Stan Freberg Discovers America

The voice is solemn, stentorian, coming from deep within the lower register:  “STAN FREBERG MODESTLY PRESENTS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.” Then there’s a jaunty overture, after which Christopher Columbus stops playing hanky-panky with Queen Isabella long enough to hit up the Spanish treasury for three ships on which to sail off into the unknown. Next thing we know, a gaggle of sailors are bound for Miami Beach, harmonizing on  “It’s a Round Round World.” It’s all part of Columbus’s grand dream to open the first Italian restaurant in America: “Starches, cholesterol, all the finer things.” And so it goes.

Stan Freberg, who died this week at 88, was successful in many venues. As a voice actor, he played Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent on the classic kids’ TV show, Time for Beany, then voiced roles in Bugs Bunny cartoons and in Disney’s Lady and the Tramp. His parody recordings, like the Dragnet spoof “St. George and the Dragonet,” sold millions of copies. When he moved into advertising, he brought his goofy sense of humor with him. Sunsweet sold a lot of pitted prunes after he announced in radio and TV spots that the company was dedicated to futuristic breakthroughs: “Today the pits, tomorrow the wrinkles.” Peddling Chung King chow mein, he added handles to the cans, so that consumers could feel as though they were getting takeout from their favorite Chinese restaurant.

But true Freberg enthusiasts best remember his long-playing 1961 album, Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America,Volume One:The Early Years. This was a full-blown musical production with a cast of, well, dozens, and an orchestra conducted by Billy May. (As fans will recall, there was tap-dancing too.) The songs, gags, and verbal tics proved so infectious that my family quickly had the entire album by heart.  During my college years, my social life revolved around finding fellow Freberg addicts who, like me, could rattle off Betsy Ross’s gripe to George Washington: “Hey,you’re tracking snow all over my Early American rug!”

Since Freberg’s death, commentators have noted the way he danced along the edge of the day’s key social issues. They often mention the skit in which Benjamin Franklin resists Thomas Jefferson’s arm-twisting over the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Sings Tom, “You’re so skittish . . . who possibly could care if you do?”  Ben answers: “The Un-British Activities Committee, that’s who.”  But my personal favorite\, involving the first Thanksgiving, pokes fun at the era’s commitment to token measures on behalf of civil rights. It seems that a Puritan mayor, in a tough re-election battle, is being urged by his campaign staff to reach out to the underclass.The idea: “Take an Indian to lunch . . . this week/ Show him we’re a regular bunch . . . this week/ Show him we’re as liberal as can be./ Let him know he’s almost as good as we.”  After all, says the mayor, “We came over on the Mayflower.”

There’s lots more silliness too.  Like George Washington, preparing to cross the Delaware, dithering about which boat he should rent. And Peter Tishman (aka Minuit) being fleeced on the deal to buy Manhattan for 23 dollars worth of junk jewelry (“You thought you bought a furnished island?”). Naturally, the disrespect shown to the Founding Fathers raised some hackles. (An outraged Daughter of the American Revolution shows up for a cameo at album’s end.)    

Decades later, I was introduced to Stan Freberg. I wanted to make a clever allusion to this album, but nothing came out of my mouth. Which he must have found very funny indeed. 

Frank Sinatra: Singing in Many Keys

These days, action fans are thrilling to the new seventh installment of the Fast and the Furious franchise. Me? I’m thinking about Frank Sinatra.

It’s fair to say that Old Blue Eyes always found himself where the action was. Starting out as a big-band singer with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, he quickly became a teen idol, then matured into an incomparable lounge singer, balladeer, and “poet of loneliness.” His personal life was colorful, to say the least, full of romantic escapades and marriages to such disparate dames as Ava Gardner  and the very young Mia Farrow. There were the friendships with leading politicians, the rumors of mob involvement, and the Las Vegas hijinks involving his buddies in the so-called Rat Pack.

