All posts by Michael Burge

Journalist, author, artist

Angela Lansbury – the sharpest battleaxe

February 23, 2013 Michael Burge 2 Comments

CANDIDATE FOR SUCCESS Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

AUSTRALIA has a dubious track record when it comes to visiting Divas. We hounded Judy Garland out of Melbourne in 1964, saw Marlene Dietrich off a decade later, and more recently had many an unkind word for Whitney Houston.

With Angela Lansbury touring here in Driving Miss Daisy, Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize winning play about a Southern Jewess and her African-American chauffeur, we might just be breaking our trend, because the reviews are great and, when I caught the show last week, the cast is enjoying standing ovations.

And Lansbury is making history. As a working actress performing eight shows a week, she is entering her 70th career year.

Neither the great English tragedienne Sarah Siddons (1755-1831), France’s ‘divine’ Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) or the once unsurpassable Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003) had longer careers on stage or screen.

The difference with Angela Lansbury is that she seems to have crept into this history-making position on the quiet.

FRESH FACE Angela Lansbury in her Hollywood years.

An escapee from London during the early years of WWII, this cockney-born daughter of Irish actress Moyna MacGill reached the United States, and, by the age of just 19, received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress in her film debut, alongside Ingrid Bergman, in George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944).

She spent the rest of the decade in the supporting actress league, and by the 1950s graduated to what she described in her own words as a series of “Battleaxes”. It was interesting work, but the roles were very much on the sidelines.

All that changed in 1962 when Lansbury took on a role that no other actress in Hollywood seemed to want – Mrs. Iselin in John Frankeheimer’s Cold War polemic The Manchurian Candidate.

The nature of this role is hard to explore without giving away the entire plot – suffice to say Lansbury was an inspired choice. The Battleaxe had found her true edge of steel, you could say.

Despite critical acclaim, and award attention for Lansbury, The Manchurian Candidate was not popular with audiences in 1963, and quickly disappeared.

In a later interview Lansbury revealed that as a supporting actress, she’d whiled-away her spare time on the studio backlot bearing witness to the production of the great musicals of the 1940s and 50s. The experience fostered her own desire to take to the musical stage, a chance which did not manifest until the mid 1960s when she appeared in the brief run of Stephen Sondheim’s doomed musical Anyone Can Whistle, which played only nine performances on Broadway in 1964.

It’s probably that musical’s failure to launch that saw Lansbury having to audition multiple times for her next musical turn – the role of Auntie Mame in Jerry Herman’s smash hit of 1966, Mame.

While the producers deliberated over bigger names, eventually she put her foot down and said they’d had their chance to make up their minds – Angela Lansbury would audition for them no more.

HER OWN TRUMPET Lansbury in the Boradway hit of 1966 - Mame. — HER OWN TRUMPET Lansbury in the Broadway hit of 1966 – Mame.

In that moment, a star was well and truly born, because it was Mame that gave her a tilt at playing a lead.

But she had to change her approach to inhabiting a role. Reminiscing on the period, Lansbury cited seeing her name above the show’s title on the marquee (and the realisation that hundreds of peoples’ incomes depended on her carrying the show) as the wake up call she needed.

Based on Patrick Dennis’ 1955 book Auntie Mame, this is the story of another edgy woman who spends her life pushing the moral code in an outward direction, taking those close to her (including her young nephew) across the borderline.

What might have been a kind of museum piece, harking back to those musicals Lansbury watched from the backlot, became a hit at a time when social conventions were breaking down in the late 1960s.

And the production ended a long period in which Lansbury seemed unable to catch a break. For the title role in Mame, she won her first of five Tony awards, and completed her reinvention as a musical star.

Original footage of Lansbury’s Mame is extremely rare. Instead of a Battleaxe, Lansbury gives a stunning turn as a sexy, wide-eyed-but-knowing ingenue. Three years of performing musical theatre shaped her into a leggy bombshell.

