Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  Though analogies between Copland and his ballet characters must remain speculative, they are nonetheless worth exploring, especially in light of recent scholarship on Copland and sexuality. Pollack has posited a loose link between Copland's homosexuality and his attraction to the themes of loneliness and liberation.67 In a more provocative analysis, David Metzer has identified a homoerotic strain in Copland's early works (often masked by allusions to the sensuality of the Orient or the physicality of black Africa). Metzer argues that Copland “later backed away from this erotic-racial play,” retreating to abstraction in works like the Piano Variations and replacing sexually charged references to other cultures with the supposedly straightforward use of Anglo folk materials. As he points out, references to homosexual desire “appear remote from the American frontier celebrated in Appalachian Spring, Rodeo, and Billy the Kid, the popular ballets of the 1930s and 1940s with which the composer is almost exclusively associated.”68 The apparent gulf Metzer identifies between Copland's sexuality and his western works is interesting in its own right, but its distance is all too easy to collapse if one takes the details of the cowboy ballet plots seriously.

  It is surely striking that both of his cowboy ballets center on individuals who are visibly alienated from the communities around them: the outlaw Billy and the misfit Cowgirl. Each protagonist is marked by the frustration or displacement of desire, each plot hinges on a sudden change in the direction or expression of sexual energy, and each community reasserts itself in such a way that deviance (sexual or otherwise) is suppressed. The Cowgirl's sexual awakening is endangered—or at least forestalled—by her blatant disregard for gender roles and her unwillingness to conform to social norms. And as for that incorrigible adolescent, Billy the Kid, although he is a favorite with the Mexican girls, his fantasies are fixated on his mother—an unattainable and unacceptable object of desire. He is betrayed at the moment he surrenders to his Sweetheart's reassurances and allows himself to be “disarmed.” Billy's relationship cannot bring him to sexual adulthood, nor can it save him from social ostracism.

  These are not really the standard character types of the Wild West dime novel or the Hollywood western. In fact, their remarkable divergence from the typical, sexually powerful heroes of western genres suggests that Copland and his collaborators viewed western settings as an appropriate backdrop for the exploration (and arguably the expansion) of acceptable sexual mores and gender roles. Whatever Copland's role in shaping our sympathies toward these atypical western heroes may have been, his own biography offers supporting evidence for the idea that the imagery of the American West offered a haven for social and sexual aberrance, but also a site where patriarchal visions of social and moral order could be vigorously upheld.

  13

  _______

  Copland and the Cinematic West

  COMING OF AGE IN ELDORADO

  Alienation and self-discovery (sexual or otherwise) are major themes in all of Copland's western scores. Billy the Kid and Rodeo made these themes visible through dance, but they withheld definitive answers about Copland's own attitudes. His authorial voice is even harder to tease out of his western film scores: Of Mice and Men (1939) and The Red Pony (1949). Both are based on previously published works of John Steinbeck, and in both cases the screenplays were substantially complete before anyone thought to approach Copland for the music. Nevertheless, the resulting scores represent his most direct engagement with western character types, gender roles, and the idea of westward expansion. They also represent the realm in which Copland's identity as a “western” composer was most influential on future generations.

  In some ways, film was a natural medium for a composer like Copland. His preferences had always tended toward the pictorial and the dramatic, and his love of rapid juxtapositions was well suited to screen action. He often articulated the view that accommodating other artists' needs did not preclude creative expression. “Having to compose music to accompany specific action,” he wrote, “is a help rather than a hindrance, since the action itself induces music in a composer of theatrical imagination.”1 As Sally Bick and Elizabeth Bergman Crist have shown, working for film also had special resonance for left-leaning artists who saw in the movie theater a mass audience attuned to a medium with great persuasive power. In short, film was enticing to Copland for political and aesthetic reasons, as well as social ones, and he praised Hollywood as a site where musicians were actually needed, calling it “a composer's Eldorado.”2

