A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Maxwell Taylor
Maxwell Taylor was a senior United States Army officer and diplomat of the mid-20th century. He served with distinction in World War II, most notably as commander of the 101st Airborne Division, nicknamed “The Screaming Eagles.” After the war, he served as the fifth chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, having been appointed by President John F. Kennedy. He is the father of biographer and historian John Maxwell Taylor and of military historian and author Thomas Happer Taylor. A controversial figure, Taylor, was considered, along with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, to have played a major role during the early days of the Vietnam War in the decision to deploy US combat troops to Vietnam and to escalate the conflict more generally.
Born in Keytesville, Missouri, and raised in Kansas City, Taylor graduated from Northeast High School and attended Kansas City Polytechnic Institute. In 1918, he passed competitive examinations for Congressional appointment by William Patterson Borland to either the United States Military Academy or United States Naval Academy and then passed the Military Academy entrance examination. Taylor attended West Point, graduated fourth in the Class of 1922, and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He served in Hawaii with the 3rd Engineers from 1923 to 1926.
Taylor transferred to the Field Artillery and, from 1926 to 1927, served with the 10th Field Artillery, receiving promotion to first lieutenant. Having demonstrated a facility for foreign languages, he studied French in Paris and was then assigned to West Point as an instructor in French and Spanish. He graduated from the Field Artillery School in 1933, and he completed the course at the United States Army Command and General Staff College in 1935.
Taylor was promoted to captain in August 1935 and served at the American embassy in Tokyo from 1935 to 1939, including attaché duty in China in 1937. He graduated from the United States Army War College in 1940 and was promoted to major in July 1940.
Taylor served on the War Plans Division staff in 1940 and took part in a defense cooperation mission to Latin American countries. He commanded the 1st Battalion of the 12th Field Artillery Regiment from 1940 to 1941, and then served in the Office of the Secretary of the General Staff until 1942. He received temporary promotions to lieutenant colonel in December 1941, colonel in February 1942, and brigadier general in December 1942.
In 1942, Taylor became chief of staff of the 82nd Airborne Division, followed by command of the 82nd Airborne Division Artillery, and took part in combat in Sicily and Italy. In 1943, during the planning for the Allied invasion of Italy, Taylor’s diplomatic and language skills resulted in his secret mission to Rome to coordinate an 82nd airdrop with Italian forces. General Dwight D. Eisenhower later said that “the risks he ran were greater than I asked any other agent or emissary to take during the war.”
Hundreds of miles behind the front lines of battle, Taylor was forced by the rules of engagement to wear his American military uniform to prevent himself, if captured, from being shot as a spy. He met with the new Italian prime minister, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, and General Carboni. The air drop near Rome to capture the city was called off at the last minute since Taylor realized that German forces were already moving in to cover the intended drop zones. Transport planes were already in the air when Taylor’s message canceled the drop, preventing the mission. His efforts behind enemy lines got Taylor noticed at the highest levels of the Allied command.
After the campaigns in the Mediterranean, Taylor was assigned to become the Commanding General (CG) of the 101st Airborne Division, nicknamed “The Screaming Eagles”, which was then training in England in preparation for the Allied invasion of Normandy, after the division’s first commander, Major General William Lee, suffered a heart attack. Taylor received temporary promotion to major general in May 1944.
Taylor took part in the division’s parachute jump into Normandy on June 6, 1944 (D-Day), the first Allied general officer to land in France on D-Day. He subsequently commanded the 101st in the Battle of Normandy, including in the capture of Carentan on June 13, and the division continued to fight in the campaign as regular infantry. The 101st Airborne Division was pulled out of the line in late June, having been in almost continuous action for nearly a month, and in early July, he returned to England to rest and refit and absorb replacements, after having suffered over 4,600 casualties.
Having been brought up to strength, Taylor led the 101st in Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands in September 1944. He was not present for the division’s action during the Siege of Bastogne as part of the Battle of the Bulge since he was attending a staff conference in the United States. The Divisional Artillery commander, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, exercised command in his absence. Taylor called the defense of Bastogne the 101st Airborne Division’s “finest hour” of the war and stated that his absence was one of his greatest disappointments of the war. After Bastogne, Taylor’s 101st saw little further service in the war and was sent to the United States in late 1945, where it was deactivated in November.
On September 4, 1945, Taylor became superintendent of the United States Military Academy. In 1947, he drafted the first official Honor Code publication marking the beginning of the written “Cadet Honor Code” at West Point. He was succeeded by Bryant Moore on January 28, 1949. Afterwards he was the commander of allied troops in West Berlin from 1949 to 1951; when he left that post, he felt like a “Berliner,” more than a decade before John F. Kennedy gave his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in the city. In July 1951 he was promoted to lieutenant general and assigned as the U.S. Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Administration at the Pentagon.
In June 1953, he was sent to Korea, where he commanded the Eighth United States Army during the final combat operations of the Korean War. From 1955 to 1959, he was the Army Chief of Staff, succeeding his former mentor, Matthew B. Ridgway. During his tenure, Taylor attempted to guide the service into the age of nuclear weapons by restructuring the infantry division into a Pentomic formation. Observers such as Colonel David Hackworth have written that the effort gutted the role of US Army company and field grade officers, rendering it unable to adapt to the dynamics of combat in Vietnam.
During 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered Taylor to deploy 1,000 troops from the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce federal court orders to desegregate Central High School during the Little Rock Crisis.
As Army Chief of Staff, Taylor was an outspoken critic of the Eisenhower administration’s “New Look” defense policy, which he viewed as dangerously over reliant on nuclear arms and neglectful of conventional forces; Taylor also criticized the inadequacies of the Joint Chiefs of Staff system. Frustrated with the administration’s failure to heed his arguments, Taylor retired from active service in July 1959. He campaigned publicly against the “New Look,” culminating in the publication in January 1960 of a highly critical book, The Uncertain Trumpet.
As the 1960 presidential campaign unfolded, Democratic nominee John F. Kennedy criticized Eisenhower’s defense policy and championed a muscular “flexible response” policy intentionally aligned with Taylor’s views as described in The Uncertain Trumpet. After the April 1961 failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Kennedy, who felt the Joint Chiefs of Staff had failed to provide him with satisfactory military advice, appointed Taylor to head a task force to investigate the failure of the invasion.
Both President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had immense regard for Taylor, whom they saw as a man of unquestionable integrity, sincerity, intelligence, and diplomacy. The Cuba Study Group met for six weeks from April to May 1961 to perform an “autopsy” on the disastrous events surrounding the Bay of Pigs Invasion. In the course of their work together, Taylor developed a deep regard and a personal affection for Robert F. Kennedy, a friendship that was wholly mutual and which remained firm until RFK’s assassination in 1968.
Taylor spoke of Robert Kennedy glowingly: “He is always on the lookout for a ‘snow job,’ impatient with evasion and imprecision, and relentless in his determination to get at the truth.” In January, 1965 Robert Kennedy named his next-to-last son Matthew Maxwell Taylor Kennedy (better known as an adult as “Max”).
Shortly after the investigation concluded, the Kennedys’ warm feelings for Taylor and the President’s lack of confidence in the Joint Chiefs of Staff led John Kennedy to recall Taylor to active duty and install him in the newly created post of military representative to the president. His close personal relationship with the President and White House access effectively made Taylor the President’s primary military adviser, cutting out the Joint Chiefs. On October 1, 1962, Kennedy ended this uncomfortable arrangement by appointing Taylor as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a position in which he served until 1964.
Taylor was of crucial importance during the first few years of the Vietnam War, during his time as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and later being appointed Ambassador to the Republic of Vietnam. Whereas Kennedy told Taylor in October 1961 that “the independence of South Vietnam rests with the people and government of that country”, Taylor soon recommended that 8,000 American combat troops be sent to the region at once. After making his report to the Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff (with Deputy National Security Adviser Walt Rostow), Taylor reflected on the decision to send troops to South Vietnam: “I don’t recall anyone who was strongly against, except one man, and that was the President. The President just didn’t want to be convinced that this was the right thing to do…. It was really the President’s personal conviction that U.S. ground troops shouldn’t go in.”
In May 1963, mass protests and civil disobedience broke out in South Vietnam in response to President Ngo Dinh Diem’s persecution of the Buddhist majority, which was met with military crackdowns, culminating in nationwide raids on Buddhist temples. In the wake of the raids, the US sent out Cable 243, which called for Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. to lobby for the removal from influence of Diem’s younger brother and chief political adviser Ngo Dinh Nhu, and to look for alternative leadership options if Diem refused. As it was known that Diem would never sideline Nhu, it was effectively an authorization for Lodge to encourage a military coup. The cable was prepared and sent out over a weekend when many leading Washington figures were away, under the misunderstanding that higher authorization had been given. Marine General Victor Krulak signed off on behalf of the military without showing Taylor, who was a supporter of Diem. On Monday August 26, at the White House, Kennedy was met with angry comments by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, CIA Director John McCone and Taylor, all of whom denied authorizing the cable. Kennedy was reported to have said “My God! My government’s coming apart.” Taylor felt insulted by the final line of the cable which asserted that only the “minimum essential people” had seen its contents. During the acrimonious exchange, he condemned the cable as an “egregious end run” by an anti-Diem faction. Roger Hilsman rebutted Taylor by asserting that Kennedy and representatives of departments and agencies had approved the message. Years afterward, Taylor declared “The anti-Diem group centered in State [department] had taken advantage of the absence of the principal officials to get out instructions which would never have been approved as written under normal circumstances”. Taylor claimed that the message was reflective of Forrestal and Hilsman “well-known compulsion” to remove Diem. He accused them of pulling “a fast one”. Kennedy asked his advisers if they wanted to retract the cable, but they agreed to stand by the original decision to maintain consistency. Taylor said that “You can’t change American policy in twenty-four hours and expect anyone to ever believe you again.” Taylor also objected to two phone calls on August 24 to Washington from Admiral Harry D. Felt, the commander of US forces in the Pacific, calling for backing to the generals to remove Nhu. Felt said that the mid-level officers would not fight if Nhu was not removed. Taylor became angry that Felt had advised the State Department to move against Diem without first consulting the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Taylor then told Kennedy that Americans would not tolerate their officers selecting the president, and thus they should not usurp the cabinet in doing the same in South Vietnam.
Taylor remained opposed to any moves towards the disposal of Diem. Years afterward, he said that Diem was “a terrible pain in the neck”, but was a devoted servant of his country. Taylor called on Kennedy to support Diem until a better leader had been lined up, pointing out that the officers were divided and therefore could not be relied on to plot and stage a coup.
The junta led by General Duong Van Minh following Diem’s removal lasted three months until General Nguyen Khanh toppled Minh in January 1964. Taylor and other military officials had disagreed with Minh’s reluctance to carry out large-scale offensives against the communists and wanted a more aggressive approach. He was known to regard Khanh as the more competent ARVN general. However, Taylor changed his opinion upon being made Ambassador to South Vietnam in July 1964 when Lodge returned to the US.
In August, following widespread Buddhist protests, some senior officers, particularly the Catholic Generals Tran Thien Khiem and Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, decried Khanh’s concessions to the Buddhists. They plotted Khánh’s removal and sought out Taylor for a private endorsement, but Taylor did not want any more changes, fearing a corrosive effect on the already-unstable government. This deterred Khiêm’s group from acting on their plans. On September 13, another coup attempt led by Catholic Generals Duong Van Duc and Lam Van Phat started while Taylor was on a flight from the US—back to Saigon and catching him off-guard. The coup failed, and Taylor helped organize for Khiêm to be made Saigon’s representative in Washington. During the coup, Minh had remained silent, angering Khánh and keeping their long-running rivalry going. By the end of October, the Johnson administration had become more supportive of Taylor’s negative opinion of Minh and eventually paid for Minh to go on a “good will tour” to remove him from the political scene.
Taylor received fierce criticism in Major (later Lieutenant General and National Security Advisor) H.R. McMaster’s book Dereliction of Duty. Specifically, Taylor was accused of intentionally misrepresenting the views of the Joint Chiefs to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and of cutting the Joint Chiefs out of the decision-making process.
Whereas the Chiefs felt that it was their duty to offer unbiased assessments and recommendations on military matters, Taylor was of the firm belief that the chairman should not only support the president’s decisions but also be a true believer in them. That discrepancy manifested itself during the early planning phases of the war while it was still being decided what the nature of American involvement should be. McNamara and the civilians of the office of the secretary of defense were firmly behind the idea of graduated pressure: to escalate pressure slowly against North Vietnam in order to demonstrate U.S. resolve. The Joint Chiefs, however, strenuously disagreed with that and believed that if the US got involved further in Vietnam, it should be with the clear intention of winning and through the use of overwhelming force. McMaster contends that using a variety of political maneuvering, including liberal use of outright deception, Taylor succeeded in keeping the Joint Chiefs’ opinions away from the President and helped set the stage for McNamara to begin to systematically dominate the U.S. decision making process in Vietnam.
Taylor was also criticized by Tom Ricks in his book The Generals (2012): “Maxwell Taylor arguably was the most destructive general in American history. As Army chief of staff in the 1950s, he steered the US military toward engaging in ‘brushfire wars.’ As White House military adviser during the early 1960s, he encouraged President John F. Kennedy to deepen American involvement in Vietnam. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he poisoned relations between the military and civilian leadership. He was also key in picking Gen. William Westmoreland to command the war there.”
Taylor again retired from the Army on July 1, 1964, having been succeeded as Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff by General Earle Wheeler, and became Ambassador to South Vietnam from 1964 to 1965, succeeding Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Taylor served in the Pentagon during parts of 1965 as “SACSA”, the Special Advisor for Counterinsurgency Affairs”. He was Special Consultant to the President and Chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1965–1969) and President of the Institute for Defense Analyses (1966–1969).
Afflicted with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also called “Lou Gehrig’s disease”), Taylor spent his last three months at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, and died at 85 years of age on April 19, 1987. He was interred at Arlington National Cemetery.
A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Mary Astor.
Mary Astor was an American actress. Although her career spanned several decades, she may be best remembered for her performance as Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941).
Astor began her long motion picture career as a teenager in the silent movies of the early 1920s. When talkies arrived, her voice was initially considered too masculine and she was off the screen for a year. After she appeared in a play with friend Florence Eldridge, film offers returned, and she resumed her career in sound pictures.
In 1936, Astor’s career was nearly destroyed by scandal. She had an affair with playwright George S. Kaufman and was branded an adulterous wife by her ex-husband during a custody fight over their daughter. Overcoming these stumbling blocks in her private life, she went on to greater film success, eventually winning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of concert pianist Sandra Kovak in The Great Lie (1941).
Astor was a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player through most of the 1940s and continued to work in film, television and on stage until her retirement in 1964. She authored five novels. Her autobiography was a bestseller, as was her later book, A Life on Film, which was about her career.
Director Lindsay Anderson wrote of Astor in 1990 that when “two or three who love the cinema are gathered together, the name of Mary Astor always comes up, and everybody agrees that she was an actress of special attraction, whose qualities of depth and reality always seemed to illuminate the parts she played
In 1919, Astor sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist. When Astor was 15, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, with her father teaching German in public schools. Astor took drama lessons and appeared in various amateur stage productions. The following year, she sent another photograph to Motion Picture Magazine, this time becoming a finalist and then runner-up in the national contest. Her father then moved the family to New York City, in order for his daughter to act in motion pictures. He managed her affairs from September 1920 to June 1930.
A Manhattan photographer, Charles Albin, saw her photograph and asked the young girl with haunting eyes and long auburn hair whose nickname was “Rusty” to pose for him. The Albin photographs were seen by Harry Durant of Famous Players-Lasky and Astor was signed to a six-month contract with Paramount Pictures. Her name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference among Paramount Pictures chief Jesse Lasky, film producer Walter Wanger, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
Astor’s first screen test was directed by Lillian Gish, who was so impressed with her recitation of Shakespeare that she shot a thousand feet of her. She made her debut at age 14 in the 1921 film Sentimental Tommy, but her small part in a dream sequence wound up on the cutting room floor. Paramount let her contract lapse. She then appeared in some movie shorts with sequences based on famous paintings. She received critical recognition for the 1921 two-reeler The Beggar Maid. Her first feature-length movie was John Smith (1922), followed that same year by The Man Who Played God. In 1923, she and her parents moved to Hollywood.
After appearing in several larger roles at various studios, she was again signed by Paramount, this time to a one-year contract at $500 a week. After she appeared in several more movies, John Barrymore saw her photograph in a magazine and wanted her cast in his upcoming movie. On loan-out to Warner Bros., she starred with him in Beau Brummel (1924). The older actor wooed the young actress, but their relationship was severely constrained by Astor’s parents’ unwillingness to let the couple spend time alone together; Mary was only seventeen and legally underage. It was only after Barrymore convinced the Langhankes that his acting lessons required privacy that the couple managed to be alone at all. Their secret engagement ended largely because of the Langhankes’ interference and Astor’s inability to escape their heavy-handed authority, and because Barrymore became involved with Astor’s fellow WAMPAS Baby Star Dolores Costello, whom he later married. In 1925, Astor’s parents bought a Moorish style mansion with 1 acre (4,000 m2) of land known as “Moorcrest” in the hills above Hollywood. The Langhankes not only lived lavishly off of Astor’s earnings, but kept her a virtual prisoner inside Moorcrest. Moorcrest is known not only for its ornate style, but its place as the most lavish residence associated with the Krotona Colony, a utopian society founded by the Theosophical Society in 1912. Built by Marie Russak Hotchener, a Theosophist who had no formal architectural training, the house combines Moorish and Mission Revival styles and contains such Arts and Crafts features as art-glass windows (whose red lotus design Astor called “unfortunate”), and Batchelder tiles. Moorcrest, which has since undergone a multimillion-dollar renovation, remains standing. Before the Langhankes bought it, it was rented by Charlie Chaplin, whose tenure is memorialized by an art glass window featuring the Little Tramp.
Astor’s parents were not Theosophists, though the family was friendly with both Marie Hotchener and her husband Harry, prominent Theosophical Society members. Marie Hotchener negotiated Astor’s right to a $5 a week allowance (at a time when she was making $2,500 a week) and the right to go to work unchaperoned by her mother. The following year when she was 19, Astor, fed up with her father’s constant physical and psychological abuse as well as his control of her money, climbed from her second floor bedroom window and escaped to a hotel in Hollywood, as recounted in her memoirs. Hotchener facilitated her return by persuading Otto Langhanke to give Astor a savings account with $500 and the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Nevertheless, she did not gain control of her salary until she was 26 years old, at which point her parents sued her for financial support. Astor settled the case by agreeing to pay her parents $100 a month. Otto Langhanke put Moorcrest up for auction in the early 1930s, hoping to realize more than the $80,000 he had been offered for it; it sold for $25,000.
Astor continued to appear in movies at various studios. When her Paramount contract ended in 1925, she was signed at Warner Bros. Among her assignments was another role with John Barrymore, this time in Don Juan (1926). She was named one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars in 1926, along with Mary Brian, Dolores Costello, Joan Crawford, Dolores del Río, Janet Gaynor, and Fay Wray. On loan to Fox Film Corporation, Astor starred in Dressed to Kill (1928), which received good reviews, and the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini (also 1928). She later said that, while working on the latter, she “absorbed and assumed something of the atmosphere and emotional climate of the picture.” She said it offered “a new and exciting point of view; with its specious doctrine of self-indulgence, it rushed into the vacuum of my moral sense and captivated me completely.” When her Warner Bros. contract ended, she signed a contract with Fox for $3,750 a week. In 1928, she married director Kenneth Hawks at her family home, Moorcrest. He gave her a Packard automobile as a wedding present and the couple moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills. As the film industry made the transition to talkies, Fox gave her a sound test, which she failed because the studio found her voice to be too deep. Though this result was probably due to early sound equipment and inexperienced technicians, the studio released her from her contract and she found herself out of work for eight months in 1929.
During her time off, Astor took voice training and singing lessons with Francis Stuart, an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge, in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play Among the Married at the Majestic Theatre in Downtown Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success, and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. She was happy to work again, but her happiness soon ended. On January 2, 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox movie Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. She was rushed from the theater to Eldridge’s apartment. A replacement, Doris Lloyd, stepped in for the next show. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work. Shortly after her husband’s death, she debuted in her first talkie, Ladies Love Brutes (1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with her friend Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more movies, she suffered delayed shock over her husband’s death and had a nervous breakdown. During the months of her illness, she was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married on June 29, 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in Smart Woman, playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation.
In May 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August, but gave birth in June in Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents’ names, and her middle name is Hawaiian. When they returned to Southern California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in MGM’s Red Dust (1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a “white elephant”, and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in The Kennel Murder Case (1933), co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance. Film critic William K. Everson pronounced it a “masterpiece” in the August 1984 issue of Films in Review.
Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, Astor wanted a divorce by 1933. At a friend’s suggestion, she took a break from movie-making in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong, but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife’s income, had discovered Astor’s diary. He indicated her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used to claim she was an unfit mother in any divorce proceedings.
