The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)

by Lillian Ross

  Mrs. Luce brought a car and chauffeur to Washington but uses them only to go to work and back. She is sure that hostile snoopers are on the job, hoping to catch her using her car while pleasure bent, and is so wary of them that she taxies to business dinners. Her chauffeur has threatened to quit, saying he is tired of seeing her into cabs. This, and her cook problem, and the dwindling power of Congress have made her a less carefree girl than she used to be. “What I need is a wife, to get me a cook,” she said. “A congressman’s life is not a happy one.”

  1943

  PREPARED PIANIST — Mary Webb and Berton Roueche

  THE subject of this short article is a young composer named John Cage, who has invented several hundred brand-new sounds. With the assistance of five so-called prepared pianos (we’ll discuss them in just a minute), he demonstrated his achievement a couple of Sundays ago at a concert at the New School for Social Research, but since you probably weren’t there we will start from scratch. As our more attentive readers should know by now, there are a number of composers who suffer from claustrophobia in the presence of the conventional twelve-tone scale. Well, Mr. Cage can’t stand tones at all. “I have developed a way of composing by means of rhythm,” he informed us when we looked him up at his apartment the other day. “That is, by organizing sounds through their time or rhythmic relationships. I have a profound lack of interest in harmony.”

  Mr. Cage, who was wearing a black corduroy jacket, green corduroy trousers, a blue shirt, a rose sweater, and red socks, told us that he was teaching piano and composition in Seattle, his native town, eight years ago when the pioneering impulse seized him. “I wanted to explore the possibilities of rhythm,” he said. “But naturally I had to develop a new set of sounds first. I had to have sounds that people had never heard before in music, so that the sound would call attention to the rhythm. Do you follow me?” We signalled to him to go on. His first move, he said, was to forget about his piano and organize a percussion orchestra composed of such inharmonious instruments as tomtoms, wooden blocks, bells, gongs, cymbals, anvils, and automobile-brake drums. The orchestra, while it lasted, occupied itself exclusively with rhythmic items composed by Mr. Cage. “However,” Mr. Cage told us, “it was too unwieldy. I’d collected about three hundred different things that would make the kind of sounds I needed. You can see what a personnel problem I had on my hands.” He solved this problem by going back to his piano. “I remembered,” he said, “that hot jazz pianists used to get new effects by placing sheets of paper between the piano strings. I started monkeying around with my piano strings.” Mr. Cage ended up with what he named the prepared piano and an itch to come to New York, which he did two or three years ago. “People are more receptive to new ideas here than in Seattle,” he said. “The New Music Society was very receptive to me.”

  Mr. Cage prepares his piano by inserting between its strings various objects—screws, pennies, splinters of wood, bits of felt or rubber, and practically any other small objects you can think of. This, as you might imagine, changes the sound of the strings. Mr. Cage gets the particular sounds he requires by paying close attention not only to the kind of object but also to its size, weight, and longitudinal position on the strings. The possibilities are limitless and bloodcurdling. There are about two hundred and twenty-five strings on a piano, and each key, depending on the register, strikes from one to three strings. Nothing but prepared strings are played in Mr. Cage’s compositions, and he prepares only a fraction of the strings. The most elaborate piano he has worked out so far has seventy-five prepared strings. No two of Mr. Cage’s compositions (he has a repertoire of fifty) have the same preparation; his recent concert consisted of three compositions and required five different prepared pianos. “It’s kind of a bother,” he said. “Sometimes it takes me three hours to prepare a piano for a complicated number—my ‘The Perilous Night,’ for instance.” Mr. Cage is holding back some of his most effective sounds until after the war. “They’re too frightening,” he told us. “They sound too much like the scream of bombs, and planes, and rifle shots. It wouldn’t be good taste to use them now. One of them even shocks me sometimes.”