  Despite the encouragement of Harold Clurman and George Antheil, Copland's first stab at a Hollywood contract in the spring of 1937 resulted only in weeks of frustration. Instead, he began his film career two years later and on more familiar ground: at the World's Fair in New York City. Like Thomson before him, Copland got his “big break” courtesy of a documentary film written in support of a civic agenda. In this case, Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke approached him on behalf of the American City Planning Institute to score The City, a film portraying the evils of unregulated urban growth.3 Though Steiner recalled his qualms about engaging a composer of Copland's markedly “modern” tendencies, he was eventually won over by some of the composer's more popular scores.4 With its evocations of small-town America, horrific industrial slums, and the improvements enabled by conscientious urban planning, Copland's contribution to The City won praise from Paul Bowles, Henry Cowell, and Stravinsky; it also had the desired impact on Hollywood producers and directors, including Lewis Milestone, the man behind three of the most important film projects that Copland subsequently scored.5

  The most immediate result of the Copland-Milestone connection was Of Mice and Men (1939). Its shocking, realistic plot and lean, dissonant score made it a watershed work for Copland and for Hollywood—one that would, in Sally Bick's words, both challenge and inspire industry norms, “establishing what would eventually become identified as an American nondiegetic style.”6 David Raksin, for one, praised Copland's contribution in retrospect, pointing to its transforming influence on later Westerns: “Not only was the score wonderful,” he told the aging composer, “you began something with that from which none of us have ever escaped: you created a definite style having to do with the Western film. Before that they used to think they were doing all right if they played ‘Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.' And then all of a sudden we were face to face with this absolutely clear and pure and wonderful style.”7 Yet the “purity” of Copland's western style was not something that could be taken for granted in 1939. On the contrary, the soundtrack for Of Mice and Men was notable for its mixing of the folksy and the contemporary and for the sheer variety of sound sources it employed: a Jew's harp during the main title music, solo guitar, a jazzy song on the radio, the honky-tonk piano at a saloon, and a snippet from an “authentic” hymn tune that the producers selected in consultation with the Farm Security Administration.8 If Copland's stylistic choices later appeared natural and straightforward, this may be traced in part to the simplifying powers of hindsight but also to the character and influence of his intervening film scores, especially The Red Pony.

  FATHERS AND SONS

  When Copland moved to California early in 1948 to begin work on The Red Pony, many things had changed. Although he had three more movie credits to his name—Our Town (1940), North Star (1943), and his score for the Office of War Information's documentary The Cummington Story (1945)—it had been a number of years since he had worked in Hollywood. He had received several offers from movie producers, but he was preoccupied with such wartime works as Appalachian Spring (1944) and the massive Symphony no. 3 (1944-46). The end of World War II and the revelation of its man-made horrors rendered the patriotic tone of such pieces difficult to sustain, and the postwar years instead saw the reevaluation of concepts like race and nation and a renewed sense of social alienation among artists and intellectuals.

  In the wake of such widespread cultural upheaval, Copland may have sensed the strangeness of his situation when he was invited by the same man who
had approached him eight years earlier (Milestone) to score a story by the same author (Steinbeck), to be filmed on exactly the same site as Of Mice and Men (figure 9). Steinbeck and Milestone had actually begun planning for the production shortly after the release of Of Mice and Men, but the project was delayed until 1947 by the war and by financial considerations—Of Mice and Men had been a critical success, but a box office failure. The two films share more than their local color. Each deals with the connections between maturity and violence or death, and each stresses personal responsibility in the face of impersonal and often hostile environmental forces. But while the migratory workers in Of Mice and Men have relatively contemporary plights and aspirations, the turn-of-the-century characters in The Red Pony move in different psychological realms: the daydreams of childhood and the reminiscences of old age. The later film lacks the extroverted action scenes and the threats of violence in the earlier film, and perhaps as a result, Copland confessed that the film had the potential to seem dull. “The picture is a nice one but no epic or path-breaker,” he wrote to Irving and Verna Fine shortly after his arrival. “The trouble from my angle is that it was shot on the same ranch that ‘Of Mice and Men' was shot on. Now I ask you: if you had to look at the same landscape every day could you think up different music? (Note, I'm getting my alibis all set up in advance.)”9