Dr. Franklyn Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. A custody battle over their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn, drew press attention to Astor in 1936. Astor’s diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge, Goodwin J. Knight ordered it sealed and impounded. Florabel Muir, then with the New York Daily News is known to have invented fabricated diary passages in her articles. Interestingly, the plot in a 1934 Perry Mason film in which Astor had recently co-starred, The Case of the Howling Dog, featured an attempt to access the incriminating diary kept by a woman suspect in a murder case who was having an affair with her married boss.
News of the diary became public when Astor’s role in Dodsworth (1936), as Edith Cortwright, was beginning to be filmed. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was urged to fire her, as her contract included a morality clause, but Goldwyn refused. With Walter Huston in the title role, Dodsworth received rave reviews on release, and the public’s acceptance assured the studios that casting Astor remained a viable proposition. Ultimately, the scandals caused minimal harm to Astor’s career, which was actually revitalized because of the custody fight and the publicity it generated.
In 1952, by court order, Astor’s diary was removed from the bank vault where it had been sequestered for 16 years and destroyed.
In 1937, she returned to the stage in well-received productions of Noël Coward’s Tonight at 8.30, The Astonished Heart, and Still Life. She also began performing regularly on radio. Over the next few years, she had roles in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), John Ford’s The Hurricane (1937), Midnight (1939) and Brigham Young (1940). In John Huston’s all time classic The Maltese Falcon (1941), Astor played scheming temptress Brigid O’Shaughnessy. The film, based upon the novel by Dashiell Hammett, also starred Humphrey Bogart and featured Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. For her performance in The Great Lie (also 1941) she won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress in the 14th Academy Awards. As Sandra Kovak, the self absorbed concert pianist who relinquishes her unborn child, her intermittent love interest was played by George Brent, but the film’s star was Bette Davis. Davis wanted Astor cast in the role after watching her screen test and seeing her play Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. She then recruited Astor to collaborate on rewriting the script, which Davis felt was mediocre and needed work to make it more interesting. Astor further followed Davis’s advice and sported a bobbed hairdo for the role.
The soundtrack of the movie in the scenes where she plays the concerto, with violent hand movements on the piano keyboard, was dubbed by pianist Max Rabinovitch. Davis deliberately stepped back to allow Astor to shine in her key scenes. In her Oscar acceptance speech, Astor thanked Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky. Astor and Davis became good friends.
Astor was not propelled into the upper echelon of movie stars by these successes, however. She always declined offers of starring in her own right. Not wanting the responsibility of top billing and having to carry the picture, she preferred the security of being a featured player. She reunited with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in John Huston’s Across the Pacific (1942). Though usually cast in dramatic or melodramatic roles, Astor showed a flair for comedy as The Princess Centimillia in the Preston Sturges film, The Palm Beach Story (also 1942) for Paramount. In February 1943, Astor’s father, Otto Langhanke, died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a result of a heart attack complicated by influenza. His wife and daughter were at his bedside.
That same year, Astor signed a seven-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), a move she soon came to regret. She was kept busy, playing what appeared to be under-written and largely interchangeable supporting roles, a category Astor later dubbed “Mothers for Metro”. After Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), the studio allowed her to debut on Broadway in Many Happy Returns (1945). The play was a failure, but Astor received good reviews. On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in Claudia and David (1946). She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury (1947), the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town. Before Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment in January 1947, Astor said she sat in the hospital room with her mother, who was delirious and did not know her, and listened quietly as Helen told her all about terrible, selfish Lucile. After her death, Astor said she spent countless hours copying her mother’s diary so she could read it and was surprised to learn how much she was hated. Back at MGM, Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the film noir Act of Violence (1948). The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in Little Women (1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent. She later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir A Life on Film:
“The girls all giggled and chattered and made a game of every scene. Taylor was engaged, and in love, and talking on the telephone most of the time (which is fine normally, but not when the production clock is ticking away the company’s money). June Allyson chewed gum constantly and irritatingly, and Maggie O’Brien looked at me as though she were planning something very unpleasant.”
The studio wanted to renew her contract, promising better roles, but she declined the offer.
At the same time, Astor’s drinking was growing troublesome. She admitted to alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics.
In 1951, she made a frantic call to her doctor and said that she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years. The story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident.
That same year, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and converted to Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock, but did not actually divorce him until 1955.
In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the play The Time of the Cuckoo, which was later made into the movie Summertime (1955), and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theater and on television. During the 1952 presidential election, Astor, a lifelong Democrat, supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson.
Her TV debut was in The Missing Years (1954) for Kraft Television Theatre. She acted frequently in TV during the ensuing years and appeared on many big shows of the time, including The United States Steel Hour, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Rawhide, Dr. Kildare, Burke’s Law, and Ben Casey. In 1954, she appeared in the episode “Fearful Hour” of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller in an episode titled “Rose’s Last Summer.”
She starred on Broadway again in The Starcross Story (1954), another failure, and returned to southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theater tour of Don Juan in Hell directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalbán.
Astor’s memoir, My Story: An Autobiography, was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the movie industry or her career in detail. In 1971, a second book was published, A Life on Film, where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction, writing the novels The Incredible Charley Carewe (1960), The Image of Kate (1962), which was published in 1964 in a German translation as Jahre und Tage, The O’Conners (1964), Goodbye, Darling, be Happy (1965), and A Place Called Saturday (1968).
She appeared in several movies during this time, including Stranger in My Arms (1959). She made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the “shocking” novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library, and received good reviews for her performance. According to film scholar Gavin Lambert, Astor invented memorable bits of business in her last scene of that film, where Roberta’s vindictive motives are exposed.
After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel, to make what she decided would be her final film. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), starring her friend Bette Davis. She filmed her final scene with Cecil Kellaway at Oak Alley Plantation in southern Louisiana. In A Life on Film, she described her character as “a little old lady, waiting to die”. Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the movie business. After 109 movies in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her Screen Actors Guild card and retired.
Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo, and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry’s retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room. She appeared in the television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980), co-produced by Kevin Brownlow, in which she discussed her roles during the silent film period. After years of retirement, she had been urged to appear in Brownlow’s documentary by a former sister-in-law Bessie Love who also appeared in the series.
Astor died on September 25, 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Astor has a motion picture star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard.
A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Maria Von Trapp.
Maria Von Trapp was the stepmother and matriarch of the Trapp Family Singers. She wrote The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, which was published in 1949 and was the inspiration for the 1956 West German film The Trapp Family, which in turn inspired the 1959 Broadway musical The Sound of Music and its 1965 film version.
Maria was born on 26 January 1905 to Augusta (née Rainer) and Karl Kutschera. She was delivered on a train heading from her parents’ village in Tyrol to a hospital in Vienna, Austria. Her mother died of pneumonia when she was two. Her father, grief-stricken, left Maria with his cousin (her foster mother) who had cared for Maria’s half-brother after his mother died. Maria’s father then traveled the world, although Maria would visit him upon occasion at his apartment in Vienna. When she was nine, her father died. Her foster mother’s son-in-law, Uncle Franz, then became her guardian.
Uncle Franz did not treat Maria well and punished her for things she did not do. (He later was found to be mentally ill.) This changed Maria from the shy child she was and, as a teenager, she became the “class cut-up”, figuring she may as well have fun if she was going to get in trouble either way. Despite this change, Maria continued to get good grades. After graduating from high school at 15, Maria ran away to stay with a friend with the intent to become a tutor for children staying at nearby hotels. As she looked so young, no one took her seriously. Finally, a hotel manager asked her to be the umpire for a tennis tournament. Although she did not know what an umpire was and had never played tennis, she took the job.
From this job, she saved enough money to enter the State Teachers College for Progressive Education in Vienna, where she also received a scholarship. She graduated from there at age 18, in 1923. In 1924, she entered Nonnberg Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Salzburg, as a postulant intending to become a nun.
Maria was asked to teach one of the seven children (Maria Franziska) of widowed naval commander Georg von Trapp in 1926, while she was still a schoolteacher at the abbey. His wife, Agathe Whitehead, had died in 1922 from scarlet fever. Eventually, Maria began to look after the other children (Rupert, Agathe, Werner, Hedwig, Johanna and Martina), as well.
Captain von Trapp saw how much she cared about his children and asked her to marry him, although he was 25 years her senior. She was frightened and fled back to Nonnberg Abbey to seek guidance from the mother abbess, Virgilia Lütz, who advised her that it was God’s will that she should marry him. She then returned to the family and accepted his proposal. She wrote in her autobiography that she was very angry on her wedding day, both at God and at her new husband, because what she really wanted was to be a nun. “I really and truly was not in love. I liked him but didn’t love him. However, I loved the children, so in a way I really married the children. I learned to love him more than I have ever loved before or after.” They were married on 26 November 1927 and had three children together: Rosmarie (1929-2022), Eleonore (“Lorli”) (1931-2021) and Johannes (born 1939).
The Von Trapps enjoyed hiking. On one outing, they stayed overnight at a farmer’s house. The next morning, they were informed that Maria and two of Georg’s daughters, Johanna and Martina, had scarlet fever. Johanna and Martina recovered, but the older Maria developed kidney stones, due to dehydration. Her stepdaughter, Maria, accompanied her to Vienna for a successful surgery, but Maria experienced lifelong kidney problems.
The family met with financial ruin in 1935. Georg had transferred his savings from a bank in London to an Austrian bank run by a friend named Frau Lammer. Austria was experiencing economic difficulties during a worldwide depression because of the Crash of 1929 and Lammer’s bank failed. To survive, the Trapps discharged most of their servants, moved into the top floor of their house, and rented out the other rooms. The Archbishop of Salzburg, Sigismund Waitz, sent Father Franz Wasner to stay with them as their chaplain and this began their singing career.
Soprano Lotte Lehmann heard the family sing, and she suggested they perform at concerts. When the Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg heard them over the radio, he invited them to perform in Vienna. After performing at a festival in 1935, they became a popular touring act. They experienced life under the Nazis after the annexation of Austria by Germany in March 1938. Life became increasingly difficult as they witnessed hostility toward Jewish children by their classmates, the use of children against their parents, the advocacy of abortion both by Maria’s doctor and by her son’s school and finally by the induction of Georg into the German Navy. They visited Munich in the summer of 1938 and encountered Hitler at a restaurant. In September, the family left Austria and traveled to Italy, then to England and finally the United States. The Nazis made use of their abandoned home as Heinrich Himmler’s headquarters.
Initially calling themselves the “Trapp Family Choir”, the von Trapps began to perform in the United States and Canada. They performed in New York City at The Town Hall on 10 December 1938. The New York Times wrote:
There was something unusually lovable and appealing about the modest, serious singers of this little family aggregation as they formed a close semicircle about their self-effacing director for their initial offering, the handsome Mme. von Trapp in simple black, and the youthful sisters garbed in black and white Austrian folk costumes enlivened with red ribbons. It was only natural to expect work of exceeding refinement from them, and one was not disappointed in this.
Charles Wagner was their first booking agent, then they signed on with Frederick Christian Schang. Thinking the name “Trapp Family Choir” too churchy, Schang Americanized their repertoire and, following his suggestion, the group changed its name to the “Trapp Family Singers”. The family, which by then included ten children, was soon touring the world giving concert performances. Alix Williamson served as the group’s publicist for over two decades. After the war, they founded the Trapp Family Austrian Relief fund, which sent food and clothing to people impoverished in Austria.
In the 1940s, the family moved to Stowe, Vermont, where they ran a music camp when they were not touring. In 1944, Maria Augusta, Maria Franziska, Johanna, Martina, Hedwig and Agathe applied for U.S. citizenship, whereas Georg never applied to become a citizen. Rupert and Werner became citizens by serving during World War II, while Rosmarie and Eleonore became citizens by virtue of their mother’s citizenship. Johannes was born in the United States in Philadelphia on the 17th January 1939 during a concert tour. Georg von Trapp died in 1947 in Vermont after suffering lung cancer.
The family made a series of 78-rpm records for RCA Victor in the 1950s, some of which were later issued on RCA Camden LPs. There were also a few later recordings released on LPs, including some stereo sessions. In 1957, the Trapp Family Singers disbanded and went their separate ways. Maria and three of her children became missionaries in Papua New Guinea. In 1965, Maria moved back to Vermont to manage the Trapp Family Lodge, which had been named Cor Unum. She began turning over management of the lodge to her son Johannes, although she was initially reluctant to do so. Hedwig returned to Austria and worked as a teacher in Umhausen.
Maria von Trapp’s book, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, published in 1949, was a best-seller. It was made into two successful German / Austrian films: The Trapp Family (1956) and The Trapp Family in America (1958)
The book was then adapted into The Sound of Music, a 1959 Broadway musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein, starring Mary Martin and Theodore Bikel. It was a success, running for more than three years. The musical was adapted in 1965 as a motion picture of the same name, starring Julie Andrews. The film version set US box office records, and Maria von Trapp received about $500,000 ($4.7 million today) in royalties.
Maria von Trapp made a cameo appearance in the movie version of The Sound of Music (1965). For an instant, she, her daughter Rosmarie, and Werner’s daughter Barbara can be seen walking past an archway during the song, “I Have Confidence”, at the line, “I must stop these doubts, all these worries / If I don’t, I just know I’ll turn back.”
Maria von Trapp sang “Edelweiss” with Andrews on The Julie Andrews Hour in 1973. In 1991, a 40-episode anime series, titled Trapp Family Story aired in Japan, her character referred to by her maiden name (Maria Kutschera), voiced by Masako Katsuki. She was portrayed in the 2015 film The von Trapp Family: A Life of Music by Yvonne Catterfeld.
A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Liberace.
Liberace was an American pianist, singer, and actor. A child prodigy born in Wisconsin to parents of Italian and Polish origin, he enjoyed a career spanning four decades of concerts, recordings, television, motion pictures, and endorsements. At the height of his fame from the 1950s to 1970s, he was the highest-paid entertainer in the world with established concert residencies in Las Vegas and an international touring schedule. He embraced a lifestyle of flamboyant excess both on and off stage.
Liberace was conservative in his political and religious beliefs. He believed fervently in capitalism and was fascinated with royalty, ceremony, and luxury. He loved to socialize and was fascinated by the rich and famous. However, he still presented himself to his fans as one of them, a Midwesterner who had earned his success through hard work, and who invited them to enjoy it with him.
In the later years of his life, having earned sudden wealth, Liberace spent lavishly, displaying extravagant materialism in his life and his act. In 1953, he designed and built his first celebrity house in Sherman Oaks, California on Valley Vista Blvd., located in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles. The house featured a piano theme throughout, including a piano-shaped swimming pool which remains today. His dream home, with its lavish furnishings, elaborate bath, and antiques, added to his image. He leveraged his fame through hundreds of promotional tie-ins with banks, insurance companies, automobile companies, food companies, and even morticians. Liberace was an experienced pitchman and relied on the support of his vast audience of housewives. Sponsors sent him complimentary products, including his white Cadillac limousine, and he reciprocated enthusiastically: “If I am selling tuna fish, I believe in tuna fish.”
Others criticized his flashy but proficient piano playing, his non-stop promotions, and his gaudy display of success. Outwardly, he remained undeterred, once sending a letter to a critic, “Thank you for your very amusing review. After reading it, in fact, my brother George and I laughed all the way to the bank.” He responded similarly to subsequent poor reviews, famously modifying it to “I cried all the way to the bank.” In an appearance on The Tonight Show some years later, Liberace retold the anecdote to Johnny Carson, and finished by saying, “I don’t cry all the way to the bank any more – I bought the bank!”
Liberace was recognized during his career with two Emmy Awards, six gold albums, and two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Liberace performed 56 sold-out shows at Radio City Music Hall, which set box-office records a few months before his death.
At the time of his death Liberace was said to be worth around $110 million and to have bequeathed $88 million to the Liberace Foundation. The story was perpetuated by the officers of the Liberace Foundation often and as late as 2013. Only in 2015 did Liberace Foundation Chairman Jonathan Warren reveal in a lecture at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas that these figures were all part of the showmanship of Liberace, and that the real figures were closer to one tenth of those amounts.
The Liberace Foundation saw the sunset of its in-house endowment fund in 2011. University endowment funds provided by it continue to offer scholarships annually. The original Liberace museum closed its doors in 2010, citing the recession and an outdated, outmoded facility.
In November 2013, a dozen of Liberace’s famous costumes, together with one of his stage cars and a piano went on display for a six-week period at the Cosmopolitan Las Vegas in an exhibition titled “Too Much of a Good Thing Is Wonderful”, Liberace’s unofficial motto, and an often-used one-liner from his act. The exhibition was extended by seven months.
Liberace’s fame in the United States was matched for a time in the United Kingdom. In 1956, an article in the Daily Mirror by columnist Cassandra (William Connor) described Liberace as “the summit of sex—the pinnacle of masculine, feminine and neuter. Everything that he, she and it can ever want… a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love”, a description which strongly suggested that he was homosexual.
Liberace sent a telegram that read: “What you said hurt me very much. I cried all the way to the bank.” He sued the newspaper for libel, testifying in a London court that he was not homosexual and that he had never taken part in homosexual acts. He was represented in court by one of the great barristers of the period, 75-year-old Gilbert Beyfus, QC. They won the suit, partly on the basis of Connor’s use of the derogatory expression “fruit-flavored”. The case partly hinged on whether Connor knew that ‘fruit’ was American slang implying that an individual is a homosexual. After a three-week civil trial, a jury ruled in Liberace’s favor on June 16, 1959, and awarded him £8,000 (around $22,400) in damages (worth about £198,000 or $208,200 today) which led Liberace to repeat the catchphrase to reporters: “I cried all the way to the bank!” Liberace’s popularization of the phrase inspired the title Crying All the Way to the Bank, for a detailed report of the trial based on transcripts, court reports, and interviews, by the former Daily Mirror journalist Revel Barker.
Liberace sued and settled a similar case in the United States against Confidential. Rumors and gossip magazines frequently implied that Liberace was homosexual throughout his career, which he continued to vehemently deny. A typical issue of Confidential in 1957 shouted, “Why Liberace’s Theme Song Should Be ‘Mad About the Boy!'”
In 1982, Scott Thorson, Liberace’s 22-year-old former chauffeur and alleged live-in lover of five years, sued the pianist for $113 million in palimony after he was dismissed by Liberace. Liberace continued to deny that he was homosexual, and during court depositions in 1984, he insisted that Thorson was never his lover. The case was settled out of court in 1986, with Thorson receiving a $75,000 cash settlement, plus three cars and three pet dogs worth another $20,000. Thorson stated after Liberace’s death that he settled because he knew that Liberace was dying and that he had intended to sue based on conversion of property rather than palimony. He later attested that Liberace was a “boring guy” in his private life and mostly preferred to spend his free time cooking, decorating, and playing with his dogs, and that he never played the piano outside of his public performances. According to Thorson: “He (Liberace) had several decorated, ornamental pianos in the various rooms of his house, but he never played them.”
Because Liberace never publicly acknowledged that he was gay, knowledge of his true sexuality was muddled by stories of his friendships and romantic links with women. He further obscured his sexuality in articles like “Mature Women Are Best: TV’s Top Pianist Reveals What Kind of Woman He’d Marry”.
In a 2011 interview, actress and close friend Betty White confirmed that Liberace was indeed gay and that she was often used as a “beard” by his managers to counter public rumors of the musician’s homosexuality.
Liberace was secretly diagnosed HIV positive in August 1985 by his private physician in Las Vegas. Aside from his long-term manager, Seymour Heller, and a few family members and associates, Liberace kept his terminal illness a secret until the day he died and did not seek medical treatment. Scott Thorson remarked that he was not aware that Liberace had any health issues prior to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and up until one year before his death that “he was in overall excellent shape for his age; barrel-chested and powerfully built.”
In August 1986, during one of his last interviews, with the TV news program Good Morning America, Liberace hinted of his failing health when he remarked, “How can you enjoy life if you don’t have your health?” He was hospitalized for pneumonia from January 23 to January 27, 1987, at the Palm Springs county hospital.
At the age of 67, Liberace died the morning of February 4, 1987, at his retreat home in Palm Springs, California. A devout Roman Catholic to the end, he had a priest administer the last rites to him the day before his death.
At the time of Liberace’s death, his press agent said he had died of pernicious anemia, emphysema, and heart disease. Liberace’s physician, Ronald Daniels, said he had died of heart failure caused by subacute encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease. The Riverside County coroner performed an autopsy and determined that Liberace’s cause of death was cytomegalovirus pneumonia, a frequent cause of death in people with AIDS. The coroner also determined that, at the time of his death, Liberace was HIV-positive, had pulmonary heart disease, and calcification of a heart valve. The coroner said that Liberace’s doctor had deliberately claimed a false cause of death, as heart failure is never caused by encephalopathy. Author Darden Asbury Pyron wrote that Liberace had been HIV-positive and symptomatic from 1985 until his death.
