner, “The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is… Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do—and what you do makes you what you are—is to back up into the grave.” – Papa Hemingway<o:p></o:p></span></div><u1:p></u1:p> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">And, for a woman, that includes just “being” who you are.<o:p></o:p></span></div><u1:p></u1:p> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Mary Claire Kendall writes about stars of Hollywood’s “Golden Age,” with a special focus on their stories of recovery.</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span></i></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Originally published in </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Forbes </i><br /><div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/02/23/what-whitney-houstons-death-tells-us-about-female-stars-of-yesteryear/">http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/02/23/what-whitney-houstons-death-tells-us-about-female-stars-of-yesteryear/</a></span></div></div></div></div></div>Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-53978982592116231942012-01-18T09:52:00.006-05:002012-01-20T14:24:01.726-05:00“The Way”—Journey of the Heart... and Soul<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">By Mary Claire Kendall</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;"><v:shapetype coordsize="21600,21600" filled="f" id="_x0000_t75" o:preferrelative="t" o:spt="75" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" stroked="f"> <v:stroke joinstyle="miter"> <v:formulas> <v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"> <v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"> <v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"> <v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"> <v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"> <v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"> <v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"> <v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"> </v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:formulas> <v:path gradientshapeok="t" o:connecttype="rect" o:extrusionok="f"> <o:lock aspectratio="t" v:ext="edit"> </o:lock></v:path></v:stroke></v:shapetype><v:shape alt="http://satmornfilmfest.org/files/images/The%20WAY%20Poster.jpg" id="Picture_x0020_10" o:spid="_x0000_i1025" style="height: 252.75pt; mso-wrap-style: square; visibility: visible; width: 337.5pt;" type="#_x0000_t75"> <v:imagedata o:title="The%20WAY%20Poster" src="file:///C:\DOCUME~1\MCKWRI~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.jpg"> </v:imagedata></v:shape><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2RKkZZBRdS5pxCXwfMMZdFrXHXAUzGWTBuVPFZboXZQ8BERJVEt7bxAZ1oyGfrKWmG_rmwL20czn54TjbNAbfhqV43Pv_R42oZcAruDhfj4vrB_9nhMDdAG20iqFeuBpe4KHL-IRge_TP/s1600/The+Way.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2RKkZZBRdS5pxCXwfMMZdFrXHXAUzGWTBuVPFZboXZQ8BERJVEt7bxAZ1oyGfrKWmG_rmwL20czn54TjbNAbfhqV43Pv_R42oZcAruDhfj4vrB_9nhMDdAG20iqFeuBpe4KHL-IRge_TP/s1600/The+Way.jpg" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">A good friend of my father has seen Emilio Estevez’s film <i>The Way</i> three times. </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">The Way </i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">is about a father who travels to France to recover the body of his estranged son, who died in the Pyrenees during a violent storm—just one day into his journey along “El camino de Santiago,” also known as “The Way of St. James.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">My father’s friend is about to see it a fourth time. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Now that I’ve seen the film, I know why. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Not only does Martin Sheen, who portrays the father, give a brilliant performance; but the screenplay by Estevez, who plays the son, is masterful; the direction, also by Estevez, production values and cinematography, superb.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Quite simply, this film, which has Oscar written all over it, is a beautiful, mesmerizing film, with layer after layer of meaning—achieved without any 3-D technology or special effects extravaganza. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Its secret is the subtle yet rich, multi-dimensional portrayal of humanity and spirituality. Nothing hits you over the head, except, of course, the sudden death of Daniel (the son) at the outset; the magnificent vistas along “The Way” as Tom (the father) relives and honors his son’s memory; and, at the end, when the four travelers, Wizard of Oz-like, arrive at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostella in Galicia in northwestern Spain in a stunning denouement.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Tom, an American opthamologist, initially had no plan other than to bring the remains of his son home to California. Then, he begins to learn about the 800-kilometer-long “El camino” leading to the Cathedral, where, tradition has it, the remains of the apostle Saint James are buried. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">In 40 or 41 A.D., Our Lady traveled with angels to see St. James in Zaragoza in northeastern Spain, and tell him Jesus wished him to return to Jerusalem, where he would be martyred. St. Augustine writes about the episode in The City of God, revealed through an apparition to a nun, the only such apparition before Our Lady’s Assumption. Our Lady was carried by angels at night on a cloud to Zaragoza. During the trip, the angels built a pillar of marble and a miniature image of Our Lady. When they all arrived, Our Lady delivered Jesus’ message to St. James, and also asked that a church be built on the site of the apparition. The main altar, she said, would feature the pillar and image and special protective graces would flow to the people of Zaragoza for their devotion to Mary and Jesus. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Legend has it that St. James’ remains were transported by boat from Jerusalem to northwestern Spain. When his burial site was discovered over 1000 years ago during medieval times, “The Way” began attracting numerous pilgrims and became one of the most popular pilgrimages, together with those to Rome (Via Francigena) and Jerusalem. However, the Black Death, Protestant Reformation and 16th century political unrest diminished travel along “The Way,” down to just a few pilgrims by 1980. Then interest surged, whereupon travel steadily rose to nearly 5,000 pilgrims in 1990 and over 272,000 twenty years later.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">That’s the awe-inspiring backdrop of the film. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">While, Tom, a non-practicing Catholic, initially has just one purpose when he arrives, he soon feels impelled by some mystical force to join the pilgrims along “The Way”—putatively, solely to honor his son’s memory.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">It’s a heartwarming journey full of colorful scenic and cultural vignettes and unforgettable, all-too-human characters, searching for more meaning in their lives. This is especially true in the case of the three characters Tom ends up traveling with, whom, as he plays off of them, inject humor as well as pathos as the layers of their lives are peeled away—revealing their loss, brokenness and pain. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">The film has a touching scene upholding life’s sacredness from conception. However, the cremation of Daniel and related details could render Tom’s choice problematic given his initial weak faith. “The Church permits cremation,” the official Catechism says, “provided that it does not demonstrate a denial of faith in the resurrection of the body.” And, while his choice is clearly cinematic—albeit Daniel’s appearances along the way are equally if not more compelling—it’s important to note, cremation is “permitted,” not “recommended.” <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">This is the seventh time father and son, Sheen and Estevez, have worked together. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Interestingly, in an LA radio interview on “The Busted Halo Show with Father Dave,” Estevez revealed the film’s inspiration was none other than a pilgrimage Sheen and grandson Taylor made a few years earlier on “The Way,” where Estevez’s son, then only 19, met and fell in love with his future wife, soon moving to Spain, where his great-grandfather, to whom the film is devoted, was born. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Truly, it’s a family affair—and not just for Sheen and his family but for many other families, as well.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><b>Published in <i>The Wanderer</i>, December 15, 2011</b></span></div><br />
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</span></span></div></div>Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-29547033455905458402012-01-18T09:43:00.010-05:002021-03-04T16:36:23.085-05:00“Hugo”: Broken Machines and Broken People<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">By Mary Claire Kendall<i><o:p> </o:p></i></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><i><o:p><br /></o:p></i></span></div></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_rLklb6mBWSUMPtClVCdrpiSbe_b59vqjUd4eVK71rDsn4CpNL-J5TkJx0u330BbqPSnz6V3RiuJLgWVZZcy6_h1x0Wt4JWgVgWRrgSPJ8psIw4N3cYsQzo91FIprOGpr7MRevEMUuR-u/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="446" data-original-width="794" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_rLklb6mBWSUMPtClVCdrpiSbe_b59vqjUd4eVK71rDsn4CpNL-J5TkJx0u330BbqPSnz6V3RiuJLgWVZZcy6_h1x0Wt4JWgVgWRrgSPJ8psIw4N3cYsQzo91FIprOGpr7MRevEMUuR-u/" width="320" /></a></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Asa Butterfield, left, and Chloe Moretz in a scene from "Hugo."<br /> (Jaap Buitendijk / Paramount Pictures)<br /><br /></span></td></tr></tbody></table><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Hugo </i>is one of Hollywood’s best offerings this Christmas season.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">It’s Martin Scorsese’s homage to motion picture<i> </i>pioneer Georges Méliès, inventor of special effects, born 150 years ago on December 8, in Paris; and like Scorsese, a Catholic. It’s a magical film, not just because, ironically, of its own deft utilization of 3-D special effects, but because of its uplifting message.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Based on the novel, <i>The Invention of Hugo Cabret</i> by Brian Selznick, far from cheapening human love, <i>Hugo</i> enriches it—love of one’s art, of husband and wife, father and son, and of friends—in this case, the protagonist, an orphan named Hugo Cabret, played by Asa Butterfield, and Isabelle, living with Méliès and his wife, played by Chloe Grace Moretz, who helps Hugo solve a mystery that unlocks not only <i>the film’s</i> mystery—why Méliès, played by Ben Kingsley, is so crabby; <i>but </i>the mystery of life.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Through the persistence and bravery of Hugo, Méliès finally, after much resistance, realizes “the story’s not over yet.” <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Known for such masterpieces as <i>A Trip to the Moon (1902)</i>, Méliès built the first movie studio and produced some 500 short films, but was forced into bankruptcy in 1913. With the outbreak of World War I, the French Army melted down most of his films to make boot heels for the Army, ending his filmmaking career. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">While it is true audiences gradually tired of Méliès’ special effects, given how they overshadowed a story; another factor in his demise was Thomas A. Edison, Inc.’s distribution of <i>A Trip to the Moon</i> without paying Méliès royalties—ironic, given Edison’s own aggressive campaign of enforcement against copyright infringement vis-à-vis <i>his</i> properties.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">“He [Méliès] lost basically most of his financing,” Scorsese explained to Jon Stewart on <i>The Daily Show</i>, “when the bigger companies came in… What happened (is)… [Thomas Edison and his associates] were just taking the films and making dupes of them. So that was one of the reasons why he [Méliès] was finished financially, ultimately.” <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">But, then God always brings good out of evil.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">With the help of other filmmakers, Méliès became a toy salesman at the Gare Montparnasse station, made famous by Claude Monet, which is where the film imaginatively brings his story to life.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">His nemesis, Hugo, lives behind the walls and above the station, where he ensures the station’s many clocks run on time. It’s a family enterprise; or, at least, was. His father, played by Jude Law, recently deceased, appears in flashbacks; and his Uncle Claude, an inebriate, is soon out of the picture, leaving Hugo to fend for himself.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Hugo comes to Méliès’ shop to steal items for his work and in his quest to repair the automaton his father found at the museum where he worked. As his father showed him, it’s the missing key that will bring it back to life. Méliès is a stern taskmaster and has little patience for the ruffian who comes to his shop. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="line-height: 115%;">Hugo nimbly survives—stealing food; fending off the rigid, buffoonish station inspector, played by Sacha Baron Cohen; observing the lives of visitors to the station; slipping into the nearby theater to watch silent film classics; and maneuvering the station’s labyrinthine passageways.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">One day, Méliès gives him the chance to show his skill at repairing toys and, duly impressed, gives him a job. That’s how Hugo meets the beguiling Isabelle who “lives” at the station—in the book store, whereupon the mysteries begin to unfold.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The story is particularly poignant for the way it mirrors Scorsese’s own early life, trapped in a world apart from other children in New York’s Little Italy when he suffered from asthma, finding solace in film. He was fascinated by 1950s 3-D films and later helped rescue filmmakers, who like Méliès, had seen better days. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">While the 3-D artistry in highlighting mechanical and architectural wonders is enchanting, the real artistry lies in how Scorsese touches hearts.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">As Professor Ian Christie of London’s Birkbeck College said, “To look at (Scorsese’s) films without an awareness of their spiritual dimension is to miss an important part of what makes Scorsese one of today’s great artists.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Ultimately, the film is not about broken machines but broken people, who, with the help of others, can come back to life; and how, in life, as with a clock’s intricate parts, each of us has a unique role to play. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">That <i>Hugo</i> is delighting audiences of all ages is testament to its cinematic workmanship, unfolding mystery, and uplifting message. Not only that, it is delighting critics— winning <i>both </i>Best Picture <i>and</i> Best Director from the National Board of Review, and Best Director from the Washington <i>and</i> Boston film critics associations—and promises more not only at the Oscars but in how it shapes the landscape of filmmaking for years to come. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><b><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Published in <i>The Wanderer</i>, January 5, 2012.</span></b></div></div>Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-83892944379670742972011-12-23T23:26:00.092-05:002013-01-24T16:36:12.692-05:00Hollywood as a Precursor to Faith<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
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<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto;">The stories of Jane Wyman and Betty Hutton — and an entrance into the Church on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception.</span> <br />
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BY MARY CLAIRE KENDALL</div>
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| Posted 12/8/11 at 9:15 PM</div>
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<a href="http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/hollywood-as-a-precursor-to-faith/">http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/hollywood-as-a-precursor-to-faith/</a> See below for feature, as originally written by author.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Jane Wyman (left) and Betty Hutton</span><br />
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Hollywood, amazingly, has served as a precursor to faith — as in the case of Jane Wyman and Betty Hutton, who were as different as night and day.</div>
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From childhood, Wyman was quiet and reserved. After her parents divorced and father died, she was adopted at age 4. In contrast, Betty Hutton was age 3 when she became an entertainer, already belting out songs, accompanied by a warm smile and energetic moves.<br />
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The two stars’ paths crossed in 1951 as Hutton’s star was fading and Wyman’s was rising.</div>
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At the time, Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer had written <i>In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening</i> expressly for Hutton. But Paramount Pictures used the Oscar-winning song in a different film, Here Comes the Groom, starring Bing Crosby and Wyman.</div>
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Wyman’s next film, <i>The Blue Veil </i>(1951), set in and around St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, longtime friend Virginia Zamboni confided, was her “favorite” — and the catalyst for her conversion.</div>
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Though Protestant, Wyman had begun attending mass with Loretta Young. In the wake of her divorce from Ronald Reagan in 1948, she continued to grieve over the death of her newborn, Christina, in 1947, A favorite destination was the Dominican sisters’ Monastery of the Angels. </div>
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While filming <i>The Blue Veil</i>, premised on the loss of the protagonist’s newborn son, the teachings of the Catholic faith, especially the redemptive meaning of suffering, “hit” Wyman “in the face,” Zamboni recalled. Wyman developed a strong devotion to Mary; three years later, on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, she was received into the Catholic Church. </div>
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In 1969, her film career over, she tucked away her Oscars and focused on the present.</div>
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Since 1994, Wyman attended Sacred Heart Church in Palm Desert, Calif. Father Howard Lincoln, the pastor, observed that “whenever our parish or our diocese rang the doorbell of Jane Wyman’s heart, she always answered.” </div>
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He had never seen a $100,000 check, he said, until she wrote one for the church.</div>
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In 2007, Jane Wyman died at age 90. A Third Order Dominican, she was buried in her habit in a pine coffin. At her funeral, Father Lincoln described the former star as “the antithesis of Sunset Boulevard and Norma Desmond” — the has-been silent-film star in Billy Wilder’s classic film who craved a “return.”</div>
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Her faith, Zamboni said, “meant everything” to Wyman.</div>
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While Wyman’s path to the faith was neat and orderly, Hutton’s was long and circuitous.</div>
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Hutton’s early childhood was a hardscrabble existence. She was 2 years old when her father abandoned the family. The following year her singing debut was prompted by a drunken man who threatened to beat her mother up in her speakeasy. Decades later, she described the frightening scene for TCM’s Robert Osbourne in a July 2000 interview.</div>
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During the Great Depression, Hutton sang on street corners to help keep food on the family table. Then, when her mother — a “total alcoholic” but the “most brilliant, wonderful woman,” Hutton told Osbourne — took her to see a Charlie Chaplin film, she vowed: “I’m gonna be a star, and my mother will stop drinking.” (corrected)</div>
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She quickly began getting one break after another, until the Broadway producer Buddy DeSylva became the production head at Paramount and brought her to Hollywood.</div>
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From her first film in 1941, Hutton consistently wowed audiences. But she could never escape the wounds of her childhood, especially the lack of a father figure. </div>
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In January 1950, she divorced her husband of five years. Three months later, she landed the role of a lifetime in <i>Annie Get Your Gun</i>. But despite her professional success, her life unraveled in 1952. Hutton injured her arm while filming <i>The Greatest Show on Earth</i> and became addicted to prescription pills. That same year, she tore up her Paramount contract.</div>
