What’s in the Water in Australia?

Last week several news agencies reported the death of a man who tried to swim across a body of water that has one of the largest concentrations of crocodiles in the world.  He died, killed by a crocodile.  It was, perhaps, appropriate that the nearest city was Darwin, Australia, and the death reminded me of an article about the unfortunate things that happen when you go in the water in Australia.

Strange and weird things happen in Australia.

Most recently, a young couple took advantage of the recent flooding by rafting down the Yarra River. Interestingly, they were using inflatable sex dolls for rafts, a use, one suspects, not intended by the manufacturer. Predictably, their hopes for a joy ride were deflated when the female lost control of her male doll, and was forced to cling to a tree branch until help arrived.

Passersby, seeing the 19-year old woman in distress, called authorities. Given that the recent floods in Australia have killedmore than 30 people, rescue teams have been sensitive to emergency calls, and they arrived on the scene quickly.

Once they better understood the circumstances of the emergency, however, they seemed none too pleased. Referring to the couple’s actions as “stupid,” Constable Wayne Wilson commented that “having to divert resources to that sort of thing is not ideal.”

Although the young woman was extricated from the river unharmed, Wilson noted that “the fate of the inflatable dolls is unknown” police later released a statement warning that inflatable sex dolls “are not recognized flotation devices.”

Of course, the inflatable dolls had nothing on American tourists Tom and Eileen Lonergan. The Lonergans were two real, live, non-inflatable people who were passing through Australia in 1998 following a stint in the Peace Corps.

Tom and Eileen Lonergan

Hoping to SCUBA dive near the Great Barrier Reef, the couple purchased passes with the Outer Edge Company. Their first two dives on their excursion were uneventful. On their third dive, however, they stayed underwater longer than their allotted forty minutes.

Coming to the surface, they may have expected some stern looks from the crew, or perhaps even a scolding by the Captain. What they found was an empty sea. The crew had incorrectly counted the passengers and, thinking that all were aboard, returned to shore—some 35 miles away.

The Lonergans were never seen again, and it took two days for anyone to even realize they were missing. A crew member from the Outer Edge came across some unclaimed luggage, prompting him, perhaps, to blurt, “Hey does this belong to anyone?” Only then did it dawn on the crew that not all of the passengers returned from the dive.

After a massive searched turned up no trace of the Lonergans, a staff member from the Outer Edge apologized, noting “somehow they fell through the system.”

Of course, things weren’t much better for poor Ginger Meadows, a “part-time model” from America who was eaten by a crocodile while vacationing in Australia in 1987. Yachting with a group of friends on the Prince Regent River, Meadows and another woman, according to the Houston Chronicle, “were frolicking in waist-deep water on a ledge under [a] waterfall.” One of the women, it’s not clear which, threw a plastic shoe at the crocodile, apparently to discourage any plans it had of attacking, a tactic that proved spectacularly ineffective.

Ginger Meadows

Meadows made a move for the yacht, but the crocodile grabbed her en route and, according to the author Bill Bryson, “jerked her beneath the water.” She resurfaced with a “startled look on her face” and “went under again and was seen no more,” at least not alive.

Even dead, Meadows was given little peace. Once her remains were recovered, they were transported to the mouth of the river, when (presumably) another crocodile “lunged four feet out of the water and snapped at the body bag, trying to tear it.” The crocodile retreated into unseen depths, but this was too much for a stressed crew, who decided to make haste to the nearest port and allow a larger, tougher vessel to finish the voyage.

Of course, it’s one thing for a minor model to be eaten by a reptile, or for the Lonergans to go missing, or for some inflatable doll that no one’s ever heard of to drift away in a flood, but in 1967 Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt simply disappeared while swimming.

Holt lived near a beach controlled by the Australian Army, and they let Holt swim there without bother.  Out with some friends on December 17, 1967, Holt, according to Bryson, went for “The Swim That Needs No Towel,”  plunging “into the surf. He swam straight out from the beach a couple of hundred feet and almost instantly vanished, without fuss or commotion or even a languorous wave.”

Various theories were proposed for his disappearance. According to the Dallas Morning News shortly after Holt’s disappearance, “[Holt] has in the past been known to swim to isolated beaches to sunbake and has sometimes fallen asleep while doing this.”

Harold Holt

As days wore on, however, hope for the Rip Van Winkle theory subsided, and rumors swirled: Holt purposefully disappeared to live with a mistress; he committed suicide; he was kidnapped by a Chinese submarine; even an alien abduction theory was floated.

The Coroner called these ideas fanciful, noting that Holt probably just drowned after being carried away by the rip current. Prime Minister Holt was never seen again.

In some respects, however, Holt was lucky. No one will ever remember the girl whose river rafting plans blew up when she lost her inflatable doll in the flood. Her name wasn’t even released to the public. The Lonergans have a facebook page, but they are remembered primarily as a warning to tourists planning Australian vacations, and Ginger Meadows is now largely forgotten. It’s hard to even find pictures of her on the internet, the cruelest fate for a model, part time or otherwise.

Only Holt has a memorial to keep alive his memory. In 1969, fewer than two years after Holt’s death from drowning, the Melbourne suburb of Glen Iris opened a municipal swimming pool in his honor.

