The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Shortly after we arrived, Reinhardt and Band drove up in a gray Cadillac convertible with the top down. Reinhardt had a navy-blue beret on his head and a cigar in his mouth. He came over and pumped Huston’s hand. “Happy birthday, John,” he said.

  “Oh, yes. I almost forgot,” Huston said. “Well, gentlemen, let’s get started.”

  Everybody was wearing rough clothes except Reinhardt, who wore neat gabardine slacks of bright blue and a soft shirt of lighter blue. Band had on Russian Cossack boots, into which were tucked ragged cotton pants. Marton wore dungarees and a khaki bush jacket, which, he said, he had brought from Africa, where he had recently worked as co-director of King Solomon’s Mines. Colonel Davidson wore Army fatigues.

  Dusty, the Huston-ranch cowboy who wanted to play in the picture, stood around while the crew got organized. He went into the stables and returned leading a large black horse, saddled and bridled. Huston mounted it, and then Dusty brought out a white-and-brown cow pony.

  “I’ll ride Papoose, pal,” Rosson said to Huston, and heaved himself aboard the cow pony.

  “He was once married to Jean Harlow,” Band said to Colonel Davidson, pointing to Rosson.

  “Let’s go, gentlemen!” Huston called, waving everybody on. He walked his horse slowly down the road.

  “John can really set a saddle,” Dusty said, watching him go.

  Rosson started after Huston. Reinhardt and Band followed in the Cadillac. The rest of us, in the limousine, brought up the rear of the cavalcade.

  Marton peered out the window at Rosson, rocking along on the cow pony. “He used to be married to Jean Harlow,” he said thoughtfully. “Reggie, what do we do first?”

  Callow said that they were going to stop at the location for the scene showing the Youth’s regiment on the march, to determine how many men would be needed to give the effect of an army on the march. It was Scene 37. All the script had to say about it was “MEDIUM LONG SHOT—A ROAD—THE ARMY ON THE MARCH—DUSK.”

  “The mathematics of this discussion is important,” Callow said.

  Katz, whose primary job was to serve as a liaison man between the crew and the studio production office, was sitting up front. He turned around and said, smiling, “Mathematics means money.”

  “Everything is such a production,” said Marton. “Why can’t they just turn Johnny loose with the camera?”

  Colonel Davidson, who was sitting in a jump seat next to Peters, cleared his throat.

  “What, what?” Katz said to him.

  “Warm today,” the Colonel said, clearing his throat again.

  “Nothing,” Marton said. “In Africa, we had a hundred and fifty degrees in the shade.”

  “That so?” said the Colonel.

  Katz turned around again. There were beads of perspiration on his forehead and in the fuzz on his head. “You boys are going to have a time climbing these hills today,” he said cheerily. “Hot, hot.”

  Peters said, without moving his head, “Very warm.”

  “It’s going to be a tough war,” Callow said.

  · · ·

  The road for the MEDIUM LONG SHOT was a dirt one curving around a hill and running through sunburned fields. A large oak tree at the foot of the hill cast a shadow over the road. Huston and Rosson sat on their horses near the top of the hill, waiting for the rest of the party to struggle up to them through dry, prickly grass. Reinhardt was carrying a sixteen-millimetre movie camera. A hawk flew overhead, and Reinhardt stopped, halfway up the hill, and trained his camera on it. “I like to take pictures of birds,” he said. When everyone had reached Huston and was standing around him, Huston pointed to the bend in the road.

  “The Army comes around there,” he said commandingly. He paused and patted the neck of his horse. “Colonel,” he said.

  “Yes, sir!” Colonel Davidson said, coming to attention.

  “Colonel, how far apart will we put the fours?” Huston asked.

  “About an arm’s length, sir,” said the Colonel.

  “Get away from my script!” Callow said to Huston’s horse, who was attempting to eat it.

  Huston gave Callow a reproachful look and patted the horse’s neck. “Never mind, baby,” he said.