  At our suggestion, Mr. Cage ran through one of his shorter compositions. We listened closely and without flinching. When the echo of the last guttural thump had died away, he asked us what we thought of it. It was fine, we said, but it was certainly different. “Really?” he said. “ Really? Some people,” he said with disgust, “say it sounds Oriental.”

  1945

  MASTERPIECE — John McCarton

  THE Associated Press picture of the raising of the American flag on Mount Suribachi will soon, without question, be as inescapable as “The Spirit of ’76” and “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” It has already been made into a poster for the next bond drive and will be seen everywhere on billboards and car cards, and in delicatessen stores, movie-house lobbies, bars, and so on. It has been generally called the most inspiring photograph to come out of this war—or out of any war, for that matter. Any day now it will be reproduced on a new postage stamp. Plans are afoot to install a two-hundred-foot reproduction of the scene in Times Square, and it will inevitably become the theme of uncountable tableaux in the Victory parades. All this has been very pleasant for the A.P., and last week it brought to town Joe Rosenthal, the man who took the picture. We got hold of him at the New Weston the day after he arrived, and he was already wobbling under the strain of the program the A.P. had laid out for him. He had been interviewed by the papers, dined with Kent Cooper, president of the A.P. (whom he’d never seen before), looked over the bond posters, arranged to broadcast on “We, the People,” selected a series of his photographs for publication in U.S. Camera, lunched with the Dutch Treat Club, and been fêted at Hamburger Mary’s by several high ranking A.P. colleagues. Rosenthal had hoped to visit the Statue of Liberty, but when we talked to him it didn’t look as if he would be able to make it before leaving for Washington to do something further about the posters. He was born in Washington, but when he was a boy the family moved to San Francisco, and he had been on Manhattan Jima only once before. That was a year ago, and he was too rushed then to see the Statue of Liberty, which he has never seen and has always wanted to see.

  Joe—nobody ever calls him Joseph—freely admitted that all the hoopla about the picture had come as a surprise to him. “I wasn’t around when they raised the first flag on Iwo—the little one,” he said. “My shot was taken about three-quarters of an hour later. I went up the mountain with the detail that was sent up with the big flag and the flagpole, along with a Marine Corps movie man and a Marine Corps still man. I took one picture when the staff was halfway up, another when it was all the way up, and then I got a lot of Marines to stand around cheering to make my last one. When they wired from Guam that my flag picture was very good, I thought they meant the last one. All my stuff from Iwo was shipped out in negative, and I never had any idea how the picture looked till I got back to Guam and saw how it developed.” When Joe’s picture was published, a commentator on the Blue Network said that the picture had been carefully posed by Joe. Later, he retracted the canard. “It wouldn’t have been any disgrace at all,” Joe told us, “to figure out a composition like that. But it just so happened I didn’t. Good luck was with me, that’s all—the wind rippling the flag right, the men in fine positions, and the day clear enough to bring everything into sharp focus.”

  Joe has been taking pictures in the Pacific since January, 1944, when he got out of the Maritime Service, in which he had served as a photographer. Because of weak vision, he’d been turned down by the Army, Navy, and Marines before the Maritime Service took him in. Since he took his flag-raising picture, his draft board in San Francisco has honored him by stepping him up from 4-F to 2A-F. He worked around San Francisco as a photographer for fifteen years before the war, and joined up with the A.P. when it absorbed another news agency he was working for, in 1938. A serious character, Joe gave us a few technical details about his masterwork
that we pass along to any camera sharps among our readers. The shot was taken with a Speed Graphic, between f/8 and f/11 at 1/400th of a second, on an Agfa Ansco Superpan Press film-pack, against an overcast sky, with camera visibility about five miles. Joe got his composition in line by standing on a sandbag on top of some stones he piled up on the rim of Suribachi’s crater. Joe said that the raising had no perceptible effect on the Marines fighting at the foot of the mountain because they were too exhausted to rejoice. Incidentally, there are six Marines in the picture, although everybody thinks there are four or five. We asked Joe if he had any other flag pictures to his credit. “I am,” said Joe, “the man who took the pictures of the two kids on Guam with homemade flags that had seven and nine stripes and thirteen and forty-three stars. I am also the man who was attached to General MacArthur’s headquarters for a month without taking a picture of the General.”