She might have felt like burning her bridges in movies after missing out on the role of Mame in the Hollywood movie version to the tone-deaf Lucille Ball, but her delightful portrayal of an apprentice witch in Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), and her knockout performance as romantic authoress Salome Otterbourne in Death on the Nile (1978) introduced her to my generation.

Then came the tour de force. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street was one of those incredibly courageous musicals which brought the unthinkable to the stage in a way so experimental that you’re left wondering how it ever became a hit. Perhaps it had something to do with composer Stephen Sondheim having the sense to call Lansbury first?

The great musical role of Nellie Lovett allowed Lansbury the chance to take her cockney roots between her teeth and dive into the world of the sweet, amoral baker who carves her way into the heart of Sweeney Todd, and generations of musical lovers ever since.

Her blade was as sharp as Sweeney’s, and, as many forget, it was Nellie Lovett who came up with the rather unique filling for the pies that got them both in such brilliant trouble.

BLOODY BAKER Lansbury as Nellie Lovett in Sweeney Todd.

The role carried Lansbury until she was pushing sixty, but a brief stint in an unsuccessful revival of Mame in 1983 must have told her that it was time for another reinvention.

This time, Lansbury jumped genres again, and she took the upper hand when it came to casting. Rejecting initial offers of playing third fiddle, she put the hard word on her agent and anyone presenting television scripts – this lady was not going to be supporting anyone this time around.

Of the few female-oriented detective shows piloted in Hollywood in the early 1980s, Murder, She Wrote had all the hallmarks of a short-lived series.

The central character was an amateur sleuth who writes detective novels, always turns up where she’s least expected, and sticks her nose, politely, into other peoples’ business. Jessica Fletcher was a very old-styled sleuth, totally unflappable and the kind of lady you’d love to sit next to on a plane, but she was no Cagney and Lacey, and this was a time when actresses of Lansbury’s vintage were expected to stick to The Golden Girls and not Moonlighting.

SUCCESS, SHE GOT Lansbury as amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher.

But Murder, She Wrote became the longest-running detective show in television history, with a tele-movie life beyond the series that saw Lansbury through to her seventies.

At the 1987 New York Film Festival, The Manchurian Candidate was exhibited. Its popularity at that event saw its international theatrical release the following year. This time, the biggest name on the poster was not Frank Sinatra or Janet Leigh, but the actress who had become a household name – Angela Lansbury.

The role of Daisy Werthan in the current revival of Driving Miss Daisy has been in the hands of Vanessa Redgrave in the northern hemisphere. Apparently Lansbury jumped at the chance to step into the shoes of this rarest of lead roles for an older actress when Redgrave became unavailable.

In this play, she ran the risk of simply exhibiting a relic of herself, slave to the constant reminder of her own theatrical heritage. But after the round of applause both leads simultaneously received on their entrance, Lansbury sank her teeth in and got on with the job of inhabiting the harsh, almost steely southern Battleaxe, only this time, she’s right at the centre of the story.

MISS MAIDY'S DESTINATION Lansbury onstage in the Australian tour of Driving Miss Daisy. — MISS DAISY’S DESTINATION Lansbury onstage in the Australian revival of Driving Miss Daisy.

But Miss Daisy’s journey is not just about her car trips, of course, and Lansbury beautifully negotiates the difficult choices Dairy Werthan is driven to, right to their stark end. It’s a beautifully written character arc and Lansbury gives it her own twist.

Seeing her side-lit in the cold reality of the character’s final destination, as opposed to the well-lit aura of Lansbury’s years at the peak of Hollywood’s golden age, I couldn’t help but be reminded what a journey this life-enlarging actor has taken.

And she revealed in an interview that she’s still looking for that signature movie role, the one which will cement her into cinema history.

If anyone can find that in her nineties, Angela Lansbury can.

This article appears in Michael’s eBook Pluck: Exploits of the single-minded.

My Story, Rebels, Rural Childhood

Dearborn, death & American dreams

February 1, 2013 Michael Burge Leave a comment

NEON DREAMS The Henry Ford Museum, Detroit.