Cary James Wyman, his alleged lover of seven years, had HIV and died in May 1997 at age 34. Another alleged lover, Chris Adler, came forward after Liberace’s death and claimed that Liberace had infected him with HIV. Adler died in 1990 at age 30.
Liberace’s body is entombed along with those of his mother and brother at Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles. In 1994, the Palm Springs Walk of Stars dedicated a Golden Palm Star to him.
A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Lee Marvin.
Lee Marvin was an American film and television actor. Known for his bass voice and premature white hair, he is best remembered for playing hardboiled “tough guy” characters. Although initially typecast as the “heavy” he later gained prominence for portraying anti-heroes, such as Detective Lieutenant Frank Ballinger on the television series M Squad (1957–1960). Marvin’s notable roles in film included Charlie Strom in The Killers (1964), Rico Fardan in The Professionals (1966), Major John Reisman in The Dirty Dozen (1967), Ben Rumson in Paint Your Wagon (1969), Walker in Point Blank (1967), and the Sergeant in The Big Red One (1980).
Marvin achieved numerous accolades when he portrayed both gunfighter Kid Shelleen and criminal Tim Strawn in a dual role for the comedy Western film Cat Ballou (1965), alongside Jane Fonda, a surprise hit which won him the Academy Award for Best Actor, along with a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, an NBR Award, and the Silver Bear for Best Actor.
Marvin enlisted in the United States Marine Corps on August 12, 1942. Before finishing School of Infantry, he was a quartermaster. Lee served in the 4th Marine Division as a scout sniper in the Pacific Theater during World War II, including assaults on Eniwetok and Saipan-Tinian. While serving as a member of “I” Company, 3rd Battalion, 24th Marines, 4th Marine Division, Lee participated in 21 Japanese islands landings and was wounded in action on June 18, 1944, during the assault on Mount Tapochau in the Battle of Saipan, during which most of his company were casualties. He was hit by machine gun fire, which severed his sciatic nerve, and then was hit again in the foot by a sniper. After over a year of medical treatment in naval hospitals, Marvin was given a medical discharge with the rank of private first class. He previously held the rank of corporal, but had been demoted for troublemaking.
Marvin’s decorations include the Purple Heart Medal, the Presidential Unit Citation, the American Campaign Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, the World War II Victory Medal, and the Combat Action Ribbon.
After the war, while working as a plumber’s assistant at a local community theatre in upstate New York, Marvin was asked to replace an actor who had fallen ill during rehearsals. He caught the acting bug and got a job with the company at $7 a week. He moved to Greenwich Village and used the G.I. Bill to study at the American Theatre Wing.
He appeared on stage in a production of Uniform of Flesh, the original version of Billy Budd (1949). It was performed at the Experimental Theatre, where a few months later, Marvin also appeared in The Nineteenth Hole of Europe (1949).
Marvin began appearing on television shows like Escape, The Big Story, and Treasury Men in Action.
He made it to Broadway with a small role in a production of Uniform of Flesh, now titled Billy Budd, in February 1951.
Marvin’s film debut was in You’re in the Navy Now (1951), directed by Henry Hathaway, a movie that also marked the debuts of Charles Bronson and Jack Warden. This required some filming in Hollywood. Marvin decided to stay in California.
He had a similar small part in Teresa (1951), directed by Fred Zinnemann. As a decorated combat veteran, Marvin was a natural in war dramas, where he frequently assisted the director and other actors in realistically portraying infantry movement, arranging costumes, and the use of firearms.
He guest starred on episodes of Fireside Theatre, Suspense and Rebound. Hathaway used him again on Diplomatic Courier (1952) and he could be seen in Down Among the Sheltering Palms (1952), directed by Edmund Goulding, We’re Not Married! (1952), also for Goulding, The Duel at Silver Creek (1952) directed by Don Siegel, and Hangman’s Knot (1952), directed by Roy Huggins.
He also guest starred on Biff Baker, U.S.A. and Dragnet, and had a showcase role as the squad leader in a feature titled Eight Iron Men (1952), a war film directed by Edward Dmytryk and produced by Stanley Kramer.
He was a sergeant in Seminole (1953), a Western directed by Budd Boetticher, and was a corporal in The Glory Brigade (1953), a Korean War film.
Marvin guest starred in The Doctor, The Revlon Mirror Theater, Suspense again and The Motorola Television Hour.
He was now in much demand for Westerns: The Stranger Wore a Gun (1953) with Randolph Scott, and Gun Fury (1953) with Rock Hudson.
Marvin received much acclaim for his portrayal as villains in two films: The Big Heat (1953) where he played Gloria Grahame’s vicious boyfriend, directed by Fritz Lang; and The Wild One (1953) opposite Marlon Brando produced by Kramer.
He continued in TV shows such as The Plymouth Playhouse and The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse. He had support roles in Gorilla at Large (1954) and had a notable small role as smart-aleck sailor Meatball in The Caine Mutiny (1954), produced by Kramer.
He had a part as Hector, the small-town hood in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) with Spencer Tracy. Also in 1955, he played a conflicted, brutal bank-robber in Violent Saturday. A critic wrote of the character, “Marvin brings a multi-faceted complexity to the role and gives a great example of the early promise that launched his long and successful career.”
Marvin played Robert Mitchum’s and Frank Sinatra’s friend in Not as a Stranger (1955), a medical drama produced and directed by Stanley Kramer. He had good supporting roles in A Life in the Balance (1955) (he was third billed), and Pete Kelly’s Blues (1955) and appeared on TV in Jane Wyman Presents The Fireside Theatre and Studio One in Hollywood.
Marvin was in I Died a Thousand Times (1955) with Jack Palance, Shack Out on 101 (1955), Kraft Theatre, and Front Row Center.
Marvin was the villain in Seven Men from Now (1956) with Randolph Scott directed by Boetticher. He was second-billed to Palance in Attack (1956) directed by Robert Aldrich.
Marvin had roles in Pillars of the Sky (1956) with Jeff Chandler, The Rack (1956) with Paul Newman, Raintree County (1957) with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift and a leading role in The Missouri Traveler (1958). He also guest starred on Climax! (several times), Studio 57, The United States Steel Hour and Schlitz Playhouse.
Marvin debuted as a leading man in M Squad as Chicago cop Frank Ballinger in 100 episodes of the successful 1957–1960 television series. One critic described the show as “a hyped-up, violent Dragnet … with a hard-as-nails Marvin” playing a tough police lieutenant. Marvin received the role after guest-starring in a Dragnet episode as a serial killer.
When the series ended Marvin appeared on Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, Sunday Showcase, The Barbara Stanwyck Show, The Americans, Wagon Train, Checkmate, General Electric Theater, Alcoa Premiere, The Investigators, Route 66 (he was injured during a fight scene), Ben Casey, Bonanza, The Untouchables (several times), The Virginian, The Twilight Zone (“The Grave” and “Steel”), The Dick Powell Theatre, and The Investigators.
Marvin returned to feature films with a prominent role in The Comancheros (1961) starring John Wayne and Stuart Whitman. He played in two more films with Wayne, both directed by John Ford: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Donovan’s Reef (1963). As the vicious Liberty Valance, Marvin played his first title role and held his own with two of the screen’s biggest stars (Wayne and James Stewart).
In 1962 Marvin appeared as Martin Kalig on the TV western The Virginian in the episode titled “It Tolls for Thee.” He continued to guest star on shows like Combat!, Dr. Kildare and The Great Adventure. He did The Case Against Paul Ryker for Kraft Suspense Theatre.
For director Don Siegel, Marvin appeared in The Killers (1964) playing an efficient professional assassin alongside Clu Gulager, grappling with villain Ronald Reagan and Angie Dickinson. The Killers was the first film in which Marvin received top billing. Originally made as a TV-movie, the film was deemed so entertaining that it was exhibited in theatres instead.
Marvin finally became a star for his comic role in the offbeat Western Cat Ballou (1965) starring Jane Fonda. This was a surprise hit and Marvin won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He also won the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival in 1965.
Playing alongside Vivien Leigh and Simone Signoret, Marvin won the 1966 National Board of Review Award for male actors for his role in Ship of Fools (1965) directed by Kramer.
Marvin next performed in the highly regarded Western The Professionals (1966), in which he played the leader of a small band of skilled mercenaries (Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, and Woody Strode) rescuing a kidnap victim (Claudia Cardinale) shortly after the Mexican Revolution. He had second billing to Lancaster but his part was almost as large.
He followed that film with the hugely successful World War II epic The Dirty Dozen (1967) in which top-billed Marvin again portrayed an intrepid commander of a colorful group performing an almost impossible mission. Robert Aldrich directed. In an interview, Marvin stated his time in the Marine Corps helped shape that role “for playing an officer how I felt it should have been seen, from the bias of an enlisted man’s viewpoint”.
In the wake of these films and after having received his Oscar, Marvin was a huge star, given enormous control over his next film Point Blank. In Point Blank, an influential film from director John Boorman, he portrayed a hard-nosed criminal bent on revenge. Marvin, who had selected Boorman for the director’s slot, had a central role in the film’s development, plot, and staging.
In 1968, Marvin also appeared in another Boorman film, the critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful World War II character study Hell in the Pacific, also starring famed Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune. Boorman recounted his work with Lee Marvin on these two films and Marvin’s influence on his career in the 1998 documentary Lee Marvin: A Personal Portrait by John Boorman. The Case Against Paul Ryker with Bradford Dillman, which Marvin shot for TV’s Kraft Suspense Theatre and had been telecast in 1963, was released theatrically as Sergeant Ryker in 1968 after the runaway success of The Dirty Dozen.
Marvin was originally cast as Pike Bishop (later played by William Holden) in The Wild Bunch (1969), but fell out with director Sam Peckinpah and pulled out to star in the Western musical Paint Your Wagon (1969), in which he was top-billed over a singing Clint Eastwood. Despite his limited singing ability, he had a hit with the song “Wand’rin’ Star”. By this time, he was getting paid $1 million per film, $200,000 less than top star Paul Newman was making at the time, yet he was ambivalent about the movie business, even with its financial rewards:
You spend the first forty years of your life trying to get in this business, and the next forty years trying to get out. And then when you’re making the bread, who needs it?
Marvin had a much greater variety of roles in the 1970s, with fewer ‘bad-guy’ roles than in earlier years. His 1970s movies included Monte Walsh (1970), a Western with Palance and Jeanne Moreau; the violent Prime Cut (1972) with Gene Hackman; Pocket Money (1972) with Paul Newman, for Stuart Rosenberg; Emperor of the North (1973) opposite Ernest Borgnine for Aldrich; as Hickey in The Iceman Cometh (1973) with Fredric March and Robert Ryan, for John Frankenheimer; The Spikes Gang (1974) with Noah Beery Jr. for Richard Fleischer; The Klansman (1974) with Richard Burton; Shout at the Devil (1976), a World War I adventure with Roger Moore, directed by Peter Hunt; The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday (1976), a comic Western with Oliver Reed; and Avalanche Express (1979), a Cold War thriller with Robert Shaw who died during production, as did the film’s director, both from heart attacks. None of these films were big box-office hits.
Marvin was offered the role of Quint in Jaws (1975) but declined, stating “What would I tell my fishing friends who’d see me come off a hero against a dummy shark?”
Marvin’s last big role was in Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One (1980), a war film based on Fuller’s own war experiences.
His remaining films were Death Hunt (1981), a Canadian action movie with Charles Bronson, directed by Hunt; Gorky Park (1983) with William Hurt; and Dog Day (1984), shot in France.
For TV he did The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission (1985; a sequel with Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, and Richard Jaeckel picking up where they had left off despite being 18 years older).
His final appearance was in The Delta Force (1986) with Chuck Norris, playing a role turned down by Charles Bronson.
Marvin was a Democrat. He publicly endorsed John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election. Due to injuries that he sustained in the war, that led to PTSD, Lee became anti-war minded and opposed the Vietnam War. In a 1969 Playboy interview, Marvin said he supported gay rights.
Marvin married Betty Ebeling in April 1952 and together they had four children, son Christopher Lamont, and three daughters: Courtenay Lee, Cynthia Louise, and Claudia Leslie. After a separation of two years, they divorced in January 1967. In her 2010 book, Tales of a Hollywood Housewife: A Memoir by the First Mrs. Lee Marvin, Betty claimed that Lee had an affair with actress Anne Bancroft.
He married Pamela Feeley in 1970 following his famous relationship with Michelle Triola. Pamela had four children from three previous marriages; they had no children together and remained married until his death in 1987.
In 1971, Marvin was sued by Michelle Triola, his live-in girlfriend from 1965 to 1970, who legally changed her surname to “Marvin”. Although the couple never married, she sought financial compensation similar to that available to spouses under California’s alimony and community property laws. Triola claimed Marvin made her pregnant three times and paid for two abortions, while one pregnancy ended in miscarriage. She claimed the second abortion left her unable to bear children. The result was the landmark “palimony” case, Marvin v. Marvin.
In 1979, Marvin was ordered to pay $104,000 to Triola for “rehabilitation purposes”, but the court denied her community property claim for one-half of the $3.6 million which Marvin had earned during their six years of cohabitation – distinguishing nonmarital relationship contracts from marriage, with community property rights only attaching to the latter by operation of law. Rights equivalent to community property only apply in nonmarital relationship contracts when the parties expressly, whether orally or in writing, contract for such rights to operate between them. In August 1981, the California Court of Appeal found that no such contract existed between them and nullified the award she had received. Michelle Triola died of lung cancer on October 30, 2009, having been with actor Dick Van Dyke since 1976.
Later there was controversy after Marvin characterized the trial as a “circus”, saying “everyone was lying, even I lied”. There were official comments about possibly charging Marvin with perjury, but no charges were filed.
This case was used as fodder for a mock debate skit on Saturday Night Live called “Point Counterpoint” and a skit on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson with Carson as Adam, and Betty White as Eve.
A heavy smoker and drinker, Marvin had health problems by the end of his life. In December 1986, Marvin was hospitalized for more than two weeks because of a condition related to coccidioidomycosis. He went into respiratory distress and was administered steroids to help his breathing. He had major intestinal ruptures as a result, and underwent a colectomy. Marvin died of a heart attack on August 29, 1987, aged 63. He was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.
A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 —Joseph E. Levine.
Joseph E. Levine was an American film distributor, financier, and producer. At the time of his death, it was said he was involved in one or another capacity with 497 films. Levine was responsible for the U.S. releases of Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, Attila and Hercules, which helped revolutionize U.S. film marketing, and was founder and president of Embassy Pictures (later Avco-Embassy). Other films he produced included Two Women, Contempt, The 10th Victim, Marriage Italian Style, The Lion in Winter, The Producers, The Graduate, The Night Porter, A Bridge Too Far, and Carnal Knowledge.
Levine became famous in the industry for his massive advertising campaigns, starting with Hercules in 1959. Levine had hired Terry Turner, who had been a former RKO Pictures exploitation expert of the late 1920s and 1930s, where he had exploited King Kong amongst other films. Levine’s and Turner’s exploitation campaigns were designed to appeal both to the general public and to the film industry and exhibitors. The Adventurers (1970) had a special “airborne world premiere”, as the in-flight movie of a TWA Boeing 747 Superjet making its premiere voyage, flying from New York to Los Angeles, with the film’s stars and members of the press aboard. It marked the first time that a movie and a plane premiered in the same event.
In 1964, Levine received the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in recognition of his lifetime achievement in motion pictures.
He entered film production in 1945, co-producing with Maxwell Finn a documentary Gaslight Follies, a compilation of silent film clips narrated by Ben Grauer, which was released through his own company, Embassy Pictures. He found success in 1956 bringing the Japanese film Godzilla to the American general public, acquiring the rights for $12,000 and spending $400,000 promoting it under the title Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, and earning $1 million in theatrical rentals. He then made a $100,000 deal to bring the 1954 French-Italian film Attila to the US in 1958 and spent $600,000 promoting it, which returned $2 million in rentals. His breakthrough came the following year with Hercules, starring Steve Reeves and released by Warner Bros. Levine invested $120,000 on dubbing, sound effects and new titles and spent $1.25 million on promoting the film. It was one of the highest-grossing films of the year, with rentals of $4.7 million.
Levine’s Embassy Pictures began dealing in art films, often European ones, in the 1960s. During that decade, he reached the peak of his career and his prestige, which he was able to sustain into the 1970s.
In 1961, Levine bought North American distribution rights for Two Women after seeing no more than three minutes of its “rushes.” He was not credited as the “executive producer” of Two Women, which was based on a novella written by Alberto Moravia, had been directed by Vittorio de Sica, and starred Sophia Loren and Eleanora Brown, who acted out the respective roles of a mother and her young daughter whom World War II had displaced from their home. One segment of it showed Moroccan soldiers raping the mother and the daughter.
Levine’s promotional campaign focused on one still photograph, which showed Loren, as the mother, wearing a torn dress, kneeling in the dirt, and weeping with rage and grief. Predicting that she would win the Academy Award for her performance, Levine brought Loren to the United States for interviews, bought space for, and placed, large advertisements in newspapers, and saw to it that Two Women appeared in the cities of residence of Academy Award jury members.
Levine’s efforts paid off when Loren became the first cast member of a foreign-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. It came to be said of him that he “nursed” Two Women towards its ultimate popularity and success.
In 1963, Levine was offered a $30 million deal with Paramount Pictures (making him a major shareholder) to produce films in the vein of his previous successes. Paramount would finance the films and Embassy would receive part of its profits. Following the deal, Levine paid Harold Robbins $900,000 for the rights to three books which were filmed – The Carpetbaggers (1964), Where Love Has Gone (1964) and Nevada Smith (1966). Carroll Baker who had appeared in The Carpetbaggers then starred in the Embassy’s Harlow (1965).
Levine got to know Mike Nichols who was one of the most in-demand directors on Broadway and signed him to make The Graduate (1967) before he made his feature film debut with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). It was the highest-grossing film of the year. Levine also hired first-time director Mel Brooks to make The Producers (1967). Levine later said “I have a knack for betting on unknown directors and actors and getting my money’s worth”. The same year, Levine sold Embassy to Avco for $40 million but stayed on as chief executive officer. He later called the sale a “horrible mistake which made me rich”.
The Lion in Winter (1968), Levine’s favorite of his films, won an Academy Award for Katharine Hepburn. After the sale, his films did not perform well except for Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge (1971) and A Touch of Class (1973), his last hit. He resigned from Avco Embassy in 1974 and formed Joseph E. Levine Presents and spent 2½ years making A Bridge Too Far (1977) with his son Richard. His last film was Tattoo (1981).
In April 1964, David Susskind, Daniel Melnick, and Levine took over as producers for the Broadway musical Kelly. Levine financed $250,000 of the $400,000 budget, with the balance coming from Columbia Records and six other investors. The producers also acquired the motion picture rights.
Directed and choreographed by Herbert Ross, the musical began previews at the Broadhurst Theatre on February 1, 1965, and opened (and closed) on February 6 after seven previews and one performance, becoming one of the biggest flops in Broadway history.
Industry representatives quoted in The New York Times stated they “could not recall any other Broadway musical representing such a comparable expenditure that became a casualty so quickly.” Costs had ballooned to $650,000, with the biggest loser being Levine, followed by Melnick and Susskind, who had invested a total of $150,000. There had been increasing arguments between the producers and writers, with Susskind complaining that the authors were unwilling to make changes per the recommendations of the investors. Charlap and Lawrence were so upset with changes that they filed suit in New York Supreme Court seeking an injunction to prevent the play from opening. While the judge urged that the parties pursue arbitration, lawyers representing Charlap and Lawrence were threatening to sue for damages that had been caused through “unauthorized changes, omissions and additions” made to the musical.
A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Joseph Campbell.
Joseph Campbell was an American writer. He was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work covers many aspects of the human experience. Campbell’s best-known work is his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), in which he discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero shared by world mythologies, termed the monomyth.
Since the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell’s theories have been applied by a wide variety of modern writers and artists. His philosophy has been summarized by his own often repeated phrase: “Follow your bliss.” He gained recognition in Hollywood when George Lucas credited Campbell’s work as influencing his Star Wars saga.
Campbell’s approach to folklore topics such as myth and his influence on popular culture has been the subject of criticism, especially from academic folklorists.
In 1924, Campbell traveled to Europe with his family. On the ship during his return trip he encountered the messiah elect of the Theosophical Society, Jiddu Krishnamurti; they discussed Indian philosophy, sparking in Campbell an interest in Hindu and Indian thought. In 1927, he received a fellowship from Columbia University to study in Europe. Campbell studied Old French, Provençal, and Sanskrit at the University of Paris and the University of Munich. He learned to read and speak French and German.
On his return to Columbia University in 1929, Campbell expressed a desire to pursue the study of Sanskrit and modern art in addition to medieval literature. Lacking faculty approval, Campbell withdrew from graduate studies. Later in life he joked that it is a sign of incompetence to have a PhD in the liberal arts, the discipline covering his work.