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By 1971, two years after good friend Judy Garland died of a drug overdose, Hutton feared she was destined for a similar end. She confronted a legacy of four shattered marriages and a wrecked career. “I almost didn’t care anymore. I didn’t want to go on,” she told Osbourne.</div>
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Then, while recuperating from her addiction to prescription pills, something miraculous happened.</div>
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As Father Peter Maguire of St. Anthony’s Church in Portsmouth, R.I., checked his cook into the same rehabilitation center where Hutton sought treatment, the star saw a very special priest calmly showing affection and respect for his ailing employee.</div>
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And, she thought, I’m going to meet that man. He’s going to save my life.</div>
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Hutton later asked the cook about Father Maguire and was told, “Betty, he helps everybody.” One thing led to another, and soon Betty was at the rectory cooking and cleaning.</div>
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When she met Father Maguire, Hutton said, “My life just turned around.”</div>
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“I never found me until Father Maquire,” she told Osbourne. The priest “had the heart to understand me. ”</div>
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And, for the first time ever, she said, she didn’t have to pretend she wasn’t upset. </div>
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“Betty, you’re just a very hurt child,” Hutton said he told her. “Let’s start from the word go.” </div>
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“And that’s how I became a Catholic,” she recalled. “It was so great — because as I walked down the aisle and I know I’m going to receive Christ, I would sob so, because this brought something out of me I never knew was in there. That’s my heart. Christ is my heart. But I didn’t know him. I did not know God.”</div>
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Hutton also had a great devotion to Our Lady, explaining, “I don’t move anywhere without my rosary.”</div>
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After completing high-school studies under Father Maguire’s tutelage, Hutton attended Salve Regina College in Newport, R.I., earning a master’s degree in liberal studies in 1986. She taught drama there, as well as at Emerson College in Boston.</div>
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In March 1997, she moved back to California, where she lived in Palm Springs until her death at age 86, in 2007.</div>
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So it is that God enveloped Wyman and Hutton in his love — by way of Hollywood.<br />
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<i style="text-align: right;">Mary Claire Kendall is a Washington-based journalist and screenwriter.</i><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: x-large;">Hollywood as Precursor to Faith: </span></span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: x-large;">The Stories of Jane Wyman and Betty Hutton</span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3;"><span style="font-size: large;">By Mary Claire Kendall</span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">Hollywood, amazingly, often serves as a precursor to faith—as in the case of Jane Wyman and Betty Hutton, different as night and day.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">From childhood, Wyman, adopted in 1921 at age 4 after her parent divorced and father died, was quiet and reserved. Betty Hutton, the consummate entertainer, starting in 1924 at age 3, belted out songs with her warm smile and energetic moves. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">The two stars’ paths crossed in 1951 as Hutton’s star was fading, Wyman’s rising.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer had written “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” expressly for Hutton but Paramount Pictures used the Oscar-winning song instead in <i>Here Comes the Groom</i>, starring Bing Crosby and Wyman.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">Wyman’s next film, <i>The Blue Veil </i>(1951), set in and around St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, long-time friend Virginia Zamboni confided, was her “favorite,” and the catalyst for her conversion. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">Though Protestant, in the wake of her divorce from Ronald Reagan in 1948, Wyman, still grieving over the death of her newborn, Christina, in 1947, began attending mass with Loretta Young. She particularly liked going to the Dominican sisters’ Monastery of the Angels. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;">While filming <i>The Blue Veil,</i> ironically premised on the loss of the protagonist’s newborn son, the faith—especially the meaning of suffering—Zamboni said, “hit (her) in the face.” Wyman was very devoted to Mary and, three years later, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, she was received into the Catholic Church. </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">In 1969, her film career over, she tucked away her Oscars and focused on the present.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">Father Howard Lincoln, Pastor of Sacred Heart in Palm Desert, Wyman’s parish since 1994, said, “Whenever our parish or our diocese rang the doorbell of Jane Wyman’s heart, she always answered.” He had never seen a $100,000 check, he said, until she wrote one for the church. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">Jane Wyman died at age 90 on September 10, 2007. A Third Order Dominican, she was buried in habit in a pine coffin. Wyman, Fr. Lincoln said at her funeral, “was the antithesis of <i>Sunset Boulevard</i> and Norma Desmond”—the “has been” silent film star in Billy Wilder’s classic film, who craved a “return.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">Her faith, Zamboni said, “meant everything really” to Wyman.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">While Wyman’s path to the faith was neat and orderly, Hutton’s was long and circuitous.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">Unlike Wyman’s early life—materially comfortable, albeit emotionally wanting—Hutton’s was hardscrabble from age 2, after her father abandoned the family. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">Her singing debut at age 3 was prompted by a drunken man who threatened to beat her mother up in her speakeasy—a frightening scene, she told TCM’s Robert Osbourne in a July 2000 interview, she remembered “like it was yesterday.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">Hutton sang on street corners to help keep food on the family table during the Great Depression. Then, when her mother—a “total alcoholic” but the “most brilliant, wonderful woman,” Hutton told Osbourne—took her to see a Charlie Chaplin film, she thought “I’m gonna be a star and my mother will stop drinking.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">She did—getting one break after another, until Broadway producer Buddy DeSylva became production head at Paramount and brought her to Hollywood. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">From her first film in 1941, she consistently wowed audiences, but could never escape the wounds of childhood, especially the lack of a father figure. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">Emotionally brittle, in January 1950, she divorced her husband of five years—three months later landing the role of a lifetime in <i>Annie Get Your Gun</i>. Seemingly on top of the world, her life unraveled in 1952 after DeSylva died and she injured her arm while filming <i>The Greatest Show on Earth</i>, becoming addicted to prescription pills. That same year she tore up her Paramount contract.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">By 1971, two years after good friend Judy Garland died of a drug overdose at age 47, Hutton—age 50, surveying four shattered marriages and a wrecked career—was on track for the same fate. “I almost didn’t care anymore. I didn’t want to go on,” she told Osbourne.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">Then, while recuperating from addiction to prescription pills—“uppers, downers, inners, outers, I took everything I could get my hands on” (AP, 1980)—something miraculous happened.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: large;">Rev. Peter J. Maguire from St. Anthony’s in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, was checking his cook into the same rehab center and Hutton saw a very special priest calmly showing affection and respect for his ailing employee. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: large;">And, she thought, “I’m going to meet that man. He’s going to save my life.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: large;">When the cook got better, she asked her about Fr. Maguire, who told her, “Betty, he helps everybody.” One thing led to another and soon Betty was at the rectory cooking and cleaning. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: large;">When she met Fr. Maguire, Hutton said, “My life just turned around.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: large;">“I never found me until Fr. Maquire,” she told Osbourne. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: large;">“Fr. Maquire,” she said, “had the heart to understand me… ” And, for the first time ever, she said, she didn’t have to pretend she wasn’t upset. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: large;">“Betty, you’re just a very hurt child,” Hutton said he told her. “Let’s start from the word go.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: large;">“And, that’s how I became a Catholic,” she said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: large;">“When I became a Catholic,” she continued, “it was so great because as I walked down the aisle and I know I’m going to receive Christ, I would sob so because this brought something out of me I never knew was in there. That’s my heart. <i>Christ</i> is my heart. But, I didn’t know him. I <i>did not know</i> God.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: large;">Hutton also had a great devotion to Our Lady, explaining “I don’t move anywhere without my rosary…”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">After completing high school studies under Fr. Maguire’s tutelage, Hutton attended Salve Regina College in Newport, from which she graduated in May 1986, earning a Masters of Liberal Studies. She taught drama there and at Emerson in Boston. In March 1997, she moved back to California, where she lived in Palm Springs until her death at age 86 on March 11, 2007. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;">So it is that God enveloped Wyman and Hutton in his love—by way of Hollywood.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;">December 7, 2011</span><b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-74418547711534137182011-12-09T22:35:00.035-05:002011-12-11T21:25:18.024-05:00Bob Hope and His Ladies of HopeHis mother, wife and Our Lady of Hope made all the difference in his life.<br />
BY MARY CLAIRE KENDALL<br />
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Posted 10/19/11 at 1:30 PM<br />
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font: normal normal normal medium/normal 'Times New Roman';"><a href="http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/bob-hope-and-his-ladies-of-hope/">http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/bob-hope-and-his-ladies-of-hope</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font: normal normal normal medium/normal 'Times New Roman';"><a href="http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/bob-hope-and-his-ladies-of-hope/">/</a></span></div><br />
Bob Hope — “the most honored entertainer” ever, according to the <i>Guinness Book of World Records</i>, for his achievements in theater, radio, film, TV, philanthropy and business, and an extraordinary record of service to country, with 199 USO shows around the globe — won the biggest prize of all in the waning days of his life when he converted to Catholicism.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmths6SvkqZeKJFr9tkgduD8ZV9Lw7R0ftD35lazFpyOYfv-NLH7pquJSRXAIwuy1bu6frNSP8XH88oyKrhlCVg8pqN3XHBYXISpbT3bdQtu6-PF_i1dxDupfW9aG-Yvtngi7-5FEpkg5d/s1600/Bob+%2526+Dolores+Hope+in+1999+%2528Getty+Images%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmths6SvkqZeKJFr9tkgduD8ZV9Lw7R0ftD35lazFpyOYfv-NLH7pquJSRXAIwuy1bu6frNSP8XH88oyKrhlCVg8pqN3XHBYXISpbT3bdQtu6-PF_i1dxDupfW9aG-Yvtngi7-5FEpkg5d/s400/Bob+%2526+Dolores+Hope+in+1999+%2528Getty+Images%2529.jpg" width="255" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bob and Dolores Hope in 1999. -Getty Images</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Born Leslie Townes Hope on May 29, 1903, in Eltham, England, he was the fifth of seven boys.<br />
<br />
Leslie’s mother, Avis, was very devoted and loving. His father, William Henry “Harry,” a stonecutter, “had only one fault,” as Hope recalled in his memoir, <i>Have Tux, Will Travel: Bob Hope’s Own Story</i>: “It was his theory that, as a result of his occupation, stone dust collected in his throat. He stopped off at the pubs to sluice it off.”<br />
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While initially prosperous, Harry’s trade gradually proved financially inadequate, as bricks displaced stone masonry — forcing the family to keep moving into smaller homes, with Harry increasingly turning to alcohol and women to feel like a real man and bury his feelings of inadequacy.<br />
<br />
When the family immigrated to Cleveland seeking brighter prospects, Avis had to intervene to shore up the family finances, renting ever more spacious and seemingly unaffordable homes to take in boarders. The children contributed too, taking part-time jobs. But Avis made sure they had at least a modicum of religious formation. “Mom,” he wrote, “after making sure we were clean and uncomfortably dressed … sent us off to Sunday school at the Euclid Avenue Presbyterian — a church dad had helped build” (Have Tux Will Travel). <br />
<br />
As a child, Hope was rescued by his brother, when he got pinned under a pier and nearly drowned, and managed to survive his father’s brutal beatings — physically, if not entirely psychologically.<br />
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But he was ultimately saved by his mother, who, a singer herself, encouraged her young son’s theatrical talent early on. After winning a Charlie Chaplin contest in 1914, Leslie set his cap — later his trademark brown derby hat — for the theater, convinced that being “on stage” was his true calling.<br />
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He started in vaudeville as “Lester,” scandal-tainted Fatty Arbuckle intervening in 1925 to get him and his partner steady work in Hurley’s Jolly Follies. “I was making $40 a week and sending $20 home to my mother to help out,” he recalled.<br />
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In New Castle, Pa., Hope got his solo break and, at the conclusion of a three-day engagement, telling well-received Scotch jokes, became a “single” and soon headed for mob-ruled Chicago to make it on his own without his partner. But, after running up a $400 tab for donuts and coffee—and perhaps some medicinal spirits—he wasn’t making it. On the verge of giving up, by chance, he bumped into a Cleveland pal, who introduced him to a theater booker friend, who gave him a Decoration Day (i.e., Memorial Day) gig. “Would $25 be all right?’ (the booker asked)… I just managed to say, ‘I’ll take it,’ without bursting into tears…” (<i>Have Tux, Will Travel</i>)<br />
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By 1929, now renamed “Bob Hope,” he was becoming a well-known and liked comedian and landing more small parts on Broadway, leading up to a large Broadway role in Jerome Kerns’ hit Roberta (November 1933 to July 1934). From there, his career took off — soon including radio, film, and eventually TV, his first special debuting Easter Sunday 1950. <br />
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Pivotal Roberta would transform his life in another important way.<br />
<br />
Early on, his co-star George Murphy took him to the Vogue Club on 57th Street to introduce him to a beautiful singer named Dolores Reade. <br />
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Father Benedict Groeschel, of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, a good friend of the Hopes’ — introduced by the Gallo family — fondly reminisced that Dolores’ Italian-American father was a well-known “singing waiter” on bustling 149th Street in the Bronx and that her mother was Irish-American. <br />
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<i>She</i> was irresistible. <br />
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Bob fell in love with Dolores when she sang in her “low, husky voice … soft and sweet …Only a Paper Moon and Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? They wed a few months later — “The smartest thing Bob Hope ever did,” Lucille Ball once quipped.<br />
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Their 69-year marriage, rare in the annals of Hollywood, gradually welcomed four adopted children: Linda, Anthony, Eleanora Avis “Nora” and Kelly.<br />
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Starting in World War II, Hope began donating entertainment hours to cheer up the troops, soon expanding his charity work to other causes. First, there was cerebral palsy; then the Eisenhower Medical Center — donating land in Palm Springs and raising millions through his Annual Hope Golf Classic — followed by myriad other causes, especially Catholic charitable institutions that helped children and the poor.<br />
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By the mid-point of his life — as one his former writers, Arthur Marx, son of Groucho, wrote in <i>The Secret Life of Bob Hope</i> — he was “no longer just a comedian or film star. He was big business … (also including) oil, real estate, frozen orange juice, charity fundraising, golf, wholesale meat, personal appearances on both sides of the Atlantic … Major League baseball (i.e., Cleveland Indians). … He was also part owner of several radio and TV stations.”<br />
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His success was accompanied, and made possible, by a fiercely competitive spirit, combined with a penny-pinching nature — a remnant of his struggle just to survive as a child and in vaudeville. Whereas he had a heart of gold when it came to the troops and special friends like his agent Jack Saphier — paying all his medical expenses when he was terminally ill — he drove particularly hard bargains with others, including his writers, who made Bob Hope. But it wasn’t personal. <br />
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Marx reminisced how, after a typically long writing session, he would ask Sherwood Schwartz, later of Gilligan’s Island fame, to go buy him a pineapple sundae. When he returned with it, Hope would enjoy it without offering any to his hungry writers. Later, when Schwartz was posted with Armed Forces Radio in New York, he showed up at Hope’s Pepsodent Show rehearsal with a pineapple sundae, and told Marx, “I sneaked up behind Hope and without telling him who I was, said, ‘Here’s our sundae, Mr. Hope’ and put it in his hand. Without turning around, and without missing a beat, Hope took the sundae from me and snapped, ‘What kept you so long, kid?’” <br />
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All through his life, he was also a prodigious womanizer — often leaving Dolores in tears. “I’m no angel. I’ve known very few angels,” Hope wrote in <i>Have Tux, Will Travel</i>. As Marx summed it up, he had more women than Errol Flynn, Chico Marx and his good friend Bing Crosby combined, which once brought the couple to the brink of divorce.<br />
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The irony is: Bob Hope’s signature song, “Thanks for the Memory,” is about a couple who is contemplating divorce, and then they begin to reminisce about the wonderful times they’ve had, and decide to stay together.<br />
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Dolores toughed it out, knowing infidelity was Bob’s weakness — albeit, like his good qualities, it played out in extreme ways. <br />
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<b>Agent of Conversion</b><br />
“Dolores,” Father Groeschel said, “faithfully, prayerfully, patiently and with a certain amount of suffering” endured these trials. “She was a devout Christian wife, and she did what she was supposed to do.” Quite simply, the reason she was able to persevere, as he summed it up, is that “Dolores Hope was a great Christian.”<br />
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Through it all, she was praying him into the Church. <br />
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“Basically, the agent of his conversion was his wife,” observed Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington, who got to know Hope through Cardinal Terence Cooke of New York (whose cause for beatification is now in Rome), when he served as his secretary.<br />
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She was a daily communicant and was particularly devoted to Our Lady, and she prayed for him with a deep faith — and asked others to pray for him as well.<br />
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Also — and this is not to be underestimated —“she took very good care of him,” longtime friend Virginia Zamboni said.<br />