Harold Holt Swim Centre in Australia

The Future of Television: Eye of the Beholder

For the first time since 1992, the number of households with a television declined.  The downturn was slight, but its impact may hint at much larger changes in the country’s entertainment and marketing industries and, by extension, the future of Americans’ social interactions.

Technological innovations have always had social implications.  When Thomas Edison invented the motion picture film in the 1890s, for example, he envisioned motion picture viewing as an individual experience.  Edison resisted the movie projector; instead, he promoted the kinetoscope, a movie machine that permitted individual customers to push their eyes against a view lens and watch images flicker about.

Other inventors, however, surmised that projecting motion pictures allowed for mass audiences—and larger profits.  Unlike today, the early days of visual electronics trended toward shared community experiences.

These shared community experiences grew through the 1940s but, by the 1950s, television began to cut into Hollywood’s profits.  Within a few years TV took hold of the family living room, with family sitcoms such as The Andy Griffith Show ruling the airwaves.

Instead of a theater audience, the immediate viewing experience was largely limited to the family unit.  Nonetheless, the medium’s popularity and restricted viewing options created, as author Victor Brooks has noted, a “shared community…in which family members, friends, and schoolmates often watched the same program so that discussion of a particular show might carry over from the living room to the schoolyard the next day.”

During the 1970s and 1980s, however, even this “shared community” began to fragment.  As television prices dropped and cable television led to more viewing options, TV viewing became more individualized.

By the turn of the millennium, mass audiences were becoming obsolete, and “narrowcasting” was commonplace.  Today, broadcast programming is largely driven by “target marketing” and, intriguingly, is now less likely to involve television.

Younger people, in particular, are relying increasingly on personal computers, laptops, and mobile devices to fill the time they devote to electronic leisure.  As they become a larger portion of the consumer market, the electronics market will change radically.

Even now, internet providers are considering ways to respond to an increased demand for online programming.  Providers will most likely implement a “net-usage” fee while simultaneously increasing the cost of internet advertising.

It’s not clear how consumers will react to price increases, but advertisers are likely to pay the higher premiums as long as net usage grows.  Unlike more “primitive” technologies, internet advertising allows for microtargeting; that is, advertising to individuals based on demographic characteristics and preferences—with the latter determined largely by users’ recent internet activity.

Consumers who have recently used search terms such as “depression” or “loneliness,” for example, may soon find their next online program interrupted with ads for Prozac or Zoloft.

Portable devices may prove even more attractive to advertisers.  Phones with GPS, for example, can alert advertisers to users’ locations, which can quickly be matched with consumer preferences to produce almost instantaneous text-message coupons for nearby businesses.

Billboards Can Now Recognize Passersby and Target Ads to Individuals

While such matching techniques might lead to greater economic efficiency, its effect on social capital, “the capacity to work together for the common good,” may be more troubling.  High levels of social capital help people work together productively, resulting in communities with high levels of trust, lower crime rates, and increased economic productivity.

Unfortunately, according to Harvard Political Scientist Robert Putnam, social capital rates have declined precipitously over the past six decades.  The reason, he hints, is that “deep-seated technological trends are radically ‘privatizing’ or ‘individualizing’ our use of leisure time and thus disrupting many opportunities for social-capital formation.”

This individuation may become complete in the next twenty years, when scientists are expected to perfect wireless contact lenses that can provide images and text to users who wish to “augment reality.”

Book lovers will forgo books, and even Nooks, in favor of reading directly from their contact lenses; emails will be sent with the blink of an eye; and movies will be seen as holographic images floating a few feet in front of an audience of one.

Contact Lens or Entertainment Center?

Social recall will be just a memory, obviated by technology.   Can’t remember where Walgreens is?  Your contact lens will provide visual arrows that overlay your vision and point the way.

Can’t remember the name of the person approaching you in the supermarket?  The lenses will employ facial recognition software to provide you with the person’s name, and then conduct a search of the web for additional helpful information, such as age, occupation, marital status, and children’s names.

In search of a mate?  Your wireless lenses will be able to identify the blonde at the bar, run a background check, and produce a “match score”—all in less time than it would take to ask, “So, come here often?”

In less than two decades, our integration with visual technology will be virtually complete.

Writing in the 1990s, Putnam argued that the logical end of technological development is “to be entertained in total isolation.”  But that isolation comes at a cost of social capital which, in turn, impairs our ability to achieve collective endeavors.

After more than 100 years of technological evolution, we are coming full circle.  Edison’s vision of individualized electronic media is again ascendant, and increasingly isolated customers will soon be employing modern-day kinetoscopes to watch artificial images dancing before their eyes.

 

 

Gram Parsons: A Memorable Swan Song

When he wasn’t making music, Gram Parsons spent much of his life abusing his body with drugs and alcohol.  Although he lived long enough to help create a distinctive style of country-rock music, his struggle with addiction led to his death at the age of 26 and, indirectly, to one of the strangest post-death odysseys ever recorded.

Gram Parsons

Parsons’ career intersected with some of the most influential musicians of the late 1960s and early 1970s.  He hit the big time with The Byrds in 1968, and expanded his musical network by partying and jamming with the Rolling Stones.  With Chris Hillman, The Byrds’ bassist, he formed The Flying Burrito Brothers, where they joined future Eagles’ founder Bernie Leadon, and, according to the New York Times “helped define the country-rock genre.”