With the arrival of the Great Depression, Campbell spent the next five years (1929–1934) living in a rented shack in Woodstock, New York. There, he contemplated the next course of his life while engaged in intensive and rigorous independent study. He later said that he “would divide the day into four three-hour periods, of which I would be reading in three of the three-hour periods, and free one of them … I would get nine hours of sheer reading done a day. And this went on for five years straight.”
Campbell traveled to California for a year (1931–1932), continuing his independent studies and becoming a close friend of the budding writer John Steinbeck and his wife Carol. Campbell had met Carol’s sister, Idell, on a Honolulu cruise and she introduced him to the Steinbecks. Campbell had an affair with Carol. On the Monterey Peninsula, Campbell, like John Steinbeck, fell under the spell of the marine biologist Ed Ricketts. Campbell lived for a while next door to Ricketts, participated in professional and social activities at his neighbor’s, and accompanied him, along with Xenia and Sasha Kashevaroff, on a 1932 journey to Juneau, Alaska on the Grampus. Campbell began writing a novel centered on Ricketts as a hero but, unlike Steinbeck, did not complete his book.
Bruce Robison writes that Campbell would refer to those days as a time when everything in his life was taking shape. … Campbell, the great chronicler of the “hero’s journey” in mythology, recognized patterns that paralleled his own thinking in one of Ricketts’s unpublished philosophical essays. Echoes of Carl Jung, Robinson Jeffers and James Joyce can be found in the work of Steinbeck and Ricketts as well as Campbell.
Campbell continued his independent reading while teaching for a year in 1933 at the Canterbury School in Connecticut, during which time he also attempted to publish works of fiction. While teaching at the Canterbury School, Campbell sold his first short story Strictly Platonic to Liberty magazine.
In 1934, Campbell accepted a position as Professor of Literature at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York. In 1938, he married one of his former students, the dancer-choreographer Jean Erdman. For most of their 49 years of marriage they shared a two-room apartment in Greenwich Village in New York City. In the 1980s they also purchased an apartment in Honolulu and divided their time between the two cities. They did not have any children.
Early in World War II, Campbell attended a lecture by the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer; the two men became good friends. After Zimmer’s death, Campbell was given the task of editing and posthumously publishing Zimmer’s papers, which he would do over the following decade.
In 1955–1956, as the last volume of Zimmer’s posthumous was finally about to be published, Campbell took a sabbatical from Sarah Lawrence College and traveled, for the first time, to Asia. He spent six months in southern Asia and another six in East Asia. This year had a profound influence on his thinking about Asian religion and myth, and also on the necessity for teaching comparative mythology to a larger, non-academic audience.
In 1972, Campbell retired from Sarah Lawrence College, after having taught there for 38 years.
Campbell attended a Grateful Dead concert in 1986, and marveled that “Everyone has just lost themselves in everybody else here!” With the Grateful Dead, Campbell put on a conference called “Ritual and Rapture from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead”.
Campbell died at his home in Honolulu, Hawaii, on October 30, 1987, from complications of esophageal cancer. Before his death he had completed filming the series of interviews with Bill Moyers that aired the following spring as The Power of Myth. He is buried in O’ahu Cemetery, Honolulu.
Campbell often referred to the work of modern writers James Joyce and Thomas Mann in his lectures and writings, as well as to the art of Pablo Picasso. He was introduced to their work during his stay as a graduate student in Paris. Campbell eventually corresponded with Mann.
The works of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche had a profound effect on Campbell’s thinking; he quoted their writing frequently.
The “follow your bliss” philosophy attributed to Campbell following the original broadcast of The Power of Myth derives from the Hindu Upanishads; however, Campbell was possibly also influenced by the 1922 Sinclair Lewis novel Babbitt. In The Power of Myth, Campbell quotes from the novel:
Campbell: Have you ever read Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt?
Moyers: Not in a long time.
Campbell: Remember the last line? “I’ve never done a thing I wanted to do in all my life.” That’s the man who never followed his bliss.
The anthropologist Leo Frobenius and his disciple Adolf Ellegard Jensen were important to Campbell’s view of cultural history. Campbell was also influenced by the psychological work of Abraham Maslow and Stanislav Grof.
Campbell’s ideas regarding myth and its relation to the human psyche are dependent in part on the pioneering work of Sigmund Freud, but in particular on the work of Jung, whose studies of human psychology greatly influenced Campbell. Campbell’s conception of myth is closely related to the Jungian method of dream interpretation, which is heavily reliant on symbolic interpretation. Jung’s insights into archetypes were heavily influenced by the Bardo Thodol (also known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead). In his book The Mythic Image, Campbell quotes Jung’s statement about the Bardo Thodol, that it belongs to that class of writings which not only are of interest to specialists in Mahayana Buddhism, but also, because of their deep humanity and still deeper insight into the secrets of the human psyche, make an especial appeal to the layman seeking to broaden his knowledge of life … For years, ever since it was first published, the Bardo Thodol has been my constant companion, and to it I owe not only many stimulating ideas and discoveries, but also many fundamental insights.
Campbell’s concept of monomyth refers to the theory that sees all mythic narratives as variations of a single great story. The theory is based on the observation that a common pattern exists beneath the narrative elements of most great myths, regardless of their origin or time of creation. Campbell often referred to the ideas of Adolf Bastian and his distinction between what he called “folk” and “elementary” ideas, the latter referring to the prime matter of monomyth while the former to the multitude of local forms the myth takes in order to remain an up-to-date carrier of sacred meanings. The central pattern most studied by Campbell is often referred to as “the hero’s journey” and was first described in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). An enthusiast of novelist James Joyce, Campbell borrowed the term “monomyth” from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Campbell also made heavy use of Carl Jung’s theories on the structure of the human psyche, and he often used terms such as anima, animus and ego consciousness.
As a strong believer in the psychic unity of mankind and its poetic expression through mythology, Campbell made use of the concept to express the idea that the whole of the human race can be seen as engaged in the effort of making the world “transparent to transcendence” by showing that underneath the world of phenomena lies an eternal source which is constantly pouring its energies into this world of time, suffering, and ultimately death. To achieve this task one needs to speak about things that existed before and beyond words, a seemingly impossible task, the solution to which lies in the metaphors found in myths. These metaphors are statements that point beyond themselves into the transcendent. The Hero’s Journey was the story of the man or woman who, through great suffering, reached an experience of the eternal source and returned with gifts powerful enough to set their society free.
As this story spread through space and evolved through time, it was broken down into various local forms (masks), depending on the social structures and environmental pressures that existed for the culture that interpreted it. The basic structure, however, has remained relatively unchanged and can be classified using the various stages of a hero’s adventure through the story, stages such as the Call to Adventure, Receiving Supernatural Aid, Meeting with the Goddess/Atonement with the Father and Return. These stages, as well as the symbols one encounters throughout the story, provide the necessary metaphors to express the spiritual truths the story is trying to convey. Metaphors for Campbell, in contrast with similes which make use of the word like, pretend to a literal interpretation of what they are referring to, as in the sentence “Jesus is the Son of God” rather than “the relationship of man to God is like that of a son to a father”.
In the 1987 documentary Joseph Campbell: A Hero’s Journey, he explains God in terms of a metaphor:
“God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought, even the categories of being and non-being. Those are categories of thought. I mean it’s as simple as that. So it depends on how much you want to think about it. Whether it’s doing you any good. Whether it is putting you in touch with the mystery that’s the ground of your own being. If it isn’t, well, it’s a lie. So half the people in the world are religious people who think that their metaphors are facts. Those are what we call theists. The other half are people who know that the metaphors are not facts. And so, they’re lies. Those are the atheists.”
Campbell often described mythology as having a fourfold function within human society. These appear at the end of his work The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, as well as various lectures.
Awakening and maintaining in the individual a sense of awe and gratitude before the ‘mystery of being’ and his or her participation in it.
According to Campbell, the absolute mystery of life, what he called transcendent reality, cannot be captured directly in words or images. Symbols and mythic metaphors on the other hand point outside themselves and into that reality. They are what Campbell called “being statements” and their enactment through ritual can give to the participant a sense of that ultimate mystery as an experience. “Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of reason and coercion…. The first function of mythology is to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this universe as it is.”
For pre-modern societies, myth also functioned as a proto-science, offering explanations for the physical phenomena that surrounded and affected their lives, such as the change of seasons and the life cycles of animals and plants.
Ancient societies had to conform to an existing social order if they were to survive at all. This is because they evolved under “pressure” from necessities much more intense than the ones encountered in our modern world. Mythology confirmed that order and enforced it by reflecting it into the stories themselves, often describing how the order arrived from divine intervention. Campbell often referred to these “conformity” myths as the “Right Hand Path” to reflect the brain’s left hemisphere’s abilities for logic, order and linearity. Together with these myths however, he observed the existence of the “Left Hand Path”, mythic patterns like the “Hero’s Journey” which are revolutionary in character in that they demand from the individual a surpassing of social norms and sometimes even of morality.
As a person goes through life, many psychological challenges will be encountered. Myth may serve as a guide for successful passage through the stages of one’s life.
Campbell’s view of mythology was by no means static and his books describe in detail how mythologies evolved through time, reflecting the realities in which each society had to adjust. Various stages of cultural development have different yet identifiable mythological systems. In brief these are:
“At this stage of evolution religion was animistic, as all of nature was seen as being infused with a spirit or divine presence. At center stage was the main hunting animal of that culture, whether the buffalo for Native Americans or the land for South African tribes, and a large part of religion focused on dealing with the psychological tension that came from the reality of the necessity to kill versus the divinity of the animal. This was done by presenting the animals as springing from an eternal archetypal source and coming to this world as willing victims, with the understanding that their lives would be returned to the soil or to the Mother through a ritual of restoration. The act of slaughter then becomes a ritual where both parties, animal and mankind, are equal participants. In Mythos and The Power of Myth, Campbell recounts the story he calls “The Buffalo’s Wife” as told by the Blackfoot tribe of North America. The story tells of a time when the buffalos stopped coming to the hunting plains, leaving the tribe to starve. The chief’s daughter promises to marry the buffalo chief in return for their reappearance, but is eventually spared and taught the buffalo dance by the animals themselves, through which the spirits of their dead will return to their eternal life source. Indeed, Campbell taught that throughout history mankind has held a belief that all life comes from and returns to another dimension which transcends temporality, but which can be reached through ritual.”
Beginning in the fertile grasslands of the Levant and the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia in the Bronze Age and moving to Europe, the practice of agriculture spread along with a new way of understanding mankind’s relationship to the world. At this time the earth was seen as the Mother, and the myths focused around Her life-giving powers. The plant and cultivation cycle was mirrored in religious rituals which often included human sacrifice, symbolic or literal. The main figures of this system were a female Great Goddess, Mother Earth, and her ever-dying and ever-resurrected son/consort, a male God. At this time the focus was to participate in the repetitive rhythm the world moved in, expressed as the four seasons, the birth and death of crops and the phases of the moon. At the center of this motion was the Mother Goddess from whom all life springs and to whom all life returns. This often gave Her a dual aspect as both mother and destroyer.
As the first agricultural societies evolved into the high civilizations of Mesopotamia and Babylonia, the observation of the stars inspired them with the idea that life on earth must also follow a similar mathematically predetermined pattern in which individual beings are but mere participants in an eternal cosmic play. The king was symbolized by the Sun with the golden crown as its main metaphor, while his court were the orbiting planets. The Mother Goddess remained, but her powers were now fixed within the rigid framework of a clockwork universe.
However, two barbarian incursions changed that. As the Indo-European people descended from the north and the Semites swept up from the Arabian desert, they carried with them a male dominated mythology with a warrior god whose symbol was the thunder. As they conquered, mainly due to the superior technology of iron smithing, their mythology blended with and subjugated the previous system of the Earth Goddess. Many mythologies of the ancient world, such as those of Greece, India, and Persia, are a result of that fusion with gods retaining some of their original traits and character but now belonging to a single system. Figures such as Zeus and Indra are thunder gods who now interact with Demeter and Dionysus, whose ritual sacrifice and rebirth, bearing testament to his pre-Indo-European roots, were still enacted in classical Greece. But for the most part, the focus heavily shifted toward the masculine, with Zeus ascending the throne of the gods and Dionysus demoted to a mere demi-god.
This demotion was very profound in the case of the biblical imagery where the female elements were marginalized to an extreme. Campbell believed that Eve and the snake that tempted her were once fertility gods worshiped in their own right, with the tree of knowledge being the Tree of Life. He also found significance in the biblical story of Cain and Abel, with Cain being a farmer whose agrarian offering is not accepted by God, while herder Abel’s animal sacrifice is. In the lecture series of Mythos, Campbell speaks of the Mysteries of Eleusis in Ancient Greece, where Demeter’s journey in the underworld was enacted for young men and women of the time. There he observed that wheat was presented as the ultimate mystery with wine being a symbol of Dionysus, much like in the Christian mysteries where bread and wine are considered to incarnate the body and blood of Jesus. Both religions carry the same “seeded earth” cosmology in different forms while retaining an image of the ever-dying, ever-resurrected God.
Campbell recognized that the poetic form of courtly love, carried through medieval Europe by the traveling troubadours, contained a complete mythology in its own right. In The Power of Myth as well as the “Occidental Mythology” volume of The Masks of God, Campbell describes the emergence of a new kind of erotic experience as a “person to person” affair, in contrast with the purely physical definition given to Eros in the ancient world and the communal agape found in the Christian religion. An archetypal story of this kind is the legend of Tristan and Isolde which, apart from its mystical function, shows the transition from an arranged-marriage society as practiced in the Middle Ages and sanctified by the church, into the form of marriage by “falling in love” with another person that we recognize today. So what essentially started from a mythological theme has since become a social reality, mainly due to a change in perception brought about by a new mythology – and represents a central foundational manifestation of Campbell’s overriding interpretive message, “Follow your bliss.”
Campbell believed that in the modern world the function served by formal, traditional mythological systems has been taken on by individual creators such as artists and philosophers. In the works of some of his favorites, such as Thomas Mann, Pablo Picasso and James Joyce, he saw mythological themes that could serve the same life-giving purpose that mythology had once played. Accordingly, Campbell believed the religions of the world to be the various culturally influenced “masks” of the same fundamental, transcendent truths. All religions can bring one to an elevated awareness above and beyond a dualistic conception of reality, or idea of “pairs of opposites” such as being and non-being, or right and wrong. Indeed, he quotes from the Rigveda in the preface to The Hero with a Thousand Faces: “Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names.”
In 1991, Campbell’s widow, choreographer Jean Erdman, worked with Campbell’s longtime friend and editor, Robert Walter, to create the Joseph Campbell Foundation.
Initiatives undertaken by the JCF include: The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell, a series of books and recordings that aims to pull together Campbell’s myriad-minded work; the Erdman Campbell Award; the Mythological Round Tables, a network of local groups around the globe that explore the subjects of comparative mythology, psychology, religion and culture; and the collection of Campbell’s library and papers housed at the OPUS Archives and Research Center.
George Lucas was the first Hollywood filmmaker to credit Campbell’s influence. Lucas stated, following the release of the first Star Wars film in 1977, that its story was shaped, in part, by ideas described in The Hero with a Thousand Faces and other works of Campbell’s. The linkage between Star Wars and Campbell was further reinforced when later reprints of Campbell’s book used the image of Luke Skywalker on the cover. Lucas discusses this influence at great length in the authorized biography of Joseph Campbell, A Fire in the Mind:
“I came to the conclusion after American Graffiti that what’s valuable for me is to set standards, not to show people the world the way it is… around the period of this realization… it came to me that there really was no modern use of mythology… The Western was possibly the last generically American fairy tale, telling us about our values. And once the Western disappeared, nothing has ever taken its place. In literature we were going off into science fiction… so that’s when I started doing more strenuous research on fairy tales, folklore, and mythology, and I started reading Joe’s books. Before that I hadn’t read any of Joe’s books… It was very eerie because in reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces I began to realize that my first draft of Star Wars was following classic motifs… So I modified my next draft according to what I’d been learning about classical motifs and made it a little bit more consistent… I went on to read The Masks of God and many other books.”
It was not until after the completion of the original Star Wars trilogy in 1983, however, that Lucas met Campbell or heard any of his lectures. In 1984, Campbell gave a lecture at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, with Lucas in the audience, who was introduced through their mutual friend Barbara McClintock. A few years later, Lucas invited Campbell to watch the entire Star Wars trilogy at Skywalker Ranch, which Campbell called “real art”. This meeting led to the filming of the 1988 documentary The Power of Myth at Skywalker Ranch. In his interviews with Bill Moyers, Campbell discusses the way in which Lucas used The Hero’s Journey in the Star Wars films to re-invent the mythology for the contemporary viewer. Moyers and Lucas filmed an interview 12 years later in 1999 called the Mythology of Star Wars with George Lucas & Bill Moyers to further discuss the impact of Campbell’s work on Lucas’ films. In addition, the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution sponsored an exhibit during the late 1990s called Star Wars: The Magic of Myth, which discussed the ways in which Campbell’s work shaped the Star Wars films.
Many filmmakers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have acknowledged the influence of Campbell’s work on their own craft. Christopher Vogler, a Hollywood screenwriter, created a seven-page company memo based on Campbell’s work, A Practical Guide to The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which led to the development of Disney’s 1994 film The Lion King. Among films that many viewers have recognized as closely following the pattern of the monomyth are The Matrix series, the Batman series and the Indiana Jones series. Dan Harmon, the creator of the TV show Community and co-creator of the TV show Rick and Morty, often references Campbell as a major influence. According to him, he uses a “story circle” to formulate every story he writes, in a formulation of Campbell’s work. A fictionalized version of Campbell himself appears in the seventh episode of the sixth season of Rick and Morty, “Full Meta Jackrick”.
After the explosion of popularity brought on by the Star Wars films and The Power of Myth, creative artists in many media recognized the potential to use Campbell’s theories to try to unlock human responses to narrative patterns. Novelists, songwriters, video game designers have studied Campbell’s work in order to better understand mythology – in particular, the monomyth – and its impact.
The novelist Richard Adams acknowledges a debt to Campbell’s work and specifically to the concept of the monomyth. In his best known work, Watership Down, Adams uses extracts from The Hero with a Thousand Faces as chapter epigrams.
Dan Brown mentioned in a New York Times interview that Joseph Campbell’s works, particularly The Power of Myth and The Hero with a Thousand Faces, inspired him to create the character of Robert Langdon.
“Follow your bliss” One of Campbell’s most identifiable, most quoted and arguably most misunderstood sayings was his admonition to “follow your bliss”. He derived this idea from the Upanishads:
“Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat-Chit-Ananda. The word “Sat” means being. “Chit” means consciousness. “Ananda” means bliss or rapture. I thought, “I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.” I think it worked.”
He saw this not merely as a mantra, but as a helpful guide to the individual along the hero journey that each of us walks through life:
“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are – if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.”
Campbell began sharing this idea with students during his lectures in the 1970s. By the time that The Power of Myth was aired in 1988, six months following Campbell’s death, “Follow your bliss” was a philosophy that resonated deeply with the American public, both religious and secular.
During his later years, when some students took him to be encouraging hedonism, Campbell is reported to have grumbled, “I should have said, ‘Follow your blisters.'”
Campbell’s approach to myth, a genre of folklore, has been the subject of criticism from folklorists, academics who specialize in folklore studies. American folklorist Barre Toelken says that few psychologists have taken the time to become familiar with the complexities of folklore, and that, historically, Jung-influenced psychologists and authors have tended to build complex theories around single versions of a tale that support a theory or a proposal. To illustrate his point, Toelken employs Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s (1992) Women Who Run with the Wolves, citing its inaccurate representation of the folklore record, and Campbell’s “monomyth” approach as another. Regarding Campbell, Toelken writes, “Campbell could construct a monomyth of the hero only by citing those stories that fit his preconceived mold, and leaving out equally valid stories… which did not fit the pattern”. Toelken traces the influence of Campbell’s monomyth theory into other then-contemporary popular works, such as Robert Bly’s Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), which he says suffers from similar source selection bias.
Similarly, American folklorist Alan Dundes was highly critical of both Campbell’s approach to folklore, designating him as a “non-expert” and gives various examples of what he considers source bias in Campbell’s theories, as well as media representation of Campbell as an expert on the subject of myth in popular culture. Dundes writes, “Folklorists have had some success in publicizing the results of our efforts in the past two centuries such that members of other disciplines have, after a minimum of reading, believe they are qualified to speak authoritatively of folkloristic matters. It seems that the world is full of self-proclaimed experts in folklore, and a few, such as Campbell, have been accepted as such by the general public”. According to Dundes, “there is no single idea promulgated by amateurs that has done more harm to serious folklore study than the notion of archetype”.
According to anthropologist Raymond Scupin, “Joseph Campbell’s theories have not been well received in anthropology because of his overgeneralizations, as well as other problems.”