All of this gives plenty of material to Alex Gibney, the celebrated documentary filmmaker best known for such politically charged work as Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, and the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side. Just last week, Gibney attracted a record-breaking 1.7 million viewers to HBO when the network premiered his Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.  The Scientology story has its Hollywood side, and Gibney has long revealed his musical interests in documentaries about Jimi Hendrix and James Brown. So it’s perhaps not surprising that (in honor of the one-hundreth anniversary of the singer’s birth) he’s produced a two-part HBO special, Sinatra: All or Nothing at All. So far I’ve only seen Part One, but look forward to more. Personally, I love Sinatra’s voice and his way with a lyric, but for now I want to concentrate on something more suprising: his highly successful movie career.

Yes, Sinatra made more than fifty movies. The first batch consisted of  lightweight musical fare, though such films as Anchors Aweigh and Take Me Out to the Ballgame  were far more sophisticated then any of the Elvis Presley showcases a decade later. After all, Frank was up there on the big screen tap-dancing with the great Gene Kelly and engaging in comic repartee with spunky Betty Garrett. One of my all-time favorites is 1949’s On the Town, in which three sailors (Sinatra, Kelly, and the goofy Jules Munshin) on shoreleave in New York City sing Leonard Bernstein songs, trade Comden-and-Green quips, and woo the delightful Garrett, adorable Vera Ellen, and sexy Ann Miller atop the Empire State Building. Four years later, Sinatra won a key dramatic role in the film made from James Jones’ bestselling From Here to Eternity. The part of the feisty and ultimately tragic Maggio, which at first was intended for Eli Wallach, won Sinatra a well-deserved supporting actor Oscar. Soon thereafter, he earned a best actor nomination for his intense portrayal of a drug addict in The Man with the Golden Arm.  

Having earned his stripes as a dramatic actor, Sinatra continued to take the occasional light comedy role, like that of the swinging bachelor in The Tender Trap. I also remember him as the original Danny Ocean, and as the star of a low-key little love story called A Hole in the Head, opposite Eleanor Parker. But he never stopped being ambitious: how could anyone forget The Manchurian Candidate?

Shirley Jones, an actress known for being forthright, has recounted how in 1956  Sinatra was supposed to be her leading man in the film adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. At the last possible moment, he dropped out, and she’s convinced he was daunted by the role’s complex musical and dramatic challenges. Maybe so, but I doubt he was ever scared again. 

Roger Corman Hammers Out a Career

April 5 is a special day in the film world: the 89^th birthday of B-movie maven Roger Corman. Roger is my former boss, as well as the subject of my best-selling independent biography, Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, now in its third edition. Unquestionably Roger has lived long and prospered. This year, though, his birthday celebration may be marred by a messy financial matter. He and wife Julie have just filed a lawsuit, claiming they’ve lost $60 million because of a hedge fund manager’s incompetence.   

I just finished reading veteran journalist Steve Weinberg’s fascinating 1989 biography of tycoon-diplomat Armand Hammer. A powerful figure on the world stage, Hammer seemed capable of living forever. (When hauled into court in 1976, charged with a Watergate-era illegal campaign contribution, he looked to be at death’s door. The judge let the sick old man off easy, and he lived to be 92, finally passing away in 1990.) What I’ve gleaned from Weinberg’s pages is how many personality traits Hammer and Corman share. They could almost be twins, separated at birth.

In one regard Hammer had Roger beat. Roger’s considerable accomplishments are all within the entertainment field. He’s told a colleague of mine, “I never want to see another movie. But it’s the only thing I know how to do.” Hammer, by contrast, seemed to succeed at whatever he chose. As an American capitalist in the early days of the Soviet Union, he made money in phosphate, and in the manufacture of pencils. Later he sold art and liquor, then discovered the oil business, founding Occidental Petroleum. Ultimately he became so rich that he could indulge in whims like cattle-breeding and Arabian horses. He even bought the Arm and Hammer Baking Soda Company, so that the Wall Street Journal could jest, “Armand Hammer and Arm and Hammer Finally Arm in Arm.”