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Father Groeschel observed the conversion process up close.<br />
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“They were both very friendly people,” he said. Years before he converted, they would open their “large” yet “comfortable” home — but not mansion-like — to guests from time to time. “Bob,” he said, “was very pleasant and easy to get on with” — not at all “on stage.”<br />
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He loved to tell a story to priests who visited, sometimes for retreats Dolores hosted, about a “big Catholic” event he attended where “the priest who was introducing him told eight jokes.” Father Groeschel recalled that “Bob got up, looked at the crowd,” as if warming up to tell his own set of jokes, “and said, ‘Let us pray.’<br />
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“That,” said Father Groeschel, “is real Bob Hope!”<br />
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In the midst of the mirth, Father Groeschel emphasized, he was “extremely respectful to a priest. Practically every word or sentence, he would call me ‘Father.’”<br />
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Of course, it’s quite comical to imagine Bob Hope — this man who was so firmly planted in the here and now, not missing a beat when it came to human nature — reacting to all of the reminders of eternity around him.<br />
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Sometimes, the two intersected, as when Dolores wrote to Father George Rutler on Dec. 9, 1991: “One of the times I was watching you on EWTN you told a wonderful story about St. Philip Neri, who died with a Bible and a joke book along side of him. … I told Bob about this, and he asked if there really was such a joke book. Is it possible that anything like this can be traced?”<br />
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They shared more than laughs. <br />
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“They were very generous in every way,” said Cardinal McCarrick. “The many benefactions are legion.”<br />
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For example, in May 1994, Our Lady of Hope Chapel, endowed by the Hopes in memory of Bob’s mother Avis, was dedicated at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.<br />
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And Father Groeschel noted, “They supported many works of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal.”<br />
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God was generous, too — with his grace.<br />
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<b>Arc of Conversion</b><br />
The gradual arc of Bob Hope’s conversion is apparent in his last book, My Life in Jokes, divided into 10 decades. Introducing his fourth decade, when he started entertaining the troops, he wrote: “I was offering time and laughs — the men and women fighting the war were offering up their lives. They taught me what sacrifice was all about.”<br />
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It was during World War II, according to Cardinal McCarrick, that Bob became “very close” to New York Cardinal Francis Spellman. “They made all those rounds visiting the troops. And I really think that Bob was impressed by the faith of the Catholic men and women in the service that he met and by their enthusiasm to greet Cardinal Spellman. He often said, ‘He got a bigger hand than I did.’”<br />
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“For many years,” Cardinal McCarrick said, “we had been chatting with him about the Church.”<br />
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God began, gradually, to wake him up to spiritual horizons.<br />
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For instance, Hope had lots of trouble with his eyes (first left, and then even right, would hemorrhage) and often had to rest in a dark room after surgery — once for three weeks. For the peripatetic Hope, that must have been misery, but also a time for badly needed reflection.<br />
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In his late 80s, at age 89, Bob Hope got the ultimate wake-up call.<br />
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It was at the festivities surrounding the opening of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Nov. 4, 1991.<br />
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As Marx describes Hope’s reaction to his reduced status, “He couldn’t believe it. ‘I’m Bob Hope,’ he complained to the people in charge. … ‘I’m sure I’m on the limo list.’”<br />
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But he wasn’t.<br />
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This world-class comedian and philanthropist, who had journeyed the world many times over, “flying a few million miles,” since World War II, entertaining “his boys”; this friend of presidents and royalty since the ’40s — who had “known most of the great personalities of our time, in politics, sports and show business,” as he wrote in Don’t Shoot, It’s Only Me —was now being shunted aside to make small talk on an open-air tram with Lou Wasserman and Michael Eisner on the way to celebrating Reagan’s immortalization at his brand-new library.<br />
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After all these years of self-indulgence — interlaced with great generosity — God was tapping Bob on the shoulder to give him a spiritual pineapple ice-cream sundae.<br />
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In his last 10 years, according to Marx, he finally settled down and began enjoying life with Dolores, attending church regularly with her at St. Charles Borromeo in North Hollywood.<br />
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“Dolores,” Cardinal McCarrick said, “always was anxious that he become a Catholic. I think he had been close to the Church in faith for many years … and she was the one who kept bringing it up to him as a possibility. She would never force anyone. She was always very thoughtful and considerate. But she was persistent in saying ‘One of these days; one of these days.’ And, finally, he said, ‘Okay, it’s time.’”<br />
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Father Groeschel said that while Bob Hope was advanced in age (i.e., 93) when he converted, “He was very clear” and lucid and “could talk.”<br />
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Msgr. Thomas Kiefer, the former pastor at St. Charles Borromeo, 1984-2000, “was the one who ultimately brought him into the Church” 15 years ago, said Cardinal McCarrick. Msgr. Kiefer, “a dear friend of both of them,” died on Oct. 30, 2006.<br />
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Bob Hope died in 2003; Dolores followed him on Sept. 19, at age 102.<br />
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Late this summer, when Dolores was still “quite conscious,” Father Groeschel stopped by to see her.<br />
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“Dolores, I hope you’re living comfortably,” he said.<br />
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She responded with a quip, “I’m ready to get out of here comfortably.”<br />
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Knowing she was instrumental in helping her husband win the biggest prize of all must have been great comfort, indeed.<br />
<br />
<i>Mary Claire Kendall is a Washington-based journalist and screenwriter.<br />
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Copyright © 2011 Circle Media, Inc. All rights reserved.<br />
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</b>Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-49726178696633395062011-08-22T15:34:00.026-04:002021-03-04T16:42:02.961-05:00Gary Cooper's AuthenticityThe screen legend had the human warmth and grace to make his conversion to Catholicism seem natural.<br />
BY MARY CLAIRE KENDALL<br />
<br />
Posted 7/21/11 at 11:21 AM<br />
<a href="http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/gary-coopers-authenticity/">http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/gary-coopers-authenticity/</a><div><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: xx-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><b style="color: #38761d;"><i><u><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpTSXGBiEz32a2JdYgHAV3GT2EVUHr9nEqrIB1wSZ_MoimLHPFdHwUS3Rb2DMQ2aFxnaZHjAKkZZr_y_GWlojQthSYcOqL79CB2YCHNlfgSlxNxNtirPv9ENTyA-U5Ifs3k7aZ6vYmuFef/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="164" data-original-width="220" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpTSXGBiEz32a2JdYgHAV3GT2EVUHr9nEqrIB1wSZ_MoimLHPFdHwUS3Rb2DMQ2aFxnaZHjAKkZZr_y_GWlojQthSYcOqL79CB2YCHNlfgSlxNxNtirPv9ENTyA-U5Ifs3k7aZ6vYmuFef/" width="320" /></a></div></u></i></b><div style="text-align: center;">Gary Cooper playing beleaguered Marshall Will Kane in <em>High Noon</em></div></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #38761d; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: xx-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: normal; font-weight: 400;"><br /></span></span></span></span></span>Hollywood icon Gary Cooper, who died 50 years ago this year, had a refreshing authenticity that makes his conversion to Catholicism only natural.<br />
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Contrary to frequent reports asserting otherwise, his conversion was not prompted by illness. “No way,” his daughter, Maria Cooper Janis, said. “He was coming to this on his own, in his own time … bits and pieces of his own life that he wanted to put together in a new way.” <br />
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“He had a very real spirituality,” Maria said, “that wasn’t an ‘ism’ … that, I think, he was born with, that he grew up with, living out West in nature [and] having a very strong affinity to the American-Indian culture and spirituality.” <br />
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Born May 7, 1901, in Helena, Mont., as the Old West was fading, Cooper was an accidental star, coming to Hollywood to find work as a commercial artist and be closer to his parents. <br />
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After he landed some stunt work, the handsome, understated Cooper was soon “discovered,” and, in 1925, he began acting in uncredited roles. <br />
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His film career, spanning 36 years, took off with <em>Wings </em>(1928), winner of the first Best Picture Academy Award.<br />
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His scene was a short one — just two-and-a-half minutes long. But, as Paramount Pictures’ legend A.C. Lyles described it, “When he came on the screen, it just lit up with him.” With just 200 feet of film, Hollywood moguls knew they were looking at a star.<br />
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Indeed, they were. <br />
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He singlehandedly lifted Paramount’s sagging Depression-era fortunes, playing “everyman” heroes, perfectly capturing the era, such as Longfellow Deeds in <em>Mr. Deeds Goes to Town</em> (1936); Long John Willoughby in <em>Meet John Doe</em> (1941) — both Frank Capra classics — and Alvin York in <em>Sergeant York</em> (1941), Cooper’s favorite role and one steeped in Christian spirituality, for which he won his first Oscar. <br />
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He came to embody the essence of the American character, especially that unique combination of rugged individualism and magnanimous selflessness — in his case, nurtured by the West and his English immigrant parents, who inculcated in him the elegant manners of a “gentleman.” <br />
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“With Gary, there are always wonderful hidden depths that you haven’t found yet,” <em>Mr. Deeds Goes to Town</em> co-star Jean Arthur said. “You feel like you’re resting on the Rock of Gibraltar.” (<em>Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success</em> by Joseph McBride)<br />
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Of the genre of film with which he was most identified — the Western — having starred in <em>The Virginian</em> (1931), the original, standard-setting Western, he said in a 1959 <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKvJWsk-Jc8">interview</a>: “I like Westerns because the good ones are real … [telling] stories of … pioneers [who] braved the elements, and … [through] the Western picture … we realize that our country was and is full of people who believe in America.” <br />
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Cooper was a “great movie actor” because in screenwriter/director Richard Brooks’ view, “he can make you feel something, something visceral, something deep, something that matters. He is who he plays.” <br />
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<em>High Noon</em>, a flawless Western, considered his greatest film, for which he won his second Oscar, revealed the moral struggle in the victory of good over evil. <br />
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In contrast, recent box office flop <em>Atlas Shrugged: Part I</em> calls to mind the one role Cooper played — Howard Roark in Warner Bros. Pictures’ <em>The Fountainhead</em>, Ayn Rand’s other work — that did not reflect Cooper’s character at all. <br />
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As Maria said of her father, “While he stood for rugged individualism — the individual against the world — anything that smelled of selfishness or exclusively self-interest was not his thing.” <br />
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Cooper’s self-effacing nature permeated his life. In March 1961, dying of cancer, he flew to New York to record the off-camera narration for <em>The Real West.</em> TV producer Donald Hyatt recalled “his simplicity and lack of ‘big star’ pretentions.” For instance, when there was no room for his coat on the rack, Cooper said, “Don’t take another coat off: Just throw mine anywhere” (<em>Gary Cooper: American Hero</em> by Jeffrey Meyers). <br />
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But, like all heroes, mere mortals after all, Cooper had a fatal flaw, which, ironically, surfaced after the filming of <em>The Fountainhead</em>, when the two stars — the married Cooper and Patricia Neal, 25 years his junior — began an affair, creating, as Cooper’s daughter notes with wry understatement, a “complicated situation.” <br />
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As Richard Widmark summed it up in <em>American Hero</em>, “Cooper was “catnip to the ladies.” From the start, his leading ladies, including, for instance, Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead, Lupe Velez, Carole Lombard, Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly — and many other women along the way — warmed up quickly to him. <br />
<br />
They were always brief affairs that went with the filmmaking territory, where falling in love on screen simply continued off screen. <br />
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The affair with Neal was different. It endured beyond filming.<br />
<br />
It began in October 1948, after <em>The Fountainhead</em> wrapped, and continued until Christmas 1951, when Cooper, realizing the affair must end, gave Neal a fur coat and left for Europe — exactly a year after he had taken her to Cuba, seeking his good friend Ernest Hemingway’s approval of this long-term extramarital relationship, which he failed to get. <br />
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But God brought great good out of this “complicated situation,” which was extremely difficult on every individual involved — Cooper suffered debilitating ulcers; his family, along with Neal, endured intense emotional strain. Neal became pregnant and had an abortion in March 1950. <br />
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The spiritual brick bats — turning points — his weakness precipitated were nothing new.<br />
<br />
He had suffered a nervous breakdown in 1931 due to Hollywood’s filmmaking demands on their new star and his non-stop romancing. As he wrote his nephew Howard: “I had drifted, taken advice, let people get at me through my emotions, my sympathy, my affections …”<br />
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As he would later, he sought solace and healing in Europe in 1931, having lived in England as a child for two years, some 20 years earlier. After a year away amidst high society, and fully rejuvenated, a key turning point in his life arrived in the form of the lovely Eastern socialite Veronica “Rocky” Balfe, niece of famed MGM art director Cedric Gibbons, who was 12 years his junior. He married her a year later on Dec. 15, 1933. <br />
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A Catholic, with refined manners — albeit some detractors criticized her perceived Eastern snobbery — she brought great stability and genuine love to Cooper’s life.<br />
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However, as Ted Nugent, a studio electrician at Paramount who observed him closely, commented in <em>Gary Cooper: American Hero</em>, “If he was born for the camera, he was born to make love. … He wanted to satisfy women … enjoyed looking at them, listening to them, pleasing them. … A guy like that does not change.” <br />
Not without grace, that is.<br />
<br />
After separating from his family in May 1951, in the wake of his affair with Neal, Cooper came to realize his life’s emptiness. His character Will Kane in <em>High Noon</em> (1952), filmed in the fall of 1951, perfectly reflected the moral conflict he was feeling.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWB4PXaa3jIQojA-GoDsWGnjCufB2_nre_mqhuiC_WDOPDyLBcByI8c6Ux8mUlHpg9sbUaKV8dEoXUuq20wZyCks3XCQWmOliifDgjFy_0Uuq1yZXNBy3q2ldQulyD3kwj3ROESeRv5jEp/s1600/GaryCooper+with+Pope+Pius+XII+%2528web%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" qaa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWB4PXaa3jIQojA-GoDsWGnjCufB2_nre_mqhuiC_WDOPDyLBcByI8c6Ux8mUlHpg9sbUaKV8dEoXUuq20wZyCks3XCQWmOliifDgjFy_0Uuq1yZXNBy3q2ldQulyD3kwj3ROESeRv5jEp/s320/GaryCooper+with+Pope+Pius+XII+%2528web%2529.jpg" width="235" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gary Cooper and family meeting <br />
Pope Pius XII on June 26, 1953</td></tr>
</tbody></table>On June 26, 1953, while on a publicity tour, joined by his family to promote <em>High Noon</em>, he visited the Vatican and met Pope Pius XII, which made a deep impression on him. <br />
<br />
Everyone in Hollywood was begging for a memento. At the papal audience, Maria reminisced, “my father had rosaries up his arm,” while grasping other mementos. But, because of a bad back, he had trouble genuflecting and, as he did, “everything just fell — the medals and the rosaries and the holy cards …” While Cooper was scrambling on all fours, “suddenly,” she humorously recalled, he encountered “this scarlet shoe and a robe.” <br />
<br />
In early 1954, after filming <em>Return to Paradise</em> (1953), coincidentally about a father who returns to take care of his 16-year-old daughter, he returned to his family and his own 16-year-old daughter.<br />
<br />
After settling back into married life, he strayed again, now going for less-refined women — his affair with the Swedish actress Anita Ekberg the most salient example. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he told his wife with that classic boyish innocence. <br />
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She wasn’t amused. <br />
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Realizing the stress his wandering placed on his family, Cooper began going to church with Rocky and Maria outside of the ordinary Christmas and Easter routine. <br />
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Though he never talked about it, Maria senses he turned to religion because “he probably was looking for some more stability than he found personally.”<br />
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It happened very naturally. After Sunday Mass together, she said, “we’d joke about” the “very erudite, funny” Father Harold Ford — “a real man,” whom her father dubbed “Father Tough Stuff.” <br />
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Cooper was intrigued and said, “Oh, I’d like to hear him some day,” prompting Rocky to respond, “Well, come along.” <br />
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Father Ford’s sermons, Maria said, made him think. <br />
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Contrary to some accounts, Rocky did not engineer Cooper’s conversion. “It wasn’t knocking him over the head,” Maria said. “Because, believe me, no one made my father do what he didn’t want to do.”<br />
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Soon Rocky invited Father Ford over to their home, thinking the two men might share some spiritual reflections. Instead, they shared their mutual interest in guns, hunting, fishing and scuba diving! <br />
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In the midst of cavorting, the talk occasionally began to drift toward religion, mirroring the path followed by Sgt. Alvin York, who said, “A fellow can’t go looking for it; it’s just got to come to a fellow.” Sure enough, Father Ford and “Coop” began getting together for longer discussions — for instance, on drives up to Malibu. <br />
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Gradually, Cooper evidently concluded, in Ma York’s famous words, “a little religion wouldn’t do him no hurt” and, on April 9, 1959, was formally admitted into the Catholic Church. <br />
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Close family friend Shirley Burden — Cornelius Vanderbilt’s great-great-grandson, married to Douglas Fairbanks Sr.’s niece — who was himself a convert, served as Cooper’s godfather at his baptism. <br />