Campbell’s Sanskrit scholarship has been questioned. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a former Sanskrit professor at the University of Toronto, said that he once met Campbell, and that the two “hated each other at sight”, commenting that, “When I met Campbell at a public gathering he was quoting Sanskrit verses. He had no clue as to what he was talking about; he had the most superficial knowledge of India but he could use it for his own aggrandizement. I remember thinking: this man is corrupt. I know that he was simply lying about his understanding”. According to Richard Buchen, librarian of the Joseph Campbell Collection at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, Campbell could not translate Sanskrit well, but worked closely with three scholars who did.
Ellwood observes that The Masks of God series “impressed literate laity more than specialists”; he quotes Stephen P. Dunn as remarking that in Occidental Mythology Campbell “writes in a curiously archaic style, full of rhetorical questions, exclamations of wonder and delight, and expostulations directed at the reader, or perhaps at the author’s other self – which is charming about a third of the time and rather annoying the rest.” Ellwood says that “Campbell was not really a social scientist, and those in the latter camp could tell” and records a concern about Campbell’s “oversimplification of historical matters and tendency to make myth mean whatever he wanted it to mean”. The critic Camille Paglia, writing in Sexual Personae (1990), expressed disagreement with Campbell’s “negative critique of fifth-century Athens” in Occidental Mythology, arguing that Campbell missed the “visionary and exalted” androgyny in Greek statues of nude boys. Paglia has written that while Campbell is “a seminal figure for many American feminists”, she loathes him for his “mawkishness and bad research.” Paglia has called Campbell “mushy” and a “false teacher”, and described his work as a “fanciful, showy mishmash”.
Campbell has also been accused of antisemitism by some authors. In a 1989 New York Review of Books article, Brendan Gill accused Campbell of both antisemitism and prejudice against blacks. Gill’s article resulted in a series of letters to the editor, some supporting the charge of antisemitism and others defending him. However, according to Robert S. Ellwood Gill relied on “scraps of evidence, largely anecdotal” to support his charges. In 1991, Masson also accused Campbell of “hidden anti-Semitism” and “fascination with conservative, semi fascist views”.
The religious studies scholar Russell T. McCutcheon characterized the “following [of] the bliss of self-realization” in Campbell’s work as “spiritual and psychological legitimation” for Reaganomics.
The first published work that bore Campbell’s name was WhereThe Two Came to Their Father (1943), an account of a Navajo ceremony that was performed by singer who was a medicine man named Jeff King and recorded by artist and ethnologist Maud Oakes, recounting the story of two young heroes who go to the hogan of their father, the Sun, and return with the power to destroy the monsters that are plaguing their people. Campbell provided a commentary. He would use this tale through the rest of his career to illustrate both the universal symbols and structures of human myths and the particulars or folk ideas of Native American stories.
As noted above, James Joyce was an important influence on Campbell. Campbell’s first important book with Henry Morton Robinson, A SkeletonKey to FinnegansWake (1944), is a critical analysis of Joyce’s final text FinnegansWake. In addition, Campbell’s seminal work, The Hero with a ThousandFaces (1949), discusses what Campbell called the monomyth – the cycle of the journey of the hero – a term that he borrowed directly from Joyce’s FinnegansWake.
From his days in college through the 1940s, Joseph Campbell turned his hand to writing fiction. In many of his later stories which were published in the posthumous collection MythicImagination he began to explore the mythological themes that he was discussing in his Sarah Lawrence classes. These ideas turned him eventually from fiction to non-fiction.
Originally titled How to Read a Myth, and based on the introductory class on mythology that he had been teaching at Sarah Lawrence College, TheHero with a ThousandFaces was published in 1949 as Campbell’s first foray as a solo author which established his name outside of scholarly circles and remains, arguably, his most influential work to this day. The book argues that hero stories such as Krishna, Buddha, Apollonius of Tyana, and Jesus all share a similar mythological basis. Not only did it introduce the concept of the hero’s journey to popular thinking, but it also began to popularize the very idea of comparative mythology itself the study of the human impulse to create stories and images that, though they are clothed in the motifs of a particular time and place, draw nonetheless on universal, eternal themes. Campbell asserted:
“Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history, mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives becomes dissolved.”
Published between 1959 and 1968, Campbell’s four-volume work TheMasksofGod covers mythology from around the world, from ancient to modern. Where TheHerowith a ThousandFaces focused on the commonality of mythology , the MasksofGod books focus upon historical and cultural variations the monomyth takes on. In other words, where TheHerowith a ThousandFaces draws perhaps more from psychology, theMasksofGod books draw more from anthropology and history. The four volumes of MasksofGod are as follows PrimitiveMythology, OrientalMythology, OccidentalMythology, and CreativeMythology.
At the time of his death, Campbell was in the midst of working on a large-format, lavishly illustrated series titled HistoricalAtlasofWorldMythology. This series was to build on Campbell’s idea, first presented in TheHerowith a ThousandFaces, that myth evolves over time through four stages which include
TheWayoftheAnimal Powers which talks about the myths of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers and focus on shamanism and animal totems.
TheWayoftheSeeded Earth which talks about the myths of Neolithic, agrarian cultures which focus upon a mother goddess and associated fertility rites.
TheWayoftheCelestialLights which talks about the myths of Bronze Age city-states with pantheons of gods ruling from the heavens, led by a masculine god-king.
TheWayofMan which talks about religion and philosophy as it developed after the Axial Age, in which the mythic imagery of previous eras was made consciously metaphorical, reinterpreted as referring to psycho-spiritual, not literal-historical, matters. This transition is evident in the East in Buddhism, Vedanta, and philosophical Taoism; and in the West in the Mystery cults, Platonism, Christianity and Gnosticism.
Only the first volume was completed at the time of Campbell’s death. Campbell’s editor Robert Walter completed the publication of the first three of five parts of the second volume after Campbell’s death. The works are now out of print. As of 2014, Joseph Campbell Foundation is currently undertaking to create a new, ebook edition.
Campbell’s widest popular recognition followed his collaboration with Bill Moyers on the PBS series ThePowerofMyth, which was first broadcast in 1988, the year following Campbell’s death. The series discusses mythological, religious, and psychological archetypes. A book, ThePowerofMyth, containing expanded transcripts of their conversations, was released shortly after the original broadcast.
The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series is a project initiated by the Joseph Campbell Foundation to release new, authoritative editions of Campbell’s published and unpublished writing, as well as audio and video recordings of his lectures. Working with New World Library and Acorn Media UK, as well as publishing audio recordings and ebooks under its own banner, as of 2014 the project has produced over seventy-five titles. The series’s executive editor is Robert Walter, and the managing editor is David Kudler.
A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — John Huston.
John Huston was an American film director, screenwriter, actor and visual artist. He wrote the screenplays for most of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered classics, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The African Queen (1951), The Misfits (1961), Fat City (1972), The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and Prizzi’s Honor (1985). During his 46-year career, Huston received 15 Academy Award nominations, winning twice. He also directed both his father, Walter Huston, and daughter, Anjelica Huston, to Oscar wins.
In his early years, Huston studied and worked as a fine art painter in Paris. He then moved to Mexico and began writing first plays and short stories, and later working in Los Angeles as a Hollywood screenwriter, and was nominated for several Academy Awards writing for films directed by William Dieterle and Howard Hawks, among others. His directorial debut came with The Maltese Falcon, which despite its small budget became a commercial and critical hit; he would continue to be a successful, if iconoclastic, Hollywood director for the next 45 years. He explored the visual aspects of his films throughout his career, sketching each scene on paper beforehand, then carefully framing his characters during the shooting. While most directors rely on post-production editing to shape their final work, Huston instead created his films while they were being shot, with little editing needed. Some of Huston’s films were adaptations of important novels, often depicting a “heroic quest,” as in Moby Dick, or The Red Badge of Courage. In many films, different groups of people, while struggling toward a common goal, would become doomed, forming “destructive alliances,” giving the films a dramatic and visual tension. Many of his films involved themes such as religion, meaning, truth, freedom, psychology, colonialism, and war.
While he had done some stage acting in his youth and had occasionally cast himself in bit parts in his own films, he primarily worked behind the camera until Otto Preminger cast him in 1963’s The Cardinal, for which he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. He continued to take prominent supporting roles for the next two decades, including 1974’s Chinatown (directed by Roman Polanski), and he lent his booming baritone voice as a voice actor and narrator to a number of prominent films. His last two films, 1985’s Prizzi’s Honor, and 1987’s The Dead, filmed while he was in failing health at the end of his life, were both nominated for multiple Academy Awards. He died shortly after completing his last film.
Huston has been referred to as “a titan”, “a rebel”, and a “renaissance man” in the Hollywood film industry. Author Ian Freer describes him as “cinema’s Ernest Hemingway”—a filmmaker who was “never afraid to tackle tough issues head on.” He traveled widely, settling at various times in France, Mexico, and Ireland. Huston was a citizen of the U.S. by birth but renounced this to become an Irish citizen and resident in 1964. He later returned to the U.S., where he lived the rest of his life. For his contributions to the American film industry, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in February 1960.
Huston received 15 Oscar nominations in the course of his career and is the oldest person ever to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar when, at 79 years old, he was nominated for Prizzi’s Honor (1985). He won two Oscars, for directing and writing the screenplay for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Huston also won a Golden Globe for that film. He received the Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute in 1983, and the Career Achievement Award from the U.S. National Board of Review of Motion Pictures in 1984.
He also has the unique distinction of directing both his father Walter and his daughter Anjelica in Oscar-winning performances (in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Prizzi’s Honor, respectively), making the Hustons the first family to have three generations of Academy Award winners. He also directed her in Sinful Davey in 1969.
In addition, he also directed 13 other actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Sydney Greenstreet, Claire Trevor, Sam Jaffe, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, José Ferrer, Colette Marchand, Deborah Kerr, Grayson Hall, Susan Tyrrell, Albert Finney, Jack Nicholson and William Hickey.
In 1960, Huston was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contribution to motion pictures. In 1965, Huston received the Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement from the Writers Guild of America. In 1981, his film Escape to Victory was nominated for the Golden Prize at the 12th Moscow International Film Festival. A statue of Huston, sitting in his director’s chair, stands in Plaza John Huston in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — James Baldwin.
James Baldwin was an African American writer. He garnered acclaim for his work across several mediums, including essays, novels, plays, and poems. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was published in 1953; decades later, Time magazine included the novel on its list of the 100 best English-language novels released from 1923 to 2005. His first essay collection, Notes of a Native Son, was published in 1955.
Baldwin’s work fictionalizes fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures. Themes of masculinity, sexuality, race, and class intertwine to create intricate narratives that run parallel with some of the major political movements toward social change in mid-twentieth century America, such as the civil rights movement and the gay liberation movement. Baldwin’s protagonists are often but not exclusively African American, and gay and bisexual men frequently feature prominently in his literature. These characters often face internal and external obstacles in their search for social and self-acceptance. Such dynamics are prominent in Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room, which was written in 1956, well before the gay liberation movement.
His reputation has endured since his death and his work has been adapted for the screen to great acclaim. An unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, was expanded and adapted for cinema as the documentary film I Am Not Your Negro (2016), which was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 89th Academy Awards. One of his novels, If Beale Street Could Talk, was adapted into the Academy Award– winning film of the same name in 2018, directed and produced by Barry Jenkins.
In addition to writing, Baldwin was also a well-known, and controversial, public figure and orator, especially during the civil rights movement in the United States.
During his high school years, uncomfortable with the fact that, unlike many of his peers, he was attracted to men rather than women, Baldwin sought refuge in religion. He first joined the now-demolished Mount Calvary of the Pentecostal Faith Church on Lenox Avenue in 1937, but followed the preacher there, Bishop Rose Artemis Horn, who was affectionately called Mother Horn, when she left to preach at Fireside Pentecostal Assembly. At 14, “Brother Baldwin”, as Baldwin was called, first took to Fireside’s altar. It was at Fireside Pentecostal, during his mostly extemporaneous sermons, that Baldwin “learned that he had authority as a speaker and could do things with a crowd”, says biographer Campbell. Baldwin delivered his final sermon at Fireside Pentecostal in 1941. Baldwin later wrote in the essay “Down at the Cross” that the church “was a mask for self-hatred and despair … salvation stopped at the church door”. He related that he had a rare conversation with David Baldwin “in which they had really spoken to one another”, with his stepfather asking, “You’d rather write than preach, wouldn’t you?”
Baldwin left school in 1941 to earn money to help support his family. He secured a job helping to build a United States Army depot in New Jersey. In the middle of 1942 Emile Capouya helped Baldwin get a job laying tracks for the military in Belle Mead, New Jersey. The two lived in Rocky Hill and commuted to Belle Mead. In Belle Mead, Baldwin came to know the face of a prejudice that deeply frustrated and angered him and that he named the partial cause of his later emigration out of America. Baldwin’s fellow white workmen, who mostly came from the South, derided him for what they saw as his “uppity” ways and his lack of “respect”. Baldwin’s sharp, ironic wit particularly upset the white Southerners he met in Belle Mead.
In an incident that Baldwin described in “Notes of a Native Son”, Baldwin went to a restaurant in Princeton called the Balt where, after a long wait, Baldwin was told that “colored boys” weren’t served there. Then, on his last night in New Jersey, in another incident also memorialized in “Notes of a Native Son”, Baldwin and a friend went to a diner after a movie only to be told that Black people were not served there. Infuriated, he went to another restaurant, expecting to be denied service once again. When that denial of service came, humiliation and rage heaved up to the surface and Baldwin hurled the nearest object at hand—a water mug—at the waiter, missing her and shattering the mirror behind her. Baldwin and his friend narrowly escaped.
During these years, Baldwin was torn between his desire to write and his need to provide for his family. He took a succession of menial jobs, and feared becoming like his stepfather, who had been unable to properly provide for his family. Fired from the track-laying job, he returned to Harlem in June 1943 to live with his family after taking a meat-packing job. Baldwin would lose the meat-packing job too after falling asleep at the plant. He became listless and unstable, drifting from this odd job to that. Baldwin drank heavily, and endured the first of his nervous breakdowns.
Beauford Delaney helped Baldwin cast off his melancholy. In the year before he left De Witt Clinton and at Capuoya’s urging, Baldwin had met Delaney, a modernist painter, in Greenwich Village. Delaney would become Baldwin’s long-time friend and mentor, and helped demonstrate to Baldwin that a Black man could make his living in art. Moreover, when World War II bore down on the United States the winter after Baldwin left De Witt Clinton, the Harlem that Baldwin knew was atrophying, no longer the bastion of a Renaissance, the community grew more economically isolated and Baldwin considered his prospects there bleak. This led Baldwin to move to Greenwich Village, where Beauford Delaney lived and a place by which he had been fascinated since at least fifteen.
Baldwin lived in several locations in Greenwich Village, first with Delaney, then with a scattering of other friends in the area. He took a job at the Calypso Restaurant, an unsegregated eatery famous for the parade of prominent Black people who dined there. At Calypso, Baldwin worked under Trinidadian restaurateur, Connie Williams, whom Delaney had introduced him to. While working at Calypso, Baldwin continued to explore his sexuality, came out to Capouya and another friend, and frequent Calypso guest, Stan Weir. He also had numerous one-night stands with various men, and several relationships with women. Baldwin’s major love during these years in the Village was an ostensibly straight Black man named Eugene Worth. Worth introduced Baldwin to the Young People’s Socialist League and Baldwin became a Trotskyist for a brief period. Baldwin never expressed his desire for Worth, and Worth died by suicide after jumping from the George Washington Bridge in 1946. In 1944 Baldwin met Marlon Brando, whom he was also attracted to, at a theater class in The New School. The two became fast friends, maintaining a closeness that endured through the Civil Rights Movement and long after. Later, in 1945, Baldwin started a literary magazine called The Generation with Claire Burch, who was married to Brad Burch, Baldwin’s classmate from De Witt Clinton. Baldwin’s relationship with the Burches soured in the 1950s but was resurrected near the end of his life.
Near the end of 1944 Baldwin met Richard Wright, who had published Native Son several years earlier. Baldwin’s main designs for that initial meeting were trained on convincing Wright of the quality of an early manuscript for what would become Go Tell It On The Mountain, then called “Crying Holy”. Wright liked the manuscript and encouraged his editors to consider Baldwin’s work, but an initial $500 advance from Harper & Brothers dissipated with no book to show for the trouble. Harper eventually declined to publish the book at all. Nonetheless, Baldwin sent letters to Wright regularly in the subsequent years and would reunite with Wright in Paris in 1948, though their relationship turned for the worse soon after the Paris reunion.
In these years in the Village, Baldwin made a number of connections in the liberal New York literary establishment, primarily through Worth: Sol Levitas at The New Leader, Randall Jarrell at The Nation, Elliot Cohen and Robert Warshow at Commentary, and Philip Rahv at Partisan Review. Baldwin wrote many reviews for The New Leader, but was published for the first time in The Nation in a 1947 review of Maxim Gorki’s Best Short Stories. Only one of Baldwin’s reviews from this era made it into his later essay collection The Price of the Ticket: a sharply ironical assay of Ross Lockridge’s Raintree Countree that Baldwin wrote for The New Leader. Baldwin’s first essay, “The Harlem Ghetto”, was published a year later in Commentary and explored anti-Semitism among Black Americans. His conclusion in “Harlem Ghetto” was that Harlem was a parody of white America, with white American anti-Semitism included. Jewish people were also the main group of white people that Black Harlem dwellers met, so Jews became a kind of synecdoche for all that the Black people in Harlem thought of white people. Baldwin published his second essay in The New Leader, riding a mild wave of excitement over “Harlem Ghetto”: in “Journey to Atlanta”, Baldwin uses the diary recollections of his younger brother David, who had gone to Atlanta as part of a singing group, to unleash a lashing of irony and scorn on the South, white radicals, and ideology itself. This essay, too, was well received.
Baldwin tried to write another novel, Ignorant Armies, plotted in the vein of Native Son with a focus on a scandalous murder, but no final product materialized and his strivings toward a novel remained unsated. Baldwin spent two months out of summer 1948 at Shanks Village, a writer’s colony in Woodstock, New York. He then published his first work of fiction, a short story called “Previous Condition”, in the October 1948 issue of Commentary, about a 20-something Black man who is evicted from his apartment, the apartment a metaphor for white society.
Disillusioned by American prejudice against Black people, as well as wanting to see himself and his writing outside of an African-American context, he left the United States at the age of 24 to settle in Paris. Baldwin wanted not to be read as “merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer.” He also hoped to come to terms with his sexual ambivalence and escape the hopelessness that many young African-American men like himself succumbed to in New York.
In 1948, with $1,500 ($16,918 today) in funding from a Rosenwald Fellowship, Baldwin attempted a photography and essay book titled Unto the Dying Lamb with a photographer friend named Theodore Pelatowski, whom Baldwin met through Richard Avedon. The book was intended as both a catalog of churches and an exploration of religiosity in Harlem, but it was never finished. The Rosenwald money did, however, grant Baldwin the prospect of consummating a desire he held for several years running: moving to France. This he did: after saying his goodbyes to his mother and younger siblings, with forty dollars to his name, Baldwin flew from New York to Paris on November 11, 1948, having given most of the scholarship funds to his mother. Baldwin would give various explanations for leaving America—sex, Calvinism, an intense sense of hostility he feared would turn inward—but most of all, his race: the feature of his existence that had to therefore expose him to a lengthy catalog of humiliations. He hoped for a more peaceable existence in Paris.
In Paris, Baldwin was soon involved in the cultural radicalism of the Left Bank. He started to publish his work in literary anthologies, notably Zero which was edited by his friend Themistocles Hoetis and which had already published essays by Richard Wright.
Baldwin spent nine years living in Paris, mostly in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with various excursions to Switzerland, Spain, and back to the United States. Baldwin’s time in Paris was itinerant: he stayed with various friends around the city and in various hotels. Most notable of these lodgings was Hôtel Verneuil, a hotel in Saint-Germain that had collected a motley crew of struggling expatriates, mostly writers. This Verneuil circle spawned numerous friendships that Baldwin relied upon in rough periods. Baldwin was also continuously poor during his time in Paris, with only momentary respites from that condition. In his early years in Saint-Germain, Baldwin acquainted himself with Otto Friedrich, Mason Hoffenberg, Asa Benveniste, Themistocles Hoetis, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Max Ernst, Truman Capote, and Stephen Spender, among many others. Baldwin also met Lucien Happersberger, a Swiss boy, seventeen years old at the time of their first meeting, who came to France in search of excitement. Happersberger became Baldwin’s lover, especially in Baldwin’s first two years in France, and Baldwin’s near-obsession for some time after. Baldwin and Happersberger would remain friends for the next thirty-nine years. Though his time in Paris was not easy, Baldwin did escape the aspects of American life that most terrified him, especially the “daily indignities of racism”, per biographer James Campbell. According to Baldwin’s friend and biographer David Leeming: “Baldwin seemed at ease in his Paris life; Jimmy Baldwin the aesthete and lover reveled in the Saint-Germain ambiance.”