  1945

  THE CELLULOID BRASSIÈRE — Andy Logan

  FOR a journalist unwilling to interview Tennessee Williams, who wrote the latest hit show, “The Glass Menagerie,” the only alternative is giving up his press card. Fortunately, Williams is an amiable and adaptable young man, unruffled even by such experiences as being asked to pose for three news photographers in a single morning. He told us, as he has told other interviewers, that four years ago he was an usher at the Strand Theatre. It turns out, however, that this was merely an interlude between jobs as a Guild playwright (unsuccessful) and as a Hollywood script writer (unsuccessful). “Battle of Angels” was the name of the Williams play the Guild put on, and, though it starred Miriam Hopkins and was directed by Margaret Webster, it folded up after the tryout in Boston. “I never heard of an audience getting so infuriated,” Williams told us. “They hissed so loud you couldn’t hear the lines, and that made Miriam so mad that she began to scream her lines above the hissing. Then they stamped their feet, and after a while most of them got up and left, banging their seats behind them. That play was, of course, a much better play than this one. The thing is, you can’t mix up sex and religion, as I did in ‘Battle of Angels,’ but you can always write safely about mothers.”

  The mother Williams wrote about in “The Glass Menagerie” is his own. The play is mainly taken from life. “We moved to St. Louis when I was about thirteen,” the author informed us. “We took an old house that just had windows at the front and back. My sister, who was a year older than I was, had a sad little shadowy room that looked out on an alley, so we painted it white for her, and she collected a lot of little glass animals and put them on the white shelves to brighten things up. It’s something you remember. Especially if you’re a playwright. ” A playwright Williams certainly is, the current show being the eighth he has written, not counting his work in Hollywood. He went out there straight from his run as a Strand usher, M-G-M having topped his old salary considerably (life is that way in the arts). They put him right to work on a Lana Turner picture the name of which he cannot remember—“I always thought of it as ‘The Celluloid Brassière,’ ” he said—and then, when this project failed to work out, tried to assign him to a Margaret O’Brien script. When he had finished telling M-G-M what he thought of child actors, they barred him from the studio. He sat out the rest of his contract on the beach at Santa Monica, drawing two hundred and fifty dollars a week. That was when he started work on “The Glass Menagerie.” He finished it in Provincetown last summer. When he showed the manuscript to his agent, she said, “Well, let’s get it typed, anyway.”

  Williams is a small, quiet man with rather close-clipped hair and a heart which is a little too unstable to allow him to be in the Army. Collectors of psychosomatic lore will be fascinated to learn that he was once paralyzed for two weeks, apparently as a gesture of protest against working in a shoe store; at any rate, when his parents told him he didn’t have to go back to the shoe store, the paralysis went away. He seems to be pretty well relaxed now. “I never had a very hard time of it,” he said, “so now that I’m about to have an easy time of it, it doesn’t seem to make so much difference. In the last ten years I’ve nearly always done what I wanted, and when I needed money there were always things I could do—clerking or ushering. Sometimes it was a nuisance, taking time off from writing to make enough money to eat, but there are plenty of things about being successful that are a nuisance, too—those three photographers this morning, for instance.”

  1945

  LAST WORD — Andy Logan

  THIS may well be our final story on Adolf Hitler, and you may be sure we’re not trying to lay the foundations for a Hitler legend—just cleaning up some odds and ends, such as the fact that two savage German shepherd dogs were the only animals he ever owned, that he had throwing flowers in his path made a penal offense (they might explode), that he was fond of cactus for interior decoration, and that he never had a checkbook in his life. He had his famous forelock cut off when he got a letter from a barber in Athens who said it was unbecoming, meat for cartoonists, and an evidence of poor barbering. Mussolini told a confidant, “Hitler is just a bad imitation of me.”