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Later that year, Cooper explained his conversion, saying: “I’d spent all my waking hours, year after year, doing almost exactly what I, personally, wanted to do; and what I wanted to do wasn’t always the most polite thing either. … This past winter I began to dwell a little more on what’s been in my mind for a long time [and thought], Coop, old boy, you owe somebody something for all your good fortune. I’ll never be anything like a saint. … The only thing I can say for me is that I’m trying to be a little better. Maybe I’ll succeed.” (<em>The Hollywood Greats</em> by Barry Norman).<br />
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In April 1961, a visibly moved Jimmy Stewart appeared at the Academy Awards to accept Cooper’s honorary Oscar and to “drop the hint” that his friend was seriously ill. The next day newspaper headlines around the world blared: “Gary Cooper Has Cancer.” <br />
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Visitors started coming, and messages poured in from friends and well-wishers around the world, including Pope John XXIII, Queen Elizabeth, John Wayne, Ernest Hemingway, former President Dwight Eisenhower, Bob Hope, Audrey Hepburn and many others. Even President John F. Kennedy called from Washington, finally getting through a day later.<br />
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Friends, expecting to find gloom at the Cooper home, instead found light and sunshine, crisp flowers and cheerful music, as the family faced this profoundly difficult time with faith. Billy Wilder “recalled that [Cooper] dressed in stylish pajamas and robe and seemed more composed than his guests.” As Rocky told Hedda Hopper, “What helped him most was his religion.” As his illness progressed, “He never asked ‘Why me?’ and never complained” and was spiritually enriched by the sacraments and books such as Bishop Fulton Sheen’s <em>Peace of Soul.</em> (<em>Gary Cooper: American Hero</em>; "How I Faced Tomorrow," interview with Veronica Cooper and Maria Cooper Janis) <br />
<br />
“I know,” announced Cooper as he lay dying, “that what is happening is God’s will. I am not afraid of the future” (<em>The Straits Times</em>, May 6, 1961). <br />
<br />
Gary Cooper died of prostate and colon cancer on May 13, 1961, and is beloved for the indelible portrait he gave us of what it is to be an authentic American hero — a portrait that’s incomplete without the story of his last heroic days.<br />
<br />
<em>Mary Claire Kendall writes from Washington, D.C.</em><br />
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Copyright © 2011 Circle Media, Inc. All rights reserved.<br />
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</u></b></span></span></div>Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-53943594091507489262011-08-22T11:27:00.005-04:002011-09-25T09:12:27.237-04:00Patricia Neal’s HeartOscar-winning actress’ journey was one of healing and forgiveness. <br />
BY MARY CLAIRE KENDALL<br />
<br />
Posted 8/10/11 at 4:56 PM<br />
<a href="http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/patricia-neals-heart/">http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/patricia-neals-heart/</a><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm23EslXm0ZTukdtWpq6IYcXXXfHXYjrbhCvWE2xPke3aT67mMRIbOYVpD2bqZsMb7v6wzLchblmgrRPFa60ha11B_vxraJPhDlbRlS8mcpzUvftjQaekwkH4XVZX31lJRQ92qH6W5Wz2a/s1600/Patricia+Neal+in+The+Fountainhead.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" qaa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm23EslXm0ZTukdtWpq6IYcXXXfHXYjrbhCvWE2xPke3aT67mMRIbOYVpD2bqZsMb7v6wzLchblmgrRPFa60ha11B_vxraJPhDlbRlS8mcpzUvftjQaekwkH4XVZX31lJRQ92qH6W5Wz2a/s1600/Patricia+Neal+in+The+Fountainhead.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Patricia Neal in <em>The Fountainhead</em></td></tr>
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Patricia Neal, who died a year ago this August, was one of the 20th century’s most gifted actresses of stage and screen. But soaring achievement was met with heart-rending tragedy, including three strokes that nearly ended her life at age 39. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div>Through it all — in a plan that only God could have written — she secured her greatest achievement of all: a surpassing quality of love, guided, after she hit rock bottom, by the richness of Catholicism.<br />
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It was a most unexpected development, making her remarkable life even more so.<br />
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Patricia Neal — christened “Patsy Louise” — was born on Jan. 20, 1926, in the small town of Packard, Ky., a close-knit community in the heart of coal country, where neighbor looked after neighbor and life’s pleasures were simple. <br />
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“Life in Packard,” she wrote in her critically acclaimed autobiography <em>As I Am</em>, “was very good.” The hub of activity was the church — “of course, Baptist” — and general store.<br />
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Her larger-than-life father William Burdette “Coot” Neal was from southern Virginia, where his family owned a tobacco plantation near Danville; and her earnest, warm-hearted mother, Eura Mildred Petrey, was from Packard, where her father, “Pappy,” was the town doctor. <br />
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“Remember what the Psalmist says,” Pappy would remind her. “‘He changes desert into pools of water.’”<br />
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At age 11, now living in Knoxville, Tenn., “I saw a glorious lady giving monologues, and that’s all I wanted to do …” she told <em>Turner Classic Movies’</em> host Robert Osborne in a 2004 Private Screenings interview. Her father’s boss’ daughter, just back from New York, was giving drama lessons, which her parents green-lighted Christmas 1937. “My monologues,” she wrote, “graduated from the front yard to Aunt Maude’s drawing room, and my audiences were growing. I got great notices the first play I did, so I knew I wanted to be an actress.”<br />
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During her first year at Northwestern University, her “daddy” — “the rock upon which anything good about me has been built” — died of a heart attack. Though eager to get to New York, she studied another year at Northwestern, at her family’s request, where drama teacher Alvina Krause was starting a summer theater and brought her along. From there she headed for New York, where she quickly landed an understudy role in <em>The Voice of the Turtle</em> and acquired her new name —”Patricia” — which the producer, Alfred de Liagre, thought matched her regal manner. <br />
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“Applause,” she wrote, “was love. It was approval by everybody. And I bathed in it.”<br />
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She also wanted the real thing. In New York, at age 19, when her first “boyfriend,” the son of an abortionist, told her he loved her more than anyone else, she traded in her virginity for “love.” When he dumped her for his virginal high-school sweetheart, she was deeply wounded.<br />
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Trusting her well-formed, sensitive theatrical instincts, she soon made her theatrical mark, landing a starring role in <em>Another Part of the Forest</em> (1946), for which she won a Tony in the first such awards ceremony; while, at the same time, hardened in “love,” she pursued romance without conscience and wrecked two marriages. <br />
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The offers started pouring in from Hollywood, and she landed a contract with Warner Bros. and the starring role in <em>John Loves Mary</em> opposite Ronald Reagan, whom she met on New Year’s Eve 1947 when she first arrived in Hollywood.<br />
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A year later, director King Vidor introduced her to Gary Cooper when she was testing for <em>The Fountainhead</em>, and, after filming wrapped, she began a legendary affair with her married co-star. <br />
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“When the young doctor took my virginity and made me a bad woman,” she wrote in <em>As I Am</em>, “I made up my mind I would never get hurt like that again. … Gary touched my heart as no one else had done before. I was really in love, and it was like I was innocent again.”<br />
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Predictably, the affair brought great turmoil to the lives of all involved — Patricia suffered a nervous breakdown when it came to an end, as it had to, by Christmas 1951; and Gary’s young daughter Maria famously spit on Patricia in public, according to <em>Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life</em> by Stephen Michael Shearer. “Gary adored her,” she wrote in <em>As I Am</em>. And, as she told Osborne, “He loved Rocky (his wife).” In 1959, during a chance encounter from afar in New York, Maria glowered at her, evidencing how raw the wound still was. <br />
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After Warner Bros. failed to renew her contract, , she returned to New York and the stage she loved so much, this time starring in Lillian Hellman’s <em>The Children’s Hour</em> and soon met and fell and love with renowned writer Roald Dahl, whom she married on July 2, 1953.<br />
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The marriage had some initial bumps — Roald asking for a divorce the first year — but, crisis averted, their children began making their grand entrances: Olivia Twenty, born on April 20, 1955; Chantal Tessa Sophia, born on April 11, 1957; Theo Matthew Dahl, born on July 30, 1960. <br />
<br />
Then tragedy struck on Dec. 5, 1960, when their son Theo — her “beautiful boy,” just 4 months old — was struck by a taxi as the family au pair was strolling him along a New York City street. He suffered brain damage, occasioning many surgeries and the family’s move back to England. <br />
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As Theo recovered, aided by Roald’s development of a successful therapeutic intervention, both career and family thrived: Patricia played Mrs. Failenson in <em>Breakfast at Tiffany’s</em> (1961), and they continued settling into a marvelous life in their white cottage with plush gardens at Great Missenden, not far from London, as, charmingly, Roald began testing his stories out on his children and writing some hit children’s books.<br />
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However, tragedy again struck the following year when Olivia, not qualifying for a scarce measles vaccine, contracted and died of the disease on Nov. 17, 1962. <br />
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Roald was <em>utterly devastated</em>. But, as they gradually picked up the pieces, Patricia landed the role of Alma Brown in <em>Hud</em> (1963), for which she won a Best Actress Oscar. The director Martin Ritt kindly scheduled filming in segments so she could take care of her most cherished role: that of mother and wife. A year later, Ophelia Magdalena was born on May 12, 1964.<br />
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As if the brain-damaging accident and death of Theo and Olivia, respectively, were not enough, on Feb. 17, 1965, while bathing Tessa, she suffered three near-fatal burst cerebral aneurysms and was in a coma for three weeks. <br />
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She had only that week begun filming John Ford’s <em>Seven Women</em> and was pregnant — a fact known only to her and Roald.<br />
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Just 39 years old, her life had changed inexorably.<br />
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As she worked to recover, she was guided by the strong, firm hand of Roald — sometimes seemingly too much so.<br />
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Then, one day she received a letter that would change her life — spiritually and emotionally. <br />
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It was from Maria Cooper, and while Roald later burned it, she will never forget the letter’s three key words: “I forgive you.” <br />
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“The grace of God in Maria,” according to Benedictine Mother Dolores Hart, a former Paramount actress, is what prompted this amazing gesture, as she stated in a 2010 "The World Over" interview. “Maria knew that ‘forgiveness demands an action,’ and I think that is one of the deepest realities of Christian love.”<br />
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On Aug. 4, 1965, having survived her stroke, Lucy Neal was born. As her precious baby grew, Patricia continued to heal physically, making her return speech in 1966 at The Waldorf Astoria in New York. It was a signal achievement for someone who had had to learn how to walk and speak again. As she noted in her speech — for which she had prepped and practiced to a wearying degree, “Tennessee hillbillies don’t conk out that easy.” <br />
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When she finished, she wrote, “I knew my life had been given back to me for one reason,” though she was unsure what that was.”<br />
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Later she recognized, among other purposes, her stroke brought attention to this all-too-common, debilitating medical emergency, serving as a catalyst for the building of many hospitals, including the Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center in Knoxville. <br />
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She credited “Roald the Rotten” for throwing her back in the deep water “where I belonged.” Indeed, by 1967, she was cast to play the leading role in <em>The Subject Was Roses</em> (1968). While it was difficult to learn lines, she quipped in her book, “I was a hit … just for being alive.”<br />
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However, when she won the starring role in the television pilot of "The Waltons" (1971), she was not asked to play the role in the TV series because executives worried her health would not bear up under the pressure.<br />
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Nor did her marriage bear up under the pressure; in 1972 Roald secretly began an affair with Catholic divorcee Felicity Crosland, the London-based freelance coordinator for David Ogilvy’s ad agency, who worked with Patricia when she began filming commercials for Maxim coffee. <br />
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In 1973, as the Maxim campaign was thriving, Patricia found herself returning every three weeks to New York, and wrote to Maria Cooper asking to get together. Maria replied, “I very much want to see you.” <br />
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Finally, after many attempts, Maria agreed to join Patricia for breakfast in her hotel suite. Upon arriving, Patricia wrote, she “spread her arms open to me. She held me, and the years of emptiness between me and Gary was over.” <br />
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“An amazing grace” occurred during that meeting, as she realized for the first time since her stroke, its gift: “Somehow, a memory that once had the power to wound me now passed benignly through my head.” <br />
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The memory was also being set right, as Patricia poignantly recounted in <em>As I Am</em>:<br />
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“Maria finally asked, ‘Is it true that you were pregnant by my father?’”<br />
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“Yes, I am sorry I didn’t have it.”<br />
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“It’s my loss, too. I’m the only one.” <br />
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Before the meeting ended, Maria asked her to promise to write to her mother, who was now “Mrs. John Converse.” <br />
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Five years later, while in Nice, France, in the summer of 1978, she again ran into Maria Cooper, now married to the accomplished pianist Byron Janis. Sensing Patricia’s inner turmoil, Maria asked her about her “faith in God,” and, told she was struggling with it, given all the tragedy in her life, Maria suggested she visit the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Conn.<br />
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In the fall of 1978, Maria said that Patricia, suffering under the weight of her crumbling marriage, called her and asked about that abbey. Maria gave her the contact information for her good friend, Dolores Hart, who had lived at the abbey in consecrated life for 15 years. “Through grace or whatever,” Maria said, “she was the one who picked up the phone and made the appointment and took herself to the abbey.” Her role, she said, was to “give her the opportunity,” but after that “it was Pat’s party.”<br />
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As the date of her scheduled visit neared, she wrote, “I suddenly wondered what the hell I was doing, going to a Catholic nunnery.”<br />
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When she arrived at the abbey in May 1979, she wrote, “I was taken to have a parlor with the nun who had written to me. She greeted me from behind a grille and had the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen.” She outlined the plan for the three day visit and in response to Patricia’s query about smoking told her, “while it was a ‘prohibiting law’, the abbess ‘knew from real sin,’ and she was sure a way to indulge my vice could be found.”<br />
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During prayers in the monastery chapel, “filled with flowers beautifully arranged … (and) calming strains of Gregorian chant … from behind a large grille …” Patricia wrote, “I remember thinking it was the first time I had felt close to peace in a long time.” And, the meals, she wrote, were wonderful, especially the fresh bread! <br />
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On second day, she wrote, “I worked up courage to talk about the struggle my marriage had become.” The nun — the same one with the beautiful eyes — only listened. <br />
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Later when she did a reading of Helen Keller for the abbey, her goal became clear: “At other times,” Keller wrote, “things that I have been taught … and learned … drop away, as the lizard sheds its skin, and I see my soul as God sees it.”<br />
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On the third day, when the nun took her to the garden, Patricia “carefully avoided mentioning the affair with Gary …” But, the nun suggested, Patricia wrote, “I would have to go … even further back than the stroke to find the seeds of my discontent” — after which the affair with Gary Cooper spilled out. Patricia lamented “there was no way we could have been together.” The nun “corrected” her by saying “‘But there was’” a way, i.e., spiritually. “I never forgot that conversation,” Patricia wrote. <br />
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Before she left, Patricia chose a flower from the greenhouse as a remembrance of Olivia. “That evening at vespers, I saw it had been placed right in front of the altar. I went back to my little room and wept.” Later, as she was packing up, she realized she had forgotten all about “the booze” she had brought to help her endure the three days at the abbey!<br />
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A few years later, having benefited from the abbey’s consistent guidance, when Patricia was again in New York for filming on <em>Ghost Story</em>, she happened to see the death notice for Rocky’s second husband, Dr. John Marquis Converse on Feb. 1, 1981. With that, she finally fulfilled the promise she made to Maria years earlier and wrote to Rocky. <br />
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After Rocky received her letter, Maria told Patricia her mother was so moved, that she read it “over and over.” Amazingly, Patricia told Osborne, Rocky wrote her back on April 20, “my Olivia’s birthday.”<br />
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“After some time had passed,” Maria said, “she and my mother arranged to meet.” This lovely ending to such a difficult personal trial for all involved was “so good,” Patricia told Osborne — “what life’s made of.” <br />
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In 1983, after Roald asked Patricia for a divorce, she was utterly devastated, and, as Mother Dolores recounts, she returned to the States intent on writing a scathing autobiography. But Mother Benedict Duss, the abbess and founder of Regina Laudis, told her writing such a book would be a decidedly bad idea. Instead, she instructed her to calm down and write her autobiography with Mother Dolores, who urged her “to remember it all” — a grueling process that took five long years and 1,200 pages.<br />
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At the outset, as she wrote this book and recovered from her “pits” in the wake of her divorce, she lived at the abbey for a few months and followed the routine of a postulant as best she could. Mother Dolores recalled with delight on "The World Over with Raymond Arroyo" shortly after Patricia’s death, how she cleaned the monastery grille better than anyone ever had. She also went to work cleaning the cobwebs out of her soul, facing, with brutal honesty, what she needed to set right in her life and becoming a willing participant in the process by which the Holy Spirit would “change desert into pools of water,” as her Pappy had counseled some five decades earlier.<br />