In his early years in Paris prior to Go Tell It on the Mountain‘s publication, Baldwin wrote several notable works. “The Negro in Paris”, published first in The Reporter, explored Baldwin’s perception of an incompatibility between Black Americans and Black Africans in Paris, as Black Americans had faced a “depthless alienation from oneself and one’s people” that was mostly unknown to Parisian Africans. He also wrote “The Preservation of Innocence”, which traced the violence against homosexuals in American life to the protracted adolescence of America as a society. In the magazine Commentary, he published “Too Little, Too Late”, an essay on Black American literature, and “The Death of the Prophet”, a short story that grew out of Baldwin’s earlier writings for Go Tell It on The Mountain. In the latter work, Baldwin employs a character named Johnnie to trace his bouts of depression to his inability to resolve the questions of filial intimacy emanating from Baldwin’s relationship with his stepfather. In December 1949, Baldwin was arrested and jailed for receiving stolen goods after an American friend brought him bedsheets that the friend had taken from another Paris hotel. When the charges were dismissed several days later, to the laughter of the courtroom, Baldwin wrote of the experience in his essay “Equal in Paris”, also published in Commentary in 1950. In the essay, he expressed his surprise and bewilderment at how he was no longer a “despised black man” but simply an American, no different than the white American friend who stole the sheet and with whom he had been arrested.
In these years in Paris, Baldwin also published two of his three scathing critiques of Richard Wright—”Everybody’s Protest Novel” in 1949 and “Many Thousands Gone” in 1951. Baldwin’s critique of Wright is an extension of his disapprobation toward protest literature. Per biographer David Leeming, Baldwin despised protest literature because it is “concerned with theories and with the categorization of human beings, and however brilliant the theories or accurate the categorizations, they fail because they deny life.” Protest writing cages humanity, but, according to Baldwin, “only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves.” Baldwin took Wright’s Native Son and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, both erstwhile favorites of Baldwin’s, as paradigmatic examples of the protest novel’s problem. The treatment of Wright’s Bigger Thomas by socially earnest white people near the end of Native Son was, for Baldwin, emblematic of white Americans’ presumption that for Black people “to become truly human and acceptable, they must first become like us. This assumption once accepted, the Negro in America can only acquiesce in the obliteration of his own personality.” In these two essays, Baldwin came to articulate what would become a theme in his work: that white racism toward Black Americans was refracted through self-hatred and self-denial—”One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of white minds. … Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves.” Baldwin’s relationship with Wright was tense but cordial after the essays, although Baldwin eventually ceased to regard Wright as a mentor. Meanwhile, “Everybody’s Protest Novel” had earned Baldwin the label “the most promising young Negro writer since Richard Wright.”
Beginning in the winter of 1951, Baldwin and Happersberger took several trips to Loèches-les-Bains in Switzerland, where Happersberger’s family owned a small chateau. By the time of the first trip, Happersberger had then entered a heterosexual relationship but grew worried for his friend Baldwin and offered to take Baldwin to the Swiss village. Baldwin’s time in the village gave form to his essay “Stranger in the Village”, published in Harper’s Magazine in October 1953. In that essay, Baldwin described some unintentional mistreatment and off-putting experiences at the hands of Swiss villagers who possessed a racial innocence few Americans could attest to. Baldwin explored how the bitter history shared between Black and white Americans had formed an indissoluble web of relations that changed both races: “No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger.”
Beauford Delaney’s arrival in France in 1953 marked “the most important personal event in Baldwin’s life” that year, according to biographer David Leeming. Around the same time, Baldwin’s circle of friends shifted away from primarily white bohemians toward a coterie of Black American expatriates: Baldwin grew close to dancer Bernard Hassell; spent significant amounts of time at Gordon Heath’s club in Paris; regularly listened to Bobby Short and Inez Cavanaugh’s performances at their respective haunts around the city; met Maya Angelou for the first time in these years as she partook in various European renditions of Porgy and Bess; and occasionally met with writers Richard Gibson and Chester Himes, composer Howard Swanson, and even Richard Wright. In 1954 Baldwin took a fellowship at the MacDowell writer’s colony in New Hampshire to help the process of writing a new novel and won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Also in 1954, Baldwin published the three-act play The Amen Corner which features the preacher Sister Margaret, a fictionalized Mother Horn from Baldwin’s time at Fireside Pentecostal, struggling with a difficult inheritance and alienation from herself and her loved ones on account of her religious fervor. Baldwin spent several weeks in Washington, D.C. and particularly around Howard University while he collaborated with Owen Dodson for the premiere of The Amen Corner, returning to Paris in October 1955.
Baldwin committed himself to a return to the United States in 1957, so he set about in early 1956 to enjoy what would be his last year in France. He became friends with Norman and Adele Mailer, was recognized by the National Institute of Arts and Letters with a grant, and was set to publish Giovanni’s Room. Nevertheless, Baldwin sank deeper into an emotional wreckage. In the summer of 1956, after a seemingly failed affair with a Black musician named Arnold, Baldwin’s first serious relationship since Happersberger, Baldwin overdosed on sleeping pills in a suicide attempt. He regretted the attempt almost instantly and called a friend who had him regurgitate the pills before the doctor arrived. Baldwin went on to attend the Congress of Black Writers and Artists in September 1956, a conference he found disappointing in its perverse reliance on European themes while nonetheless purporting to extol African originality.
Baldwin’s first published work, a review of the writer Maxim Gorky, appeared in The Nation in 1947. He continued to publish in that magazine at various times in his career and was serving on its editorial board at his death in 1987.
In 1953, Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman was published. He began writing it when he was only seventeen and first published it in Paris. His first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son appeared two years later. He continued to experiment with literary forms throughout his career, publishing poetry and plays as well as the fiction and essays for which he was known.
Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room, caused great controversy when it was first published in 1956 due to its explicit homoerotic content. Baldwin again resisted labels with the publication of this work. Despite the reading public’s expectations that he would publish works dealing with African American experiences, Giovanni’s Room is predominantly about white characters.
Baldwin sent the manuscript for Go Tell It on the Mountain from Paris to New York publishing house Alfred A. Knopf on February 26, 1952, and Knopf expressed interest in the novel several months later. To settle the terms of his association with Knopf, Baldwin sailed back to the United States on the SS Île de France in April, where Themistocles Hoetis and Dizzy Gillespie were coincidentally also voyaging—his conversations with both on the ship were extensive. After his arrival in New York, Baldwin spent much of the next three months with his family, whom he had not seen in almost three years. Baldwin grew particularly close to his younger brother, David Jr., and served as best man at David’s wedding on June 27. 121 Meanwhile, Baldwin agreed to rewrite parts of Go Tell It on the Mountain in exchange for a $250 advance ($2,551 today) and a further $750 ($7,653 today) paid when the final manuscript was completed. When Knopf accepted the revision in July, they sent the remainder of the advance, and Baldwin was soon to have his first published novel. In the interim, Baldwin published excerpts of the novel in two publications: one excerpt was published as “Exodus” in American Mercury and the other as “Roy’s Wound” in New World Writing. Baldwin set sail back to Europe on August 28 and Go Tell It on the Mountain was published in May 1953.
Go Tell It on the Mountain was the product of Baldwin’s years of work and exploration since his first attempt at a novel in 1938. In rejecting the ideological manacles of protest literature and the presupposition he thought inherent to such works that “in Negro life there exists no tradition, no field of manners, no possibility of ritual or intercourse”, Baldwin sought in Go Tell It on the Mountain to emphasize that the core of the problem was “not that the Negro has no tradition but that there has as yet arrived no sensibility sufficiently profound and tough to make this tradition articulate.” Baldwin biographer David Leeming draws parallels between Baldwin’s undertaking in Go Tell It on the Mountain and James Joyce’s endeavor in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: to “encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Baldwin himself drew parallels between Joyce’s flight from his native Ireland and his own run from Harlem, and Baldwin read Joyce’s time in Paris in 1950, but in Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, it would be the Black American “uncreated conscience” at the heart of the project.
The novel is a bildungsroman that peers into the inward struggles of protagonist John Grimes, the illegitimate son of Elizabeth Grimes, to claim his own soul as it lies on the “threshing floor”, a clear allusion to another John, the Baptist born of another Elizabeth. John’s struggle is a metaphor for Baldwin’s own struggle between escaping the history and heritage that made him, awful though it may be, and plunging deeper into that heritage, to the bottom of his people’s sorrows, before he can shuffle off his psychic chains, “climb the mountain”, and free himself. John’s family members and most of the characters in the novel are blown north in the winds of the Great Migration in search of the American Dream and all are stifled. Florence, Elizabeth, and Gabriel are denied love’s reach because racism assured them that they could not muster the kind of self-respect that love requires. Racism drives Elizabeth’s lover, Richard, to suicide, Richard will not be the last Baldwin character to die thus for that same reason. Florence’s lover Frank is destroyed by searing self-hatred of his own Blackness. Gabriel’s abuse of the women in his life is downstream from his society’s emasculation of him, with mealy-mouthed religiosity only a hypocritical cover.
The phrase “in my father’s house” and various similar formulations appear throughout Go Tell It on the Mountain, and was even an early title for the novel. The house is a metaphor at several levels of generality: for his own family’s apartment in Harlem, for Harlem taken as a whole, for America and its history, and for the “deep heart’s core”. John’s departure from the agony that reigned in his father’s house, particularly the historical sources of the family’s privations, came through a conversion experience. “Who are these? Who are they” John cries out when he sees a mass of faces as he descends to the threshing floor: “They were the despised and rejected, the wretched and the spat upon, the earth’s offscouring; and he was in their company, and they would swallow up his soul.” John desperately wants to escape the threshing floor, but ” then John saw the Lord” and “a sweetness” filled him. The midwife of John’s conversion is Elisha, the voice of love that had followed him throughout the experience, and whose body filled John with “a wild delight”. Thus comes the wisdom that would define Baldwin’s philosophy: per biographer David Leeming: “salvation from the chains and fetters, the self-hatred and the other effects of historical racism could come only from love.”
It was Baldwin’s friend from high school, Sol Stein, who encouraged Baldwin to write an essay collection reflecting on his work thus far. Baldwin was reluctant, saying he was “too young to publish my memoirs.” Stein persisted in his exhortations to his friend Baldwin, and Notes of a Native Son was published in 1955. The book contained practically all the major themes that would continue to run through Baldwin’s work: searching for self when racial myths cloud reality; accepting an inheritance (“the conundrum of color is the inheritance of every American”); claiming a birthright (“my birthright was vast, connecting me to all that lives, and to everyone, forever”); the artist’s loneliness; love’s urgency. All the essays in Notes were published between 1948 and 1955 in Commentary, The New Leader, Partisan Review, The Reporter, and Harper’s Magazine. The essays rely on autobiographical detail to convey Baldwin’s arguments, as all of Baldwin’s work does. Notes was Baldwin’s first introduction to many white Americans and became their reference point for his work: Baldwin often got asked, “Why don’t you write more essays like the ones in Notes of a Native Son?”. The collection’s title alludes to both Richard Wright’s Native Son and the work of one of Baldwin’s favorite writers, Henry James’s Notes of a Son and Brother.
Notes of a Native Son is divided into three parts: the first part deals with Black identity as artist and human; the second part negotiates with Black life in America, including what is sometimes considered Baldwin’s best essay, the titular “Notes of a Native Son”; the final part takes the expatriate’s perspective, looking at American society from beyond its shores. Part One of Notes features “Everybody’s Protest Novel” and “Many Thousands Gone”, along with “Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough”, a 1955 review of Carmen Jones written for Commentary where Baldwin at once extols the sight of an all-Black cast on the silver screen and laments the film’s myths about Black sexuality. Part Two reprints “The Harlem Ghetto” and “Journey to Atlanta” as prefaces for “Notes of a Native Son”. In “Notes of a Native Son”, Baldwin attempts to come to terms with his racial and filial inheritances. Part Three contains “Equal in Paris”, “Stranger in the Village”, “Encounter on the Seine”, and “A Question of Identity”. Writing from the expatriate’s perspective, Part Three is the sector of Baldwin’s corpus that most closely mirrors Henry James’s methods: hewing out of one’s distance and detachment from the homeland a coherent idea of what it means to be American.
Throughout Notes, when Baldwin is not speaking in first-person, Baldwin takes the view of white Americans. For example, in “The Harlem Ghetto”, Baldwin writes: “what it means to be a Negro in America can perhaps be suggested by the myths we perpetuate about him.” This earned some quantity of scorn from reviewers: in a review for The New York Times Book Review, Langston Hughes lamented that “Baldwin’s viewpoints are half American, half Afro-American, incompletely fused.” Some others were nonplussed by the handholding of white audiences, which Baldwin himself would criticize in later works. Nonetheless, most acutely in this stage in his career, Baldwin wanted to escape the rigid categories of protest literature and he viewed adopting a white point-of-view as a good method of doing so.
Shortly after returning to Paris, Baldwin got word from Dial Press that Giovanni’s Room had been accepted for publication. Baldwin sent the final manuscript for the book to his editor, James Silberman, on April 8, 1956, and the book was published that autumn.
In the novel, the protagonist David is in Paris while his fiancé Hella is in Spain. David meets the titular Giovanni at the bar that Guillaume owns; the two grow increasingly intimate and David eventually finds his way to Giovanni’s room.
David is confused by his intense feelings for Giovanni and has sex with a woman in the spur of the moment to reaffirm his sexuality. Meanwhile, Giovanni begins to prostitute himself and finally commits a murder for which he is guillotined.
David’s tale is one of love’s inhibitions: he cannot “face love when he finds it”, writes biographer James Campbell. His novel features a traditional theme: the clash between the restraints of puritanism and the impulse for adventure, emphasizing the loss of innocence that results. The inspiration for the murder part of the novel’s plot is an event dating from 1943 to 1944.
A Columbia University undergraduate named Lucien Carr murdered an older, homosexual man, David Kammerer, who made sexual advances on Carr. The two were walking near the banks of the Hudson River when Kammerrer made a pass at Carr, leading Carr to stab Kammerer and dump Kammerer’s body in the river.
To Baldwin’s relief, the reviews of Giovanni’s Room were positive, and his family did not criticize the subject matter.
Even from Paris, Baldwin heard the whispers of a rising Civil Rights Movement in his homeland: in May 1954, the United States Supreme Court ordered schools to desegregate “with all deliberate speed”; in August 1955 the racist murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, and the subsequent acquittal of his killers would burn in Baldwin’s mind until he wrote Blues for Mister Charlie; in December Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus; and in February 1956 Autherine Lucy was admitted to the University of Alabama before being expelled when whites rioted. Meanwhile, Baldwin was increasingly burdened by the sense that he was wasting time in Paris. Baldwin began planning a return to the United States in hopes of writing a biography of Booker T. Washington, which he then called Talking at the Gates. Baldwin also received commissions to write a review of Daniel Guérin’s Negroes on the March and J. C. Furnas’s Goodbye to Uncle Tom for The Nation, as well as to write about William Faulkner and American racism for Partisan Review.
The first project became “The Crusade of Indignation”, published in July 1956. 146 Baldwin suggests that the portrait of Black life in Uncle Tom’s Cabin “has set the tone for the attitude of American whites towards Negroes for the last one hundred years”, and that, given the novel’s popularity, this portrait has led to a unidimensional characterization of Black Americans that does not capture the full scope of Black humanity. The second project turned into the essay “William Faulkner and Desegregation”. The essay was inspired by Faulkner’s March 1956 comment during an interview that he was sure to enlist himself with his fellow white Mississippians in a war over desegregation “even if it meant going out into the streets and shooting Negroes”. For Baldwin, Faulkner represented the “go slow” mentality on desegregation that tries to wrestle with the Southerner’s peculiar dilemma: the South “clings to two entirely antithetical doctrines, two legends, two histories”; the southerner is “the proud citizen of a free society and, on the other hand, committed to a society that has not yet dared to free itself of the necessity of naked and brutal oppression.” Faulkner asks for more time but “the time … does not exist. … There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation.”
Baldwin initially intended to complete Another Country before returning to New York in the fall of 1957 but progress on the novel was trudging along, so he ultimately decided to go back to the United States sooner. Beauford Delaney was particularly upset about Baldwin’s departure. Delaney had started to drink a lot and was in the incipient stages of mental deterioration, now complaining about hearing voices. Nonetheless, after a brief visit with Édith Piaf, Baldwin set sail for New York in July 1957.
Baldwin’s third and fourth novels, Another Country (1962) and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), are sprawling, experimental works dealing with Black and white characters, as well as with heterosexual, gay, and bisexual characters.
Baldwin’s lengthy essay “Down at the Cross” similarly showed the seething discontent of the 1960s in novel form. The essay was originally published in two oversized issues of The New Yorker and landed Baldwin on the cover of Time magazine in 1963 while he was touring the South speaking about the restive Civil Rights Movement. Around the time of publication of The Fire Next Time, Baldwin became a known spokesperson for civil rights and a celebrity noted for championing the cause of Black Americans.
He frequently appeared on television and delivered speeches on college campuses. The essay talked about the uneasy relationship between Christianity and the burgeoning Black Muslim movement. After publication, several Black nationalists criticized Baldwin for his conciliatory attitude. They questioned whether his message of love and understanding would do much to change race relations in America. The book was consumed by whites looking for answers to the question: What do Black Americans really want? Baldwin’s essays never stopped articulating the anger and frustration felt by real-life Black Americans with more clarity and style than any other writer of his generation.
Baldwin’s next book-length essay, No Name in the Street (1972), also discussed his own experience in the context of the later 1960s, specifically the assassinations of three of his personal friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Baldwin’s writings of the 1970s and 1980s were largely overlooked by critics, although they have received increasing attention in recent years. Several of his essays and interviews of the 1980s discuss homosexuality and homophobia with fervor and forthrightness. Eldridge Cleaver’s harsh criticism of Baldwin in Soul on Ice and elsewhere and Baldwin’s return to southern France contributed to the perception by critics that he was not in touch with his readership. As he had been the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, he became an inspirational figure for the emerging gay rights movement. His two novels written in the 1970s, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979), placed a strong emphasis on the importance of Black American families. He concluded his career by publishing a volume of poetry, Jimmy’s Blues (1983), as well as another book-length essay, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), an extended reflection on race inspired by the Atlanta murders of 1979–1981.
Baldwin lived in France for most of his later life. He also spent some time in Switzerland and Turkey. Baldwin settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the south of France in 1970, in an old Provençal house beneath the ramparts of the famous village. His house was always open to his friends who frequently visited him while on trips to the French Riviera. American painter Beauford Delaney made Baldwin’s house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence his second home, often setting up his easel in the garden. Delaney painted several colorful portraits of Baldwin. Fred Nall Hollis also befriended Baldwin during this time. Actors Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier were also regular house guests.
Many of Baldwin’s musician friends dropped in during the Jazz à Juan and Nice Jazz Festivals. They included Nina Simone, Josephine Baker, Miles Davis, and Ray Charles. In his autobiography, Miles Davis wrote:
“I’d read his books and I liked and respected what he had to say. As I got to know Jimmy we opened up to each other and became real great friends. Every time I went to southern France to play Antibes, I would always spend a day or two out at Jimmy’s house in St. Paul de Vence. We’d just sit there in that great big beautiful house of his telling us all kinds of stories, lying our asses off…. He was a great man.”
Baldwin learned to speak French fluently and developed friendships with French actor Yves Montand and French writer Marguerite Yourcenar who translated Baldwin’s play The Amen Corner into French.
The years Baldwin spent in Saint-Paul-de-Vence were also years of work. Sitting in front of his sturdy typewriter, he devoted his days to writing and to answering the huge amount of mail he received from all over the world. He wrote several of his last works in his house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, including Just Above My Head in 1979 and Evidence of Things Not Seen in 1985. It was also in his Saint-Paul-de-Vence house that Baldwin wrote his famous “Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis” in November 1970.
On December 1, 1987, Baldwin died from stomach cancer in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. He was buried at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, near New York City.
Fred Nall Hollis took care of Baldwin on his deathbed. Nall had been friends with Baldwin from the early 1970s when Baldwin would buy him drinks at the Café de Flore. Nall recalled talking to Baldwin shortly before his death about racism in Alabama. In one conversation, Nall told Baldwin “Through your books you liberated me from my guilt about being so bigoted coming from Alabama and because of my homosexuality.” Baldwin insisted: “No, you liberated me in revealing this to me.”
At the time of Baldwin’s death, he was working on an unfinished manuscript called Remember This House, a memoir of his personal recollections of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Following his death, publishing company McGraw-Hill took the unprecedented step of suing his estate to recover the $200,000 advance they had paid him for the book, although the lawsuit was dropped by 1990. The manuscript forms the basis for Raoul Peck’s 2016 documentary film I Am Not Your Negro.