He developed that sound further when he split from the Burrito Brothers in 1970.  After kicking around with the Rolling Stones on their 1971 United Kingdom Tour, Parsons decided to go solo.

He found strong support from a young vocalist named Emmylou Harris, whose sweet harmonies enhanced his music and whose back-stage presence provided him with much-needed professional structure.  In the last two years of his life, he was able to complete a successful (if erratic) tour, and two solo albums.

Nevertheless, his career lasted only about six years, and he never fully established himself with a band or as a solo performer.  His addictions made it difficult for him to work productively with any consistency.

The Byrds, for example, kept him on salary rather than a full-fledged member.  It was, according to fellow band member Hillman, “the only way we could get him to turn up.”  Sometimes he turned up, but was too impaired to perform, a habit that eventually got him fired from The Flying Burrito Brothers.

Even his time knocking around with the Rolling Stones ended with Keith Richards telling him (politely) to move on.  When Keith Richards urges you to get your life in order, you’ve got problems.

Too unreliable to maintain lasting relationships among musical collaborators, Parsons’ closest professional associate may have been Philip Kaufman, his road manager from 1968 through 1973.

Phil Kaufman: Would you trust this man with your corpse?

Kaufman, who had served time with Charles Manson in the mid 1960s, was responsible for Parsons’ road schedule and, at times, for helping him function.  “My job,” Kaufman recalled, years later, “was primarily to get…him fed, get him to rehearse a little bit, [and] hide the drugs.”

Kaufman couldn’t hide the drugs all the time, however.  Parsons liked getting away, especially to Joshua Tree National Park, where he enjoyed doing drugs and looking for UFOs.  It was, Parsons told Kaufman, where he wanted his ashes spread following his death.

His death came in 1973, and although life hadn’t been kind to Parsons, death wasn’t much of a picnic, either.

His family arranged for his body to be flown home to New Orleans.  Kaufman, however, had other ideas.  He was determined to honor the musician’s wish to be cremated, so he and a friend borrowed a hearse, posed as representatives of a funeral home, and intercepted Parsons’ corpse at the Los Angeles International Airport.

With corpse in tow, they headed to Joshua Tree National Park, stopping for the occasional drink along the way.  When Kaufman was too inebriated to drive further, he pulled over.  The men hauled the coffin out of the hearse, doused it in gasoline, and set it afire.

It was a botched job.  As Parsons’ corpse was burning, the body snatchers heard a police siren and fled.  “Unencumbered by sobriety,” they managed to elude the police for a time, leaving behind the partially burned corpse.

Parsons’ body, weighing only 35 pounds by this time, was flown to New Orleans, where it was given a proper burial.

The culprits were eventually apprehended and brought to justice, although the Judge seemed at a loss for charges.  Finding that a corpse had “no intrinsic value,” he fined Kaufman and his confederate $300 each for starting a fire in a national park.

The whole thing, as you might imagine, was unsettling to the family.  “You don’t just take a friend,” noted Parsons’ wife, Gretchen, “and pour gasoline on them and light a match.  How do you do that?  It’s insane.”

Gram Parsons’ music fared has better than his corpse.  He is widely respected by musicians, Rolling Stone magazine named him one of the “Greatest 100 Artists of All Time,” and his fans, called Grampires, still buy his music.

But his strangest legacy is commemorated by a makeshift memorial in Joshua Tree National Park.  Even by the standard of rock-star deaths, his was the oddest swan song of all.

"Home of Gram Parson's Spirt:" The Joshua Tree Inn's Marketing Campaign

Coming to Terms During the Holidays

As Americans open their hearts to their fellow man this Thanksgiving, many families will also be opening their homes and cupboards to guests, both welcome and, perhaps, unwelcome.  And while they clean their spare bedrooms and prepare extra food in an effort to provide “room and board,” some may wonder, what, exactly, does that phrase mean?

To provide a “room” is clear enough, but why did the word “board” take hold as a phrase signifying the provision of food?

The answer to this lies deep in history, before even the first Thanksgiving.  In Medieval times, people did not dine at tables, at least not the tables that we know.  In those days, a table was a simple board, on which people placed their food as they ate.

In wealthier homes, the board was placed on a trestle or some other end support.  In less well-off households, however, even the trestle was a luxury.  Diners simply rested the board on their knees as they ate.  Either way, the board signified a place to eat.

The “board” in “room and board,” then, simply meant to have a place at the table from which to dine.  It is from this origin, too, that the terms “boarding house” and “boarding school” developed.

Of course, the board wasn’t only used for dining; it was also useful for holding discussions.  Hence, a “boardroom” came to mean a room in which discussions were held.  A “board of directors” signified organization leaders who sat, literally, at the board.

The seating for most of these individuals, whether dining or deliberating, was supplied by benches.  For the head of the household or the leader of an organization, however, a chair might be supplied to designate authority.   Thus, to “chair” a meeting is to preside over the meeting, a function typically assumed by the “Chairman of the Board” in a “boardroom.”

Today, the term “Chairman of the Board” is sometimes used figuratively.  Former Yankees’ pitcher Whitey Ford, for example, was occasionally referred to as the “Chairman of the Board” because of his immense skill and the fact that his name rhymed nicely with the phrase.