  When it came time to write program notes for the orchestral suite drawn from the film score, however, the composer had found a silver lining in the film's quietude, using it to explain the story's susceptibility to musical treatment. “There is a minimum of action of a dramatic or startling kind,” he admitted. “The story gets its warmth and sensitive quality from the character studies of the boy Jody, Jody's grandfather, the cow-hand Billy Buck and Jody's parents, the Tiflins [Alice and Fred]. The kind of emotions that Steinbeck evokes in his story are basically musical ones since they deal so much with the unexpressed feelings of daily living.”10

  FIGURE 9. Copland with Peter Miles on the set of The Red Pony. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures Corporation

  Steinbeck created his film scenario from materials originally published in four distinct but thematically interrelated short stories: “The Gift,” “The Great Mountains,” “The Promise,” and “The Leader of the People.”11 These stories were originally self-sufficient snapshots of life on the Tiflin Ranch, but the screenplay omits the second story and interweaves the remaining events into a single narrative. From the beginning, there were autobiographical overtones. As he completed the stories, Steinbeck was preparing for the death of his mother and remembering his own childhood joy at receiving his first pony. In the later screenplay, produced while he was in the midst of his own domestic strife, he escalated the unspoken tension between Fred and Billy and pushed the Tiflins' unhappy marriage to the brink of disaster. In addition, the child protagonist, originally “Jody,” was renamed “Tom”—perhaps after Steinbeck's own son, or perhaps to avoid confusion with the child protagonist “Jody” in The Yearling (1947). Tom (played by Peter Miles) gains a gang of schoolyard friends and a Technicolor dreamworld for his heroic fantasies. Grandfather (Louis Calhern), who appears only in the last of the four stories, becomes a central presence in the movie, providing occasional comic relief and genuine pathos.

  Neither a straightforward children's film nor a conventional western, The Red Pony offers an essay on conflicting models of masculinity, with the warm but flawed ranchman Billy Buck replacing Tom's distant schoolteacher father, Fred (Sheppard Strudwick), as mentor and confidant. From the very first scene, when Fred burns himself while trying to help Alice with the breakfast dishes, we are faced with illustrations of his physical and emotional impotence. Most important to the unfolding plot is his ill-timed outburst over Alice's father's rambling anecdotes about “Indians and crossing the plains.” Domestic meltdown is followed by lame attempts at apology and Fred's eventual departure for his parents' home in San Jose to “think things out” alone. Fred is hardly more successful in his attempts to connect with his son. He quashes his moment of paternal glory—when he gives Tom the pony—by immediately threatening to sell off the animal if Tom falls behind in his chores. In similar fashion, Fred has erected barriers between himself and his neighbors; to his chagrin, none of the other ranchers ever call him by his first name. As Alice observes, he has made himself “a stranger.” By contrast, Billy Buck is competent and approachable. Naturally, the Tiflins rely on his expert horsemanship, but his nurturing attitude toward Tom is what sets him most starkly apart from Fred. It is from Billy that Tom learns the ways of the ranch, and it is by recognizing Billy's limitations that Tom gains a more mature understanding of the ways of the world.

  Like the short stories, the film shows little affectionate interaction between Alice and Fred—a lack that seems more acute on screen because of Hollywood genre expectations (even a family drama might be expected to have a glimmer of romance). The fact that Billy was played by the charismatic Robert Mitchum makes an even greater issue of Fred's masculinity by suggesting, probably unintentionally, a covert love interest between Billy and Alice, played by Myrna Loy. To make matters worse, Billy's active sexuality is discreetly but clearly apparent during a comic dialogue in the bunkhouse when he explains away his pinup pictures of attractive women by telling Tom they are his “cousins.”

