The Philadelphia (and Newport, Rhode Island) Story

High Society (1956) promises fun at the movies. And it delivers. This spritely screwball musical stars Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, both of whose characters are at least somewhat in love with an elegant heiress, Tracy Lord, played by the blonde and beautiful Grace Kelly. This was to be Kelly’s very last movie role before she married a real-life Prince Charming and became Princess Grace of Monaco. Rounding out the cast are the acerbic Celeste Holm and the delightfully ebullient Louis Armstrong. The setting is ritzy Newport, Rhode Island, where the central characters live in posh mansions, surrounded by fawning retainers.  

 Armstrong’s presence is explained by the fact that there’s a jazz festival in the vicinity. He acts as a kind of narrator to open and close the film; he also memorably duets with Crosby on the up-tempo "Now You Has Jazz.” In this story, Crosby plays  C. K. Dexter Haven, a well-heeled singer/composer who is Tracy Lord’s neighbor, as well as her former husband. Though they were once deeply attached, and shared a romantic honeymoon aboard a yacht called the “True Love,” affection has turned to loathing (on Tracy’s part, at least), followed by an acrimonious divorce. Now Tracy is on the brink of marrying a staid businessman, and Dex wanders over to observe the hubbub. You see, C. K. Dexter Haven has (in his relaxed way) never quite gotten over Tracy, and he’s hanging around to check on what his former wife is up to.

 Also in residence on the wedding weekend are a magazine journalist (Sinatra) and his photographer sidekick (Holm), determined to get a scoop on this big society event. Everything goes haywire on the night before the nuptials, when Tracy gets drunk and Sinatra’s character gallantly comes to her rescue.

 The Cole Porter ditties (including the romantic hit, “True Love” and a nifty Crosby/Sinatra duet) are appealing, and there are no false notes among the performers. Still, seeing High Society again after many years, I became convinced that there was a better version of this tale to be found. And so, of course, there is. Back in 1940, the great George Cukor directed The Philadelphia Story, based on a Philip Barry stage hit that starred Katharine Hepburn. Hepburn’s Hollywood career had recently been foundering, and so she bought the play’s film rights in order to reintroduce herself to the moviegoing public. It worked magnificently well, especially since Cukor invited two of the era’s brightest male stars, Cary Grant and James Stewart, to play the main men in her life., If Hoboken’s rough-and-tumble Frank Sinatra is amusing when he romances the soignée Grace Kelly in and around her estate’s swimming pool, imagine how much funnier it is when aw-shucks Jimmy Stewart pitches woo to the imperious Hepburn. And of course Cary Grant is Cary Grant, effortlessly suave and just the fellow to tame this particular shrew. What we love about Katharine Hepburn is how wonderfully she plays a woman who is absolutely wrong about pretty much everything. Seeing her get her comeuppance is a delight for those of us who admire strong women but also place great stock in happily-ever-after.

 F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, insisted that the very rich “are different from you and me.” To which his pal Ernest Hemingway wryly reposted, “Yes, they have more money.” Movie fans, particularly in the years coming out of the Great Depression, preferred to think that—despite all their riches—the wealthy could be as foolish as those of us with emptier pockets. The Philadelphia Story certainly proves this is so.   

 

Hemingway and Dos Passos: Frenemies to the End

Almost 50 years after his death in 1961, Ernest Hemingway remains an American icon. Schoolchildren continue to know (or at least I hope they do) such masterworks as In Our Time and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Cineastes revere films based on Hemingway novels, like To Have and Have Not, which gained fame as the first and sexiest on-screen pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. In various picturesque parts of the globe there are Hemingway statues as well as watering holes named after his favorite drinking spot, Harry’s Bar in Venice. I once made a pilgrimage to a Madrid restaurant called Botín because Hemingway’s Jake Barnes had feasted on suckling pig there, washed down with a nice rioja, in The Sun Also Rises.   

Not only have many of Hemingway’s works been filmed (as far back as 1932, Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes starred in a screen version of A Farewell to Arms) but he himself has appeared as a character in numerous Hollywood movies and TV series. Some were intended as seriously biographical, but he has also shown up in several fanciful projects. A Hemingway character was featured in TV’s Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. does not actually materialize in an offbeat 1993 indie called Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, but I still treasure Corey Stoll’s robust portrayal of the author in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. 