Chairman of the Board Whitey Ford

Frank Sinatra was also known as “Chairman of the Board,” although this sobriquet was meant both informally and formally.  In addition to being a peerless singer, Sinatra also commanded vast business holdings—a record company, a personal staff of seventy five, and three planes, so his title was well earned.

Frank Sinatra, Chairman of the Board

Of course, whether the phrase is used formally or informally, one hopes that the “chair” of any organization will be “above board” while conducting business.  This phrase comes from the world of card games, where players who kept their hands “above board” (on the card table) were perceived as honest, while players who kept their cards “under the table” might be switching cards or otherwise engaged in subterfuge.

And this phrase, “under the table,” brings us back to contemporary times and the familiar piece of furniture on which we eat today.  But even this term has its mysterious usages which can sometimes lead to as much confusion as the old-school “board.”

Consider, for example, that the term “table,” in its parliamentary sense, has exactly opposite meanings in England and the United States.  In England, to table a motion means to consider or entertain the motion.  In the United States, tabling a motion means to postpone it indefinitely.

No wonder Winston Churchill referred to the two countries as “divided by a common language.”

Alas, sometimes the offer of room and board during the holiday season leads to family divisions as well.  But as you sit down to eat this Thanksgiving, let those divisions slip away.  If nothing else, be grateful that you have the opportunity to eat your Thanksgiving feast from a table while sitting in a chair.

The Highs and Lows of William Holden

This week marks the 30^th anniversary of the death of William Holden, an actor who typified the pre-1960s ideal of the American male, but whose insecurities and alcoholism plagued him throughout his four-decade career.

He was born into a family that didn’t want him to go into acting and, as if to punctuate the point, gave him the very un-Hollywood name of “William Beedle.”  The name didn’t last long into the young actor’s career.  When a studio scout discovered him, he said, “Beedle, huh?  Sounds too much like an insect.”

He became William Holden, and he got his first break in 1939’s Golden Boy, a film with established stars Barbara Stanwyck and Lee J. Cobb.  It was a big film for a newcomer and a minor hit, but at the age of 20, “Golden” Holden was too young to transition to traditional leading-man roles.   Despite his auspicious start, he spent the next decade toiling in routine studio fare.

Holden was frustrated by his inability to break into bigger films.  He was relegated to what he called “Smiling Jim” roles, where his good looks allowed him to smile his way out of on-screen trouble.  “Good ole Smiling Jim,” he said.  “I hate him.”

William Holden, Circa 1950

Speaking with Joel McCrea, one of his idols, he commented, “I’m too young to get good parts.  I need lines in my face, like you and Coop.”  McCrea replied: “They’ll come, Bill.  They’ll come.”

The lines appeared soon enough, a byproduct of his natural aging process and his unnatural alcohol consumption.

Sober, Holden didn’t care to be the center of attention; he was shy.  To perform he needed to relax his inhibitions and, for that, he turned to alcohol.  Before he left home each morning, he called the set and asked his assistant to “Warm the ice cubes.”

Soon, his career began to warm up, too, catalyzed by the hard-edged Billy Wilder film Sunset Boulevard, which was released in 1950.  Given the opportunity to play a well-rounded character with a top director, Holden broke out of his “Smiling Jim” roles and into Hollywood’s elite.

Over the next decade, Holden enjoyed a nearly unbroken—and unprecedented—string of hits.  He proved adept at romantic comedy (Born Yesterday and Sabrina), action (The Bridge on the River Kwai and Bridges at Toko-Ri), drama (Picnic and The Country Girl) as well as the impossible-to-categorize Stalag 17 (AMC describes it as a “War/Comedy/Drama”).

Movie Poster for Picnic

For a decade, he was as big as any star in Hollywood, but it did little to attenuate his drinking.  Wilder described him as a “a very tense man [who] drinks to pull himself together and to go on the set for the next scene.”

After a day of shooting, however, the drinking could get out of hand.  Co-stars remember times when he would do hand stands on upper-story window-sills.  On at least one occasion, Holden leapt out of a ten-story window, turned and caught himself before falling.  To the horror of his co-stars, he dangled from the window, lifting finger-by-finger from the window sill until he hung by only two fingers.  He was, according to Rosalind Russell, as “strong as an ox, stubborn as a monkey, and luckier than anything.”

But he wasn’t eternally youthful, and his hard-driving life-style caught up with him in the 1960s.  His good looks gave way to a more haggard appearance, and stars such as Paul Newman, Peter O’Toole, and Steve McQueen became the matinee idols of the decade.

By the late 1960s, Holden’s career had stalled.The facial lines for which he had longed early in his career had indeed come, they settled and deepened and proliferated.  One writer compared his face to a road map of the United States.

Bill Holden, in Network (1976)

But even as his leading-man looks faded, Holden reinvented himself as a character star.  With the genre busting The Wild Bunch (1969) and the prophetic Network (1976), Holden re-established himself as a Hollywood presence.  Indeed, some of his best work came in such lesser-known films as the tragic The Counterfeit Traitor (1962), the poignant Wild Rovers (1971), the quirky Breezy (1973) and television’s gritty The Blue Knight (1973),all of which came after his matinee-idol days.

But even as he enjoyed his late-career activity, he couldn’t overcome his alcoholism. According to Holden biographer Bob Thomas, the actor’s addiction counselor told him he was going to die.  “I know how it’s going to be,” Holden said.  “Lonely, alone, without dignity.”