Following Baldwin’s death, a court battle began over the ownership of his home in France. Baldwin had been in the process of purchasing his house from his landlady, Mlle. Jeanne Faure. At the time of his death, Baldwin did not have full ownership of the home, although it was still Mlle. Faure’s intention that the home would stay in the family. His home, nicknamed “Chez Baldwin”, has been the center of scholarly work and artistic and political activism. The National Museum of African American History and Culture has an online exhibit titled “Chez Baldwin” which uses his historic French home as a lens to explore his life and legacy. Magdalena J. Zaborowska’s 2018 book, Me and My House: James Baldwin’s Last Decade in France, uses photographs of his home and his collections to discuss themes of politics, race, queerness, and domesticity.
Over the years, several efforts were initiated to save the house and convert it into an artist residency. None had the endorsement of the Baldwin estate. In February 2016, Le Monde published an opinion piece by Thomas Chatterton Williams, a contemporary Black American expatriate writer in France, which spurred a group of activists to come together in Paris. In June 2016, American writer and activist Shannon Cain squatted at the house for 10 days in an act of political and artistic protest. Les Amis de la Maison Baldwin, a French organization whose initial goal was to purchase the house by launching a capital campaign funded by the U.S. philanthropic sector, grew out of this effort. This campaign was unsuccessful without the support of the Baldwin Estate. Attempts to engage the French government in conservation of the property were dismissed by the mayor of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Joseph Le Chapelain whose statement to the local press claiming “nobody’s ever heard of James Baldwin” mirrored those of Henri Chambon, the owner of the corporation that razed his home. Construction was completed in 2019 on the apartment complex that now stands where Chez Baldwin once stood.
In all of Baldwin’s works, but particularly in his novels, the main characters are twined up in a “cage of reality” that sees them fighting for their soul against the limitations of the human condition or against their place at the margins of a society consumed by various prejudices. Baldwin connects many of his main characters, John in Go Tell It On The Mountain, Rufus in Another Country, Richard in Blues for Mister Charlie, and Giovanni in Giovanni’s Room, as sharing a reality of restriction: per biographer David Leeming, each is “a symbolic cadaver in the center of the world depicted in the given novel and the larger society symbolized by that world”. Each reaches for an identity within their own social environment, and sometimes, as in If Beale Street Could Talk‘s Fonny and Tell me How Long The Train’s Been Gone‘s Leo, they find such an identity, imperfect but sufficient to bear the world. The singular theme in the attempts of Baldwin’s characters to resolve their struggle for themselves is that such resolution only comes through love. Here is Leeming at some length:
“Love is at the heart of the Baldwin philosophy. Love for Baldwin cannot be safe; it involves the risk of commitment, the risk of removing the masks and taboos placed on us by society. The philosophy applies to individual relationships as well as to more general ones. It encompasses sexuality as well as politics, economics, and race relations. And it emphasizes the dire consequences, for individuals and racial groups, of the refusal to love.”
Baldwin returned to the United States in the summer of 1957 while the civil rights legislation of that year was being debated in Congress. He had been powerfully moved by the image of a young girl, Dorothy Counts, braving a mob in an attempt to desegregate schools in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv had suggested he report on what was happening in the American South. Baldwin was nervous about the trip but he made it, interviewing people in Charlotte, and Montgomery, Alabama. The result was two essays, one published in Harper’s magazine and in Partisan Review. Subsequent Baldwin articles on the movement appeared in Mademoiselle, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, where in 1962 he published the essay that he called “Down at the Cross”, and the New Yorker called “Letter from a Region of My Mind”. Along with a shorter essay from The Progressive, the essay became The Fire Next Time.
While he wrote about the movement, Baldwin aligned himself with the ideals of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Joining CORE gave him the opportunity to travel across the American South lecturing on his views of racial inequality. His insights into both the North and South gave him a unique perspective on the racial problems the United States was facing.
In 1963 he conducted a lecture tour of the South for CORE, traveling to Durham and Greensboro in North Carolina, and New Orleans. During the tour, he lectured to students, white liberals, and anyone else listening about his racial ideology, an ideological position between the “muscular approach” of Malcolm X and the nonviolent program of Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin expressed the hope that socialism would take root in the United States.
By the spring of 1963, the mainstream press began to recognize Baldwin’s incisive analysis of white racism and his eloquent descriptions of the Negro’s pain and frustration. In fact, Time featured Baldwin on the cover of its May 17, 1963, issue. “There is not another writer”, said Time, “who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South.”
In a cable Baldwin sent to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy during the Birmingham, Alabama crisis, Baldwin blamed the violence in Birmingham on the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, Mississippi Senator James Eastland, and President Kennedy for failing to use “the great prestige of his office as the moral forum which it can be.” Attorney General Kennedy invited Baldwin to meet with him over breakfast, and that meeting was followed up with a second, when Kennedy met with Baldwin and others Baldwin had invited to Kennedy’s Manhattan apartment. This meeting is discussed in Howard Simon’s 1999 play, James Baldwin: A Soul on Fire. The delegation included Kenneth B. Clark, a psychologist who had played a key role in the Brown v. Board of Education decision; actor Harry Belafonte, singer Lena Horne, writer Lorraine Hansberry, and activists from civil rights organizations. Although most of the attendees of this meeting left feeling “devastated”, the meeting was an important one in voicing the concerns of the civil rights movement, and it provided exposure of the civil rights issue not just as a political issue but also as a moral issue.
James Baldwin’s FBI file contains 1,884 pages of documents, collected from 1960 until the early 1970s. During that era of surveillance of American writers, the FBI accumulated 276 pages on Richard Wright, 110 pages on Truman Capote, and just nine pages on Henry Miller.
Baldwin also made a prominent appearance at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, with Belafonte and long-time friends Sidney Poitier and Marlon Brando.
Baldwin’s sexuality clashed with his activism. The civil rights movement was hostile to homosexuals. The only out gay men in the movement were Baldwin and Bayard Rustin. Rustin and King were very close, as Rustin received credit for the success of the March on Washington. Many were bothered by Rustin’s sexual orientation. King himself spoke on the topic of sexual orientation in a school editorial column during his college years, and in reply to a letter during the 1950s, where he treated it as a mental illness which an individual could overcome. King’s key advisor, Stanley Levison, also stated that Baldwin and Rustin were “better qualified to lead a homo-sexual movement than a civil rights movement”. The pressure later resulted in King distancing himself from both men. Despite his enormous efforts within the movement, due to his sexuality, Baldwin was excluded from the inner circles of the civil rights movement and was conspicuously uninvited to speak at the end of the March on Washington.
At the time, Baldwin was neither in the closet nor open to the public about his sexual orientation. Although his novels, specifically Giovanni’s Room and Just Above My Head, had openly gay characters and relationships, Baldwin himself never openly stated his sexuality. In his book, Kevin Mumford points out how Baldwin went his life “passing as straight rather than confronting homophobes with whom he mobilized against racism”.
After a bomb exploded in a Birmingham church three weeks after the March on Washington, Baldwin called for a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience in response to this “terrifying crisis”. He traveled to Selma, Alabama, where SNCC had organized a voter registration drive; he watched mothers with babies and elderly men and women standing in long lines for hours, as armed deputies and state troopers stood by, or intervened to smash a reporter’s camera or use cattle prods on SNCC workers. After his day of watching, he spoke in a crowded church, blaming Washington, “the good white people on the hill”. Returning to Washington, he told a New York Post reporter the federal government could protect Negroes, it could send federal troops into the South. He blamed the Kennedys for not acting. In March 1965, Baldwin joined marchers who walked 50 miles from Selma, Alabama, to the capitol in Montgomery under the protection of federal troops.
Nonetheless, he rejected the label “civil rights activist”, or that he had participated in a civil rights movement, instead agreeing with Malcolm X’s assertion that if one is a citizen, one should not have to fight for one’s civil rights. In a 1964 interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?, Baldwin rejected the idea that the civil rights movement was an outright revolution, instead calling it “a very peculiar revolution because it has to… have its aims the establishment of a union, and a… radical shift in the American mores, the American way of life… not only as it applies to the Negro obviously, but as it applies to every citizen of the country.” In a 1979 speech at UC Berkeley, Baldwin called it, instead, “the latest slave rebellion”.
In 1968, Baldwin signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse to make income tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.
A great influence on Baldwin was the painter Beauford Delaney. In The Price of the Ticket (1985), Baldwin describes Delaney as
“… the first living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognized as my teacher and I as his pupil. He became, for me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken but I never saw him bow.”
Later support came from Richard Wright, whom Baldwin called “the greatest black writer in the world”. Wright and Baldwin became friends, and Wright helped Baldwin secure the Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Award. Baldwin’s essay “Notes of a Native Son” and his collection Notes of a Native Son allude to Wright’s novel Native Son. In Baldwin’s 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel”, however, he indicated that Native Son, like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, lacked credible characters and psychological complexity, and the friendship between the two authors ended. Interviewed by Julius Lester, however, Baldwin explained “I knew Richard and I loved him. I was not attacking him; I was trying to clarify something for myself.” In 1965, Baldwin participated in a debate with William F. Buckley, on the topic of whether the American dream had been achieved at the expense of African Americans. The debate took place at Cambridge Union in the UK. The spectating student body voted overwhelmingly in Baldwin’s favor.
In 1949 Baldwin met and fell in love with Lucien Happersberger, a boy aged 17, though Happersberger’s marriage three years later left Baldwin distraught. When the marriage ended they later reconciled, with Happersberger staying by Baldwin’s deathbed at his house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Happersberger died on August 21, 2010, in Switzerland.
Baldwin was a close friend of the singer, pianist, and civil rights activist Nina Simone. Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, and Baldwin helped Simone learn about the Civil Rights Movement. Baldwin also provided her with literary references influential on her later work. Baldwin and Hansberry met with Robert F. Kennedy, along with Kenneth Clark and Lena Horne and others in an attempt to persuade Kennedy of the importance of civil rights legislation.
Baldwin influenced the work of French painter Philippe Derome, whom he met in Paris in the early 1960s. Baldwin also knew Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Billy Dee Williams, Huey P. Newton, Nikki Giovanni, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, Rip Torn, Alex Haley, Miles Davis, Amiri Baraka, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini, Margaret Mead, Josephine Baker, Allen Ginsberg, Chinua Achebe, and Maya Angelou. He wrote at length about his “political relationship” with Malcolm X. He collaborated with childhood friend Richard Avedon on the 1964 book Nothing Personal.
Maya Angelou called Baldwin her “friend and brother” and credited him for “setting the stage” for her 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Baldwin was made a Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur by the French government in 1986.
Baldwin was also a close friend of Nobel Prize–winning novelist Toni Morrison. Upon his death, Morrison wrote a eulogy for Baldwin that appeared in The New York Times. In the eulogy, entitled “Life in His Language”, Morrison credits Baldwin as being her literary inspiration and the person who showed her the true potential of writing. She writes:
“You knew, didn’t you, how I needed your language and the mind that formed it? How I relied on your fierce courage to tame wildernesses for me? How strengthened I was by the certainty that came from knowing you would never hurt me? You knew, didn’t you, how I loved your love? You knew. This then is no calamity. No. This is jubilee. “Our crown,” you said, “has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do,” you said, “is wear it.”
Baldwin’s influence on other writers has been profound: Toni Morrison edited the Library of America’s first two volumes of Baldwin’s fiction and essays: Early Novels & Stories (1998) and Collected Essays (1998). A third volume, Later Novels (2015), was edited by Darryl Pinckney, who had delivered a talk on Baldwin in February 2013 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of The New York Review of Books, during which he stated: “No other black writer I’d read was as literary as Baldwin in his early essays, not even Ralph Ellison. There is something wild in the beauty of Baldwin’s sentences and the cool of his tone, something improbable, too, this meeting of Henry James, the Bible, and Harlem.”
One of Baldwin’s richest short stories, “Sonny’s Blues”, appears in many anthologies of short fiction used in introductory college literature classes.
In 1987, Kevin Brown, a photo-journalist from Baltimore founded the National James Baldwin Literary Society. The group organizes free public events celebrating Baldwin’s life and legacy.
In 1992, Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, established the James Baldwin Scholars program, an urban outreach initiative, in honor of Baldwin, who taught at Hampshire in the early 1980s. The JBS Program provides talented students of color from under-served communities an opportunity to develop and improve the skills necessary for college success through coursework and tutorial support for one transitional year, after which Baldwin scholars may apply for full matriculation to Hampshire or any other four-year college program.
Spike Lee’s 1996 film Get on the Bus includes a Black gay character, played by Isaiah Washington, who punches a homophobic character, saying: “This is for James Baldwin and Langston Hughes.”
His name appears in the lyrics of the Le Tigre song “Hot Topic”, released in 1999.
In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante included James Baldwin on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.
In 2005, the United States Postal Service created a first-class postage stamp dedicated to Baldwin, which featured him on the front with a short biography on the back of the peeling paper.
In 2012, Baldwin was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display that celebrates LGBT history and people. 218
In 2014, East 128th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues was named “James Baldwin Place” to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Baldwin’s birth. He lived in the neighborhood and attended P.S. 24. Readings of Baldwin’s writing were held at The National Black Theatre and a month-long art exhibition featuring works by New York Live Arts and artist Maureen Kelleher. The events were attended by Council Member Inez Dickens, who led the campaign to honor the Harlem native’s son; also taking part were Baldwin’s family, theater and film notables, and members of the community.
Also in 2014, Baldwin was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk, a walk of fame in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood celebrating LGBTQ people who have “made significant contributions in their fields.”
Also in 2014, The Social Justice Hub at The New School’s newly opened University Center was named the Baldwin Rivera Boggs Center after activists Baldwin, Sylvia Rivera, and Grace Lee Boggs.
In 2016, Raoul Peck released his documentary film I Am Not Your Negro. It is based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, Remember This House. It is a 93-minute journey into Black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights Movement to the present of Black Lives Matter. It is a film that questions Black representation in Hollywood and beyond.
In 2017, Scott Timberg wrote an essay for the Los Angeles Times in which he noted existing cultural references to Baldwin, 30 years after his death, and concluded: “So Baldwin is not just a writer for the ages, but a scribe whose work, as squarely as George Orwell’s, speaks directly to ours.”
In June 2019 Baldwin’s residence on the Upper West Side was given landmark designation by New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.
In June 2019, Baldwin was one of the inaugural fifty American “pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes” inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument (SNM) in New York City’s Stonewall Inn. The SNM is the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history, and the wall’s unveiling was timed to take place during the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
At the Paris Council of June 2019, the city of Paris voted unanimously by all political groups to name a place in the capital in the name of James Baldwin. The project was confirmed on June 19, 2019, and announced for the year 2020. In 2021, Paris City Hall announced that the writer would give his name to the very first media library in the 19th arrondissement, which is scheduled to open in 2023.
A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Jackie Gleason.
Jackie Gleason was an American actor, comedian, writer, and composer known affectionately as “The Great One”. Developing a style and characters from growing up in Brooklyn, New York, he was known for his brash visual and verbal comedy, exemplified by his city-bus-driver character Ralph Kramden in the television series The Honeymooners. He also developed The Jackie Gleason Show, which maintained high ratings from the mid-1950s through 1970. After originating in New York City, videotaping moved to Miami Beach, Florida, in 1964 after Gleason took up permanent residence there.
Among his notable film roles were Minnesota Fats in 1961’s The Hustler (co-starring with Paul Newman) and Buford T. Justice in the Smokey and the Bandit series from 1977 to 1983 (co-starring Burt Reynolds).
Gleason enjoyed a prominent secondary music career during the 1950s and 1960s, producing a series of best-selling “mood music” albums. His first album, Music for Lovers Only, still holds the record for the longest stay on the Billboard Top Ten Charts (153 weeks), and his first 10 albums sold over a million copies each. His output spans some 20-plus singles, nearly 60 long-playing record albums, and over 40 CDs.
Gleason worked his way up to a job at New York’s Club 18, where insulting its patrons was the order of the day. Gleason greeted noted skater Sonja Henie by handing her an ice cube and saying, “Okay, now do something.” It was here that Jack L. Warner first saw Gleason, signing him to a film contract for $250 a week.
By age 24, Gleason was appearing in films: first for Warner Brothers (as Jackie C. Gleason) in such films as Navy Blues (1941) with Ann Sheridan and Martha Raye and All Through the Night (1941) with Humphrey Bogart; then for Columbia Pictures for the B military comedy Tramp, Tramp, Tramp; and finally for Twentieth Century-Fox, where Gleason played Glenn Miller Orchestra bassist Ben Beck in Orchestra Wives (1942). He also had a small part as a soda shop clerk in Larceny, Inc. (1942), with Edward G. Robinson and a modest part as an actor’s agent in the 1942 Betty Grable–Harry James musical Springtime in the Rockies.
During World War II, Gleason was initially exempt from military service, since he was a father of two. However, in 1943 the US started drafting men with children. When Gleason reported to his induction, doctors discovered that his broken left arm had healed crooked (the area between his thumb and forefinger was nerveless and numb), that a pilonidal cyst existed at the end of his coccyx, and that he was 100 pounds overweight. Gleason was therefore classified 4-F and rejected for military service.
Gleason did not make a strong impression on Hollywood at first; at the time, he developed a nightclub act that included comedy and music. At the end of 1942, Gleason and Lew Parker led a large cast of entertainers in the road show production of Olsen and Johnson’s New 1943 Hellzapoppin. He also became known for hosting all-night parties in his hotel suite; the hotel soundproofed his suite out of consideration for its other guests. “Anyone who knew Jackie Gleason in the 1940s”, wrote CBS historian Robert Metz, “would tell you The Fat Man would never make it. His pals at Lindy’s watched him spend money as fast as he soaked up the booze.” Rodney Dangerfield wrote that he witnessed Gleason purchasing marijuana in the 1940s.
Gleason’s first significant recognition as an entertainer came on Broadway when he appeared in the hit musical Follow the Girls (1944). While working in films in California, Gleason also worked at former boxer Maxie Rosenbloom’s nightclub (Slapsy Maxie’s, on Wilshire Boulevard).
Gleason’s big break occurred in 1949, when he landed the role of blunt but softhearted aircraft worker Chester A. Riley for the first television version of the radio comedy The Life of Riley. (William Bendix had originated the role on radio but was initially unable to accept the television role because of film commitments.) Despite positive reviews, the show received modest ratings and was canceled after one year. Bendix reprised the role in 1953 for a five-year series. The Life of Riley became a television hit for Bendix during the mid-to-late 1950s. But long before this, Gleason’s nightclub act had received attention from New York City’s inner circle and the fledgling DuMont Television Network. He was working at Slapsy Maxie’s when he was hired to host DuMont’s Cavalcade of Stars variety hour in 1950, having been recommended by comedy writer Harry Crane, whom he knew from his days as a stand-up comedian in New York. The program initially had rotating hosts; Gleason was first offered two weeks at $750 per week. When he responded it was not worth the train trip to New York, the offer was extended to four weeks. Gleason returned to New York for the show. He framed the acts with splashy dance numbers, developed sketch characters he would refine over the next decade, and became enough of a presence that CBS wooed him to its network in 1952.
Renamed The Jackie Gleason Show, the program became the country’s second-highest-rated television show during the 1954–55 season. Gleason amplified the show with even splashier opening dance numbers inspired by Busby Berkeley’s screen dance routines and featuring the precision-choreographed June Taylor Dancers. Following the dance performance, he would do an opening monologue. Then, accompanied by “a little travelin’ music” (“That’s a Plenty”, a Dixieland classic from 1914), he would shuffle toward the wings, clapping his hands and shouting, “And awaaay we go!” The phrase became one of his trademarks, along with “How sweet it is!” (which he used in reaction to almost anything). Theona Bryant, a former Powers Girl, became Gleason’s “And awaaay we go” girl. Ray Bloch was Gleason’s first music director, followed by Sammy Spear, who stayed with Gleason through the 1960s; Gleason often kidded both men during his opening monologues. He continued developing comic characters, including:
Reginald Van Gleason III, a top-hatted millionaire with a taste for both the good life and fantasy;
Rudy the Repairman, boisterous and boorish; Joe the Bartender, gregarious and with friendly words for the never-seen Mr. Dennehy (always first at the bar); The Poor Soul, a silent character who could (and often did) come to grief in the least-expected places (or demonstrated gratitude at such gifts as being allowed to share a newspaper on a subway); Rum Dum, a character with a brush-like mustache who often stumbled around as though drunk and confused; Fenwick Babbitt, a friendly, addle-headed young man usually depicted working at various jobs and invariably failing; Charlie Bratton, a loudmouth who frequently picked on the mild-mannered Clem Finch (portrayed by Art Carney, a future Honeymooners co-star); Stanley R. Sogg, a pitchman who usually appeared on commercials during late night movies and sold items that came with extras or bonuses (the ultimate inducement was a 10-pound wedge of Facciamara’s Macciaroni cheese); and The Bachelor, a silent character (accompanied by the song “Somebody Loves Me”) doing everyday things in an unusually lazy (or makeshift) way.