A Writer’s Midwestern adventure.

SEEKING the childhood haunts of farming icon Henry Ford, on arrival in the great city of Detroit, we (me, a cameraman and a presenter) headed not for Motown (unfortunately) but to the city fringe and the Dearborn area.

There, the Motor City puts on a veneer of rural respectability, but on the many occasions we got lost in our hired Buick, street upon street of homely clapboard stoops in everyday neighbourhoods revealed themselves, where no-one cared much for Ford and the quiet revolutions he spearheaded.

All that is on ostentatious display at the Henry Ford Museum, our first port of call.

It would be hard to name a more complete exhibition anywhere in the world. As an entrée to life in the American heartland, this place is the veritable cherry on the pie.

Acres of halls burst with memorabilia on a huge scale – the neon sign display must be the world’s best, and there’s an entire Holiday Inn which was moved brick-by-brick as an homage to the original American road trip.

A Museum staffer showed us to another building on the far side of the exterior exhibition (filled with entire villages – Ford loved the whole brick-by-brick thing), where he pulled-up a garage door and trundled a rather strange looking machine into the daylight.

This was Henry Ford’s 1907 ‘Automotive Plow’ – the prototype for the mass-produced Fordson tractor.

This tractor changed farming practices dramatically after centuries of hard labour and heavy horses. Ford didn’t invent it, but he made it affordable for most.

MAN OF EXTREMES Henry Ford and his wife in his first car.

A documentary shown at the Museum detailed Ford’s deep regret that his vehicle production technologies helped inspire the military tank, which tore through troops in the slaughter that was WW1.

Turns out Henry Ford (1863-1947) was not just a farmer and industrialist – he was also a pacifist and a vegetarian. Now that got me interested.

As we left the Museum, a formal line of Presidential vehicles revealed itself, from beautiful carriages to limousines. The last one was roped-off, because people respectfully leant across to touch the rear right passenger door.

I wanted to see why, but the sign explained the patently obvious – this was the car in which President John F. Kennedy was killed. Surprisingly, it had been remodelled and used by other presidents for many years after the assassination.

Quite close by, the upholstered chair in which President Abraham Lincoln was shot to death is also on display.

Such a strange, endearing collection of dreams, death and the pinnacle of farming achievements. The dichotomy says much about the man behind the collection, loved and reviled in equal measure. Say what you want about Henry Ford: he was a collector like no other.

Ford’s early tractors were manufactured the world over, and many have become collectors’ items, so we hit the road in search of them, heading south into the great farming state of Ohio, on the very edge of America’s Midwest.

As we embarked, another journey was just beginning in California. Young high flier, 7-year-old student pilot Jessica Dubroff’s ‘Sea to Shining Sea’ flight was going to rewrite history and make her the youngest person to fly across the United States, assisted by her pilot trainer and her father. The Ohio and Michigan media were anticipating seeing Jessica cross their skies any day now.

Passing through the endless city limits of mighty Cleveland, I checked our itinerary, and realised a colleague back in Suffolk, England, had booked us to do an interview in east Ohio, then travel a day and a half back to Michigan, only to turn around and drive back south into Ohio again. The English have no idea about distances! I grumbled, before calling and asking for the dates to be changed.

Meanwhile, we visited affluent farms where Ford tractors that had not tilled the soil for decades were stored like precious objects in huge, pristine sheds.

We interviewed farmers who ran thousands of head of cattle on prairie-like pastures. Here, my vegetarianism was something even I questioned, since these cows lived a life of liberty, with just their ears tagged before they were set free to graze the hills until it was time to bring them in for slaughter.

We met an Amish man who ran a sawmill entirely without electricity, just a pair of heavy horses who he treated like the precious commodity they were.

LAND OF EXTREMES A traditional Amish buggy makes its way into town (Photo: Ad Meskens).

The sight of Amish carriages crossing the landscape in the distance was an eerie link with America’s past. The culture of the Plain People contains the last vestiges of a rural romanticism that every country child can relate to.