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She told Mother Dolores she wanted to be buried at the abbey. But Mother Dolores told her she first needed to become a Catholic. “Ooohhh. Well … I’ll work on that,” Mother Dolores said she replied, doing a marvelous imitation of that inimitable voice and style.<br />
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As she worked on her conversion, in 1990, shortly before Theo turned 30, she finally decided to call Roald and his now-wife Felicity, and let bygones be bygones. She talked to Roald three more times before his death later that year. Nov.17 was “the last time I hung up on my love” — coincidentally the anniversary of Olivia’s death, as well as that of his mother.<br />
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On March 30, 2010, she was finally admitted to the Church. <br />
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Four months later, on Aug. 8, 2010, she died of lung cancer at the age of 84 in her beloved Martha’s Vineyard. She was laid to rest at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Conn.<br />
<br />
<em>Mary Claire Kendall is a Washington-based journalist and screenwriter. This piece serves as a companion to </em><a href="http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/gary-coopers-authenticity/"><em>“Gary Cooper’s Authenticity.”</em></a><br />
<br />
Copyright © 2011 Circle Media, Inc. All rights reserved.<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #d9ead3; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><b><u><br />
</u></b></span></span>Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-53986300088261491682011-08-15T22:43:00.010-04:002011-09-25T09:14:58.011-04:00Patricia Neal's Legacy<em>Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center: "A House of Heroes"</em><br />
<br />
By Mary Claire Kendall<br />
<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Patricia Neal as "Alma Brown" in <em>Hud. </em><br />
Credit: Paramount Pictures</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
Patricia Neal, exquisite actress of stage and film, known for <em>Breakfast at Tiffany’s</em> (1961), <em>The Day the Earth Stood Still</em> (1951) and <em>Hud</em> (1963), for which she won a Best Actress Oscar, died some forty-five years after she suffered three debilitating strokes in one day—on February 17, 1965—that nearly took her life. At the time, just 39, she was pregnant with her daughter Lucy Neal, whom she gave birth to six months later on August 4, 1965. <br />
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“I was as one dead,” she wrote in her classic autobiography, <em>As I Am</em>. “My right side was completely paralyzed and I had been left with maddeningly double vision. I had not power of speech and my mind just didn’t’ work.”<br />
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Hers was a miraculous recovery—the fruit of sheer grit, determination, and just plain stubbornness.<br />
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She also had amazing support systems. Valerie Eaton Griffith, her tutor, helped lift her “out of the cabbage patch,” she wrote. “A master (her husband’s role) can tell you what he expects… a teacher though awakens your own expectations.” <br />
<br />
“Suddenly Patricia Neal wanted to live,” <em>Life Magazine</em> headlined its feature story about her. Patricia countered, it would be truer to say, “Suddenly I realized I was, in fact, living and was starting to like the experience again.” <br />
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She returned to public life with her debut speech in March 1966 at The Waldorf Astoria in New York. The occasion was “An Evening with Patricia Neal.” It was a signal achievement for someone who had had to learn how to walk and speak again—and, perhaps most dauntingly of all for an actress, remember lines.<br />
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“Tennessee hillbillies don't conk out that easy,” she quipped at that pivotal moment dramatizing her triumph over the tragedy.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRzGt9XajWP0uK94oZT49a8wrniMW4VWOankcH0Uv0XIa_hqd_jhug-K83l0-1B9mMngsgRjtjyVubQ8_j7ATh8Len698XxsFmTSqsaA7mHq4gQ4hO6J_TRWI2GVANIXhWbx28lZIK17Jj/s1600/As+I+Am+%2528photo%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" naa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRzGt9XajWP0uK94oZT49a8wrniMW4VWOankcH0Uv0XIa_hqd_jhug-K83l0-1B9mMngsgRjtjyVubQ8_j7ATh8Len698XxsFmTSqsaA7mHq4gQ4hO6J_TRWI2GVANIXhWbx28lZIK17Jj/s1600/As+I+Am+%2528photo%2529.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cover photo of <em>As I Am.</em> <br />
From the Author's Collection; Globe Photos</td></tr>
</tbody></table>When she finished her speech, she wrote, “I knew my life had been given back to me for one reason.” Unsure what it was at the time, she credited her husband, Roald Dahl, famed writer of children’s books, for throwing her back into the deep water “where I belonged.” <br />
<br />
As her post-stroke life unfolded, besides resuming her acting career with a notable performance in <em>The Subject Was Roses</em> (1968), she began bringing the reality of stroke to the public’s attention in speeches around the country in the 1970s, spotlighting its debilitating effects and how to surmount the practical obstacles to resuming normal life, or a semblance thereof, in the wake of a stroke’s neurological devastation.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbTqtaYVueCuFp88VHptiilWPihe0yln_wpwxB9ZLoPYyWq5aBCKphxwuq93Ig1Ol4TMSr7Dc4BmynFgAh_0-bdxZGp4iirODmavbfu4BFhmqMuWMtqJb_iv7zbwOf4m8V6CjuoWwYCCR1/s1600/Patricia+Neal+%2528The+Subject-Roses%2529.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" naa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbTqtaYVueCuFp88VHptiilWPihe0yln_wpwxB9ZLoPYyWq5aBCKphxwuq93Ig1Ol4TMSr7Dc4BmynFgAh_0-bdxZGp4iirODmavbfu4BFhmqMuWMtqJb_iv7zbwOf4m8V6CjuoWwYCCR1/s1600/Patricia+Neal+%2528The+Subject-Roses%2529.bmp" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Patricia Neal as "Nettie Cleary" in <em>The Subject Was Roses</em>. <br />
Credit: Metro Goldwyn Mayer</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div>Her story—initially publicized in the <em>Life Magazine</em> article, from which flowed a cascade of publicity—not only served as an inspiration to stroke victims worldwide, but soon began to catalyze the establishment of many hospitals and centers focused on helping patients rehabilitate to the fullest extent possible. <br />
<br />
One such hospital is the Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center in Knoxville—<a href="http://www.patneal.org/news/?sid=14&nid=83">one of the finest in the country</a>, according to surveyors for the Council on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF). <br />
<br />
When Fort Sanders Presbyterian Hospital in Knoxville—now the Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center—wrote Patricia to inform her they were building a wing dedicated to rehabilitation and wanted to name it after her, she replied “Great, Great, Great, Great.” <br />
<br />
In her speech at the dedication ceremony, she dubbed it a “House of Heroes,” which the center put on an engraved plaque in the foyer. <br />
<br />
This “House of Heroes” is one her most enduring legacies. <br />
<br />
Since its opening in 1978, it has offered a <a href="http://www.patneal.org/news/?sid=14&nid=8">comprehensive, team approach to care</a>, whereby physical, occupational, recreational, behavioral medicine and speech language therapists work with physicians to develop individual plans of care designed to return patients to as normal a lifestyle as possible. <br />
<br />
Ironically, on February 17, 2005—forty years to the day after she suffered her three massive, nearly fatal, strokes—Patricia Neal was admitted to the center for two weeks of therapy helping her recover from recent surgeries with complications.<br />
<br />
“I was so thrilled to learn that I would be able to come to my hospital for treatment,” Patricia said. “I’ve always said there is no better place for rehabilitation patients …and <a href="http://www.patneal.org/news/?sid=14&nid=83">now I have experienced that care personally</a>!” <br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOS3Le0gDHmAnI3eISUCcCzvNr9fdNfjq5tQQ3ZuNLNeHkZDiUxQ6Q6d0LbwIAbZQynSK8-9JUGl0IxAnAiZLI9l8zV50k-na-czRmMpTwDOwXovgA4oawQRsx7jrpkQf2ZW__8jdZkhUp/s1600/Patricia+Neal+with+Medallion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" naa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOS3Le0gDHmAnI3eISUCcCzvNr9fdNfjq5tQQ3ZuNLNeHkZDiUxQ6Q6d0LbwIAbZQynSK8-9JUGl0IxAnAiZLI9l8zV50k-na-czRmMpTwDOwXovgA4oawQRsx7jrpkQf2ZW__8jdZkhUp/s1600/Patricia+Neal+with+Medallion.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Patricia Neal proudly displays her <br />
“House for Heroes” medallion. <br />
The medallions are presented to patients <br />
who are completing their inpatient therapy <br />
at Patricia Neal Rehab Center</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Dr. Mary Dillon, PNRC Medical Director, recalled, “She went through therapy just as any of our other patients do, and progressed beautifully. She also brightened the spirits of PNRC patients with whom she worked side by side.” <br />
<br />
At the time, Patricia was splitting her time between New York City and Martha’s Vineyard, where she participated in Theater Guild “Theatre at Sea” programs. In May 2005, she traveled to Hollywood to receive a star on the Walk of Fame. While she told the Center’s “News,” she was “thrilled,” she also added, with that hearty laugh of hers, “It’s about time!” <br />
<br />
Every year she attended the Patricia Neal Golf Classic in August that brings Tennessee pro golfers together with local amateurs for a worthwhile cause at one of the state’s top courses—raising more than $3 million in net proceeds since 1985 to support the many programs and services of the rehab center. <br />
<br />
In 2011, they held the tournament on August 8, the first anniversary of her death. It was a special occasion—honoring a woman who helped other stroke victims survive and thrive, just like her, the ‘Tennessee hillbilly,’ who rose to become one of the 20th century’s greatest actresses of stage and film. <br />
<br />
<em>Mary Claire Kendall has written about notable stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, including, most recently, screen legend <a href="http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/gary-coopers-authenticity/">Gary Cooper</a> and <a href="http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/patricia-neals-heart/">Patricia Neal</a>.</em>Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-80501282490665828942011-07-17T10:33:00.014-04:002023-11-12T09:55:50.992-05:00Mary Surratt: 'An Innocent Woman'<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjRCeCA31w14pKO35nALI6U7Yl6CKcAMjNcFFwu-yUzOwmyX_l9LRVzu3S7R5S1vwTjU84o43_OEEV0gtBZzMMiwltdmdguEgFtDxGmkoqrtGr9hbHw41YEynYYnUVD1HefzTSnZvtg_Rp/s1600/Robin+Wright+and+James+McAvoy+in+The+Conspirator.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><img border="0" height="192" m="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjRCeCA31w14pKO35nALI6U7Yl6CKcAMjNcFFwu-yUzOwmyX_l9LRVzu3S7R5S1vwTjU84o43_OEEV0gtBZzMMiwltdmdguEgFtDxGmkoqrtGr9hbHw41YEynYYnUVD1HefzTSnZvtg_Rp/s320/Robin+Wright+and+James+McAvoy+in+The+Conspirator.jpg" true="" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Robin Wright and James McAvoy in <i>The Conspirator (2011)</i></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-size: x-small;"></span><br /><br />
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">Robert
Redford's latest film, <i>The Conspirator </i>— released just days after the
Sesquicentennial of the attack on Fort Sumter, the Civil War's start — stirred
many childhood memories. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgilHiT7v7kARgfIeRK-9J_s6ZM1pburo5U-b9RKjLzGWH1Y50JVh6NvT0sDhWwUy7rClUgL4dSekKu4hS9u_hJQEbqUsxGDdJ5EqdX4Aau3nNTCEcH1Rdz2r-19Ok6JuV7K5CXgE57zSFuFAKqRRd4ETXm_JiP4QFTVr7i4oRSVilh7tNqZPyjlB-OaA/s523/Lillian%20Webster%20Keane%20%232%20-%20Copy.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="523" data-original-width="368" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgilHiT7v7kARgfIeRK-9J_s6ZM1pburo5U-b9RKjLzGWH1Y50JVh6NvT0sDhWwUy7rClUgL4dSekKu4hS9u_hJQEbqUsxGDdJ5EqdX4Aau3nNTCEcH1Rdz2r-19Ok6JuV7K5CXgE57zSFuFAKqRRd4ETXm_JiP4QFTVr7i4oRSVilh7tNqZPyjlB-OaA/w141-h200/Lillian%20Webster%20Keane%20%232%20-%20Copy.jpg" width="141" /></a></div><br />My great-grandmother, Lillian Webster Keane (pictured left), who was a longtime
Washingtonian, frequently spoke about the injustice the film portrays. <o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">Fittingly, <i>The Conspirator </i>opened April 15 — the same day,
146 years earlier, President Abraham Lincoln was celebrating the end of the
Civil War.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">The bloody conflict that ripped our nation apart for four years,
North against South, was now over — ending officially on April 9, 1865, when
Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse to Union
Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">After enjoying a pleasant carriage ride with first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, soaking in springtime Washington, this president, a lover of
literature, was soaking in <i>Our American Cousin </i>at his box in the new
Ford's Theatre. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">Of course, drama of an epic nature would soon envelop the
audience, when Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor
and familiar face at the theater, slipped into Lincoln's box and fatally shot
him, yelling, <i>"Sic semper tyrannus"</i> (thus always to tyrants),
as he plunged onto the stage and injured his leg, limping to his well-planned
escape. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">In the ensuing investigation into the tragedy, Mary Surratt, a
Maryland Catholic, was accused and convicted of conspiring to kill the
president. She was executed by hanging on July 7, 1865. She is played by Robin
Wright in Redford's film. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">Lillian Webster knew Father Jacob Walter, who was close to
Surratt. (In fact, he heard Surratt's last confession before she was executed.)
Lillian said Father Walter always contended, "They hung an innocent
woman." <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">Ironically, Lincoln foreshadowed this injustice. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">As he wrote to close friend Joshua Speed 10 years earlier,
"As a nation, we began by declaring that 'All men are created equal.' When
the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'All men are created equal, except
Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer
emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to
Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base
alloy of hypocrisy." <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">My great-grandmother's father, Bradshaw Hall Webster, had worked
on Lincoln's presidential campaign fresh out of college. In the course of
campaigning, this son of the North met my great-</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">great-grandmother, Martha Mungen Starrett, whose family owned a
plantation in Jacksonville, Fla.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">When Bradshaw's lumber mill in Orono, Maine, burned down, he took
up the cause of temperance, as a "writer and orator," traveling up
and down the Eastern seaboard. After Martha died in 1881, the 33rd-degree Mason
remarried — of all things, a Catholic, whom he met through the convent school
his daughters attended. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">Lillian, born in 1878, was only 3 at the time of her father's
remarriage, and she soon became a Catholic. She noted in her diary how the faith
"lightened the burdens of life." In 1888, after President Benjamin
Harrison's election, Bradshaw moved his family to Washington. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">So it is that my "blue blood" great-grandmother, related
to Daniel Webster and President William Henry Harrison, grew up in a social and
cultural milieu in which the Civil War conflict still burned brightly so many
years later. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">She mingled with Washington's Catholic community, which included
friends of the wrongfully accused and executed Southern sympathizer Mary
Surratt, and dated the son of Dr. Samuel Mudd, the doctor who set Booth's
broken leg. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVWM-yr6ei37OkoKJ568ZTd2aKR4WMoN-O3T0HMZ59eob7J10iFAMaw6yVDKB3NbMJ08LuQFQA6qLfzN7ka0zDfc00lTIajehlcm-R6HkqYzcEAjN4pyJOXvvjPLzY8mXOcBXIM568b-vhf2voJfi440vfUicdSv4i17O1z69uXUE_TUSWlDMC4RAjaQ/s604/Grandmother%20Helena%20Biberstein.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="604" data-original-width="433" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVWM-yr6ei37OkoKJ568ZTd2aKR4WMoN-O3T0HMZ59eob7J10iFAMaw6yVDKB3NbMJ08LuQFQA6qLfzN7ka0zDfc00lTIajehlcm-R6HkqYzcEAjN4pyJOXvvjPLzY8mXOcBXIM568b-vhf2voJfi440vfUicdSv4i17O1z69uXUE_TUSWlDMC4RAjaQ/w143-h200/Grandmother%20Helena%20Biberstein.jpg" width="143" /></a></div>After Lincoln's assassination, the desire for retribution was so
intense, a kangaroo military tribunal, portrayed in <i>The Conspirator</i>,
sent Surratt to her death — a fate she faced with faith, clinging to her
constantly held rosary beads and praying until the end. <o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">As my great-grandmother always wisely counseled, "Two wrongs
don't make a right."</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">Her daughter, my grandmother Helena (shown left), like Surratt, died much too
young — the victim not of injustice, but of a heart weakened by rheumatic fever
that just stopped one day, on the way home from grandma's, as she held my
mother, then 6 months old, in her arms. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">Like Dr. Mudd, whose ancestors have tried in vain posthumously to
overturn his conviction — though President Andrew Johnson pardoned him in 1869
largely because of his work saving yellow-fever victims at his military prison,
as portrayed in <i>The Prisoner of Shark Island </i>(1936) — Mary Surratt's
name is still mud — something <i>The Conspirator </i>will hopefully help
correct. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">Thus would she finally rest in peace right there in Mount Olivet
Cemetery in Northeast Washington, not far from where my grandmother Helena is
buried. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">"The Conspirator" DVD is being released on August 16,
2011. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;"><span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">
<hr align="center" size="1" width="100%" />
</span></div>
<span face="Verdana, sans-serif" style="font-size: 7.5pt; line-height: 115%;">This article was originally
published under the title, "<a href="https://www.ncregister.com/news/mary-surratt-an-innocent-woman-0ni456p0">Mary Surratt, 'An Innocent Woman</a>'" in the
National Catholic Register, July 3-16, 2011 Issue </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #d9ead3; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><b><u><br />
</u></b></span></span>Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-78205633207070232162011-07-03T14:31:00.018-04:002021-05-28T19:39:03.360-04:00There Be Saints and Sinners<div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">By Mary Claire Kendall </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp0Re94AFvD_DKCCFejOU15CuUW6ALSGsNn5WceGRN5YMAG8FeQt0auCwMnKarnrIaPEUMsbjlGb-tmrRCQdJE5tI-zkLjsG3NQCuRfPsLmX4TaIdMK29q01evOWA-w1vBs7HTaxTIQ9lS/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="325" data-original-width="220" height="296" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp0Re94AFvD_DKCCFejOU15CuUW6ALSGsNn5WceGRN5YMAG8FeQt0auCwMnKarnrIaPEUMsbjlGb-tmrRCQdJE5tI-zkLjsG3NQCuRfPsLmX4TaIdMK29q01evOWA-w1vBs7HTaxTIQ9lS/w200-h296/image.png" width="200" /></a></div><br /><em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1316616/">There Be Dragons</a></em>, like a fine delicacy, can only be fully appreciated, it seems, through an acquired taste.</div></div>
<br />
This newly released film, written and directed by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0423646/">Roland Joffe</a>, of Oscar-nominated <i>The Killing Fields</i> and <i>The Mission</i> fame, tells the story of <a href="http://www.josemariaescriva.info/">St. Josemaria Escriva</a>, who founded “The Work of God” (“Opus Dei” in Latin), a world-wide phenomenon infused with the spirit of early Christians, where God is found in ordinary work.<br />
<br />
That Escriva’s approach is utterly grounded in what it means to be human is revealed in the opening Oscar Wilde quote, “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future”—a recurring theme, which provides the rationale for the quest for God, given our weak human nature, and the corresponding role God gives each of us.In Escriva’s case, the role was rather large; thus the epic nature of the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=I5sHwb2O5L8">film</a>.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://pro.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi3354434841/">When <i>There Be Dragons</i> opens</a>, it’s 1975. Escriva has just keeled over from a heart attack whereupon his cause of canonization surges—the requisite miracle for “beatification” provided when a nun with a tumor prays to God through Escriva’s intercession, and is cured. A journalist, who’s writing about him, realizing his father is from the same town, decides to try and reconnect with his estranged elder to see what, if anything, he knows about Escriva: A mother lode, it so happens.<br />