  “Gentlemen,” Rosson said, “keep in mind we must not have these Western mountains in what was primarily an Eastern war.” He dismounted and gave the reins of his pony to Band, who clambered clumsily into the saddle. The pony started turning in circles.

  “It’s only me, little baby,” Band said to it.

  “Albert!” Huston said. Band got off the pony, and it calmed down.

  “Gentlemen,” Huston said. “The range finder, please.”

  Marton handed him a cone-shaped tube with a rectangular window at the wide end. It would determine the kind of lens that would be needed for the shot. Huston looked at the road through the finder for a long time. “A slow, uneven march,” he said dramatically. “The Union colonel and his aide are leading the march on horseback. Looks wonderful, just wonderful. Take a look, Hal.” He handed the finder to Rosson, who looked at the road through it.

  “Great, pal!” Rosson said, chewing his gum with quick, rabbitlike chomps.

  “Doesn’t it look like a Brady, kid?” Huston said to Rosson.

  “Great, pal,” said Rosson.

  The two men discussed where the camera would be set up, how the shot of the column of soldiers would be composed, when the shot would be taken (in the early morning, when the light on the troops would be coming from the back). They also discussed the fact that the scene, like most of the others in the picture, would be photographed as if from the point of view of the Youth. Then they got to talking about how many men would be needed for the scene.

  “How about four hundred and fifty?” said Katz.

  “Eight hundred,” Huston said immediately.

  “Maybe we could do with six hundred and fifty,” Reinhardt said, giving Huston a knowing glance.

  Katz said that the column would be spaced out with horses and caissons, and that they could get away with less than six hundred and fifty infantrymen.

  Huston gave Colonel Davidson a sly glance and winked.

  The Colonel quickly cleared his throat and said, “Sir, to be militarily correct we ought to have a thousand infantry.”

  “God!” Reinhardt said.

  “Never, never,” Katz said.

  “Make the picture in Africa,” Marton said. “Extras cost eighteen cents a day in Africa.”

  “That’s exactly fifteen dollars and thirty-eight cents less than an extra costs here,” Callow said. “We could change it to the Boer War.”

  “Is it to be six hundred and fifty, gentlemen?” Huston said impatiently.

  “If that’s the way you want it,” Katz said. “Anything I can do you for.”

  · · ·

  We went from one site to another, trudging up and down hills and breaking paths through heavy underbrush. The afternoon sun was hot, and the faces of the crew were grimy and wet, and their clothes were dusty and sprinkled with burs and prickly foxtails. Only Reinhardt seemed unaffected by his exertions. His blue slacks were still creased, and a fresh cigar was in his mouth as he stood beside Huston examining the site for a scene—to be shot some afternoon—that would show the Youth coming upon a line of wounded men, who would be moving down a path on a slope. Huston and Reinhardt looked at a grassy slope that led down to a road and a patch of trees. The distance from the top of the slope to the road was two hundred and seventy yards, Callow told Huston and Reinhardt. The three men estimated that they would need a hundred extras to make an impressive line of wounded men.

  Huston looked through the finder at the slope. “The Youth sees a long line of wounded staggering down,” he said, in a low voice.

  “We’ve got to have something for these men to do in the morning,” Katz said. “We can’t have a hundred extras on the payroll and have them stand around with nothing to do for half a day.”

  Huston lowered the finder. “
Let’s just put the figures down as required for each shot, without reference to any other shot,” he said coldly.

  Katz smiled and threw up his hands.

  “And if we find we need twenty-five more men—” Huston began.

  “I will appeal to Mr. Reinhardt,” Katz said.

  “You have great powers of persuasion,” said Huston.

  Reinhardt bobbed his head and laughed, looking at his director with admiration.

  Callow sat by the side of the path, laboriously pulling foxtails out of his socks. “I’m stabbed all over,” he said. “I fought the Civil War once before, when I was assistant director on Gone with the Wind. It was never this rough, and Wind was the best Western ever made.”

  Reinhardt was aiming his camera at a small silver-and-red airplane flying low overhead.

  “That’s no bird; that’s Clarence Brown,” said Band.

  “Clarence is up there looking for gold,” Marton said.