When Hemingway was just starting out, the talk of the literary world was John Dos Passos, a Harvard graduate with an exotic upbringing, a talent for art, and strong leftwing leanings. The two met in Paris in the 1920s, and quickly bonded. One thing that drew them together, aside from their literary interests, was that both had experienced the bloodshed of World War I while serving as volunteer ambulance drivers on the battlefields of Europe. The twists and turns of their relationship are chronicled by my friend and colleague, James McGrath Morris, in a short but fascinating  book called The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War. The sad truth of the matter: Hemingway was not easy on his friends. At the beginning, the chum and drinking companion he called “Dos” performed an invaluable service by bringing Hemingway’s work to the attention of New York publishers. But later, as the esoteric works of Dos Passos (who experimented with using cinematic techniques like montage on the printed page) earned more respect than money, Hemingway resented needing to make loans to keep Dos and his wife afloat.  Eventually, as he came to do with all his (former) friends, he was cruelly lampooning Dos Passos in print

Jamie Morris is at his most captivating when he compares Hemingway and Dos Passos in terms of their feelings about war. Dos Passos, says Jamie, “had come away from the experience with the belief that war was a macabre and purposeless dance of death.” By contrast, Hemingway looked to war as a place for a man to prove himself, as well as a prime opportunity for romance. Hemingway’s own wartime experience of near-death followed by a passionate love affair is the stuff that movies are made of.  Hollywood heroes, like Hemingway himself, tend to find that the closeness to death make them feel more alive, and the vicarious excitement makes moviegoers feel alive too. 

There are also a lot of famous Hollywood movies that chronicle wartime friendships: see, for instance, the Vietnam era films The Deer Hunter and Platoon. From the example of these movies and others, friendship in time of war doesn’t fare so well in the long term. 

The Rain in Spain: “Hotel Florida”

Robert Capa's photo of a dead man in a tree

The Iberian Peninsula is in the news again, via the parliamentary election in Catalonia that is sending a signal of the region’s desire to be independent of Spain. And the whole world has been shaken by the photos of a Syrian toddler lying dead on a Turkish beach, one victim of the current refugee crisis. Both the news accounts and the photos have sent me back to Hotel Florida, Amanda Vaill’s fascinating 2014 account of “truth, love, and death in the Spanish Civil War.” Vaill’s book has a lot to say about the role of both movies and still photography in shaping popular opinion about a conflict that turned out, sadly, to be a rehearsal for World War II.

At the heart of Vaill’s book are three romantic couples. Arturo Barea and Ilsa Kulcsar came together unexpectedly when both were serving as press officers on behalf of the Spanish Loyalist cause. Robert Capa, originally from Hungary, and Gerda Taro, born in Poland, were war photographers on the lookout for the next big story. They gave their all to the Loyalists, and ultimately Taro gave her life. Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, both of them journalists and authors, were Americans who loved Spain and craved adventure. Hemingway, looking for a way to be involved in the conflict, found it in the making of a pro-Loyalist film, The Spanish Earth.

All of these characters passed, at one time or another, through the lobby of Madrid’s Hotel Florida, which explains the book’s title. Vaill paints a vivid picture of Spain’s capital as a place where it seemed “as if the war were a movie on a distant screen.” Early in the conflict, life in Madrid goes on as usual: at the Genova movie palace at Plaza de Callao, you could buy a ticket to see Lionel Barrymore performing in David Copperfield. Hemingway, chronicling the war for a global audience, noted that  “readers in New York, and Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco, would never believe you could be in a war zone where there were bars and functioning movie theaters and shops selling perfume; they needed to smell cordite and hear guns.” Later, though, Madrid too suffered bomb attacks. The Paramount Theatre near Hotel Florida took a direct hit, one that damaged the giant sign advertising Chaplin’s Modern Times.

Out in the countryside, Robert Capa and Gerda Taro were risking their lives to capture images of fallen soldiers, weeping women, and murdered children. Early in the war, Capa had participated in staging faked war footage, and he would do so again years later on behalf of The March of Time. But for the most part he was deeply committed to photography as a form of honest recording of reality at its most raw. His motto: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”  The quintessential combat photographer, he died in 1954 in Vietnam, while shooting photos for Life magazine.

Hemingway, while playing at documentary filmmaking, was involved with creatively shaping material that made the causes of the Spanish Civil War seem simple and direct. Later, dramatic devices were added, like artificial sound effects and the reading of a purely fictional letter. Back in the U.S., screenings of The Spanish Earth were hosted by such Hollywood celebs as Joan Crawford, John Ford, and Darryl Zanuck. Lillian Hellman sponsored a similar gathering at the home of Frederic March. Hemingway himself made a speech at Carnegie Hall, and through Martha Gellhorn’s contacts got his film into the hands of Eleanor Roosevelt.  Thus did Hemingway use his movie-star status on behalf of the Loyalist cause.   

Capa photographs a young refugee

 

 

 

Capa's most famous photo of a dying soldier