He was right.

On screen, Holden was a pro at death scenes.  He was shot by a crazed femme fatale in Sunset Boulevard.  In The Bridges of Toko-Ri, he died in uniform, defending his country.  In the western The Wild Bunch, he died defending a long-forgotten code.

In real life, however, Holden’s death was far from the stuff of Hollywood.

On November 12, 1981, a drunken Holden slipped on a rug in his Santa Monica apartment, hitting his head on a night table.  The blow left Holden with a severe cut, and it sent the table scuttling across the floor and, literally, into the wall.  Apparently unaware of the severity of his injury, Holden tried to “treat” his wound with tissue.  Over a 30 minute-period, he bled to death within a few feet of a phone.

“Killed by a bottle of vodka and a night table,” observed Billy Wilder.  “What a lousy fadeout for a great guy.”

Note: For fans in search of happier endings, rent Born Yesterday or Sabrina.

William Holden

Cary Grant: A Touch of Class

This month marks the 25^th anniversary of the passing of Cary Grant, an actor whose extraordinary looks, sophistication, and star power continue to define Hollywood’s image of the leading man.  Others had longer careers, but Grant’s three-decade career coincided almost perfectly with Hollywood’s Golden Age; he was the industry’s finest leading man in its finest hour.

Cary Grant

The glamor that Grant enjoyed in Hollywood, however, was notably lacking from his childhood in Bristol, England. He was born “Archie” Leach, and he spent most of his time in poverty, with his schooling and childhood cut short.  When he was nine, he returned home from school to find his mother missing.  She had taken “a long holiday,” he was told.

In fact, his father had committed her to the “Country Home for Mental Defectives,” where she stayed, unhappily, for 22 years.  It wasn’t until he was in his early 30s that “young Archie” learned that his mother was still alive.  With his help, she was released from her “Country Home.”

But her long absence from his early life took its toll.  He was expelled from school at the age of 14, and shortly thereafter joined a troupe of vaudevillians, which eventually landed him in New York.  After trying his hand on the New York stage, Grant headed west to Hollywood.

Within two years of his arrival, he was spotted on a studio lot by Mae West. “If he can talk,” she said, “I’ll take him.”  The result was She Done Him Wrong, the movie in which she famously invited Grant to come and see her sometime.

Cary Grant and Mae West in I'm No Angel

Starting his career at the dawn of the Golden Age of Hollywood, Grant worked industriously under the old studio system. In his first six years of film making, he churned out 28 films, learning the craft alongside more established stars such as Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, and Myrna Loy.

This period also allowed him to demonstrate the brand of physical comedy he had learned in vaudeville.  He was a natural at the screwball comedies of the time, and soon films such as Topper, The Awful Truth, and Bringing Up Baby made him a star of the first order.

As a star, Grant was able to develop his acting further.  He applied his physicality to adventure films such as Gunga Din; and he refined his skills to become a master of light comedy, as evinced in films such as The Philadelphia Story, My Favorite Wife, and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream Home.

As his screen image evolved, he seemed consciously to leave “Archie Leach” behind.  In His Girl Friday, Grant incorporated his former identity into the script, saying, “The last person to say that to me was Archie Leach, just a week before he cut his own throat.”  And in Arsenic and Old Lace, his former name was written on one of the props—a tombstone.

But if Archie Leach was dead and buried, Cary Grant the movie star was alive and well in Hollywood.  Even as he approached middle age, he occasionally returned to the broad comedy of his early years, as in Monkey Business with Ginger Rogers and Marilyn Monroe. He ventured into light thrillers such as Stanley Donen’s Charade and Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest.  He also teamed with Hitch on darker films such as Suspicion and Notorious.  It was perhaps the latter film that prompted Ian Fleming to use Grant as a model for his superspy, James Bond.

But it was his work in romantic comedies that came to typify the Cary Grant on-screen image.  He was handsome, graceful, and he possessed impeccable timing, giving his films a unique mix of physicality, sophistication, and humor.

Moreover, he appealed equally to males and females.  Women loved him, but not in a way that threatened their dates.  Cary Grant was a screen image, not a flesh-and-bones romantic competitor, and he seemed to sense this perception: “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant.  Even I want to be Cary Grant.”

For more than three decades, he was able to be Cary Grant, at least on the screen.  He was Hollywood’s biggest star when Hollywood offered the nation’s most popular entertainment.

By the early 1960s, however, both Hollywood and Grant were beginning to show their age.  The studio system was crumbling, and television had made inroads into Hollywood’s monopoly on visual entertainment.

Even Grant was showing wear.  His hair was going gray, a change that prompted his mother to suggest that he use hair dye.  Grant declined, noting that he didn’t mind looking old.  “But it makes me look older, too,” she replied.

Cary Grant

Not wishing to watch himself “grow old on screen,” and wishing to spend more time with his young daughter, Grant retired from Hollywood at the age of 60.  His retirement, like his on-screen image, was graceful.

In his later years, according to Hollywood lore, a reporter wired Grant’s agent, asking “How old Cary Grant?”  Intercepting the message, Grant responded, “Old Cary Grant fine.  How you?”

But there never  was an “Old Cary Grant,” at least not one open to the public.  He left in his prime, the Joe DiMaggio of the silver screen.

Always the master of timing, his timely departure preserved his image as the matinee idol that graced cinema screens during his, and Hollywood’s, Golden Age.