  “There is a great story about Clarence Brown,” Reinhardt said. “A friend says to him, ‘What do you want with all that money, Clarence? You can’t take it with you.’ ‘You can’t?’ Clarence says. ‘Then I’m not going.’ ” Band and Marton agreed that it was a great story, and Reinhardt looked pleased with himself.

  Katz was saying that the first battle scene would have four hundred infantrymen, fifty cavalrymen, and four complete teams of artillerymen and horses, making a total of four hundred and seventy-four men and a hundred and six horses.

  “More people than we ever had in Wind,” Callow said.

  Huston, now on his horse, leaned forward in the saddle and rested the side of his face against the neck of the horse.

  “We accomplished a lot today,” Reinhardt said.

  Huston said, with great conviction, “It looks just swell, Gottfried, just wonderful.”

  “It must be a great picture,” Reinhardt said.

  “Great,” Band said.

  Huston wheeled his horse and started across the slope at a canter. He approached a log on top of a mound of earth, spurred his horse, and made a smooth jump. Reinhardt trained his camera on Huston until he disappeared around a wooded knoll.

  Winthrop Sargeant

  FEBRUARY 16, 1957 (ON MARIANNE MOORE)

  MONG PEOPLE WHO like to feel that they know just how things stand, Marianne Craig Moore is regarded, variously, as America’s greatest living woman poet, or as one of America’s greatest living poets, or even as America’s greatest living poet—three views that combine to establish her squarely as a literary monument, handily labelled for ready reference. There may be some doubt in the minds of those who are not well up on modern verse about just how these titles have been arrived at, but there is no doubt that they are supported by an overwhelming assortment of prizes, memberships in societies of immortals, and honorary Litt. D.s that Miss Moore has collected over nearly half a century of writing verse, and by many qualified authorities, among them a number of distinguished fellow-poets, such as W. H. Auden, who has gallantly confessed to plundering her work for technical ideas, and T. S. Eliot, who has stated that in his opinion “her poems form part of the small body of durable poetry written in our time.” There are, however, other ways of looking at Miss Moore. A large public that has never opened any of the books responsible for her fame has been led by articles about her in big-circulation family magazines to see her as a quaint and rather stylish spinster who, at the age of sixty-nine, lives in a cluttered apartment in Brooklyn and writes poems about animals—a picture that is essentially accurate, if considerably oversimplified. To some of the more complicated types who frequent literary teas and cocktail parties in Manhattan, Miss Moore is a quite outrageous chatterbox and intellectual comedienne; to others, more fondly disposed toward her, she is a gentle lioness of formidable glamour, capable of non-stop conversational monologues, richly interspersed with observations on life and letters, which they feel should be treasured for their outspokenness and originality. At gatherings of this kind, her meticulous and all but breakneck manner of expressing herself—mirroring a mind in which wisdom and innocence are curiously combined—often produces a flow of imagery and anecdote whose quality leads some of her admirers to contend that she not only writes but talks literature.

  And there is still another Miss Moore—the one known to her neighbors in the fairly nondescript area surrounding her modest five-room, fifth-floor apartment on Cumberland Street, in the Fort Greene Park section of Brooklyn. To her neighbors she is, and has been for many years, a familiar and affectionately regarded figure as—dressed with a conservative smartness that often includes a skimmer or a tricorne hat, armed with a shopping basket, and exuding an air of invincible energy and cheerfulness—she passes the time of day with her grocer or her vegetable man. Along Cumberland Street, her claim to distinction rests not so much on her writing or on her drawing-room wit as on certain aspects of her conduct and bearing that mark her, in the eyes of people she has daily dealings with, as a great lady who represents the genteel traditions of a noble and nearly forgotten era. “For my money, they don’t come any finer than Miss Moore,” says Henry Burfeindt, one of the clerks at the Oxlord Delicatessen, a couple of blocks from her apartment. “She gave me one of her books—and she autographed it. It says ‘To Henry’ in the front of it. One of these days I’m going to lay in the sun and read it.” And Mike Moscarella, who runs a shoe-repair shop at the corner of Carlton Street and De Kalb Avenue, a block and a half away, says, “She don’t dress modern. She makes friends easy, and she’s a real home lady. Very interesting to talk to, too. She likes to talk about scenery and flowers.” Among another group of her Brooklyn acquaintances—the parishioners of the nearby Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church—Miss Moore is revered for still different virtues, of a sort not often associated with poets nowadays. She regularly attends services at the church, and invariably says grace before meals. Moreover, she strictly avoids alcohol, tobacco, and even coffee. So highly is she thought of by the church authorities that on several occasions they have asked her to write a special benediction to be delivered at church dinners on Thanksgiving or some other ceremonial day, but this she has so far declined to do. “I don’t believe in substituting conscious expression for spontaneous devotion,” she says.