In Ohio’s land of abundance, everything was larger than I had ever experienced. To reach the arms of the chairs in restaurants, you needed to put your arms out wide!

Then the nation awoke to terrible news that Jessica Dubroff’s plane had gone down shortly after takeoff from Cheyenne in the state of Wyoming. A brief life cut short. A dream broken in this land of big, record-breaking dreams.

Thankfully our itinerary had been adjusted, but we were asked not to delay – the subjects of our interview back in Michigan were heavily pregnant, due any day now. They couldn’t guarantee what we’d be greeted with. So we completed a long night drive across the border into Portland, Indiana, then back up to Michigan to the city of Flint, home of another great American, film maker Michael Moore.

Flint, and in fact that whole section of Michigan, was emerging from a harsh winter. Nevertheless it’s not just the climate that caused a certain down-at-heel quality.

Unlike the vasty fields of Ohio, that part of Michigan seemed rather poverty-stricken. The farmers were less welcoming and more suspicious of travellers. We got lost a few times, and the idea of knocking on doors and asking for directions was more than a little frightening.

This was long before Michael Moore’s films pricked the conscience of the western world – we were only there to interview a goat breeder.

Her flock of Boer goats was in the process of birthing its next generation, so we waited patiently while the mothers bleated. New life within a toughened landscape brought all the cheer we needed to feel better about Henry Ford’s macabre collection, about Jessica Dubroff’s life cut short, and about ourselves in the midst of a thawing state of disbelief … and more beautiful footage of brand new kids has rarely been captured, I’m sure.

Writers

Helene Hanff – lady of letters

January 17, 2013 Michael Burge 2 Comments

MISTRESS OF MISSIVES Helene Hanff (1916-1997) made a career of letter writing.

COULD there be a better proponent of written communication, a smarter wordsmith, a more ‘writerly’ writer than New York denizen, Queen of the day job, rejection letter collector, and one of the world’s biggest fans of English Literature – Helene Hanff (1916-1997), author of 84, Charing Cross Road?

Of all the writers I admire, I cannot think of one who deserved more to have lived long enough to write in the age of blogging.

It could be argued that Helene Hanff invented the style of writing now employed almost blindly by bloggers the world over – the confessional epistolary genre, studded with emotion, was embedded in her genes, and her unbeatable use of it was borne of her own life experience.

“I’m a great lover of i-was-there books,” she wrote in her most famous work.

“That her nature often resulted in alienation gives her story all the more pathos.”

Overwhelmed by a sense of failure and loneliness in her fifties, after the collapse of some long-held dreams about becoming a Broadway playwright (not to mention the four decades she spent trying), Hanff received news that one of her oldest friends had died.

This was bookstore manager Frank Doel of Marks & Co. at the address made famous by the title of her book, in the city of London, England.

The two had known one another since 1949. Hanff was devastated.

Forget that she had never been to London. Forget that they had never met face to face. Through their two decade correspondence, Doel and Hanff had developed a unique long distance friendship.

There was no overt romance, but there was a great and tender mutual love of English Literature – Hanff the reader, and Doel her literary scout, seeking-out affordable copies of the classics for a writer of limited means eking out an existence in New York City.

Compelled to document what may have felt like one of the more meaningful relationships in her life, Hanff embarked on what she thought would be a very small work.

MEETING OF MINDS First edition cover of Hanff's most famous book. — MEETING OF MINDS First edition cover of Hanff’s most famous book.

It’s hard to put a finger on why 84, Charing Cross Road resonates with readers. Beyond the letters between the main characters, Hanff (and Doel, in his replies) recorded the early post-WWII years on both sides of the Atlantic, through to the revolutionary late 1960s. On the journey, they held steadfastly to literature as the world changed around them.

I first encountered this story in its 1987 film adaptation, starring Anne Bancroft as Hanff and Anthony Hopkins as Doel.

What spoke to me was the idea that Hanff fed her soul without really leaving her living room, which some might consider limited, but which struck me as profoundly imaginative.

