She had more famous roles, of course, but I love to think of her in the 1946 movie The Harvey Girls, starring a fiesty Judy Garland and a particularly fetching Ray Bolger. Charisse is one of the trainful (that’s the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe, to be exact) of gals who’ve come to civilize the west with starched shirtfronts and tender cuisine.
Charisse, in her first speaking role on film (according to a few web sources, anyway—feel free to correct me), plays Deborah, who back home was a dancer (of course), and here in rowdy Sandrock is a tall, dreamy, exceptionally graceful waitress who falls for the piano player at the local bordello (madam in chief: the proud, resplendently decked out, and lovelorn Angela Lansbury).
Anyway, there’s quite a bit of silliness involving steaks, snakes, horseshoes, and yokels unaccustomed to the pleasures of the waltz, but just try to resist Charisse singing (in the voice of Marion Doenges) “It’s a Great Big World” and dancing in the saloon for her sweetie. This one’s not about The Legs—they’re tucked under yards of fabric in the tidy Harvey uniforms (“Black shirtwaist, cuffs neat and trim/The apron must be spotless from the collar to the hem”)—but about her gentle voice, shy smile, and searching, wistful eyes. R.I.P., dancing lady.
Category Archives: In Memoriam
Tim Russert, 1950-2008
Such a shock. David Remnick contributes an eloquent postscript.
Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008
William F. Buckley, 1925-2008
Martin Schneider writes:
When I pondered William Buckley with reference to The New Yorker, my first thought was that someone so conservative must surely have scorned such a bastion of liberal sentiment. The Complete New Yorker archive shows such a supposition to be hostage to more recent Rove-ian (and not just Rove-ian) categories of political discourse. Buckley was a creature of a no less heated but perhaps a less doctrinaire age; his byline appeared in The New Yorker no fewer than 11 times.
His work for The New Yorker fell into two broad categories: articles about sailing and journal-like accounts of his daily lot. As Buckley in National Review possessed a vessel for his own political opinions, it likely never occurred to him to rail against the welfare state in the pages of The New Yorker.
I confess that to me, Buckley was a figure out of Doonesbury cartoons and Woody Allen movies from the 1970s. I don’t remember Firing Line. I have caught him on old episodes of The Dick Cavett Show, and I can tell that he must have been a delicious object of abhorrence for the East Coast liberals of the day. Next to Rove he looks positively benign; judging from his views on Iraq he was closer to the Upper West Side liberal of today than either side of that dyad ever would have imagined.
Buckley’s first contribution, a two-parter from 1971 billed in the Complete New Yorker as an account of his “activities in November,” looks especially interesting. Go check it out.
Update: On his blog, Hendrik Hertzberg posts this fond reminiscence of his encounter with the preeminent conservative. Elsewhere on the site, Ben Greenman directs us to a YouTube clip of Buckley and Gore Vidal being nasty to one another (these clips of Buckley debating Noam Chomsky are almost as compelling).
“Poetry’s a Little Swervier Now”: An Interview With Alice Quinn
There’s a short, good interview with Alice Quinn on the Poets & Writers website, in which she talks about her twenty years as The New Yorker‘s poetry editor, what she’ll do next, and her successor, Paul Muldoon. An excerpt (thanks to Ron Silliman for the link):
How did you feel about the appointment of Paul Muldoon as poetry editor?
It was really my dream to have him succeed me. David [Remnick] asked, “What would you think about Paul Muldoon?” and honestly, I almost did a jig. You lay a foundation and then you see that somebody you adore and admire is going to come and shore it up and further it, and that’s great.
Who do you perceive to be the audience for the New Yorker‘s poems?
I feel that New Yorker readers are people who were profoundly connected to poetry in childhood, adolescence, or college, who want to touch base with it and want to feel that they still can read poetry. The New Yorker gives poets access to an international audience of literarily eager people who are sampling poetry.
Also, R.I.P. Milt Dunnell, sports columnist for the Toronto Star, who won an A.J. Liebling Award from the Boxing Writers’ Association of America in 1997. He passed away last week at the age of 102. From the collegial and eloquent obituary in the Star:
The 1975 fight between Ali and Frazier in Manila – the Thrilla in Manila – was his all-time favourite sporting event. At the time, he began his column this way:
“Not since the big guns of nearby Corregidor, now rotting in the tropical sun, has there been such cannonading in this corner of the Pacific.”
It was the greatest fight he covered and Ali was the greatest athlete of the century in Dunnell’s view.
“In my opinion,” he once said, “Ali was one of the greatest salesmen and public relations personalities in the world.”
“After a training session, Ali would sit on the corner of the ring and talk for an hour. Most of it was b.s., but he would talk about world politics, fighting, about blacks in society … all those things … and he described himself as the world’s best-known citizen.”
But he didn’t know everything. If Dunnell was nearby and Ali didn’t have a stock answer for a technical or historical question, he would say, “I don’t know about that. Why don’t you ask Milt here?”
…
On one occasion, Stephen Brunt, a sports columnist for the Globe and Mail, recalled seeing Dunnell in action at a heavyweight fight between Mike Tyson and Michael Spinks in 1986.