It sounds like Roger to me when Weinberg says, “For Hammer . . . wealth and adulation seemed to substitute for friendship.” The hirings and firings that went on within Hammer’s innner circle seem familiar too: in Corman’s world I’ve also seen protégés suddenly banished, and heirs apparent announced one day, then demoted the next. Roger has no board of directors whom he needs to keep in line by requiring that they all file unsigned letters of resignation. But  there’s no question that Roger, like Hammer, can be intimidating to underlings. When Michael Amato was head of marketing at Roger’s Concorde-New Horizons, he was too much in awe of his boss to disagree about anything significant. Whenever business problems arose, Amato would march into Corman’s office, intent on expressing his views. But inevitably he would be won over to Corman’s own perspective. So the meeting would end with his complete capitulation: “Whatever you say. I’ll work all night on this, get it done for tomorrow.”  

A man who loved publicity, Hammer commissioned over the course of his lifetime four flattering books about himself. Predictably, he ignored Weinberg’s request that he cooperate on a wholly objective account of his long, eventful career. Roger has published his own ghost-written autobiography, and I know from experience that he encourages outside writers to chronicle his life only when he’s allowed to pass judgment on everything that’s said about him. If he doesn’t get final cut, watch out!    

Inevitably Hammer too aspired to move into the movie biz. But his documentaries, like 1984’s Backstage at the Kirov, can hardly compete with Roger’s Poe cycle. Still, Hollywood is not without a Hammer: his great-grandson Armie is now accumulating an impressive list of leading-man credits.

Happy birthday, Roger! And many happy returns. . . .

Biographer and journalist Steve Weinberg will appear on a panel I’m moderating, “The Biographer’s Voice,” at the sixth annual conference of BIO, the Biographers International Organization. It takes place on June 6, 2015, in Washington, D.C. The public is most welcome! 

"Wild Tales": Flying the Unfriendly Skies

There can’t be anyone who hasn’t heard by now the story of Andreas Lubitz. He was, of course, the Germanwings co-pilot who seems to have deliberately slammed a plane carrying 150 people into a mountain peak in the French Alps. The possibility of a suicidal maniac at the controls is just one more reason for all of us to shudder when thinking about our next trip into the “friendly skies.” But I didn’t expect the full horror of the situation to hit me at my local movie house.

Last weekend I finally caught up with Wild Tales (or Relatos Selvajes) the darkly comic film from Argentina that was nominated for the 2015 Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar. Written and directed by Damián Szifrón, and produced by Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar, Wild Tales is a morbid but hilarious exploration of people behaving badly. This anthology film brings together six short vignettes united by the theme of revenge. Here the grotesque is the norm: death by rat poison, death by butcher knife, grim encounters with a hammer and an oversized mirror. One segment, “El Más Fuerte,” is a rapidly escalating tale about the consequences of road rage. Another, which translates as “Till Death Do Us Part,” kicks off with a joyous wedding reception, then introduces jealousy, sex, an orgy of destruction, and a blood-stained bridal gown. The stories are carefully crafted, and the ending of each is rarely predictable. (In one case a vengeful explosion turns a sad-sack into a local hero.) Basically, though, it’s hard to tell which comes off  worse: Argentina’s tangled government bureaucracy or basic human nature.

The opening segment, called simply “Pasternak,” is the one that took my breath away. It starts out with an attractive young woman, a fashion model, showing up for an airline flight. Once aloft, she discovers that each and every one of her fellow passengers has some sort of long-ago connection with her former boyfriend, a fellow named Gabriel Pasternak. There’s a music critic who barred his way into a conservatory, a teacher who labeled him hopeless, a shrink who failed to help him solve his problems, a best friend who let him down . . . .  And guess who turns out to be the purser on the flight, the one who’s just barricaded himself in the cockpit? There’s a final twist that I won’t spoil: it’s simultaneously delicious and horrible. Yes, life sometimes imitates art, but this coincidental overlapping of screenplay and current events was (not just for me, I’m certain) a bit too close for comfort.