The Curse of the Bambino

For most Americans, the end of October signals the arrival of two American traditions: the World Series and Halloween.  You might excuse fans of the Boston Red Sox, however, for thinking that the two are one and the same.

With only a couple of exceptions, Autumns have been truly scary for fans of the Red Sox.  This September’s historic collapse not only extended the team’s legacy of failure, but has also reawakened the specter of Bambino’s Curse.

The “Bambino,” of course, is Babe Ruth, and the “Curse” refers to the seemingly supernatural record of Red Sox futility from 1920 to 2003.

Ruth played for the Red Sox from 1914 through 1919.  During that time, he established himself as the best left-handed pitcher in the game, winning 89 games with only 46 losses.  His 2.19 ERA over this period is even more remarkable.  If that weren’t enough, the Babe also demonstrated an astounding ability to hit the ball.  In his last two years with the Red Sox, he led the league in home runs, setting the single-season record in the process.

Babe Ruth with Red Sox

His performance translated to wins.  With the Bambino, the Red Sox were the best team in baseball, winning the World Series three times in five years.

But Ruth was also a headache.  He treated curfews and other team rules much the way he treated opposing pitchers.  The Red Sox wanted him to pitch full time; he wanted to hit and, sometimes, he hit people instead of the ball.  He once threatened to hit his manager in the head, and he did actually hit an umpire in the head.

But it was his annual demands for more money that finally drove the Red Sox owner, Harry Frazee, to the point of exasperation.  When Ruth followed his 1919 season by demanding that his salary be doubled, Frazee balked, and then he dealt.

The Red Sox owner always claimed that selling Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees was a baseball decision.  Tired of Ruth’s hangovers and headaches—both suffered and caused—Frazee dealt Ruth to the Yankees for $125,000.  With the money, he argued, he could build a strong team of solid professionals and improve club morale in the process.

But that’s only part of the story.  Before Frazee was a baseball man, he was a man of the theater, and that was his first love.  Accordingly, the Red Sox owner negotiated that the Yankees also include a $300,000 personal loan (with Fenway Park as collateral!), money that was used, at least in part, to build a winning team on Broadway, if not in Boston.

The same month that the Babe was sold, Frazee opened “My Lady Friends” which, a few years later, was put to music as “No, No, Nanette.”  Babe Ruth, it seems, was traded for a Broadway Musical.  The curse was on.

With the Bambino, the Yankees thrived.  They made their first trip to the World Series in 1921, and won it all in 1923.  Since then, they have won 40 pennants and 27 World Series, becoming the most successful franchise in sports history.

Babe Ruth Yankees

But while the Yankees got the Bambino, the Red Sox got the curse.  When they sold the Babe, the Red Sox had won more World Series than any other team.  For the next eight decades, however, the team lost, often spectacularly.  It wasn’t until 1934 that the Red Sox even reached .500, and it took until 1946 for the team to return to the World Series.  They lost that contest in a heart-breaking seventh game, something they would do again in 1972, 1975, and in 1986.

Mostly, though, the Red Sox broke their fans’ hearts before they ever got to the World Series.  In 1949, the Red Sox lost a doubleheader to the Yankees on the last day of the season to lose the pennant.  In 1978, they enjoyed a 14 game lead over the Yankees, only to end up tied by season’s end.  In the one-game playoff the Yankees’ light-hitting short-stop, Bucky Dent, hit a three-run home run to put the Yankees up 3-2 and help them, ultimately, win the game.  In 2003, the Red Sox lost the American League Championship Series (ALCS) to the Yankees after leading three games to none.

Meanwhile, the fans often seemed to try harder than the players to “reverse the curse.”  One fan climbed Everest and placed a Red Sox cap on the summit.  Another recruited a “professional exorcist” to chase off the team’s demons.  Singer Jimmy Buffet fought fire with fire, bringing a witch doctor on to one of his stage shows to “hex” the “Curse.”  Others proposed exhuming Ruth and forcing the Red Sox to apologize to his corpse.

In 2004, the players finally got into the act, beating the Yankees in the ALCS and the Cardinals in the World Series.  The curse was broken.

Of course, the team’s epic collapse at the end of 2011 has sparked talk of a new curse.  But even in this Halloween season, that’s unlikely.  The Curse of the Bambino was, literally and figuratively, the Babe Ruth of Curses and, therefore, unlikely to be equaled.

Harry Frazee's Tomb

Interview with Sandra McKee: The Munster Mansion

The Munster Mansion, Waxahachie, TX

Sandra Mckee and her husband, Chuck, own “The Munster Mansion” in Waxahachie, Texas.  The home is an almost-exact replica of the home lived in by the Munsters from the 1960s television series. After I toured the home, I spoke with Ms. Mckee about the “Munster Mansion” and her experiences living in it.

MY: Tell us how the Munster Mansion came about.

SM: I was joking with my husband how cool it would be to build the Munster House.  He said, “Yeah, we could do that.”  I ran with it before he could say, “No, no, no.”  I watched all 70 episodes to find out, for example, how many steps from the door to the staircase.

MY: What do your children think about the home?

SM: They are accustomed to me jumping into things.  You only live once; you might as well go for it.  But it’s my grandchildren that really love it.  In fact, the younger ones actually believe we are the Munsters.