“The bout ended quickly, but still it was past midnight and in the confusion at ringside there was shoving and jostling as the spectators pushed toward the ring and as the reporters tried to push their way out to the post-fight press conference.
“And somewhere, in the middle of it all, was Dunnell (only about 80 then), climbing over a table, fighting his way through the mob, to get the quote, to get the story, to get it back to his readers, to make the event real the next morning over somebody’s breakfast in Scarborough.
“Athletes aren’t the only heroes in sport,” concluded Brunt.
Oscar Peterson, 1925-2007
Oscar Peterson is dead. (He was the age of The New Yorker, which, fortunately, is invincible.) I wish I were listening to Jonathan Schwartz talking about it on the radio. I hope he’ll be talking about it next weekend and playing hours of songs. I bet he will. I heard once, from another lindy-hopper, that Peterson wasn’t very keen on modern swing dancers. Is this true? Either way, I plan to be dancing to his music till the end of my days.
Elizabeth Hardwick, 1916-2007
The Times obituary. Every day, someone important to us will expire, and all those people will also be born, we know. But how can we be sure they’ll be capable of soothing that place made sore by so many losses? How can we prepare for the certainty of the names that will appear in tomorrow’s paper and in the paper (or flexible digital scroll) of our own old age, should we reach it in time?
Norman Mailer, 1923-2007
On the New Yorker website, Louis Menand reflects on the late Norman Mailer’s life and career. Mailer himself rarely contributed to The New Yorker, though. Until Tina Brown’s tenure, Mailer had published only two short poems in the magazine, both in 1961. There are just five bylines in all. As one of America’s most important postwar writers and a frequent object of public attention, he was far more often written about; a search on his name in The Complete New Yorker yields more than 100 hits.
Indeed, it would appear that Mailer had little interest in writing for the magazine. Perhaps he considered that a New Yorker byline would be incidental to his various projects—to remake American literature, to upend the battle of the sexes, to provide a channel whereby citizens could regain authenticity. Nevertheless, he’s enough of an icon to have served as the subject of a New Yorker cartoon—eight times. This 1997 Lee Lorenz drawing is apropos.
Mailer’s reputation doesn’t rest primarily on his novels (although I still plan to read The Naked and the Dead). Provocateur, mayoral candidate, co-founder of The Village Voice, journalist of genius, he did not squander his tenure on this planet. —Martin Schneider
Madeleine L’Engle, 1918-2007
From the Times obituary:
Madeleine L’Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88.
Her death, of natural causes, was announced today by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Ms. L’Engle … was best known for her children’s classic, “A Wrinkle in Time,†which won the John Newbery Award as the best children’s book of 1963. By 2004, it had sold more than 6 million copies, was in its 67th printing and was still selling 15,000 copies a year.
If you have access to the Complete New Yorker, this might be a good weekend to revisit Cynthia Zarin’s excellent April 12, 2004, Profile of this remarkable woman. She will be missed.—Martin Schneider
The Halberstam Tribute Tour
Martin Schneider writes:
David Halberstam was probably the first serious American nonfiction writer I read, so news of his sudden death in April came as quite a shock to me.
I didn’t become a serious reader until college, but I read Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game and The Powers That Be as a teenager, and both books had a profound effect on me. I don’t think I’ve ever read a better nonfiction book about professional sports—a subject I cared a lot about at the time—than The Breaks of the Game. The Powers That Be seemed likewise world-changingly important. There are many situations and stories from those books I can still summon at will.
I wasn’t certain whether Halberstam had been published in The New Yorker, but in fact, he was: the archive contains two items by him in the 1990s, one on Michael Jordan and one on Robert McNamara. I don’t know about Jordan, but there probably wasn’t a more qualified person in the world to discuss McNamara.
For all of these reasons, I was glad to see that a group of esteemed writers has volunteered to promote Halberstam’s posthumously published book The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War for Hyperion. The group includes Frances FitzGerald, Alex Kotlowitz, Cynthia Gorney, Neil Sheehan, Joan Didion, and Gay Talese, and the tour kicks off with seven events across the country on a single day. Here’s the schedule:
Halberstam Tribute Tour
9/25/2007
Adam Hochschild and Geoffrey Wolff
Portland, ME
Dexter Filkins, Frances Fitzgerald, Leslie Gelb, Lt. Gen.
(Ret) Harold G. Moore, Don Oberdorfer, and William Stueck.
New York, NY
Cynthia Gorney
San Francisco, CA
Anna Quindlen
Milwaukee, WI
Alex Kotlowitz
Chicago, IL
Bill Walton
San Diego, CA
Ward Just
Martha’s Vineyard, MA
9/26/2007
Neil Sheehan and Jim Wooten
Washington, DC
9/27/2007
Paul Hendrickson
Philadelphia, PA
9/30/2007
Nathaniel Philbrick
Nantucket, MA
10/3/2007
John Seigenthaler and John M. Seigenthaler
Nashville, TN
10/4/2007
Samantha Power
Boston, MA
10/15/2007
Joan Didion, Robert McNeil, Jon Meacham, and Gay Talese
New York, NY
More details at Hyperion and at the Emdashes Google Calendar.