  Hitler did not by any means receive a unanimously bad press outside the Reich. George Bernard Shaw hailed his first actions as Chancellor as “perfectly right.” Bishop Wade of the Methodist Episcopal Church said that he was not wholly bad but did have some bad advisers. He was a teetotaler, and this won him some admirers, too, though his oldest brother, Alois Hitler, a bartender in Berlin, was probably not among them. Hitler’s father, by the way, died while drinking in a tavern in the village of Leonding, near Linz. Over the doorway of the tavern was the motto “Whether Christian, Pagan, Jew, we’ve a drink that waits for you.” Hitler’s habit of making important moves or announcements on Saturday resulted in a decision to keep the Paris Bourse closed Saturdays during some of those tense moments of 1937. Among the evils he introduced into our society was a revival of astrology. He was said to have chosen for the Munich coup of 1938 the moment when the sun, moon, and planets were in good configuration with his chart. Hearing of this, certain Washington believers began lobbying for the appointment of a federal astrologer. Presumably in a spirit of pure irony, Hitler was once voted the world’s greatest man by the Princeton freshmen and proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize by the Swedish senate. He was not formally called Der Führer until 1939. Before that he was Reichsführer, Reichskanzler, und Höchstkommandierende der Armee.

  The official fiction was that Hitler drew no salary or other emoluments, and lived on the royalties from “Mein Kampf.” His black Mercedes-Benz car held the record for the run between Stuttgart and Munich. It was specifically forbidden for members of the master race to name babies after him. A Hungarian factory owner once forbade his workers to wear mustaches cut like Hitler’s, declaring that they were beneath the dignity of a Hungarian, and a Czech court once ruled that to call a man a Hitler was slander. In death notices printed within the Reich, Hitler was invoked instead of God. A German linotyper once got a stiff jail sentence for accidentally or intentionally making “ Heil Hitler” read “Heilt Hitler”—“Cure Hitler.”

  Before the war, Hitler could recite from memory the name of every warship of the British and American navies and the cast of every German movie comedy. The night after the 1934 “blood purge,” he made his friend Putzi Hanfstaengl play bits of “Die Meistersinger” to him over and over. Of his library of six thousand volumes, the only one he ever gave any evidence of having read was Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s “Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.” He used to say he could get the gist of a book by running his hands over it. One piece of Hitler art that was extant in Germany as recently as ten years ago was a poster he painted in 1909 for the manufacturers of Teddy’s Perspiration Powder; he did this after twice flunking his entrance tests to the Vienna Academy of Art. He had a dozen pairs of spectacles at each of his desks, various pairs for various hours of the day and night. In 1937, he prophesied that Berlin would be completely rebuilt within twenty years.

  1945

 
ONE MAN’S FAMILY — Lillian Ross

  HERE is a brief report on the recent visit to town of the Saudi Arabian delegation to the United Nations Conference in San Francisco. The party was headed by His Royal Highness Prince Faisal ibn-Abdul-Aziz al-Saud, Viceroy of the Hejaz and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Saudi Arabia, who is the second son of King Ibn-Saud. He was accompanied by eight official advisers, all sheiks, and two physicians, three bodyguards, and four other princes—his son, Prince Abdullah ibn-Faisal al-Saud, who is twenty-three, and Prince Fahad ibn-Abdul-Aziz al-Saud, Prince Muhammad ibn-Abdul-Aziz al-Saud, and Prince Nawaf ibn-Abdul-Aziz al-Saud, three of his twenty-four brothers. Prince Nawaf, who is twelve, is one of the youngest of the King’s sons, and is (we’ve worked it out for you) Prince Abdullah ibn-Faisal al-Saud’s uncle.