<br />
Some critics have less appreciation for Joffe’s substantial achievement—if not a masterpiece, then certainly masterful—because their base of understanding is limited. <br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH73vtwniHSlsXu4UFEKj5ruTEAD90KgNb6vc-gVANZEGvqHJAM6o4Fr0zZVErW7vJhAG2f_j8C1oCXGfIWrUGq8tN_r3Q1haBTzf_7d_K2aULtY5QYiiycyLkTv7K1KqQAlwt77QzNZC7/s1600/Manolo+in+There+Be+Dragons.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><img border="0" i="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH73vtwniHSlsXu4UFEKj5ruTEAD90KgNb6vc-gVANZEGvqHJAM6o4Fr0zZVErW7vJhAG2f_j8C1oCXGfIWrUGq8tN_r3Q1haBTzf_7d_K2aULtY5QYiiycyLkTv7K1KqQAlwt77QzNZC7/s1600/Manolo+in+There+Be+Dragons.jpg" true="" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Manolo, St. Josemaria's friend, played by Wes Bentley</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>But, for those, for instance, whose lives were directly and intimately affected by the Spanish Civil War—Spain devastated; beloved relatives, one of 500,000 souls, lost forever in the fighting—the appreciation is immense. As one Spaniard <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/be-dragons-review-171212">commented</a> on <i>The Hollywood Reporter</i> review, rating the film full of missing pieces, it had one piece right, namely: “… from most Spanish people’s point of view (it) is the best approach Hollywood has done to our civil war.”<br />
<br />
While the film is not without its flaws, as a screenwriter, I marveled at the craft Joffe brought to the story: the element of surprise, conflict, and more conflict—the very essence of drama—and directorial skill and cinematic vision on par with David Lean. <br />
<br />
Of course, flashbacks are generally a “no, no.” That’s because the action derives from the storyline—in this case an artifice—from which you are flashing back, lessening the forward-momentum.<br />
<br />
And, while Charlie Cox, who played Escriva, gave an overall masterful performance, sometimes he seemed to translate Escriva’s cheerfulness without enough reference to the weight of his human frailty, making that smile he would flash seem more a preternatural gift than a triumph over weakness—for love. <br />
<br />
As the current prelate of Opus Dei, Bishop Javier Echeverria, commented on the portrayal of Escriva, while it was impressive, he was “mucho mas!”<br />
<br />
All of which means, Escriva’s story will just have to be told free of the artifice, dramatic though it may be.<br />
<br />
Joffe certainly whets the appetite for that story! <br />
<br />
For more information on <em>There Be Dragons</em>, including cinema locations and times, see <a href="http://dragonsresources.com/">http://dragonsresources.com/</a>.<br />
<br />
Published in <em>The Wanderer</em> on Sunday, May 26, 2011.<br />
<br />
Here’s a PDF version of the published article<br />
<a href="http://www.stjosemaria.org/dragons/pdf/ThereBeSaintsandSinners.pdf">http://www.stjosemaria.org/dragons/pdf/ThereBeSaintsandSinners.pdf</a>.Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-37371437005242958142011-06-28T23:11:00.014-04:002022-03-29T16:49:29.886-04:00Mary Surratt, 'An Innocent Woman' <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpHB6-MJ_6f9kletgZ4-YWlK1cRNBd_nYViBnl5tbZaZ6SKsrjUF8jg8v5rp5DAqNAf5L4_AeDm6x00SfXi98JJ-G56edcH5o7Ev58R3brElnUy5eIA2fsPnoGxbQGsYVBwmn1JMa-PUnI/s1600/Robin+Wright+and+James+McAvoy+in+The+Conspirator.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="192" i="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpHB6-MJ_6f9kletgZ4-YWlK1cRNBd_nYViBnl5tbZaZ6SKsrjUF8jg8v5rp5DAqNAf5L4_AeDm6x00SfXi98JJ-G56edcH5o7Ev58R3brElnUy5eIA2fsPnoGxbQGsYVBwmn1JMa-PUnI/s320/Robin+Wright+and+James+McAvoy+in+The+Conspirator.jpg" true="" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Robin Wright and James McAvoy in <em>The Conspirator </em><br />
Note: DVD being released on August 16, 2011</td></tr>
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<a href="http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/mary-surratt-an-innocent-woman/">http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/mary-surratt-an-innocent-woman/</a><br />
<br />
National Catholic Register<br />
July 3-16, 2011 Issue <br />
Posted 6/24/11 at 4:53 PM<br />
<br />
BY Mary Claire Kendall<br />
<br />
Robert Redford’s latest film, <em>The Conspirator</em> — released just days after the Sesquicentennial of the attack on Fort Sumter, the Civil War’s start — stirred many childhood memories.<br />
<br />
My great-grandmother, Lillian Webster Keane, who was a longtime Washingtonian, frequently spoke about the injustice the film portrays.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNhG884AgJL_S2BsxXKnAWw8yTZEfq7bXVI_DceZMRJvQyyBxFVKT1dE008kFq6qiQu29WbxvUIBrs7sWKlGfmHMNsj2tiq_CpHlGwh5ta6gbTVkgAR8aNvBOjnbbQHvy1CPIE7v1TPwkn/s1600/Lillian+Webster+Keane+%25232.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" i="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNhG884AgJL_S2BsxXKnAWw8yTZEfq7bXVI_DceZMRJvQyyBxFVKT1dE008kFq6qiQu29WbxvUIBrs7sWKlGfmHMNsj2tiq_CpHlGwh5ta6gbTVkgAR8aNvBOjnbbQHvy1CPIE7v1TPwkn/s320/Lillian+Webster+Keane+%25232.jpg" true="" width="225" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lillian Webster Keane, c. 1938</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Fittingly, <em>The Conspirator</em> opened April 15 — the same day, 146 years earlier, President Abraham Lincoln was celebrating the end of the Civil War.<br />
<br />
The bloody conflict that ripped our nation apart for four years, North against South, was now over — ending officially on April 9, 1865, when Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.<br />
<br />
After enjoying a pleasant carriage ride with first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, soaking in springtime Washington, this president, a lover of literature, was soaking in Our American Cousin at his box in the new Ford’s Theatre.<br />
<br />
Of course, drama of an epic nature would soon envelop the audience, when Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor and familiar face at the theater, slipped into Lincoln’s box and fatally shot him, yelling, “Sic semper tyrannus” (thus always to tyrants), as he plunged onto the stage and injured his leg, limping to his well-planned escape.<br />
<br />
In the ensuing investigation into the tragedy, Mary Surratt, a Maryland Catholic, was accused and convicted of conspiring to kill the president. She was executed by hanging on July 7, 1865. She is played by Robin Wright in Redford’s film.<br />
<br />
Lillian Webster knew Father Jacob Walter, who was close to Surratt. (In fact, he heard Surratt’s last confession before she was executed.) Lillian said Father Walter always contended, “They hung an innocent woman.”<br />
<br />
Ironically, Lincoln foreshadowed this injustice.<br />
<br />
As he wrote to close friend Joshua Speed 10 years earlier, “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘All men are created equal.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘All men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”<br />
<br />
My great-grandmother’s father, Bradshaw Hall Webster, had worked on Lincoln’s presidential campaign fresh out of college. In the course of campaigning, this son of the North met my great-great-grandmother, Martha Mungen Starrett, whose family owned a plantation in Jacksonville, Fla.<br />
<br />
When Bradshaw’s lumber mill in Orono, Maine, burned down, he took up the cause of temperance, as a “writer and orator,” traveling up and down the Eastern seaboard. After Martha died in 1881, the 33rd-degree Mason remarried — of all things, a Catholic, whom he met through the convent school his daughters attended.<br />
<br />
Lillian, born in 1878, was only 3 at the time of her father’s remarriage, and she soon became a Catholic. She noted in her diary how the faith “lightened the burdens of life.” In 1888, after President Benjamin Harrison’s election, Bradshaw moved his family to Washington.<br />
<br />
So it is that my “blue blood” great-grandmother, related to Daniel Webster and President William Henry Harrison, grew up in a social and cultural milieu in which the Civil War conflict still burned brightly so many years later.<br />
<br />
She mingled with Washington’s Catholic community, which included friends of the wrongfully accused and executed Southern sympathizer Mary Surratt, and dated the son of Dr. Samuel Mudd, the doctor who set Booth’s broken leg.<br />
<br />
After Lincoln’s assassination, the desire for retribution was so intense, a kangaroo military tribunal, portrayed in <em>The Conspirator</em>, sent Surratt to her death — a fate she faced with faith, clinging to her constantly held rosary beads and praying until the end.<br />
<br />
As my great-grandmother always wisely counseled, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”<br />
<br />
Her daughter, my grandmother Helena, like Surratt, died much too young — the victim not of injustice, but of a heart weakened by rheumatic fever that just stopped one day, on the way home from grandma’s, as she held my mother, then 6 months old, in her arms.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixUYqRHNGns7WTzkVDLKhgu-o2AifUgCFxzXjDdpSjWf0Ap1R3LnezVxLNht2QvzKc1W8iMCUx0sq8-Yr4ThpkPKdb8snRWTX5SwIIMkoc9mvzlI-Ux2lbfzqTNTd5fMIXc7-6mhNvN3rq/s1600/Grandmother+Helena+Keane+Biberstein.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" i="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixUYqRHNGns7WTzkVDLKhgu-o2AifUgCFxzXjDdpSjWf0Ap1R3LnezVxLNht2QvzKc1W8iMCUx0sq8-Yr4ThpkPKdb8snRWTX5SwIIMkoc9mvzlI-Ux2lbfzqTNTd5fMIXc7-6mhNvN3rq/s320/Grandmother+Helena+Keane+Biberstein.jpg" true="" width="229" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Helena Keane Biberstein, c. 1920</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Like Dr. Mudd, whose ancestors have tried in vain posthumously to overturn his conviction — though President Andrew Johnson pardoned him in 1869 largely because of his work saving yellow-fever victims at his military prison, as portrayed in <em>The Prisoner of Shark Island</em> (1936) — Mary Surratt’s name is still mud — something <em>The Conspirator</em> will hopefully help correct.<br />
<br />
Thus would she finally rest in peace right there in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Northeast Washington, not far from where my grandmother Helena is buried.<br />
<br />
<em>Mary Claire Kendall is a Washington-based journalist and screenwriter.</em><br />
<br />
Copyright © 2011 Circle Media, Inc. All rights reserved.Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-39490207971879636132011-04-05T21:49:00.020-04:002021-05-28T19:43:09.469-04:00John Tracy's Inspiring LifeBy Mary Claire Kendall<br />
<br />
It is said—our strength is our weakness. In the case of Spencer Tracy and his son John Ten Broeck Tracy, who died in Acton, California on June 15, 2007—five days after the 40th anniversary of his father’s death—nothing could be truer.<br />
<br />
“Spence was considered by many to be the greatest actor the screen had ever seen,” his good friend, 82-year Paramount veteran, A.C. Lyles told me. <br />
<br />
Yet, the painful emotion he felt upon learning, in 1925, that his baby son, John, was deaf was the hardest of blows. The only thing Spencer Tracy was not good at, he candidly admitted, was “life.”<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNMcrs3WaGFK2rsMR1G5A9VAQ4mSQ-4K_oZL1gsVJKyVuE4mwmaEEXesAFoiJqrxQPseuQ3dm7F3YdUAjlTwbtkMaA5I3MLpe-Ydzxg4FTxInPtJa1qNtraPA4oyA_yg6w5AkHCQ8LBfwI/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="218" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNMcrs3WaGFK2rsMR1G5A9VAQ4mSQ-4K_oZL1gsVJKyVuE4mwmaEEXesAFoiJqrxQPseuQ3dm7F3YdUAjlTwbtkMaA5I3MLpe-Ydzxg4FTxInPtJa1qNtraPA4oyA_yg6w5AkHCQ8LBfwI/" width="174" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Spencer Tracy with his son John, c. 1928-29,</span></div></div><div><span style="font-size: xx-small;">prior to his film debut in 1930 in <em>Up the River</em></span></div></div></div><br />
His son John, on the other hand—dealt a whole series of setbacks, in what, at age 22, he would term “My Complicated Life”—was great at life. <br />
<br />
If only Spencer Tracy could have read the script, he would have discovered John would soon hear the voice of God a little more loudly; see with the eyes of faith a little more clearly; and grow a big heart, drenched with hope and optimism.<br />
<br />
As John’s daughter-in-law Cyndi Tracy said, “he just always had an uncanny ability to accept God’s love and always knew (his suffering) was going to be for a greater good.” It was never “Why me?” or “Poor me.”<br />
<br />
God, he felt certain, had a plan.<br />
<br />
<strong>The Plan’s Unfolding</strong><br />
<br />
When Louise Treadwell met Spencer Tracy, her theatrical star was rising. Spencer, four years her junior, was just starting out. <br />
<br />
It was early 1923. They were both arriving in Grand Rapids, Michigan to play in the same stock company. As fate would have it, they alighted the train station platform simultaneously. <br />
<br />
The attraction between these two polar opposites, descended from, respectively, English blue bloods and working-class Irishmen, was immediate. Six weeks later, in between the matinee and evening shows in Cincinnati, Ohio, they got married. Nine months and two weeks hence, on June 26, 1924, in Spencer’s hometown of Milwaukee, their little bundle of joy arrived.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><strong>Turning Point</strong><br />
<br />
One day, while John lay napping, the screen door accidentally slammed behind Louise and he kept peacefully slumbering on. She immediately, instinctively knew he was deaf. The diagnosis came back as nerve damage of unknown origin. Unbeknownst to them, he had what’s known as Usher Syndrome, which also causes gradual blindness due to Retinitis Pigmentosa—starting at birth. <br />
<br />
The doctors said the Tracy’s best option was to place John in an institution for retarded children at age six. The Tracys would hear none of that and promptly went to work talking to him, reading him nursery rhymes, playing games with him… loving him. <br />
<br />
“Spence,” said Lyles, “was absolutely marvelous with him;” but “gave all credit to (Louise)” for John’s progress. <br />
<br />
Early on she “kept repeating the word ‘talk’… a hundred… sometimes three hundred times” in twice or thrice daily “exercises.” One day, said Lyles, when she finished, John, then 3 or 4, leaned his head close to hers and said, “talk”—his very first word.<br />
<br />
Tragedy again visited when John contracted polio at age six, leaving him with a withered right leg. That same year, Lyles recounted, Louise “gave up her career to devote herself entirely to her son and studied everything she could get her hands on about (educating deaf children).” No institution existed that worked with parents of deaf children, teaching them how to help their children develop a bridge to the speaking, hearing world. <br />
<br />
Meanwhile, John’s travails motivated Spencer to work that much harder so he could give his son all the financial help he needed to overcome his disability. Thus did he overcome what his good friend and fellow actor Lynne Overman said was a tendency toward laziness, thereby becoming the acting legend he was.<br />
<br />
John learned how to lip-read perfectly and to speak, read and write and was fully functioning by age 11, when he began to write his daily journals. Three years later, he started “publishing” his “Newsy News” for friends and family.<br />
<br />
When John was 17, Louise first spoke publicly, in her lovely English-accented tones, about raising and educating a deaf child. Her speech at the University of Southern California led her, a year later, in 1942, to found, in a campus bungalow, with Spencer’s money, the John Tracy Clinic. <a href="http://www.jtc.org/">http://www.jtc.org/</a> It became the only such entity worldwide to provide gratis service to parents of infants and preschool children born with hearing losses.<br />
<br />
Walt Disney, with whom the family played polo at the Will Rogers Ranch and The Riviera Polo Club, was one of the original board members.<br />
<br />
In 1975, poignancy overflowing, Louise was the first recipient of the Father Flanagan Award for her special service to youth; and, around the same time, she helped establish the Boys Town National Research Hospital for Usher Syndrome: Boys Town, saved from bankruptcy and oblivion by Spencer Tracy’s Oscar-winning performance as Father Flanagan, was now rescuing those who suffer John’s same sensory afflictions.<br />
<br />
<strong>“Our Everyday Blessing” </strong><br />
<br />
John was always intent, as his son and fellow artist, Joseph Spencer Tracy, characterized it, on living “each day to the fullest, regardless” of his daily challenges. <br />
<br />
“I’m an artist, writer, photographer; I played polo, tennis; swim, water-ski, dance,” he wrote in his journal in 1975. “ I got married, had a family. I’m also profoundly deaf, going blind, had polio. What can you do?”<br />
<br />
Well, apparently everything!<br />
<br />
Endowed with a high IQ and an athlete’s body, he energetically poured himself into life, blissfully unaware of his multiple disabilities until he was in his twenties.<br />
<br />
He loved horses, which mirrored his own “gentle” spirit, and the invigorating sense of freedom riding gave him: It reminded him of his “favorite” times of life at the family ranch in Encino (1936-1955), so full of fond memories like the day he started playing polo at age 12. (He had only begun riding three years earlier.) That day, one of the players was injured and Spencer summoned him to come on down!<br />
<br />
Through it all, he had, said Cyndi, a “tremendous sense of humor” and the “charm of an angel.” Fittingly, he did a dead-on impersonation of his father, which no professional comedian has ever attempted. <br />
<br />
John graduated from Pasadena City College then attended Chouinard Art Institute, graduating in 1955, the same year his son was born. He subsequently worked at Walt Disney Studios in the props department for nearly five years, until his eyesight started failing. But, he continued doing his watercolor paintings and pen and ink and pencil drawings, as he was able to: He was declared legally blind in the early eighties and, by 1994, was totally blind. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghzz49D0qft67SVB78cmjsBnW5I-jMki8MSIjnIEpTL5elQju2dsTZrEcGehL1SmOd-K_yjGUZIJ6O0EGajFATUe6QNrtoDCk7WfEliCzfO63leJX1RpCa6HSxp1w1BASpvV4kvVWgfpN4/s1600/A+John+Tracy+Photos+for+NANCY+REAGAN+002.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="245" r6="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghzz49D0qft67SVB78cmjsBnW5I-jMki8MSIjnIEpTL5elQju2dsTZrEcGehL1SmOd-K_yjGUZIJ6O0EGajFATUe6QNrtoDCk7WfEliCzfO63leJX1RpCa6HSxp1w1BASpvV4kvVWgfpN4/s320/A+John+Tracy+Photos+for+NANCY+REAGAN+002.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">John Tracy in 2004</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div>“The moment you met him,” said Cyndi, “your life was changed. You knew that you were in the company of someone… great, who was, at the same time, the most humble person you would ever meet.” Quite simply, he had no idea how positively he impacted others’ lives. <br />
<br />
“Pa Pa Johnny,” said Cyndi, “was truly ‘our everyday blessing.’” <br />
<br />
John attended Sunday services at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills for decades with his mother, who died in 1983. He would also pray nightly in an elaborate ritual that, Cyndi said, revealed his “darling personality.” The family—Joe’s family, sister Susie, the cousins, among others—“was lined up in the (same) order every night.” But “all his friends and acquaintances were always jockeying for position.” <br />
<br />
“He was strong until the end,” said Joe, and “always prayed for other people, didn’t pray for himself”—a lesson in selflessness he communicated to his three grandchildren. <br />
<br />
As for actually communicating with words, John could talk, but his deafness combined with his blindness required some special techniques for his family to reply back. <br />
<br />
Cyndi described how he loved to converse and remembered with particular warmth those special times, often at the end of a long day, she would be perched next to him as he would regale her with fascinating stories. And, she would reply by spelling words on his back. Or, for shorter responses, she would spell words on his hand—a hand that so often held her hand, while tapping her other hand, as he said, “God bless you, Cyndi. Thank you. ” <br />
<br />
For, whatever else he was, John Tracy was always profoundly grateful for all life’s blessings.<br />
<br />
<strong><span style="color: blue;">Originally published in <em>DBI Review</em>, Number 45, January-June 2010. </span></strong><a href="http://www.deafblindinternational.org/">http://www.deafblindinternational.org/</a><br />
<br />
<span style="color: lime;"><strong>Today is the 111th anniversary of Spencer Tracy's birth. He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on April 5, 1900.</strong></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: lime;"><b><br />
</b></span>Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-89301583774971255902011-03-23T09:54:00.021-04:002017-03-24T10:07:05.664-04:00God Bless Dame Elizabeth "Liz" Taylor, Hollywood Legend, Dead at Age 79<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images</div>
<br />
God bless <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/elizabeth-taylor-37991">Elizabeth “Liz” Taylor</a>, glittering and beloved Hollywood icon, who died today of congestive heart failure, with family at her side, at Cedar Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles... she was 79...<br />
<br />