In a 1985 interview, Gleason related some of his characters to his youth in Brooklyn. The Mr. Dennehy whom Joe the Bartender greets is a tribute to Gleason’s first love, Julie Dennehy. The character of The Poor Soul was drawn from an assistant manager of an outdoor theater he frequented.
Gleason disliked rehearsing. With a photographic memory he read the script once, watched a rehearsal with his co-stars and stand-in, and shot the show later that day. When he made mistakes, he often blamed the cue cards.
Gleason’s most popular character by far was blustery bus driver Ralph Kramden. Largely drawn from Gleason’s harsh Brooklyn childhood, these sketches became known as The Honeymooners. The show was based on Ralph’s many get-rich-quick schemes; his ambition; his antics with his best friend and neighbor, scatterbrained sewer worker Ed Norton; and clashes with his sensible wife, Alice, who typically pulled Ralph’s head down from the clouds.
Gleason developed catchphrases he used on The Honeymooners, such as threats to Alice: “One of these days, Alice, pow! right in the kisser” and “Bang! Zoom! To the moon Alice, to the moon!”
The Honeymooners originated from a sketch Gleason was developing with his show’s writers. He said he had an idea he wanted to enlarge: a skit with a smart, quiet wife and her very vocal husband. He went on to describe that, while the couple had their fights, underneath it all they loved each other. Titles for the sketch were tossed around until someone came up with The Honeymooners.
The Honeymooners first was featured on Cavalcade of Stars on October 5, 1951, with Carney in a guest appearance as a cop (Norton did not appear until a few episodes later) and character actress Pert Kelton as Alice. Darker and fiercer than the milder later version with Audrey Meadows as Alice, the sketches proved popular with critics and viewers. As Kramden, Gleason played a frustrated bus driver with a battleax of a wife in harrowingly realistic arguments; when Meadows (who was 15 years younger than Kelton) took over the role after Kelton was blacklisted, the tone softened considerably.
When Gleason moved to CBS, Kelton was left behind; her name had been published in Red Channels, a book that listed and described reputed communists (and communist sympathizers) in television and radio, and the network did not want to hire her. Gleason reluctantly let her leave the cast, with a cover story for the media that she had “heart trouble”. At first, he turned down Meadows as Kelton’s replacement. Meadows wrote in her memoir that she slipped back to audition again and frumped herself up to convince Gleason that she could handle the role of a frustrated (but loving) working-class wife. Rounding out the cast, Joyce Randolph played Trixie, Ed Norton’s wife. Elaine Stritch had played the role as a tall and attractive blonde in the first sketch but was quickly replaced by Randolph. Comedy writer Leonard Stern always felt The Honeymooners was more than sketch material and persuaded Gleason to make it into a full-hour-long episode.
In 1955, Gleason gambled on making it a separate series entirely. These are the “Classic 39” episodes, which finished 19th in the ratings for their only season. They were filmed with a new DuMont process, Electronicam. Like kinescopes, it preserved a live performance on film; unlike kinescopes (which were screenshots), the film was of higher quality and comparable to a motion picture. That turned out to be Gleason’s most prescient move. A decade later, he aired the half-hour Honeymooners in syndicated reruns that began to build a loyal and growing audience, making the show a television icon. Its popularity was such that in 2000 a life-sized statue of Jackie Gleason, in uniform as bus driver Ralph Kramden, was installed outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City.
Gleason went back to the live format for 1956–57 with short and long versions, including hour-long musicals. These musical presentations were reprised ten years later, in color, with Sheila MacRae and Jane Keane as Alice and Trixie.
Audrey Meadows reappeared for one black-and-white remake of the ’50s sketch “The Adoption”, telecast January 8, 1966. Ten years later she rejoined Gleason and Carney (with Jane Kean replacing Joyce Randolph) for several TV specials (one special from 1973 was shelved).
The Jackie Gleason Show ended in June 1957. In 1959, Jackie discussed the possibility of bringing back The Honeymooners in new episodes. His dream was partially realized with a Kramden-Norton sketch on a CBS variety show in late 1960 and two more sketches on his new hour-long CBS show The American Scene Magazine in 1962.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Gleason enjoyed a prominent secondary music career producing a series of best-selling “mood music” albums with jazz overtones for Capitol Records. Gleason believed there was a ready market for romantic instrumentals. His goal was to make “musical wallpaper that should never be intrusive, but conducive”. He recalled seeing Clark Gable play love scenes in movies; the romance was, in his words, “magnified a thousand percent” by background music. Gleason reasoned, “If Gable needs music, a guy in Brooklyn must be desperate!”
Gleason could not read or write music; he was said to have conceived melodies in his head and described them vocally to assistants who transcribed them into musical notes. These included the well-remembered themes of both The Jackie Gleason Show (“Melancholy Serenade”) and The Honeymooners (“You’re My Greatest Love”). In spite of period accounts establishing his direct involvement in musical production, varying opinions have appeared over the years as to how much credit Gleason should have received for the finished products. Biographer William A. Henry wrote in his 1992 book, The Great One: The Life and Legend of Jackie Gleason, that beyond the possible conceptualizing of many of the song melodies, Gleason had no direct involvement (such as conducting) in making the recordings. Red Nichols, a jazz great who had fallen on hard times and led one of the group’s recordings, was not paid as session-leader. Cornetist and trumpeter Bobby Hackett soloed on several of Gleason’s albums and was leader for seven of them. Asked late in life by musician–journalist Harry Currie in Toronto what Gleason really did at the recording sessions, Hackett replied, “He brought the checks”.
But years earlier Hackett had glowingly told writer James Bacon:
Jackie knows a lot more about music than people give him credit for. I have seen him conduct a 60-piece orchestra and detect one discordant note in the brass section. He would immediately stop the music and locate the wrong note. It always amazed the professional musicians how a guy who technically did not know one note from another could do that. And he was never wrong.
The composer and arranger George Williams has been cited in various biographies as having served as ghostwriter for the majority of arrangements heard on many of Gleason’s albums of the 1950s and 1960s. Williams was not given credit for his work until the early 1960s, albeit only in small print on the backs of album covers.
Nearly all of Gleason’s albums have been reissued on compact disc.
Gleason’s lead role in the musical Take Me Along (1959–60) won him a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical.
In 1956 Gleason revived his original variety hour including The Honeymooners, winning a Peabody Award. He abandoned the show in 1957 when his ratings for the season came in at No. 29 and the network “suggested” he needed a break. He returned in 1958 with a half-hour show featuring Buddy Hackett, which did not catch on.
In addition to his salary and royalties, CBS paid for Gleason’s Peekskill, New York, mansion “Round Rock Hill”. Set on six acres, the architecturally noteworthy complex included a round main home, guest house, and storage building. It took Gleason two years to design the house, which was completed in 1959. Gleason sold the home when he relocated to Miami.
In October 1960, Gleason and Carney briefly returned for a Honeymooners sketch on a TV special. His next foray into television was the game show You’re in the Picture, which was cancelled after a disastrously received premiere episode but was followed the next week by a broadcast of Gleason’s humorous half-hour apology, which was much better appreciated. For the rest of its scheduled run, the game show was replaced by a talk show named The Jackie Gleason Show.
In 1962, Gleason resurrected his variety show with more splashiness and a new hook: a fictitious general-interest magazine called The American Scene Magazine, through which Gleason trotted out his old characters in new scenarios, including two new Honeymooners sketches. He also added another catchphrase to the American vernacular, first uttered in the 1963 film Papa’s Delicate Condition: “How sweet it is!” The Jackie Gleason Show: The American Scene Magazine was a hit that continued for four seasons. Each show began with Gleason delivering a monologue and commenting on the attention-getting outfits of band leader Sammy Spear. Then the “magazine” features would be trotted out, from Hollywood gossip (reported by comedian Barbara Heller) to news flashes (played for laughs with a stock company of second bananas, chorus girls and dwarfs). Comedienne Alice Ghostley occasionally appeared as a downtrodden tenement resident sitting on her front step and listening to boorish boyfriend Gleason for several minutes. After the boyfriend took his leave, the smitten Ghostley would exclaim, “I’m the luckiest girl in the world!” Veteran comics Johnny Morgan, Sid Fields, and Hank Ladd were occasionally seen opposite Gleason in comedy sketches. Helen Curtis played alongside him as a singer and actress, delighting audiences with her ‘Madame Plumpadore’ sketches with ‘Reginald Van Gleason.’
The final sketch was always set in Joe the Bartender’s saloon with Joe singing “My Gal Sal” and greeting his regular customer, the unseen Mr. Dunahy. During the sketch, Joe would tell Dennehy about an article he had read in the fictitious American Scene magazine, holding a copy across the bar. It had two covers: one featured the New York skyline and the other palm trees. Joe would bring out Frank Fontaine as Crazy Guggenheim, who would regale Joe with the latest adventures of his neighborhood pals and sometimes show Joe his current Top Cat comic book. Joe usually asked Crazy to sing, almost always a sentimental ballad in his fine, lilting baritone.
Gleason revived The Honeymooners; First with Sue Ane Langdon as Alice and Patricia Wilson as Trixie for two episodes of The American Scene Magazine, then with Sheila MacRae as Alice and Jane Kean as Trixie for the 1966 series. By 1964 Gleason had moved the production from New York to Miami Beach, Florida, reportedly because he liked year-round access to the golf course at the nearby Inverrary Country Club in Lauderhill. His closing line became, almost invariably, “As always, the Miami Beach audience is the greatest audience in the world!” In 1966, he abandoned the American Scene Magazine format and converted the show into a standard variety hour with guest performers.
Gleason kicked off the 1966–1967 season with new, color episodes of The Honeymooners. Carney returned as Ed Norton, with MacRae as Alice and Kean as Trixie. The sketches were remakes of the 1957 world-tour episodes, in which Kramden and Norton win a slogan contest and take their wives to international destinations. Each of the nine episodes was a full-scale musical comedy, with Gleason and company performing original songs by Lyn Duddy and Jerry Bresler. Occasionally Gleason would devote the show to musicals with a single theme, such as college comedy or political satire, with the stars abandoning their Honeymooners roles for different character roles. This was the show’s format until its cancellation in 1970. The musicals pushed Gleason back into the top five in ratings, but audiences soon began to decline. By its final season, Gleason’s show was no longer in the top 25. In the last original Honeymooners episode aired on CBS, Ralph encounters the youth-protest movement of the late 1960s, a sign of changing times in both television and society.
Gleason wanted The Honeymooners to be just a portion of his format, but CBS wanted another season of only The Honeymooners. The network had cancelled a mainstay variety show hosted by Red Skelton and would cancel The Ed Sullivan Show in 1971 because they had become too expensive to produce and attracted, in the executives’ opinion, too old an audience. Gleason simply stopped doing the show in 1970 and left CBS when his contract expired.
Gleason did two Jackie Gleason Show specials for CBS after giving up his regular show in the 1970s, including Honeymooners segments and a Reginald Van Gleason III sketch in which the gregarious millionaire was portrayed as a comic drunk. When the CBS deal expired, Gleason signed with NBC. He later did a series of Honeymooners specials for ABC. Gleason hosted four ABC specials during the mid-1970s. Gleason and Carney also made a television movie, Izzy and Moe (1985), about an unusual pair of historic Federal prohibition agents in New York City who achieved an unbeatable arrest record with highly successful techniques including impersonations and humor, which aired on CBS in 1985.
In April 1974, Gleason revived several of his classic characters, including Ralph Kramden, Joe the Bartender and Reginald Van Gleason III in a television special with Julie Andrews. In a song-and-dance routine, the two performed “Take Me Along” from Gleason’s Broadway musical.
In 1985, three decades after the “Classic 39” began filming, Gleason revealed he had carefully preserved kinescopes of his live 1950s programs in a vault for future use. These “lost episodes” were initially previewed at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City, aired on the Showtime cable network in 1985, and later were added to the Honeymooners syndication package. Some of them include earlier versions of plot lines later used in the ‘classic 39′ episodes. One had all Gleason’s best-known characters, Ralph Kramden, the Poor Soul, Rudy the Repairman, Reginald Van Gleason, Fenwick Babbitt and Joe the Bartender featured in and outside of the Kramden apartment. The storyline involved a wild Christmas party hosted by Reginald Van Gleason up the block from the Kramdens’ building at Joe the Bartender’s place.
Gleason did not restrict his acting to comedic roles. He had also earned acclaim for live television drama performances in “The Laugh Maker” (1953) on CBS’s Studio One and William Saroyan’s “The Time of Your Life” (1958), which was produced as an episode of the anthology series Playhouse 90.
He was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his portrayal of pool shark Minnesota Fats in The Hustler (1961), starring Paul Newman. Gleason made all his own trick pool shots. In his 1985 appearance on The Tonight Show, Gleason told Johnny Carson that he had played pool frequently since childhood, and drew from those experiences in The Hustler. He was extremely well-received as a beleaguered boxing manager in the film version of Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962). Gleason played a world-weary army sergeant in Soldier in the Rain (1963), in which he received top billing over Steve McQueen.
Gleason wrote, produced and starred in Gigot (1962), in which he played a poor, mute janitor who befriended and rescued a prostitute and her small daughter. It was a box office flop. But the film’s script was adapted and produced as the television film The Wool Cap (2004), starring William H. Macy in the role of the mute janitor; the television film received modestly good reviews.
Gleason played the lead in the Otto Preminger-directed Skidoo (1968), considered an all-star failure. In 1969 William Friedkin wanted to cast Gleason as “Popeye” Doyle in The French Connection (1971), but because of the poor reception of Gigot and Skidoo, the studio refused to offer Gleason the lead; he wanted it. Instead, Gleason wound up in How to Commit Marriage (1969) with Bob Hope, as well as the movie version of Woody Allen’s play Don’t Drink the Water (1969). Both were unsuccessful.
Eight years passed before Gleason had another hit film. This role was the cantankerous and cursing Texas sheriff Buford T. Justice in the films Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Smokey and the Bandit II (1980) and Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 (1983). He co-starred with Burt Reynolds as the Bandit, Sally Field as Carrie and Jerry Reed as Cledus “Snowman” Snow, the Bandit’s truck-driving partner. Former NFL linebacker Mike Henry played his dimwitted son, Junior Justice. Gleason’s gruff and frustrated demeanor and lines such as “I’m gonna barbecue yo’ ass in molasses!” made the first Bandit movie a hit.
Years later, when interviewed by Larry King, Reynolds said he agreed to do the film only if the studio hired Jackie Gleason to play the part of Sheriff Buford T. Justice Reynolds said that director Hal Needham gave Gleason free rein to ad-lib a great deal of his dialog and make suggestions for the film; the scene at the “Choke and Puke” was Gleason’s idea. Reynolds and Needham knew Gleason’s comic talent would help make the film a success, and Gleason’s characterization of Sheriff Justice strengthened the film’s appeal to blue-collar audiences.
During the 1980s, Gleason earned positive reviews playing opposite Laurence Olivier in the HBO dramatic two-man special, Mr. Halpern and Mr. Johnson (1983). He also gave a memorable performance as wealthy businessman U.S. Bates in the comedy The Toy (1982) opposite Richard Pryor. Although the film was critically panned, Gleason and Pryor’s performances were praised. His last film performance was opposite Tom Hanks in the Garry Marshall-directed Nothing in Common (1986), a success both critically and financially.
For many years, Gleason would travel only by train; his fear of flying arose from an incident in his early film career. Gleason would fly back and forth to Los Angeles for relatively minor film work. After finishing one film, the comedian boarded a plane for New York. When two of the plane’s engines cut out in the middle of the flight, the pilot had to make an emergency landing in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Although another plane was prepared for the passengers, Gleason had enough of flying. He went into downtown Tulsa, walked into a hardware store, and asked its owner to lend him $200 for the train trip to New York. The owner asked Gleason why he thought anyone would lend a stranger so much money. Gleason identified himself and explained his situation. The store owner said he would lend the money if the local theater had a photo of Gleason in his latest film. However, the publicity shots showed only the principal stars. Gleason proposed to buy two tickets to the film and take the store owner; he would be able to see the actor in action. The two men watched the film for an hour before Gleason appeared on screen. The owner gave Gleason the loan, and he took the next train to New York. There, he borrowed $200 to repay his benefactor.
Gleason met dancer Genevieve Halford when they were working in vaudeville, and they started to date. Halford wanted to marry, but Gleason was not ready to settle down. She said she would see other men if they did not marry. One evening when Gleason went onstage at the Club Miami in Newark, New Jersey, he saw Halford in the front row with a date. At the end of his show, Gleason went to the table and proposed to Halford in front of her date. They were married on September 20, 1936.
Halford wanted a quiet home life but Gleason fell back into spending his nights out. Separated for the first time in 1941 and reconciled in 1948, the couple had two daughters, Geraldine, born in 1940 and Linda, born in 1942. Gleason and his wife informally separated again in 1951. It was during this period that Gleason had a romantic relationship with his secretary Honey Merrill, who was Miss Hollywood of 1956 and a showgirl at The Tropicana. Their relationship ended years later after Merrill met and eventually married Dick Roman.
In early 1954, Gleason suffered a broken leg and ankle on-air during his television show. His injuries sidelined him for several weeks. Halford visited Gleason while he was hospitalized, finding dancer Marilyn Taylor from his television show there. Halford filed for a legal separation in April 1954. A devout Catholic, Halford did not grant Gleason a divorce until 1970.
Gleason met his second wife, Beverly McKittrick, at a country club in 1968, where she worked as a secretary. Ten days after his divorce from Halford was final, Gleason and McKittrick were married in a registry ceremony in Ashford, England on July 4, 1970.
In 1974, Marilyn Taylor encountered Gleason again when she moved to the Miami area to be near her sister June, whose dancers had starred on Gleason’s shows for many years. She had been out of show business for nearly 20 years. In September 1974, Gleason filed for divorce from McKittrick. The divorce was granted on November 19, 1975. As a widow with a young son, Marilyn Taylor married Gleason on December 16, 1975; the marriage lasted until his death in 1987.
Gleason’s daughter Linda became an actress and married actor-playwright Jason Miller. Their son, Gleason’s grandson, is actor Jason Patric.
As early as 1952, when The Jackie Gleason Show captured Saturday night for CBS, Gleason regularly smoked six packs of cigarettes a day, but he never smoked on The Honeymooners.
In 1978, he suffered chest pains while touring in the lead role of Larry Gelbart’s play Sly Fox; this forced him to leave the show in Chicago and go to the hospital. He was treated and released, but after suffering another bout the following week, he returned and underwent triple-bypass surgery.
Gleason delivered a critically acclaimed performance as an infirm, acerbic, and somewhat Archie Bunker-like character in the Tom Hanks comedy-drama Nothing in Common (1986). This was Gleason’s final film role. During production, it was determined that he was suffering from terminal colon cancer, which had metastasized to his liver. Gleason was also suffering from phlebitis and diabetes. “I won’t be around much longer”, he told his daughter at dinner one evening after a day of filming. Gleason kept his medical problems private, although there were rumors that he was seriously ill. A year later, on June 24, 1987, Gleason died at age 71 in his Florida home.
After a funeral Mass at the Cathedral of Saint Mary, Gleason was entombed in a sarcophagus in a private outdoor mausoleum at Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Cemetery in Miami. Gleason’s sister-in-law, June Taylor of the June Taylor Dancers, is buried to the left of the mausoleum, next to her husband.
Miami Beach in 1987 renamed the Miami Beach Auditorium as the Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts. As of May 2010, the theater was scheduled to be razed as part of a convention-center remodeling project and replaced by a hotel. The demolition did not take place and The Fillmore Miami Beach is still in operation as of October 2017.
Gleason was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Television Hall of Fame in 1986. In 2000 a statue of him as Ralph Kramden in “And away we go!” pose was installed at the Miami Beach Bus Terminal.
Gleason was nominated three times for an Emmy Award, but never won.
In 1976 at the Sixth Annual American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA) “Entertainer of the Year Awards”, Paul Lynde received an award for being voted the funniest man of the year. Lynde immediately turned his award over to host Jackie Gleason, citing him as “the funniest man ever.” The unexpected gesture shocked Gleason.
On June 30, 1988, the Sunset Park MTA, NYCT’s 5th Avenue Bus Depot in Brooklyn was renamed the Jackie Gleason Depot in honor of the native Brooklynite.
A statue of Gleason as Ralph Kramden in his bus driver’s uniform was dedicated in August 2000 in New York City in Manhattan at the 40th Street entrance of the Port Authority Bus Terminal (PABT). The statue was briefly shown in the film World Trade Center (2006).
A city park in Lauderhill, Florida, was named the “Jackie Gleason Park” in his honor; it is located near his former home and features racquetball and basketball courts and a children’s playground.
Signs on the Brooklyn Bridge which advise drivers that they are entering Brooklyn have the Gleason phrase “How Sweet It Is!”
Late in his life actor-playwright Jason Miller, Gleason’s former son-in-law, was writing a screenplay based on Gleason’s life. He died before it was completed.
Gleason was portrayed by Brad Garrett in a 2002 television biopic about his life.
SCREEN TIME WITH SAM 