  Musically, Copland's sympathies are clear. Fred has no recognizable music of his own, apart from a repetitive (and probably intoxicated) song that he and Billy sing on their way home from town. As Pollack points out, “For much of the film, Copland leaves Fred in chilly silence, thus emphasizing his presence as a distant husband and father” (HP, 432). By contrast, Billy Buck moves easily to the music that accompanies the daily activities of rural life. He is the first human we see after the main title music merges into the musical cue labeled “Morning on the Ranch.” Simple and triadic, the irregular but repetitive melodic strains make a flexible and effective background accompaniment to the long sequence of stage actions that introduces the characters. As Copland described it, “The daily chores begin. A folk-like melody suggests the atmosphere of simple country living.” The small range, circular tendencies, and potential motivic monotony of this folklike music also underscore the routine nature of the actions on-screen, as if to say that this “morning on the ranch” is much like any other. While Fred and Tom struggle to get out of bed, Billy's chores in the barn and Alice's kitchen duties show that they are the ones in charge of this gentle morning choreography.

  Billy becomes the primary agent of Tom's initiation into adulthood as the child's innocent faith is tested by the death of his beloved pony. Indeed the film's preoccupation with life-and-death matters occasionally outweighs its schoolyard antics and heroic daydreams. Tom's brutal battle with the buzzards drew numerous critiques from viewers expecting a lighthearted family film. Steinbeck himself, however, emphasized the story's weighty implications in a narration he wrote and recorded for Copland's orchestral suite. Here the eminent author refers to “the twisted and lovely and tortured path up the Hill of the Skull which every boy must travel to become a man.”12 Nonetheless, for much of the movie, Tom's childlike side prevails. Joseph Millichap has noted that one response to the poor box office return on Of Mice and Men was to market The Red Pony as a “kiddy western about a boy and his horse.”13 The most serious casualty of this transformation is the poorly prepared climax, which betrays all previous foreshadowing in favor of the Hollywood “Happy Ending” that gives the last movement of Copland's orchestral suite its title. Avoiding the gruesome birth/death scene that ends Steinbeck's story “The Promise,” the movie shows Billy's willingness to sacrifice his horse Rosie in order to deliver her colt to Tom, but then ends with smiles and relieved laughter: Fred and Alice are reunited; Tom and Billy are reconciled; both mare and foal survive.

  The movie enacts its creators' reluctance to let carefree childhood be overshadowed by the awareness of death, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the memorable sequences illustrating
Tom's daydreams. Caught in the routine events and awkward family dynamics of the Tiflin household, Tom escapes into a fantasy world that seems extremely remote from the western ranch. Our first glimpse of his vibrant inner life comes during his long walk to school. Using a stick to beat out a march rhythm on his metal lunch bucket, he is magically transformed into a knight in shining armor, riding at the head of a stately processional in the company of Billy Buck. When this fantasy is dispelled by the shouts of his approaching classmates, Tom reappears in his familiar overalls, kicking up dust from the dirt road at his feet. His next adventure occurs as he does his after-school chores. While feeding the chickens gathered in a circle around him, Tom suddenly finds himself the ringmaster of a cartoon circus. These daydream sequences have been roundly criticized for their lack of integration into the film; nevertheless, each one provided an opportunity to explore the newest frontiers in cinematic technology. The Red Pony was Milestone's first color film, and the fantasy sequences let him make the most of Technicolor. For his part, Copland used a click track in Tom's “Dream March,” and the circus fantasy allowed him to experiment with mixing two different source tracks, “overlapping incoming and outgoing music tracks when the daydreaming imagination of a little boy turns white chickens into white circus horses.”14

  Although the fantasy sequences were drastically curtailed during the production process, the movie retained its status as a kids' film, thanks to inserted schoolroom sequences, numerous lines for child actors, and Tom's almost continuous presence on screen. Copland, too, allowed childlike qualities to infiltrate portions of the score both inside and outside of Tom's imagination. As he put it in his program note for the orchestral suite, “I decided to call it a children's suite because so much of the music is meant to reflect a child's world.”15 In addition to the nursery rhyme march rhythms of the knights' parade or the giddy bitonal play of the “Circus March,” Copland made frequent recourse to the “toy” timbres of celesta, glockenspiel, and string harmonics and devised a static shimmer (courtesy of vibraphone and divisi strings) to accompany Tom's wide-eyed wonder when he first sees his pony.