MY:  How much of an inconvenience is it to go about your day-to-day living in what amounts to a museum?

SM: It’s normal.  The problem is that I can’t just go out and buy something.  I can’t say, “Oh, I see this beautiful living room set, I’d love to have that.”  It has to match the show. There’s a lot of research involved.  You just adjust.  It’s no big deal for me to have half the house covered in cobwebs or statues.  It sounds weird, but it’s kind of normal for me. When I decorate for our Halloween event, I always ask, “Do I have enough stuff out?”  And other people come to the house and say, “Oh, yeah, you got plenty of stuff out.”

MY: What’s your most prized piece of memorabilia?

SM: I’d say, probably Al Lewis’s tuxedo in the memorabilia room.  It was actually worn by him in 2002, and he burned a hole in it with his cigar.  To have Grandpa Munster in your home, that’s pretty cool.  I bought the tuxedo he wore to our home.

At this point, Ms. McKee was interrupted by her husband, who told her that The Munsters were on television.

MY: You offer tours twice a year to raise funds for charity.  What gave you this idea?

SM: When we were building the house in 2002, I was contacted by Butch Patrick (Eddie Munster), and he wanted to come down.  We decided to throw a party and raise funds for a charity, but this year is our biggest yet.  We donated$13,000 to the SPCA.

Tourists Wait to be Shuttled to the Munster Mansion

MY: What’s the most unusual thing someone has tried to do while touring the house?

SM: Well, our first year, we didn’t have tour guides to watch things.  We caught one couple in the coffin phone.  That was weird.  We figured we should ensure it was family friendly.  Another lady, not that she chose to do this, but she fell in the dungeon (Grandpa’s Dungeon) with her five-year old.  That was scary.  We now have a rail.

MY: Other than the show’s stars, have any notables come by for a tour?

SM: No, but we’ve hosted Extreme Cribs, TV Land, People Magazine, and The New York Times, and now we’ve done the Huntsville Item!  My dream is that they will remake The Munsters and put my home in the movie!

MY: Finally, what are the worst and best things about living in the Munster Mansion?

SM: I get to live with something I grew up enjoying.  I watch The Munsters and look up and say, “This is cool.  It’s like living on the set.”  My home was on television, and the show’s stars have been here, and it’s great to turn that into a charitable event.  It’s stressful, but we love it.

Down Waxahachie Way, to the Munster Mansion

For most couples, the American Dream is to own a house with a nice lawn, picket fence, and a nice car in their two-car garage.  But for Charles and Sandra McKee, their dream was to own a home at 1313 Mockingbird Lane—a home with dragons guarding the lawn, bats on the roof, and a graveyard in their front yard.  Their dream, in short, was to build an out-sized replica of the Munster Mansion.

The Munster Mansion, of course, refers to the home owned by the fictional Herman and Lily Munster in the television series The Munsters, which aired from 1964-1966.  The house was notable for its extreme Gothic characteristics and its retractable stairs, under which the Munster’s pet dragon, Spot, lived.

On television, the Munster Mansion was set outside of Los Angeles, California.  In real life, the McKees built their dream home in Waxahachie, Texas, a town about two and a half hours north of Huntsville.

The Munster Mansion, Owned by Charles and Sandra McKee

Despite the small-town setting, the home is a larger-than-scale, 5,800 square-foot replica of the Munster’s television domicile.  It was completed in 2002, the vision of the Munster-loving McKees.  Together, they watched all 70 of the show’s episodes, taking detailed notes of the home’s interior and exterior design.

Their note taking worked.  The gothic mansion is a dead ringer for the Munster home, down to the lifeless and leafless tree in the front yard and Koach, the family’s carriage-like automobile, in the driveway.  But it is the interior that offers the most striking sense of verisimilitude.  The staircase includes the famous hydraulic hatch; the electric chair and trap door rest comfortably in the living room; and there’s the kitchen, where Eddie “wolfed” down “tasty owl’s eggs and vulture livers”; and then there’s the secret passageway behind the revolving bookcase on the second floor.

The show’s furniture, appliances, and décor are replicated throughout the house.  Cobwebs hang from the same chandeliers, lamps, and fixtures.  The cracks in the wall are the same size and shape as those on the television series, and the house is adorned with various original props from the show.  Indeed, the McKees watched the show “over and over” to learn details such as how many steps it takes to get from the front door to the famous stairway.

To passersby, the house is a real curiosity.  But to the McKees, the house is a real home.  They live there—amidst the cobwebs, torture devices, and brewing broth—365 days a year.  Raven, the bird in the cuckoo clock, really talks.  Spot, the dragon beneath the stairs, really roars.  When the McKees venture outside, they stroll through a (presumably) mock graveyard, and for a family outing, Koach is available. “You just adjust,” McKee noted.  “It sounds weird, but it’s kind of normal for me.”

Koach

Indeed, the atmosphere is so television-realistic that the McKee’s younger grandchildren believe that Charles and Sandra are, in fact, The Munsters.  It’s a different kind of home.

Being different, the house makes a lot of people curious, which leads to a lot of tourist sorts making their way to the McKee’s home.  This, it seems, is one of the drawbacks to having an aggressively interesting house.  While the McKees are comfortable with tourists taking photographs from outside the gates, the most curious individuals occasionally seek to get a more intimate view.  The interior of the home, however, is not open to the public—at least not for most of the year.