But leave it to the Argentineans to look at the world through a glass, darkly. (I guess the cynical Argentine approach to life reflects a bizarre national history that includes, among other oddities, the eccentric regime of Juan and Evita Perón.) When I was Roger Corman’s story editor at Concorde-New Horizons, I was privileged to work with Héctor Olivera, best known for a sardonic 1983 political film, Funny Dirty Little War, that won international prizes. Though Héctor, a courtly white-haired gentleman, was a respected filmmaker in his own country, he seemed happy enough to direct Concorde schlock like Barbarian Queen and Wizards of the Lost Kingdom. We’d come up with the scripts, send a few leading actors down Argentine way, and let Héctor do the rest. I worked directly with him on Two to Tango, an English-language version of an Argentine hit-man thriller, and on Play Murder for Me. (Yes, I have credits on both films.) 

Muchas gracias to Argentine journalist (and Facebook buddy) Andrés Fevrier for reminding me of those wild and crazy days. 

Christopher Plummer Makes an Impression

Today the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of The Sound of Music will bring Captain Von Trapp to his knees. As part of the festivities, Christopher Plummer has been invited to leave his handprints in the forecourt of Hollywood’s famous Chinese Theatre. And he’s tickled pink about the honor.

I’ve been a bit in love with Christopher Plummer since long before I ever saw him perform. As a stage-struck kid in SoCal, I read plays and kept up with Broadway news. Several of the shows in which Plummer starred were so entrancing on the page that I knew he must have been wonderful. My tastes were rather literary, and I loved J.B., a verse drama by the poet Archibald MacLeish that used a circus tent as a setting for a stylized rendition of the Biblical story of Job. Under Elia Kazan’s direction, Pat Hingle played an Everyman figure caught in the middle of a tussle between a God-like Raymond Massey and a Satanic Plummer. Of course it was the dark role played by Plummer that captured my imagination. In the following decade, he took on another near-demonic figure in Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt for the Sun. This time he was the ruthless conquistador Francisco Pizarro, butting heads with the noble and doomed Incan lord Atahualpa (played in a loincloth by, of all people, David Carradine!)

I never saw Plummer perform the great Shakespearean roles: Iago (opposite James Earl Jones), Macbeth, King Lear. I was, however, dazzled by his portrayal of the swashbuckling Cyrano de Bergerac, in a version of Rostand’s play televised in 1962 on the wonderful old Hallmark Hall of Fame.  

And of course the man has made movies. The Sound of Music was one of his very first feature films, and the role of the gloomy widower who blossoms into Julie Andrews’ romantic swain never struck me as ideal casting for Plummer. But he plunged into movie-making, appearing in many guises in everything from Inside Daisy Clover to The Return of the Pink Panther to A Beautiful Mind to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In 1999’s The Insider (based on a true story about the evil machinations of Big Tobacco) he won acclaim for his impersonation of TV journalist Mike Wallace. He was first nominated for an Oscar in 2010, playing a dying Tolstoy in The Last Station, then took home a statuette two years later, as another dying man who owns up to his homosexuality in the rueful Beginners. (At 82, he was the oldest person ever to win an acting Oscar.)

Now he’s featured in the new Al Pacino film, Danny Collins. This and other upcoming roles appeal to him because, as he told the L.A. Times, “they're not all boring, old men dying.  Even though I am kind of 85 now, I think I can pass for late 60s, 70, so maybe there's a few more years yet. I'd love to play a dashing young thing, though, who jumps in and out of Rolls Royces, who has a huge wardrobe that I could take home afterward.”

Plummer’s still-youthful spirit was well on display a year ago when he brought to L.A.’s Ahmanson Theatre a selection of brilliant words, brilliantly spoken. A Word or Two is a one-man show devoted to his love of the gorgeous language of poets and playwrights. It’s highly personal but not confessional: we learn next to nothing about his three marriages nor his feelings toward Julie Andrews. What we do learn is how a lonely little boy took to Lewis Carroll, and to Shakespeare, finding joy in speaking great words aloud.