In a statement to ABC News, her son Michael Wilding said: “My Mother was an extraordinary woman who lived life to the fullest, with great passion, humor, and love. Though her loss is devastating to those of us who held her so close and so dear, we will always be inspired by her enduring contribution to our world.” <br />
<br />
It gives me goosebumps to think of her in <em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB6oI04sMc4">National Velvet</a> </em>(1944),<i> </i>not to mention her Oscar-winning performances in <em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_SbnvPdRTw">Butterfield 8</a></em> (1960) and <em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgMu5oM4rUg">Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? </a></em>(1966) and stellar performances in <em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OchpaSIYrDY">Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</a> </em>(1958),<em> </em><em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUm2M0tmMUk">Giant</a> </em>(1956)<em>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEuFNnJSIw8">A Place in the Sun</a> </em>(1951)..<em>. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H7XknY3PMA">Lassie Come Home</a> </em>(1943)...<br />
<br />
Here's Elizabeth Taylor <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSaSkMp7-X8">receiving the Oscar for <i>Butterfield 8</i></a> and Anne Bancroft <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxddqJFbaJ8">accepting the Oscar on behalf of Elizabeth Taylor</a> who won for Best Actress in <em>Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?</em><br />
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RIP <a href="http://pro.imdb.com/news/ns0000004/">Dame</a> <a href="http://pro.imdb.com/title/tt0053622/news#ni8861416">Elizabeth Taylor</a>.<br />
<em><br />
</em>Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-26547466801005926172011-03-04T20:41:00.018-05:002011-04-03T21:29:56.135-04:00Oscar Crowns "The King's Speech"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwp1MfKNcNZSziJX5jr9vXuoZs1HovaHVJQqdLdFrURBehdHMzg0RzXX78Xz2gWWysuGH9mx29lML2KGZCNu783BoRS6WHh9z0YT0szUt4kUrg_is3jE-uycEXVRqBucSdUUxiXSXzPfM8/s1600/Firth+%2526+co..jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="176" l6="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwp1MfKNcNZSziJX5jr9vXuoZs1HovaHVJQqdLdFrURBehdHMzg0RzXX78Xz2gWWysuGH9mx29lML2KGZCNu783BoRS6WHh9z0YT0szUt4kUrg_is3jE-uycEXVRqBucSdUUxiXSXzPfM8/s320/Firth+%2526+co..jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> Monica Almeida/The New York Times</span></div><br />
What a joy it was to see Colin Firth basking in Oscar's glory... he's such a decent chap, and such a great actor, it was a pleasure indeed to see him win! All hail and congratulations to Colin Firth and his fellow actors, including Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter, Anthony Andrews, Claire Bloom -- what a cast!!! -- who turned in marvelous performances, to complement Firth's magnificent portrayal of King George VI, struggling with a speech impediment to rise to the awful challenge of leading England in time of war -- World War II, when the freedom of the West was at stake... For more, read: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/movies/awardsseason/28oscars.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/movies/awardsseason/28oscars.html</a>Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-66691518331102994402011-03-01T21:09:00.005-05:002011-07-03T14:27:29.523-04:00Chris Dodd, New MPAA ChairmanMPAA has a new chairman, finally! "It's official: Chris Dodd is headed to Hollywood. Or at least, he'll be representing it in D.C. The former Connecticut senator has broken his "no lobbying" pledge to become head of the Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA has been struggling to find a new leader for over a year." <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/afternoon-fix/afternoon-fix-chris-dodd-going.html">http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/afternoon-fix/afternoon-fix-chris-dodd-going.html</a> ... and here's the <em>New York Times' </em> report on Senator Dodd's appointment, published on March 2... <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/02/business/02dodd.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/02/business/02dodd.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper</a>Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-66461812746530548182011-02-06T13:57:00.002-05:002011-02-21T21:42:43.906-05:00Best Picture Oscars since "Wings" (1927)...<a href="http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/oscarlegacy/bestpictures/index.html">http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/oscarlegacy/bestpictures/index.html</a> ...<br />
<br />
Onto the Oscars! <br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d22CiKMPpaY">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d22CiKMPpaY</a> ("As Time Goes By")Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-41794598321622399352011-02-06T11:22:00.004-05:002011-02-06T11:24:26.729-05:00Writers Guild Awards: "Inception" Spotlighted<a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheat-sheet/item/writers-guild-awards-hail-inception/dream-come-true/?om_rid=NsfbZY&om_mid=_BNTrVPB8YQpjhk">"Writers Guild Awards Hail Inception</a>"... Onto the Oscars!Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-79422385893577883702011-01-31T09:10:00.016-05:002011-04-03T10:47:10.692-04:00Firth, Portman Win Big at SAG Awards (Daily Beast)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheat-sheet/item/firth-portman-win-big-at-sag-awards/hardware/?om_rid=NsfbZY&om_mid=_BNRrlfB8X6sFNi">http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheat-sheet/item/firth-portman-win-big-at-sag-awards/hardware/?om_rid=NsfbZY&om_mid=_BNRrlfB8X6sFNi</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: right;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOQsxxNma_AJg_HxhJc5f8a7PVNCSSFrEbb5XyImOAdG-sFie777c2k_Qy12QmxcDYNq4xczRPwEW238vRBz9CL7q9LY_gQZR0lI1DXHbYcXcV29AGXDPyXTk7EKV9ZWLfqWBfxHfrYPkR/s1600/Colin+Firth.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" s5="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOQsxxNma_AJg_HxhJc5f8a7PVNCSSFrEbb5XyImOAdG-sFie777c2k_Qy12QmxcDYNq4xczRPwEW238vRBz9CL7q9LY_gQZR0lI1DXHbYcXcV29AGXDPyXTk7EKV9ZWLfqWBfxHfrYPkR/s1600/Colin+Firth.jpg" /></a><span style="font-size: xx-small;"></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">The Weinstein Co. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This on the heels of the two stars winning the same honors at the Golden Globes.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6sk8YfXtulru4kuFYVu8pDkgYNM2itIsHnLSC2rX5j-G-0T7zLpYoMXpYtG9qU9brt_5vg6yfNZR5QxpYWIiMNi0Y8gWtyAzf0XOYjOLmCWJdcaehAL4fe2XTYpcpWbqXM8h6kCKId9eq/s1600/Natalie+Portman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" s5="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6sk8YfXtulru4kuFYVu8pDkgYNM2itIsHnLSC2rX5j-G-0T7zLpYoMXpYtG9qU9brt_5vg6yfNZR5QxpYWIiMNi0Y8gWtyAzf0XOYjOLmCWJdcaehAL4fe2XTYpcpWbqXM8h6kCKId9eq/s320/Natalie+Portman.jpg" width="202" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Jason Merritt; Photos: Getty</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The night before Tom Hooper was awarded the Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film for <em>The King’s Speech</em> at the 63rd annual Director Guild of America Awards, considered an excellent prognosticator for who will win Best Director Academy Award. <a href="http://insidemovies.ew.com/2011/01/30/the-kings-speech-wins-the-dga-awards/">http://insidemovies.ew.com/2011/01/30/the-kings-speech-wins-the-dga-awards/</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">... Onto the Oscars!</div>Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-37558422088096658762010-12-26T21:10:00.012-05:002012-08-26T11:00:55.802-04:00Middle Class Dreams & HollywoodToday's <em>New York Times</em> has two key pieces on the "Middle Class": "Who Killed the Disneyland Dream?" by Frank Rich; and "Hollywood's Class Warfare" by A.O. Scott, shown below. In the course of writing a screenplay, I've been studying <em>It's a Wonderful Life, </em>which epitomizes the quest for the middle class dream... it's becoming more and more illusive, which Hollywood is reflecting and reinforcing... Where is Frank Capra when you need him?<br />
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/opinion/26rich.html?ref=todayspaper">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/opinion/26rich.html?ref=todayspaper</a><br />
December 25, 2010<br />
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<strong><span style="font-size: large;">Who Killed the Disneyland Dream?</span></strong><br />
By FRANK RICH<br />
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OF the many notable Americans we lost in 2010, three leap out as paragons of a certain optimistic American spirit that we also seemed to lose this year. Two you know: Theodore Sorensen, the speechwriter present at the creation of J.F.K.’s clarion call to “ask what you can do for your country,” and Richard Holbrooke, the diplomat who brought peace to the killing fields of Bosnia in the 1990s. Holbrooke, who was my friend, came of age in the Kennedy years and exemplified its can-do idealism. He gave his life to the proposition that there was nothing an American couldn’t accomplish if he marshaled his energy and talents. His premature death — while heroically bearing the crushing burdens of Afghanistan and Pakistan — is tragic in more ways than many Americans yet realize. <br />
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But a third representative American optimist who died this year, at age 91, is a Connecticut man who was not a player in great events and whom I’d never heard of until I read his Times obituary: Robbins Barstow, an amateur filmmaker who for decades recorded his family’s doings in home movies of such novelty and quality that one of them, the 30-minute “Disneyland Dream,” was admitted to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress two years ago. That rare honor elevates Barstow’s filmmaking to a pantheon otherwise restricted mostly to Hollywood classics, from “Citizen Kane” to “Star Wars.” <br />
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“Disneyland Dream” was made in the summer of 1956, shortly before the dawn of the Kennedy era. You can watch it on line at archive.org or on YouTube. Its narrative is simple. The young Barstow family of Wethersfield, Conn. — Robbins; his wife, Meg; and their three children aged 4 to 11 — enter a nationwide contest to win a free trip to Disneyland, then just a year old. The contest was sponsored by 3M, which asked contestants to submit imaginative encomiums to the wonders of its signature product. Danny, the 4-year-old, comes up with the winning testimonial, emblazoned on poster board: “I like ‘Scotch’ brand cellophane tape because when some things tear then I can just use it.” <br />
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Soon enough, the entire neighborhood is cheering the Barstows as they embark on their first visit to the golden land of Anaheim, Calif. As narrated by Robbins Barstow (he added his voiceover soundtrack to the silent Kodachrome film in 1995), every aspect of this pilgrimage is a joy, from the “giant TWA Super Constellation” propeller plane (seating 64) that crosses the country in a single day (with a refueling stop in St. Louis) to the home-made Davy Crockett jackets the family wears en route. <br />
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To watch “Disneyland Dream” now as a boomer inevitably sets off pangs of longing for a vanished childhood fantasyland: not just Walt Disney’s then-novel theme park but all the sunny idylls of 1950s pop culture. As it happens, Disney’s Davy Crockett, the actor Fess Parker, also died this year. So did Barbara Billingsley, matriarch of the sitcom “Leave It to Beaver,” whose fictional family, the Cleavers, first appeared in 1957 and could have lived next door to the Barstows. But the real power of this film is more subtle and pertinent than nostalgia. <br />
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When the Barstows finally arrive at the gates of Disneyland itself and enter its replica of Main Street, U.S.A. — “reconstructed as it might have been half a century earlier,” as the narration says — we realize that the America of “Disneyland Dream” is as many years distant from us as that picture-postcard Main Street was from this Connecticut family. The almost laughably low-tech primitivism of the original Disneyland, the futuristic Tomorrowland included, looks as antique in 2010 as Main Street’s horse-drawn buggies and penny-candy emporium looked to the Barstows. <br />
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Many of America’s more sweeping changes since 1956 are for the better. You can’t spot a nonwhite face among the family’s neighbors back home or at Disneyland. Indeed, according to Neal Gabler’s epic biography of Disney, civil rights activists were still pressuring the park to hire black employees as late as 1963, the same year that Martin Luther King Jr.’s march on Washington and Betty Friedan’s “Feminine Mystique” started upending the Wonder Bread homogeneity that suffuses the America of “Disneyland Dream.” <br />
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But, for all those inequities, economic equality seemed within reach in 1956, at least for the vast middle class. (Michael Harrington’s exposé of American poverty, “The Other America,” would not rock this complacency until 1962.) The sense that the American promise of social and economic mobility was attainable to anyone who sought it permeates “Disneyland Dream” from start to finish. <br />
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The Barstows exemplified that postwar middle class. Robbins Barstow’s day job was as a director of professional development for a state teachers’ union. His family wanted for nothing, but finances were tight. Once in California they cheerfully stretch their limited expense money ($300 for the week) by favoring picnics over restaurants. As they dive into the pool at the old Huntington Sheraton, the grand Pasadena hotel where they’re bivouacked, they marvel at its reminders of “bygone days of more leisurely and gentle upper-class style and elegance.” <br />
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The key word in that sentence is “bygone.” The Barstows accept as a birthright an egalitarian American capitalism where everyone has a crack at “upper class” luxury if they strive for it (or are clever enough to win it). It’s an America where great corporations like 3M can be counted upon to make innovative products, sustain an American work force, and reward their customers with a Cracker Jack prize now and then. The Barstows are delighted to discover that the restrooms in Fantasyland are marked “Prince” and “Princess.” In America, anyone can be royalty, even in the john. <br />
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“Disneyland Dream” is an irony-free zone. “For our particular family at that particular time, we agreed with Walt Disney that this was the happiest place on earth,” Barstow concludes at the film’s end, from his vantage point of 1995. He sees himself as part of “one of the most fortunate families in the world to have this marvelous dream actually come true” and is “forever grateful to Scotch brand cellophane tape for making all this possible for us.” <br />
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Only 15 months after the Barstows returned home, America’s faith in its own unbounded future, so palpable in “Disneyland Dream,” would be shaken by the Soviet launch of Sputnik, the first Earth-orbiting satellite. Could it be that America, for all its might, entrepreneurship and brainpower, was falling behind its cold war antagonist in the race to the future? It was in that shadow that John F. Kennedy promised a New Frontier that would reclaim America’s heroic destiny, and do so with shared sacrifice and a renewed commitment to the lower-case democratic values central to both the American and Disneyland dreams of families like the Barstows. <br />
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This month our own neo-Kennedy president — handed the torch by J.F.K.’s last brother and soon to face the first Congress without a Kennedy since 1947 — identified a new “Sputnik moment” for America. This time the jolt was provided by the mediocre performance of American high school students, who underperformed not just the Chinese but dozens of other countries in standardized tests of science, math and reading. In his speech on the subject, President Obama called for more spending on research and infrastructure, more educational reform and more clean energy technology. (All while reducing the deficit, mind you.) Worthy goals, but if you watch “Disneyland Dream,” you realize something more fundamental is missing from America now: the bedrock faith in the American way that J.F.K. could tap into during his era’s Sputnik moment. <br />
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How many middle-class Americans now believe that the sky is the limit if they work hard enough? How many trust capitalism to give them a fair shake? Middle-class income started to flatten in the 1970s and has stagnated ever since. While 3M has continued to prosper, many other companies that actually make things (and at times innovative things) have been devalued, looted or destroyed by a financial industry whose biggest innovation in 20 years, in the verdict of the former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, has been the cash machine. <br />
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It’s a measure of how rapidly our economic order has shifted that nearly a quarter of the 400 wealthiest people in America on this year’s Forbes list make their fortunes from financial services, more than three times as many as in the first Forbes 400 in 1982. Many of America’s best young minds now invent derivatives, not Disneylands, because that’s where the action has been, and still is, two years after the crash. In 2010, our system incentivizes high-stakes gambling — “this business of securitizing things that didn’t even exist in the first place,” as Calvin Trillin memorably wrote last year — rather than the rebooting and rebuilding of America. <br />
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In last week’s exultant preholiday press conference, Obama called for a “thriving, booming middle class, where everybody’s got a shot at the American dream.” But it will take much more than rhetorical Scotch tape to bring that back. The Barstows of 1956 could not have fathomed the outrageous gap between this country’s upper class and the rest of us. America can’t move forward until we once again believe, as they did, that everyone can enter Frontierland if they try hard enough, and that no one will be denied a dream because a private party has rented out Tomorrowland. <br />
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/movies/26scott.html?ref=todayspaper">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/movies/26scott.html?ref=todayspaper</a><br />
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December 22, 2010<br />
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<strong><span style="font-size: large;">Hollywood’s Class Warfare</span></strong><br />
By A. O. SCOTT<br />
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THE idea of the universal middle class is a pervasive expression of American egalitarianism — and perhaps the only one left. In politics the middle has all but swallowed up the ends. Tax cuts aimed at the wealthy and social programs that largely benefit the poor must always be presented as, above all, good for the middle class, a group that thus seems to include nearly everyone. It is also a group that is, at least judging from the political rhetoric of the last 20 years, perennially in trouble: shrinking, forgotten, frustrated, afraid of falling down and scrambling to keep up. <br />
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In the movies, which exist partly to smooth over the rough patches in our collective life, the same basic picture takes on a more benign coloration. Middle-classness is a norm, an ideal and a default setting. For a long time most commercial entertainments not set in the distant past or in some science-fiction superhero fantasyland have taken place in a realm of generic ease and relative affluence. Everyone seems to have a cool job, a fabulous kitchen, great clothes and a nice car. Nothing too fancy or showy, of course, and also nothing too clearly marked with real-world signs of status or its absence. <br />
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The characters in, let’s say, a typical romantic comedy or family drama are blander, better-looking reflections of what the members of the audience are imagined to imagine themselves to be: hard workers and eager shoppers, neither greedy nor needy. Those airbrushed mirror images draw from a common well of (reasonable) aspirations and (mild) anxieties. The people on screen are ambitious but not obsessively so, educated but not snobbish about it. Mostly they want to be happy, and we want them to be happy because we want to be happy too. <br />
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Right at the moment, though, we may be feeling a little grumpy, and otherwise inoffensive movies (“How do You Know,” for instance, or “Love and Other Drugs”) can look more clueless than playful in their genial assumptions of material comfort and financial security. More than that, the cheery, harmonious universalism that Hollywood has promoted and relied upon for so long seems out of tune with the surrounding cacophony. And lo and behold, the screen suddenly bristles with something that looks like class consciousness. <br />