For two days each October, however, the McKees offer a tour of the home along with festivities on the grounds.  There are midway games on the north lawn; a fire breather on the west lawn; and a live band, a fortune teller, and a face painter amidst the tombstones to the south.  This year, Pat Priest, who played Marilyn Munster in the television show, also made an appearance.

She’s one of three cast members to stop by over the years.  Al Lewis, who played Grandpa in the series, visited in 2002.  While visiting, he burned a hole in his tuxedo with his cigar.  The tuxedo now hangs in the memorabilia room.

That was the first year of the open house, and they hadn’t quite worked out all of the kinks yet.  They served alcohol at the party, and they didn’t have tour-guide volunteers to watch over things.  They realized they needed to change those policies when they found a couple in the coffin phone booth—doing things that weren’t allowed on television in the 1960s.  Since then, they’ve implemented a no-alcohol policy and they now have tour guides and security of sorts.

There is a fee ($20 for adults; $12 for children) for all this fun, but the proceeds go to charity.  This year the McKees designated the Ellis County SPCA as the official charity.  The tours raised more than $13,000, no doubt making Spot’s and Raven’s stray counterparts very happy.

The tourists seemed happy, too, even with a three-hour wait to get in.  For them, it’s a chance to have fun, satisfy their curiosity, and be a part of television history.

For the McKees, it’s an adventure and a privilege.  “I get,” noted Ms. McKee, “to live with something I grew up enjoying.”  For them, it’s just a normal part of the American Dream—at least, as they told one reporter, as “normal as you can get with an electric chair in the front room.”

Dwarf Tossing: The Latest in Florida State Politics

Things may soon get a lot livelier in Florida bars.  Patrons tired of throwing back drinks and tossing darts may soon have another activity in which to engage if Florida State Representative Ritch Workman has his way.  This week he introduced a bill that would permit dwarf tossing in Florida bars.

For those not in the know, dwarf tossing involves, as the name suggests, competitively tossing a “little person” as far as possible.  In one variation, a little person is picked up by a special back harness and heaved. The contestant throwing the little person the farthest wins the contest.

The Act of Dwarf Tossing

In another variation, a little person is wrapped in a Velcro costume and thrown by contestants against a Velcro wall.  The contestant who gets the little person to stick at the highest point on the wall is the winner.

While such activities might be amusing for bar flies, you’d think it would be a sticky situation for a politician in the age of political correctness.

But those aren’t the only dwarf-related sports.  A cousin of dwarf tossing is dwarf bowling, which involves strapping a little person to a skateboard-like object and rolling him toward pins.  Another distant relative is “dwarf curling,” where little people are pushed across ice toward a targeted area.

Dwarf-related sports reportedly originated in Australia, spread to Europe in the mid 1980s, and then migrated to the United States, where they gained popularity in Chicago, New York, and Florida.  Most commonly, these activities were featured in bars—the types of places, no doubt, where Randy Newman’s “Short People” got a lot of play on the jukebox.  It’s not everywhere that you can employ a little person to become a human projectile.

But such activities were quite common in the late 1980s, when dwarf-related sports were at the height of their popularity.  Traveling tours were arranged.  Semi-official records were kept (record toss: 16 feet). The fad, however, was short lived.

For one, the sport raised safety concerns.  For another, many people, especially little people, believed these activities were demeaning, and they lobbied (but, thankfully, didn’t lob) legislators to end the practice.  A Committee to Ban Dwarf Tossing was created.  The Little People of America, an interest group with 6,000 members advocating for people of small stature, took a stand against it, calling it “deplorable” and “inhumane.”  It was only a matter of time before state legislatures gave the sport short shrift.

In 1989, Florida banned the practice, followed soon thereafter by New Jersey, Illinois, and Michigan.  New York banned it in 1990, with Governor Mario Cuomo ending the practice with the curiously unemphatic comment, “This disturbs me, I don’t know why.”

Canada also banned the sport, as did Portugal and France.  In France, the decision was appealed all the way to the United Nations, which upheld the ban on the grounds of “human decency.”

But the most extensive battles over dwarf tossing have come in Florida.  In 2002, for example, “Dave the Dwarf” sued the State of Florida, arguing that the ban against Dwarf Tossing denied him employment opportunities.  The case, however, was tossed out.

But now, Representative Workman has taken up the cause, framing the matter in loftier terms, as matters of individual freedom and employment opportunities.  “All that it does is prevent some dwarfs from getting jobs they would be happy to get,” the Florida Representative remarked.

Workman did note that he is not personally in favor of the practice, which he called “ridiculous.”  He simply doesn’t think the government should tell people which jobs they can take.

Interestingly, Workman’s bill to permit dwarf tossing was introduced during the first week of “Dwarfism Awareness Month,” which is sponsored by the Little People of America to raise “awareness about the lives of people with dwarfism.”  Workman called the timing a coincidence, noting, “it certainly wasn’t filed on purpose for that.”

Workman, as it turns out, might not be a giant in the field of timing.  On his campaign website, for example, he promises to speak to Floridians “about the issues important to you and your families,” a dubious claim in light of his latest sponsored bill.

On the other hand, there’s still a year before the next election.  Perhaps he can shift his campaign slogan to: “Workman—he’s for the little people.”