  · · ·

  These diverse facets of Miss Moore’s public personality suggest that the individual embodying them is a phenomenon of some complexity. Since poetry—and contemporary poetry in particular—is one of the most personal of the arts, and since connoisseurs long familiar with Miss Moore and her verse believe that her poems are works of self-portraiture to an even greater extent than those of most poets, it is natural to look for clues to the essential character of this phenomenon in the half-dozen volumes of verse that, except for a book of essays and some translations, constitute her life work to date. The poems in these volumes are instantly striking for the exquisite care with which they have been put together; Miss Moore sets down her metaphors and images in neat, precise patterns, using schemes of metre and rhyme that are at once as intricate and as clearly defined as needlepoint embroidery, and even the typographic schemes of her printed verses are fastidiously original. A good example of this last is a fragment from “In Distrust of Merits,” one of the few poems she has written on subjects of major social significance:

  There never was a war that was

      not inward; I must

  fight till I have conquered in myself what

  causes war, but I would not believe it.

  I inwardly did nothing.

  O Iscariotlike crime!

  Beauty is everlasting

  and dust is for a time.

  In general, her poems reveal an intense preoccupation with often microscopic visual detail and an extraordinary joy in the contemplation of such minutiae as the sheen of sea shells, the tendrils of plants, and the legs and wings of insects. While Miss Moore’s scrupulous descriptions of her abundant observations would hardly constitute poetry in themselv
es, she has a flair for symbolism that gives them meaning, making each small object the protagonist of an engrossing drama—a drama that, as often as not, points a moral of some sort. The sequence in which the visual images swiftly appear and vanish is not so much a matter of logic as it is of kaleidoscopic association, and the agility with which Miss Moore jumps from one association to the next is such that even the most diligent reader sometimes loses his way in attempting to follow her— a drawback that she tries to minimize by including a series of explanatory notes at the end of each volume. A reader who, with or without the notes, is able to keep pace with Miss Moore finds himself being led through an aggregation of sensations and perceptions that are similar in effect to a collage or a mosaic, and are highlighted by epigrams and descriptive phrases memorable for the particularly vivid insight they give into one truth or another.

  In “The Labours of Hercules,” a poem about poetry, Miss Moore has written “that one detects creative power by its capacity to conquer one’s detachment, that while it may have more elasticity than logic, it knows where it is going”—an eminently logical assertion and a justification of the elastic, or intuitive, method that characterizes most of her writing. A great deal of the charm of her work lies in the originality of her point of view; somehow she is able to describe things as if they were being seen for the first time by a mind without preconceptions. This faculty, similar to that of a child or a primitive, enables her to avoid clichés of thought and expression; her poetry contains no second-hand ideas, except when she openly borrows from other writers, in which case she takes pains to make that fact clear by using quotation marks—a sort of code, informing the knowing reader that he will find the source listed back among the notes. She seems, indeed, to be perpetually and delightedly poised on the frontier of fresh experience—a narrow and perilous region where she can lean neither on learning nor on generalized principles. Miss Moore is, of course, neither a child nor a primitive but an urbane and educated woman, and her position on this frontier—as consciously maintained as that of a tightrope walker—demands an air of ingenuousness that is patently calculated artifice but nevertheless a most appealing one.