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Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network” takes on the ultra-privileged Winklevoss twins. The real-life Micky Ward in “The Fighter” takes on the world and his own family, just like the fictitious protagonists of “Winter’s Bone” and “The Town.” Denzel Washington, a heroic working stiff in “Unstoppable,” takes on a mighty train (and the corporate fat cats more concerned with the bottom line than with public safety). A howl of anti-Wall Street rage sounds through Charles Ferguson’s documentary “Inside Job” and, more bombastically if less coherently, through Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” To the barricades! <br />
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But — if I may sloganize further — which side are you on? There is no doubt that in the past year, through seasons of economic malaise and political anger, there has seemed to be a lot more division than consensus in American life. And this friction is often articulated and analyzed in what sounds like the language of class. Not in the old European (or, God forbid, socialist) sense of the word. The history of the world might be, as Karl Marx said, the history of class struggle but the history of American exceptionalism insists otherwise. So we have instead, at this moment in history, a culture war, a battle between populism and elitism, a sectional conflict between the coasts and the heartland and ideological dispute between liberals and conservatives. <br />
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This confused Hobbesian state of belligerence, a prominent feature of the media and political landscape for at least the past decade (though rarely reflected in mass-marketed movies), is persuasively sketched in Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” surely the year’s most talked- and written-about novel. Its main characters are the members of a proudly, perhaps smugly, right-thinking — which is to say left-leaning — Minnesota family whose veneer of social responsibility and liberal niceness is shattered by external fissures and internal pressures. Walter and Patty Berglund are do-gooders and gentrifiers, nutritionally and environmentally conscious NPR listeners (and readers of The New York Times) who have a knack for inspiring rage and resentment in their neighbors and at least one of their children. If Walter and Patty are unable to refute the accusation that they think they’re better than everyone else, it’s partly because they do. <br />
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The sense of class conflict that ripples through Mr. Franzen’s novel is all the more invidious and unsettling because nearly all of it takes place among neighbors, friends and family members. Class warfare, in other words, is carried out as a civil war between segments of the same class, who are only slightly caricatured in the novel’s sympathetic satire. Rush Limbaugh on the radio in one house — the one with the big vinyl-sided addition and the S.U.V. in the driveway — versus Garrison Keillor in the other, a rehabbed old Victorian where the boxy old Volvo has recently been replaced by a Prius. <br />
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Maybe in much of America these warring clans don’t live in such immediate proximity, but neither are they as conveniently divided as we might sometimes suppose, or as a movie like “The Kids Are All Right” might make it seem. Nic and Jules, the lesbian parents played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, are cut from the same cloth as the Berglunds, but they exist mainly in a world of the like-minded, spared the kind of hostility that Walter and Patty habitually inspire. <br />
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Someone once said that there are no red states or blue states, just united states, which may be true except for the united part. That, at least, is Mr. Franzen’s insight: that disunion is a much more diffuse and intimate condition than our political expressions of it might lead us to suppose. (And this leads him back, eventually, to a quiet rediscovery of the basic truth that we’re all in this together.) <br />
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Or, to put it another way: Class is everywhere and nowhere. The feeling of class antagonism is what allows the Mark Zuckerberg of “The Social Network,” a child of suburban prosperity, a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and a student at Harvard, to feel that he is excluded from the highest reaches of social distinction, an underdog with something to prove. That same feeling percolates in Micky Ward’s Lowell, a few years and an hour’s drive from Zuckerberg’s Cambridge but a different world altogether. There Micky’s girlfriend, Charlene, is regarded by his sisters as superior and stuck-up — a virtual Berglund, even though what they call her is an “MTV skank” — because she briefly went to college and believes that Micky can rise above his hardscrabble circumstances. <br />
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Micky — like Ree Dolly, the Missouri teenager in “Winter’s Bone” — wants out, just as surely as Zuckerberg wants in. What they want into and out of are the closed systems defined by custom and kinship that demarcate the ends of the social spectrum. The special status of the Winklevoss twins, or of the shadowy bankers in “Wall Street” (or indeed of the couple in Jonathan Dee’s novel “The Privileges,” speaking of works of fiction by authors named Jonathan) is defined not only by wealth, but also by a vestigial mystique of aristocracy. <br />
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A countervailing mystique clings to the streets of Lowell — and Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood in “The Town” — and to the hollows of Appalachia and the Ozarks. The defining common trait of these places is not so much poverty or criminality, though these certainly flourish, as tribalism. <br />
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Family ties and longstanding traditions, which in the modern world of “Winter’s Bone” and “The Town” have come to include methamphetamine production and bank robbing, are what complicate and sometimes doom any effort to escape. Jennifer Lawrence’s Ree Dolly wants to join the Army. Ben Affleck’s Doug MacRay in “The Town” wants to run away with the pretty bank employee who was once his hostage. Mark Wahlberg’s Micky Ward wants a shot at the title. <br />
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What they all really want is entrée into the middle class, which is why these movies can set them up as objects of audience sympathy and identification. The people around them are variously scary, comical, noble and grotesque, to be pitied, feared and wondered at. But they are consistently exotic, always other. <br />
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This is not to say that they are unrecognizable or unrealistic, or that the long-overdue discovery of the white underclass on the part of filmmakers is not a welcome and interesting development. (It is also interesting that, in novels, in political coverage and in movies not starring Mr. Washington, race and class tend to be treated as mutually exclusive concepts, rather than as strands in the same contradictory knot.) But the implicit assumption that the viewer, whatever his or her actual social circumstances, belongs in the middle — where the most sympathetic characters also long to be — is stronger than the will of any particular writer or director. <br />
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And this same assumption is at work in movies — and, especially, television series — that explore the fear of dropping out of the middle class rather than the impulse to climb into it. In John Wells’s “Company Men,” a brutal chronicle of corporate downsizing, the characters face the loss of jobs, income and, much more frighteningly, the collapse of their identities. It may be possible to claw your way from the middle to the top, but it is not as if the comforts of family and locale that hold Ree Dolly and Micky Ward in place are waiting for anyone on the way down. The battered petty-bourgeois breadwinners in “Hung” and “Breaking Bad,” for instance, find their way into stereotypical professions of the underclass (sex work and drug dealing), but only as a desperate means of staying in place. They do not become part of a culture of poverty, but rather parodic, degraded specimens of suburban individualism. <br />
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Should we laugh, cry, or envy them? It’s hard to say. Back in the last Depression the class divide was also, characteristically, a genre divide: films about the poor were crime stories or melodramas, while comedy was the favored (though not exclusive) province of the rich. Think of James Cagney and his fellow scrappy slum kids on one hand, and the gowned and tuxedoed inhabitants of an Ernst Lubitsch society comedy (like “Design for Living”) on the other. <br />
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Dramas of poverty are more marginal than they used to be; they tend to occupy the art houses rather than the multiplexes. Comedies about the very rich are rarer, and are often camouflaged as stories about folks like us: “Sex and The City 2” is a notable recent example, since its luxury-swamped characters were not made to seem exotic at all, just blessed with taste, luck and money. <br />
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Which is not, at least in the movies, the same as class, since taste and money are things all of us can — and should, and surely want to — acquire. For the price of a movie ticket, perhaps.Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-14416821386291664342010-11-28T16:02:00.017-05:002010-12-25T21:19:38.528-05:00Arthur Penn & Tony Curtis...Arthur Penn and Tony Curtis died one day apart - on Tuesday, September 28 and Wednesday, September 29, respectively. But, while they were roughly the same age, they were from entirely different eras in filmmaking as this <em>New York Times</em> article illumines. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/weekinreview/03dave.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/weekinreview/03dave.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper</a><br />
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<em>New York Times</em><br />
October 2, 2010<br />
<strong>How Arthur Penn Undid Tony Curtis</strong><br />
By DAVE KEHR<br />
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ON Tuesday, the director Arthur Penn died in New York City, the day after his 88th birthday. <br />
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On Wednesday, the actor Tony Curtis died in his home near Las Vegas. He was 85. <br />
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By conventional standards, these two important contributors to the American motion picture would be considered members of the same generation. Born in the 1920s, they were both sons of immigrants, and grew up in hardscrabble environments — Mr. Curtis in the Bronx, and Mr. Penn in a peripatetic childhood divided among New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia. <br />
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But in Hollywood terms, they stood on two sides of a great divide, between Old Hollywood and New. Mr. Curtis belonged to the last generation of stars discovered and developed under the studio system. Signed by Universal in 1948, he changed his name from Bernard Schwartz and began working his way up from bit roles in small films, allowing the studio to shape his image and manage his appearances in the fan magazines. <br />
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Mr. Penn came to movies late and reluctantly, after beginning his career in New York theater and live television. Hollywood remained an alien environment, a factory of empty escapism that he hoped to redeem by introducing Method acting and significant social themes. <br />
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For his part, Mr. Curtis was a happy camper, gamely working his way through whatever costume dramas and light comedies the studio assigned to him. In 1957, however, he broke away to make an independent film, “Sweet Smell of Success,” in which his performance as an eager-to-please press agent demonstrated true skill and led to his being cast in “The Defiant Ones,” a social allegory that spoke to the growing civil rights movement and earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor. <br />
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But he was soon back to comedies and light dramas, where his good looks were an asset rather than a distraction. <br />
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In the meantime, Mr. Penn was eagerly absorbing the lessons of the European New Wave directors, with their insistence on formal experimentation, sexual frankness and themes of alienation and revolt. Mr. Penn made the highly Europeanized art house movie “Mickey One” with the actor Warren Beatty, and when François Truffaut decided against directing Mr. Beatty’s first project as a producer, the gangster film “Bonnie and Clyde,” Mr. Beatty lured Mr. Penn with promises of autonomy and the rare privilege of the final cut. <br />
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Released in the summer of 1967, “Bonnie and Clyde” developed into a bona fide success, supported by critics and audiences alike. It was as if Hollywood had given birth to a European art film, and its combination of sex, violence and anomie was thrillingly unlike almost anything American audiences had seen before. <br />
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Earlier in 1967, Mr. Curtis reunited with the director of “Sweet Smell of Success,” Alexander Mackendrick, to appear in the gently farcical “Don’t Make Waves.” Mr. Curtis played a New York tourist who wakes up on Malibu Beach to find himself surrounded by surfers, skydivers and diverse representatives of the rapidly emerging counterculture. By the end of 1967, “Don’t Make Waves” seemed like a quaint relic, and Mr. Curtis’s career as a leading man (despite the daring comeback attempt of “The Boston Strangler” in 1968) was effectively over. <br />
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Change does not happen overnight, even in an industry as volatile as motion pictures, and for a few more years the two Hollywoods continued to exist side by side. The years 1966 and 1967 also saw the release of Howard Hawks’s last great Western, “El Dorado,” starring John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, and Charles Chaplin’s last film, “A Countess from Hong Kong,” in which the legendary silent comedian unsuccessfully attempted to graft his genius onto Marlon Brando. <br />
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“Bonnie and Clyde” did not destroy Tony Curtis, but it did pull the rug from under him: the calculating company man, the eager assimilationist, the striving outsider — all aspects of his screen personality that filmgoers of the ’50s and early ’60s found appealing were suddenly in doubt, subsumed by Clyde Barrow’s nihilistic hedonism and the quivering sensitivity of Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock in “The Graduate.” <br />
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Today, even that period seems remote: The paternalistic producers of Old Hollywood have disappeared, but in their place are the marketing executives of the new — probably not what Arthur Penn had in mind when he struck his first blow for cinematic freedom. Even in the dream factory, be careful what you wish for.Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-90833137070681704262010-10-10T21:51:00.080-04:002011-02-27T00:05:58.570-05:00Tony Curtis...Tony Curtis, a wonderful American actor, whose formal schooling included mostly the "school of hard knocks," left us on September 29, at the age of 85, on the heels of Arthur Penn's passing the day before...<br />
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Debbie Reynolds told Larry King that Curtis "loved life" and that, what made him a great star is, "he had the 'it' thing... he had 'it'." <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Movies/10/01/tony.curtis.memorial.service/index.html">http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Movies/10/01/tony.curtis.memorial.service/index.html</a><br />
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Ironically, Jamie Lee Curtis spoke with Joy Behar about her father three weeks before his death. She said while he didn't raise her, that was no strike against him -- it's how it was done in those years after a couple separated. Her mother Janet Leigh and her father divorced, in 1962, when she was 3. And, before that he was away making one film after another. But, she said, "we've repaired it and we're good." <a href="http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/showbiz/2010/09/30/behar.jamie.lee.curtis.on.dad.hln">http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/showbiz/2010/09/30/behar.jamie.lee.curtis.on.dad.hln</a><br />
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Right now, Turner Classic Movies is airing <em>The Defiant Ones</em>, a rare treat in which his serious, dramatic side was on full display... one of Tony's many films which TCM has been airing today in this moving 24 hour memorial tribute to him...<br />
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Until I get around to writing more about Tony, as a placeholder, here's the IMDb bio <a href="http://pro.imdb.com/name/nm0000348/bio">http://pro.imdb.com/name/nm0000348/bio</a> ... as well as the <em>New York Times </em>summary of his remarkable life... <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/movies/01curtis.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/movies/01curtis.html</a> ...<br />
and some video clips of his most memorable films such as <em>Some Like It Hot</em>, <em>Sweet Smell of Success</em>, <em>The Defiant Ones</em>, and on the list goes... <a href="http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/tony-curtis-on-screen/?ref=movies">http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/tony-curtis-on-screen/?ref=movies</a><br />
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And, now, time to get down to the serious business of watching <em>The Defiant Ones, </em>which I never had the pleasure of seeing...Mary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5943863739328110097.post-44663386182218127252010-09-29T21:23:00.024-04:002010-10-12T15:20:54.449-04:00Arthur Penn... and Patricia Neal...RIP, Arthur Penn, film and theater directing genius... Here's the <em>Wall Street Journal's</em> blog<a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/09/29/arthur-penn-bonnie-and-clyde-director-dies/#">#</a> ... and the <em>New York Times'</em> obit... <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/movies/30penn.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/movies/30penn.html</a> ... <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/09/29/arts/20100930_Penn_slideshow.html?ref=movies">http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/09/29/arts/20100930_Penn_slideshow.html?ref=movies</a> ...<br /><br /><strong>Amazingly, Penn died on Tuesday, September 28, the day after he turned 88...</strong><br /><br /><em>Coincidentally</em>, I just happened to be reading the chapter in Patricia Neal's book, <em>As I Am</em>, about her experience with Arthur Penn, last night about the time Penn died ...<br /><br />"It was April in 1959," she opens, "when I heard from Arthur Penn, the director. He was casting William Gibson's <em>The Miracle Worker, </em>about the young Helen Keller. Everyone knew it was bound to be one of the biggest hits of the season and the vehicle of a lifetime for the actress who played Annie Sullivan, Helen's teacher... The only problem was, Arthur was not offering me that part... We were in rehearsal only a few days when Anne (Bancroft) and Arthur invited me for a drink. Arthur asked me quite candidly if I resented not playing the star role. I was equally candid. I admitted that I did, indeed, find it tough to step down, but I was trying my damnedest to do it graciously. They breathed sighs of relief. Both of them thanked me for being honest and assured me they knew how difficult it was. I can truthfully say that the fact that I adored Anne and Arthur helped..."<br /><br /><strong>Patricia Neal, herself, died on August 8, 2010 at the age of 84... so, now they can continue the conversation!</strong><br /><br />See IMDbPro for complete list of his film & TV credits... <a href="http://pro.imdb.com/name/nm0671957/">http://pro.imdb.com/name/nm0671957/</a><br /><br />"He directed 8 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: <a href="http://pro.imdb.com/name/nm0001157/">Patty Duke</a>, <a href="http://pro.imdb.com/name/nm0000843/">Anne Bancroft</a>, <a href="http://pro.imdb.com/name/nm0663820/">Estelle Parsons</a>, <a href="http://pro.imdb.com/name/nm0000886/">Warren Beatty</a>, <a href="http://pro.imdb.com/name/nm0001159/">Faye Dunaway</a>, <a href="http://pro.imdb.com/name/nm0000432/">Gene Hackman</a>, <a href="http://pro.imdb.com/name/nm0689488/">Michael J. Pollard</a> and <a href="http://pro.imdb.com/name/nm0313381/">Chief Dan George</a>. Duke, Bancroft and Parsons won Oscars for their performances in one of Penn's movies. Won Broadway's 1960 Tony Award as Best Director (Dramatic) for <em>The Miracle Worker</em>. He was also Tony-nominated two other times: in 1958 as Best Director for <em>Two for the Seesaw</em> and in 1961 as Best Director (Dramatic) for <em>All the Way Home</em>." IMDbMary Claire Kendallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17244664533097133301noreply@blogger.com0