She really was an armchair traveller who reassured people the world over that where we were, right at that moment, was neither limited or mundane, if only we could read and access our imaginations.

I felt I was starting to understand Hanff better when I read one of her most revealing paragraphs in the sequel, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, when she described how she stumbled into what is known as the Actors’ Church in London’s Covent Garden, and promptly burst into tears at the sight of the small plaque in memory of Vivien Leigh.

It also says a lot that Hanff doesn’t explain why. Her sentiment was very personal, but it was also very private. She seemed to take plenty of secrets to her death in 1997, leaving behind much speculation about her life.

Although readers and fans got a rare glimpse into Helene Hanff’s life in a 2014 tribute written by her cousin, writer Jean Hanff Korelitz, who recorded her first meeting with her famous relative.

“Helene turned out to be a small woman with the wiry build of a preadolescent boy, and she dressed in a style that had seen her through decades of a writer’s life: wool trousers, cardigans, flat sneakers, everything well worn and often less than scrupulously clean,” Korelitz wrote.

“She had a barking voice, a wry perpetual smile, and a pageboy haircut that veered in colour towards a not entirely natural rust.”

These observations make Hanff sound like a short Katharine Hepburn, but it was Hanff’s response to her young cousin’s first published book that is the more revealing memory. According to Korelitz, when Hanff questioned, brusquely, why Korelitz wrote something “like that?”

“Five minutes later she called back, in tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ she wailed. I was stunned, and tried to persuade her that it was nothing, but she didn’t believe me, and she was right; when she died the following year there was still that skein of discomfort between us.”

These moments are reminiscent of similar turning points in 84, Charing Cross Road that do not appear in the correspondence, but rather provide the links between Doel and Hanff’s letters.

For example, when Hanff writes of sending a food package to the staff at the London bookshop in the middle of Britain’s postwar rationing, only to realise that the six-pound ham in it may have meant any kosher Jewish staff would miss out, she cares enough to write and make other arrangements.

In these anecdotes, Hanff reveals herself as an ‘act first, think second’ character, but one who was never afraid to try better next time.

Confronted with her younger cousin’s publication success, the woman who’d waited until she was almost fifty to make her own literary splash, and only did so by writing primarily about herself, Hanff’s response to Korelitz is understandable.

But it’s this combination of a strong individual who showed actions of great empathy that provides the dynamic attractive force in Helene Hanff, and, by extension, her work. That her nature often resulted in alienation gives her story all the more pathos.

A loyal respondent to the thousands of fan letters she received (and, according to her obituarist, kept in relative poverty for a few years from the postage costs), Hanff’s true life’s work was probably in these letters, surely scattered across the globe by now.

One day, Hanff’s replies to these fan letters may provide an even deeper account of this intensely private woman who preferred to put things in writing – after all, her breakthrough work (and certainly her most enduring), is ‘just’ an edited collection of letters.

If only the rest of her missives could be collected.

Her correspondence style was direct, humorous, polite, punctuated by outbursts in capitals and underlinings for emphasis (you can hear the clack of her typewriter in the execution), and you’ll never catch her abrevi8.

It’s tempting to imagine what Hanff would think of all the communication problems modern internet participants encounter in their use of written language. I’d like to think she’d write: “GET OVER IT and just READ, for God’s sake!” and: “TONE, you think I used a TONE with you? Of course I did …”

If she were alive today, Helene Hanff would preside over the world’s most followed literary blog, from which she’d broadcast her wry empathy to the world from her kitchen table. Would Twitter’s 140 characters have given her the space to say what she wanted? I am sure she’d have found a way; but emoticons? NEVER!

This article appears in Michael’s eBook Pluck: Exploits of the single-minded.

Michael Burge Media

All posts by Michael Burge

Angela Lansbury – the sharpest battleaxe

Dearborn, death & American dreams

Helene Hanff – lady of letters

Journalist, artist, author, designer, digital publisher and mentor

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Journalist, artist, author, designer, digital publisher and mentor